Brooklyn City Council candidate Carlos Menchaca, who is challenging incumbent Councilwoman Sara Gonzalez, added another labor endorsement today when the Communications Workers of America District 1 announced that they would be lending their support to his campaign. “Carlos Menchaca is the voice New York’s workers need on the City Council,” said Chris Shelton, vice president of CWA, in a statement. “Carlos has spent his entire career serving his neighbors, working to expand affordable housing, and fighting on behalf of small… [More]

A group of construction unions, community groups, and elected officials, including two Brooklyn politicians, City Councilwoman Letitia James and Assemblyman Walter Mosley, filed an Article 78 lawsuit against the Bloomberg administration and developer Acadia Realty Trust calling for the City Point real estate project to be shut down and to commission a new environmental impact statement for the construction site. The suit alleges that the wage rate allowed in the City Point lease would force construction workers to earn substandard… [More]

Mayor Michael Bloomberg fired a subliminal shot at Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, a Democratic candidate for mayor, for releasing a report that accused the mayor and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn for systematically targeting small businesses in the outer boroughs and levying onerous fines against them. “The world is not as simple as a campaign, and it’s not true just to this campaign, it’s all campaigns,” Bloomberg said on his weekly radio appearance this morning on the John Gambling Show.… [More]

During his State of the City speech on Thursday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg provided ample evidence to disprove critics who said that his third term failed to live up to the promise of his previous two, and for good measure, he hung it from the ceiling of the lobby in the Barclays Center. The mayor’s office teased Bloomberg’s various third-term accomplishments in an email leading up to his speech, from the record low in homicides in 2012 to the record number… [More]

Growing tired of the inertia in collective bargaining talks between Cablevision and the company’s Brooklyn employees, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer stood with workers outside of Madison Square Garden to demand that Cablevision negotiate in good faith and reinstate a group of workers who were dismissed a week ago. Last week,  Quinn and de Blasio–both Democratic candidates for mayor–ventured deep into Brooklyn to stand with 23 Brooklyn Cablevision workers… [More]

The New York City Council Districting Commission voted on the final map of the new council district lines on Thursday, but for Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito, the final product was far from satisfactory. Mark-Viverito was very outspoken when the Districting Commission released proposed district maps in October that fragmented the East Harlem section of her district and excluded the iconic landmark marketplace La Marqueta. The final map now includes La Marqueta in the district, but cuts out up to 35 blocks… [More]

At forum on minority- and women-owned businesses, mayor, mayoral candidates talk strategy City & State presented a day-long program this week entitled “The New Agenda” on the topic of minority- and women-owned businesses, with Mayor Michael Bloomberg giving a keynote address to kick off the forum. The event at New York University’s Kimmel Center, which was sponsored by AlliedBarton Security Services, concluded with the first roundtable to feature all six of the 2013 New York City mayoral candidates, discussing the… [More]