From Borough Hall to City Hall?
Borough President Adams is looking to vacate his seat at Borough Hall in America’s Downtown and take over the big chair in City Hall as the next mayor.
The beep recently launched a website, Eric Adams 2021, which not so subtly hints at his next steps for higher office.
“Eric is ready to service this city that he loves in a major way,” Adams’s site reads, which is paid for by his campaign committee, Eric Adams 21, which currently shows a balance of $0. “He just needs your support! Together, we can continue building a better New York.”
And Brooklyn’s Commander-in-Chief, who took office in Borough Hall in 2014 after serving in the state Senate and as one of New York’s Finest, is not shying away from his goals for becoming Mayor.
“From my first days as a police officer, I’ve been clear about my commitment to protect and serve the city I love. New Yorkers have entrusted me with that honor for more than three decades, and I will continue to reaffirm that trust as leader of our largest borough,” the potentially future Hizzoner said in a statement. “Throughout the years I have continuously stated that I’d be privileged to bring that service to City Hall as mayor. While some may have played coy about their ambitions, I’ve been up front for a long time. I believe that’s what New Yorkers respect and deserve.”
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Gov. Cuomo is charging full steam ahead to oust state Sen. Simcha Felder (D–Midwood) after he refused to budge from caucusing across the aisle with Republicans and rejoin the True Blues.
On April 24, senate Democrats picked up two new seats to give them a numerical, but meaningless, majority in Albany following the dissolution of the rogue Independent Democratic Conference that also controversially sat across the aisle with the Grand Old Party.
But Felder announced he’d remain seated with Republicans, preventing the Dems from gaining control of the state Senate and giving them a trifecta — along the governor’s mansion and the Assembly — in Albany.
Now Cuomo is searching for another candidate to challenge Felder in a Democratic primary in September, according to the New York Post.
Felder is already facing a challenge from Democrat Blake Morris in September.
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The Mooch is on his side.
A convicted felon running to take back his old Ridge-to-Rock congressional seat from Rep. Dan Donovan (R–Bay Ridge) picked up support from the former, and fleeting, White House communications director, the inimitable Anthony Scaramucci.
The Mooch will headline a May 19 fund-raiser for the former pol — who spent seven months behind bars for tax fraud, and was well known for threatening to break a reporter in half — as he looks to unseat the incumbent in a heated Republican primary, according to the New York Post.
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This pol is doing the perp walk.
Cops hauled Councilman Stephen Levin (D–Brooklyn Heights) away in cuffs on April 25 after he refused to step out of a busy street while protesting for the release of a city report on a controversial treatment for opioid addicts.
Police arrested Levin amid the demonstration where he demanded the publication of a Department of Health study on so-called safe-consumption sites — polarizing facilities that offer addicts a secure place to use drugs under the supervision of doctors standing by to provide care, which some medical studies show are proven to reduce overdoses.
“Safe-consumption sites save lives and we need to do everything that we can as a city to demonstrate that we are committed to ending overdoses and fighting the opioid crisis with new and innovative ways to expand access to treatment,” Levin said moments before New York’s Finest hauled him away for civil disobedience, according to his chief of staff.
Hygiene-agency leaders launched the study in 2016 after Council set aside $100,000 in taxpayer funds to examine the pros and cons of opening the spaces — which have yet to arrive in any U.S. city, but have opened in other countries including Canada.
And after officials failed to release the report last month as promised following months of back-and-forth over its publication, according to a Politico report, advocates of the safe-injection sites took to the Manhattan streets near City Hall to demand Mayor DeBlasio share the study once and for all, according to Levin’s chief of staff Jonathan Boucher.
“It’s been almost two years now since it’s preparation. We, along with the advocates, believe the mayor has been stalling on this,” he said. “We’re getting a number of statements that ‘it’s coming out soon,’ but it hasn’t.”
Authorities arrested 11 other protestors with Levin, who Boucher said has friends that struggled with and overcame addiction, whose battles inspired his passion for addressing the issue.
“It’s something that he’s always cared deeply about,” the chief of staff said.
In March, Mayor DeBlasio pledged to allocate an additional $22 million to his so-called Healing NYC initiative to combat the opioid epidemic, after setting aside $38 million to launch the program in 2017.
Roughly 1,075 of the 1,300 drug-overdose deaths citywide in 2016 involved opioid use — more than the number of fatalities from car crashes and murders that year combined — according to statistics from the mayor’s office.
And it’s not the first time Levin butted heads with New York’s Finest — the last time cops cuffed the pol was likely back in 2013, when he protested the state’s plan to close Cobble Hill’s Long Island College Hospital, which eventually sold to a developer that is now building residential towers in its place.
