RFK Jr. picks running mate as LI donors give him a shot in the arm

Daily Point

Ask what $250,000 from LI can do for 'Team Kennedy' 

Sick and tired of both Democrats and Republicans, Sea Cliff Village administrator Bruce Kennedy is among dozens of Long Islanders who are supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s third-party bid for the presidency which is steaming ahead. On Tuesday, RFK Jr. unveiled Nicole Shanahan, an attorney and entrepreneur and the wealthy ex-wife of a Google founder, as his vice-presidential pick.

Since last year, Long Islanders have given more than $250,000 to Kennedy’s campaign, with much more expected to be reported by the filing deadline at the end of the month.

His whole life, Bruce Kennedy says, he’s been asked if he has some connection to the famous political family, including the current candidate. “I’m not related,” Kennedy, 59, told The Point. “I say I’m from the Kennedy family of Brooklyn, not the one from Boston.”

Kennedy, who lives in Glen Cove and served as Sea Cliff’s mayor from 2009-2017, said he’s turned off by the negatives surrounding both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump and was attracted to RFK Jr. as a “common sense individual” whom he sees as uplifting.

Like other RFK Jr. supporters, Bruce Kennedy thinks the third-party candidate has raised “good questions” about the nation’s current vaccine policy. Also like many others, he did not vote for either Biden or Trump in 2020. Instead, “I wrote in my brother-in-law’s name” for president, he said.

Overall, Team Kennedy, as the campaign is known, has raised $27 million nationally so far, including $1.3 million from New Yorkers, according to federal records. A recent Politico analysis found that 74% of the roughly 21,000 donors to RFK Jr.’s campaign this year did not make any political donations during the 2020 cycle. Starting next month, his campaign will seek to collect 45,000 valid signatures from registered voters to get on the November ballot in New York as a third-party candidate.

His supporters see him as a welcome alternative, and brush off the possibility that RFK Jr.’s campaign would help Trump get reelected to the presidency and cause Biden’s defeat.

“I don’t think it necessarily opens the door to a Trump victory,” said Cengiz Bolvadin, a 34-year-old consultant from Port Jefferson who donated $1,000. “I think Kennedy can win New York.”

Campaign records show 760 separate donations to Team Kennedy from Long Islanders, usually through the campaign website, ranging from $25 to as much as $3,400. His supporters on Long Island are doctors, lawyers and real estate agents, as well as self-employed in jobs like choreographer, author, massage therapist, sailmaker, and a Fire Island Ferry worker. Rita Palma of Blue Point, a prominent Long Island vaccine critic, gave $250 and is a contact person listed on RFK Jr.’s website in his effort to get on the New York ballot.

“A lot of people are unhappy with both [major party] candidates,” explains Jillian Burne, 49, of Westhampton Beach, a volunteer Kennedy campaign staffer who has personally contributed nearly $2,000, given in small batches. “This is the first time I’ve been involved politically like this.”

For Burne, who says she works as a health coach and cancer patient advocate, Kennedy’s advocacy of “medical freedom makes a lot of sense.”

Wendy Hodor, 65, an attorney from Islip Terrace, has given close to $900, all in small donations over the past several months. A longtime Democrat, Hodor says Kennedy brings an honest maverick style on issues like the environment that she finds refreshing. “The Democrats have sold out to big oil,” said Hodor, who says she’s thinking of changing her voting registration to an independent not affiliated with any party. She says she’s inspired by Kennedy’s example.

“I’ve always followed him,” said Hodor. “Nobody wants to debate this guy. He’s written more books than Biden and Trump combined.”

— Thomas Maier thomas.maier@newsday.com

Pencil Point

Boeing, Boeing, gone

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Final Point

NYC retirees’ Medicare fight escalates

An extended if not epic civic battle over health coverage and its costs for an estimated 250,000 New York City government retirees goes roaring on after nearly three years, with a final resolution yet to come into view. The lingering issues of the continuing drama played out last week before a state appellate division panel in Manhattan where a lawyer for the city clashed with an attorney for the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees.

From the start, when the group sued over the benefit in August 2021, one big twist has been that City Hall is allied in this battle with the Municipal Labor Committee, run by union leaders, together seeking to change the plan accorded to ex-employees. During the de Blasio administration, teacher raises were funded on the premise that the switch in health plans would end up saving taxpayers some $600 million. The retiree organization — headed by former FDNY/EMS employee and longtime Babylon resident Marianne Pizzitola — charged that its members’ premium-free Medicare coverage was to be replaced by inferior coverage under the switch and that the labor leaders sold the retirees out for their own purposes.

State Supreme Court Justice Lyle Frank has ruled that sending retirees into an Aetna-run Medicare Advantage Plan goes against city statute. Now that key finding is on appeal, and with both sides failing to get the City Council to pass legislation that would resolve the dispute in their favor, the case was debated anew before the appellate court.

Part of this clash involved the nooks and crannies of city funding, which is especially important at a moment when Mayor Eric Adams and the Council must grapple with projected deficits and the potential for service cutbacks and tax hikes.

Jake Gardener, attorney for the retirees, raised the fact that while campaigning for his current office, Adams suggested that forcing the change could be a “bait and switch” by which employees were recruited with the promise of no-cost lifetime medical coverage. The quote from Adams, as reported in published accounts, was: “We need to look at it and make sure it’s not a bait and switch … I’m a retiree, I get retiree benefits. Their plan is my plan. We want to make sure that it is a fair plan. Nothing is more frightening for a retiree than health care.”

Once he was elected, however, Adams supported a new health deal for the retirees. Gardener sought to link this about-face with the idea that the money involved comes from the Joint Health Insurance Stabilization Fund controlled by city and union officials. This fund, outside of the city’s general budget, would mean “access” to the money “with no oversight or accountability,” Gardener argued.

Richard Dearing, chief of the city Law Department’s appeals division, replied during the arguments: “What you heard is fantasy.” The long-standing stabilization fund “is not a slush fund,” and it doesn’t “line the pockets of the mayor or anyone else,” as Dearing said was implied. Dearing argued that which fund the money goes in and out of doesn’t matter practically in terms of the larger impact on municipal revenues and savings.

Beyond the matter of savings is the question of exactly what was promised to the employees when they were hired, and what was binding. Judges questioned Dearing about an affidavit from a former deputy mayor and social-services commissioner in three mayoral administrations, Lilliam Barrios-Paoli, stating that the health care deal for employees was “an essential recruitment and retention tool” for the city.

Separately, the buzz in municipal circles is that the Adams administration could also seek to negotiate savings from health care changes that affect those currently employed, before retirement. For now, however, the traditional full premium-free Medicare coverage continues for retired seniors.

In court on Thursday, Associate Justice Sallie Manzanet-Daniels remarked from the bench, in an aside to a colleague that’s audible on the recording, at the number of people the organization brought to watch the proceedings. “We’ve never had such a big full house,” she said.

There is no clear timeline for a court decision.

— Dan Janison dan.janison@newsday.com

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