Politics
Photo by Mark Hallum
CHECK OUT
how 11 public advocate hopefuls
will keep the office relevant
Assemblyman Ron Kim was one of many candidates
for public advocate speaking at an Astoria forum.
www.qns.com I LIC COURIER I FEBRUARY 2019 41
BY MARK HALLUM
The list of candidates for public advo-cate
may have dwindled from over 20 to
just 11, several of the remaining hopefuls
for the seat found themselves justifying
the need for a seat that has been called
little more than a placeholder office.
At Cretans Association Omonia on
Jan. 30, Flushing Assemblyman Ron
Kim, investigative journalist Nomiki Konst
and Brooklyn City Councilman Jumaane
Williams all said that they plan on keeping
the office relevant by standing up for key
city-wide issues in unique ways.
Kim said he wants to use the public
advocate’s office to aid people strug-gling
with student loan debt, a burden
which he says has set those individu-als
financially when it should boosted
personal income.
“I have a platform to transform this of-fice
to directly help people by buying and
cancelling student debt and personal
debt which is crippling generations of
people in our city,” Kim said. “Over a
million young people are struggling with
a lifetime of student debt. This is not a
compassion plea. If we forgive this debt,
we can actually spur economic growth.
These people are seven to nine years
behind in economic growth… If we can
actually use this office to cancel debt,
we’d be the first in the nation to do so.”
An Astoria resident, Konst plans to
use her journalistic skills to uncover what
New Yorkers need to know about their
city officials and agencies to challenge
alleged corruption regarding the real
estate industry.
“At the end of the day, we have to start
taxing the rich… and most importantly
the real estate developers who have
controlled this city and have been de-regulated
since the mid-70s for trillions
of dollars in tax breaks,” Konst said in
response a question regarding funding
the MTA for transit modernizations. “It’s
time that we flipped the script and start
taxing these guys so we can start fund-ing
our infrastructure.”
When Williams ran for lieutenant gov-ernor
in the 2018 election cycle against
Kathy Hochul, who won a second term,
he ran on the notion of turning the state
office into a sort of public advocate for
all of New York.
“People think it’s just an amorphous
office, but there’s more to it than that,”
Williams said, claiming that a form of public
advocate has been in existence in one
form or another since the 19th century.
Williams envisions himself holding
the public advocate’s office to appoint
the right people to the City Planning
Commission to protect the interests of
residents and to take on transit issues.
David Eisenbach, who ran for public
advocate in 2017, is back for another
round and wants to challenge the
de Blasio administration and use the
office to fight the closing of Rikers
Island.
Eisenbach, a history professor at
Columbia University, called the decade-long
plan to close Rikers in favor of
community jails a talking point for re-election
which would not treat the core
problem in criminal justice.
“The problem of overcrowding and
abuse is not caused by the buildings,
it’s caused by a failed bail system that
needs to be reformed… and that we
punish those guards who are abusing or
who were abusing prisoners regularly,”
Eisenbach said. “Community jails are
a bad solution to a problem the city
did not even want to address.”
City Councilman Eric Ulrich, who with
Kim and Konst represent the Queens
field of public advocate candidates, did
not attend the forum.
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