A bloody Tuesday

Daily Point

Everything at once in Brooklyn

The multiple and compounding challenges NYC faces were on display at the Sunset Park site of a subway shooting Tuesday. The packed briefing where officials sought to convey calm and concern did not feature the city’s mayor, Eric Adams, who is isolating due to a case of COVID-19.

Details about the bloody morning incident, in which a gunman appears to have donned a gas mask underground, released a smoke canister, and shot at least 10 people, are still emerging. But it’s the kind of situation in which Adams, a former police captain with a flair for the theatrical, would surely have leapt to dominate. But COVID kept him out of commission, even at a time when he has been urging the city to get back to business as the pandemic seemingly wanes.

That’s a work in progress. Images from Tuesday morning showed scattering subway riders wearing masks in the smoke, and “no entry without mask” signs still dot the 99 cent stores and beer warehouses that line the blocks near the 36th Street Station.

At the same time, the officials who did speak in Brooklyn Monday afternoon also addressed the spate of recent tabloid-cover crimes that have been upending New York politics before this most recent shooting.

Gov. Kathy Hochul, for one, urged New Yorkers to be “united in a common purpose,” promising to fight crime, and expressing exhaustion at recurring gun violence like this. “No more mass shootings,” she said before largely dodging a question about the morning arrest of Lt. Gov. Brian Benjamin whom she hand-picked to be her deputy and running mate.

And fear of riding the subway is one of the last things Hochul wants as she goes into a reelection campaign that got more complicated with the federal bribery charges filed against Benjamin — just the latest in New York’s long-standing government corruption challenges.

As all these issues percolated on one Brooklyn street corner, New Yorkers who experienced the shots and smoke did their best to shrug off the frenzy. A beverage wholesaler who watched a woman emerge from the subway bleeding bemoaned the ease of getting guns and wished he saw more cops around. One HVAC repairman who had been coming out of the station as the shots rang called it “crazy” but also “just another day”: He’d seen shootings before in Flatbush and Midwood. And a Manhattan hotel cleaning supervisor coming off a night shift said people around him fleeing the station were admirably not “bumrushing or pushing each other.” As a person raised in Brooklyn during the late 80s and 90s, he called the drama a “regular New York situation.”

— Mark Chiusano @mjchiusano

Talking Point

NIFA news

As the end of the state budget process came into view, the usual collection of last-minute surprises from the Democratic majority emerged. For Nassau County, the biggest shocker was a law compelling its fiscal watchdog board to audit the county’s off-track betting corporation, its industrial development authority, and the Nassau University Medical Center, all entities now controlled by Republican County Executive Bruce Blakeman and a GOP-majority county legislature.

Tuesday, Nassau Interim Finance Authority board chairman Adam Barsky met virtually with the Editorial Board, and those audits were a big part of the conversation.

Barsky said he doesn’t want the oversight board to become a political tool. But it’s also important, he said, that NIFA keep the county from slipping back into fiscal irresponsibility. Oversight of these centers of power, jobs, and revenue is a big part of that.

What actually can be done?

Barsky said NIFA is looking at options, including having state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s office conduct the audits that would be paid for by county tax revenues.

“The OTB and the IDAs are not so complex,” Barsky said. “With the IDAs it’s mostly a question of what businesses promise to get tax breaks, in terms of job creation, whether they live up to their promises, and whether money gets clawed back if they don’t. With the OTB, it’s revenue and jobs and contracts.”

But Barsky said an audit of the hospital, the political football that started this state/county brouhaha, will be complicated.

Blakeman’s stance toward NIFA thus far seems to hearken back to a time when county Republicans made the oversight board the boogeyman, and with Nassau awash in money, Barsky said a lawsuit from the Republicans to end the county’s control period is likely if, for example, NIFA rejects the longevity pay deal with municipal unions.

But, Barsky said, the fact that Nassau essentially has $800 million in found money, half from federal COVID relief and half from debt savings realized by NIFA refinancing county debt, doesn’t change the structural spending problems of the county.

“Nassau won the lottery, but about 70% of lottery winners go broke,” Barsky said. “We don’t want to let that happen, and it’s our position that until the future revenue and spending projections are reasonably balanced, the control period should continue.”

— Lane Filler @lanefiller

Pencil Point

Tunnel vision test

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Final Point

A CD4 poll

Laura Gillen’s campaign is out with a poll showing her up 29 percentage points over her nearest challenger in the 4th Congressional District Democratic primary.

The poll, paid for by the former Hempstead Town supervisor’s campaign and conducted by Impact Research between March 28 and April 3, logged Gillen at 40%, Nassau County Legislators Carrié Solages and Siela Bynoe at 11% and 9%, respectively, and Malverne Mayor Keith Corbett trailing the field at 4%.

Gillen’s campaign was happy to celebrate the findings so far, a little over two months before the primary. The survey found that just 36% of voters are undecided, and it suggested Gillen’s favorable ratings were much higher than those of her opponents.

The research firm interviewed 400 likely 2022 Democratic primary voters using mobile and landlines and SMS text-to-web, with a margin of sampling error of ±4.9%.

It’s an early look at the race to replace Rep. Kathleen Rice. Gillen, whom Rice endorsed, represented much of the district as supervisor before being ousted by Republican Don Clavin in 2019. Bynoe and Solages are legislators whose districts overlap with pieces of the congressional area and each has roots with many of the district’s voters of color. Corbett is hoping for a boost from his connections to state and Nassau Democratic Party chairman Jay Jacobs.

At least one opponent shrugged off the picture of the contest so far. Bynoe campaign manager Rachael Scheinman nodded to last year’s Long Island political upsets in a statement to The Point: “We saw just last year how inaccurate polling can be in Nassau and how much can change in a few short weeks.”

She went on: “It's no surprise that Gillen has higher name recognition but polls don't decide races, voters do.”

— Mark Chiusano @mjchiusano