Carlos Menchaca Is Running for Mayor
Gay Sunset Park Democratic councilmember set to announce formally October 22
BY PAUL SCHINDLER
Just weeks after the most
prominent member among
the fi ve out gay city councilmembers
— Speaker
Corey Johnson — bowed out of
the 2021 race for mayor, one of
his colleagues, Brooklyn’s Carlos
Menchaca, fi rst fl oated the possibility
that he would step up for the
contest.
Mid-afternoon on October 9,
Ben Max, the executive editor of
Gotham Gazette, an online watchdog
publication of the Citizens
Union Foundation, tweeted his
discovery that Menchaca — who
has represented Sunset Park, Red
Hook, Greenwood Heights, and
portions of Borough Park since
January 2014 — had opened an
account with the city Campaign
Finance Board for a mayoral run.
Menchaca did not respond to Gay
City News’ query to him asking for
clarifi cations of his plans but later
in the afternoon, tweeted, “Amigos:
These past months I’ve been
thinking a lot about our City and
how we could do better, we must
do better. Nothing is offi cial… will
share news soon. #brighterdays”
Four days later, Menchaca joined
the fi rst mayoral forum of the 2021
campaign, a virtual event hosted
by the Jim Owles Liberal Democratic
Club, which included six
other contenders.
Then on October 21, City and
State reported that he would formally
announce his candidacy the
following day.
Menchaca recently won widespread
attention for his successful
effort to block the Industry City
redevelopment in an underutilized
warehouse district along the Sunset
Park waterfront that would
have created three new buildings
housing fi lm studios and offi ce and
retail space. Andrew Kimball, the
Industry City CEO, had promised
that 15,000 jobs would be created
by the project, but Menchaca
charged it would lead to gentrifi cation
of the working class, largely
immigrant surrounding community
without guarantees of signifi -
Councilmember Carlos Menchaca, in a photo he used to tease a possible mayoral run.
cant benefi ts to its current residents.
As councilmember for the district,
Menchaca enjoyed a strong
voice regarding the project on a City
Council that traditionally defers to
the local member on land use approvals.
Menchaca, however, drew
fi re from one of his gay colleagues,
the Bronx’s Ritchie Torres, who,
fresh from a victory in the Democratic
primary for an open US
House seat, argued in favor of the
project on job creation grounds.
Torres’ position was quickly undercut,
however, when numerous local
elected offi cials — including Congressmembers
Hakeem Jeffries,
Yvette Clarke, Nydia Velázquez,
and Jerry Nadler jumped into the
fi ght on Menchaca’s side.
The following day, Industry City
withdrew its land use application
from the Council.
An outspoken champion of the
Latinx and Asian-American constituents
he represents, Menchaca
has been a searing critic of President
Donald Trump’s Immigration
and Customs Enforcement
(ICE) efforts, and last year took on
Mayor Bill de Blasio over a list of
criminal offenses which the mayor
said would qualify for the city to
be willing to work with ICE agents
on tracking down undocumented
residents.
TWITTER/ @CMENCHACA
Menchaca also clashed with several
gay colleagues this summer
over the city’s budget. He and Jimmy
Van Bramer of Queens, who is
also gay, were among the 17 councilmembers
who voted against the
budget Johnson had negotiated on
the Council’s behalf with de Blasio.
Menchaca and Finance chair Daniel
Dromm got into a heated Twitter
dispute over claims that the
budget cut roughly $1 billion from
the NYPD’s $6 billion budget in
response to racial justice protests.
Menchaca, along with many other
critics of the budget, noted that a
signifi cant portion of that $1 billon
was merely shifted to other city
agencies for the same police purposes.
Though Menchaca rose up in
politics as an insider — fi rst as an
aide to Brooklyn Borough President
Marty Markowitz and later
to City Council Speaker Christine
Quinn — he has cut an independent
fi gure in his eight years on
the Council, at times alienating
other Brooklyn members. Former
Councilmember David Greenfi eld,
a social conservative who represented
an adjacent district with a
large Orthodox Jewish community,
was a particular nemesis.
In 2017, Menchaca handily withstood
a primary campaign by Assemblymember
Félix Ortiz and the
POLITICS
county Democratic organization
to unseat him after one term. (Ortiz,
who was fi rst elected in 1994
and is the Assembly’s assistant
speaker, was defeated for reelection
in this June’s Democratic primary.)
His district’s representative
in the US House, Velázquez, however,
has been a consistent ally of
Menchaca’s.
Menchaca, who is 40, was the
fi rst out gay legislator elected in
Brooklyn and the Council’s fi rst
Mexican-American member, having
grown up in public housing in
El Paso, Texas, one of seven children
raised by a single mother. In a
2013 interview, Menchaca credited
his mother’s infl uence in encouraging
his interest in learning, but
he also noted the government social
safety net that was vital to the
family’s well-being. When he decided
to challenge Sara González, an
11-year incumbent twice his age,
he cited the city government’s failures
during the Superstorm Sandy
crisis the year before as the motivating
factor.
“Government was nowhere to be
seen,” Menchaca said at the time,
as he promised to be a candidate
and legislator who would be “visible
and active.”
One undeniable skill Menchaca
brings to his political career is his
skill as a community organizer. It
helped him turn out record numbers
of primary voters, both in 2013
and 2017. As the Trump administration’s
ICE crackdown on undocumented
immigrants stepped up
in recent years, Menchaca worked
to facilitate dialogue between undocumented
transgender women
in his district and the Lambda
Independent Democrats, the borough’s
LGBTQ political club that
has traditionally drawn most of its
membership from heavily white,
more affl uent neighborhoods.
As he jumps into the mayoral
race, Menchaca joins Loree Sutton,
a retired US Army brigadier
general who is a psychiatrist and
served as the fi rst commissioner of
the city’s Department of Veterans’
Services, as an LGBTQ contender
for the city’s top job.
GayCityNews.com | October 22 - November 4, 2020 13
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