Heard Around Town, Jan 12, 2012

* Carlo Scissura hopes to get a head start on his run for Brooklyn borough president with a politician’s best friend – early money. He will report raising $126,765 in his first three months as a candidate, which will get him plenty of attention (though probably not enough to completely scare off challengers). Scissura is a top aide to term-limited incumbent Marty Markowitz, which may help explain how 198 of his 250 donors were from Brooklyn. Still, money can’t buy everything: The State Board of Elections registered his campaign committee as “Cario 2013,” somehow managing to misspell “Carlo” while spelling “Scissura” just fine.

* Mayor Michael Bloomberg‘s idea to build a tech campus in New York is catching on across the pond. In a recent speech in London, David Willets, a British Conservative Party politician and the Minister of State for Universities and Science, called for proposals to build a similar science and technology university in the U.K. But unlike New York’s competition, which ended with Cornell University and the Israeli Technion Institute getting $100 million in city money help to build a Roosevelt Island campus, the British government is not offering any seed money or state-owned land to sweeten the deal. “This time we will be looking to private finance and perhaps sponsorship from some of the businesses that are keen to recruit more British graduates,” Willets said. “A major city might wish to offer a site as Mayor Bloomberg has just done so successfully with his competition for a new graduate school in New York.”

* As the state’s hydrofracking comment period ended yesterday, lawmakers called for postponing the deadline again – this time to let people weigh in on upcoming revisions to the Department of Environmental Conservation’s study of the socioeconomic impacts of drilling. “DEC recognized the fact that the environmental impact statement fell far short of reviewing the negative financial impacts that hydrofracking would have on every neighborhood,” said Sen. Tony Avella, who’s also sponsoring long-shot legislation to ban the controversial natural-gas drilling procedure entirely. “The comment period should be extended to the release of this new report, and 180 days thereafter.” Spokeswoman Emily DeSantis noted that the DEC twice extended the comment period to a total of 120 days. “Based on the tens of thousands of comments we have received to date, we feel 120 days has been ample time to submit comments,” DeSantis said. “Through the review of comments and additional information, we fully expect there will be changes to the SGEIS.”