Brad Hoylman Registers For Quinn Seat, As Living Wage Comes To a Head

We wrote about this prospect in depth a few months ago, and now Brad Hoylman has take a step towards running for term-limited Speaker Christine Quinn’s seat, opening a campaign account to raise money for a run.

Hoylman, who narrowly lost a Lower Manhattan Council race in 2001, is the well-known chairman of Community Board 2. Others expected to run for the seat include Corey Johnson, the chairman of Community Board 4, and Yetta Kurland, a civil rights lawyer and radio host. All the candidates are LGBT identified.

Hoylman’s Council campaign committee popped up the very day that Quinn stormed out of a rally heralding the passage of the living wage bill, after an attendee criticized Mayor Michael Bloomberg –  a close Quinn ally who opposes the bill.

And in his Council race, Hoylman faces a similar balancing act as Quinn, as he runs in a liberal West Side district. The personal politics he espouses are liberal. Yet he has long served as the executive vice-president and general counsel of the Partnership for New York City, a pro-business group with close ties to Quinn and Bloomberg.

The situation has grown even more complex for Hoylman after Quinn decided to drop a contentious provision from the living wage bill three weeks ago. That led the the pro-business group, which had initially supported a compromise version of the bill, to drop its support.

Issues such as living wage could well be a litmus test in the Hoylman’s Council race, and the Partnership is now to the right of Quinn on that issue. So I emailed Hoylman about that development, and in an initial email, Hoylman wrote that he was “glad Speaker Quinn reached an agreement.” When asked specifically about his organization pulling support, though, Hoylman did not return a request for comment.