Congressional primary roundup

Not mentioned here is a pretty interesting race in Brooklyn. Yvette Clarke vs. Adam Bunkeddeko. She won. But barely.

Change is in the air.

Grimm gets only 8 months in prison

From NY Magazine:

Former representative Michael Grimm was sentenced to eight months in prison on Friday, after pleading guilty to a federal tax-evasion charge late last year.

Grimm resigned from his seat shortly after winning reelection in 2014. Dan Donovan, the district attorney in charge of the Eric Garner investigation, now represents the district.

Grimm's lawyers had hoped to avoid a stint in prison; they argued that the Staten Island politician was "tremendously remorseful over his offense" and "will live with the shame of it the rest of his life.” A federal investigation into Grimm's campaign fund-raising ended with charges accusing Grimm of paying employees at his Manhattan restaurant Healthalicious off the books — and thus avoiding taxes.

Grimm resigning

From the NY Observer:

It’s official: Congressman Michael Grimm will serve just five days of the term he won in November.

Mr. Grimm, a Republican, confirmed late Monday night in a statement that he would resign from the House of Representatives effective January 5. The resignation comes after he pleaded guilty last Tuesday to a single count of felony tax evasion at a restaurant he owned before running for Congress.

“This decision is made with a heavy heart, as I have enjoyed a very special relationship and closeness with my constituents, whom I care about deeply,” Mr. Grimm said. “The events which led to this day did not break my spirit, nor the will of the voters. However, I do not believe that I can continue to be 100% effective in the next Congress, and therefore, out of respect for the Office and the people I so proudly represent, it is time for me to start the next chapter of my life.”

Dan Donovan is considered the strongest candidate to replace Grimm.

Grimm to plead guilty and may head to the pokey

From the Daily News:

After vowing to fight his criminal indictment “tooth and nail,” Rep. Michael Grimm of Staten Island has agreed to plead guilty Tuesday to a felony charge of tax evasion, the Daily News has learned.

Grimm’s admission of guilt will place his congressional career in danger, exactly seven weeks after he won reelection by an overwhelming margin.

Grimm was scheduled to enter the plea Tuesday before Judge Pamela Chen in Brooklyn Federal Court.

A Republican who served in the Marines and worked as an FBI agent, Grimm was charged in a 20-count federal indictment in April with hiding more than $1 million in sales and wages at an Upper East Side restaurant he co-owned, and with hiring undocumented immigrants.

He pleaded not guilty, and his trial was to begin in February.

Despite the indictment, Grimm trounced Democrat Domenic Recchia 55% to 42% on Nov. 4 to win a third term.

Recchia made the criminal case a central issue of his campaign, and at a debate on Oct. 17, Grimm was asked, “If found guilty, would you resign?”

“Certainly, if I was not able to serve, then of course I would step aside and there would be a special election,” he replied.

But if he can escape prison time, Grimm is expected to try to hold onto his seat, arguing he would still be “able to serve,” a source familiar with his thinking said.

Under federal law, Grimm faces up to three years behind bars on the tax evasion charge. As a first-time offender, however, he might not have to serve any time. That decision will be up to Chen when she sentences him sometime next year.

If Grimm is spared prison and refuses to resign, it would up to House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to decide whether to force him to step down.

Grim news for Grimm

From Capital New York:

Rep. Michael Grimm surrendered to federal authorities on Monday morning, shortly before prosecutors at the U.S. attorney's office in Brooklyn unsealed a 20-count indictment related to Grimm's ownership of a health foods store in Manhattan.

Loretta Lynch, the U.S. Attorney for New York's Eastern District, presented the indictment at a press conference in Brooklyn, detailing a tax-evasion scheme that she said was "almost breathtaking in its simplicity."

The indictment accuses Grimm of pocketing more than a million dollars in cash payments at the Upper East Side store called Healthalicious.

"When it came to his restaurant, Michael Grimm never met a tax he didn't lie to evade," Lynch said.

The charges include mail, wire, health care and tax fraud, along with two counts of perjury.

According to the indictment, "Grimm paid a large portion of Healthalicious’ employees’ wages in cash and did not report those cash wages to federal and state authorities, thereby lowering the restaurant’s payroll tax costs."

In 2013, two former Healthalicious employees filed a federal civil lawsuit against Grimm alleging the congressman did not pay them minimum or overtime wages as required by law. During a deposition hearing for the case, Grimm allegedly lied "about several material matters in connection with the lawsuit including whether he paid his employees in cash, and if he had interacted with a payroll processing company," according to prosecutors.

The indictment comes after a two-year investigation that was believed to focus on Grimm's congressional fund-raising.

Rethinking rebuilding

From NBC News:

Federal projects intended to help protect New York and New Jersey towns from hurricanes and coastal flooding have languished – many unfunded -- for decades, the I-Team has learned.

The stalled projects, often approved by Congress as far back as the 1980s and 90s, were intended to study the feasibility of manmade barriers like seawalls, marshlands or large sand dunes to protect coastal areas on Staten Island as well as the Rockaways, Long Island and the Jersey shore.

One such study, aimed at making recommendations for flood barriers along the south shore of Staten Island, remains unfinished even though it was commissioned in 1993.

The south shore of Staten Island was the scene of some of the worst damage caused by Sandy.

"This system is broken. It needs to be fixed. It needs to be overhauled,” said U.S. Rep. Michael Grimm. “Something gets approved and then it gets lost. It's almost like putting it in a bottomless pit and it never gets done."

From The Indypendent:

Sandy has triggered a public debate about how to protect the city in the future given the growing consensus that powerful storms and sea level rise are inevitable. But who will be protected? And who will pay?

Gov. Andrew Cuomo thinks New York City needs floodgates. Mayor Michael Bloomberg thinks other drastic measures have to be taken. Both of them have joined the chorus linking Sandy’s devastation with global climate change. But neither of them has suggested he would stray from government’s long tradition of protecting big real estate interests and abandoning those living at the margins, such as the tenants in the public housing projects of the Rockaways, Coney Island and Red Hook.

There needs to be a more equitable strategy going forward that forces the powerful real estate giants in Manhattan to pay the steep price of fortifying their luxury enclaves and puts public funds into protecting the most vulnerable working people.

The Cuomo and Bloomberg proposals are examples of short-term thinking dressed up in green rhetoric. They fail to look deeply at the long-term sustainability of the city. They obscure the basic questions of who benefits and who pays. If the chief beneficiaries of expensive dikes and other greening measures are downtown and waterfront property owners, why shouldn’t they foot their fair share of the bill? If the captains of the growth machine took the risk with their capital, why should government have to bail them out?

On the other hand, if the city and state administrations seriously want to address climate change, they might begin to limit development in flood-prone areas instead of promoting it. They could also put more money into preserving and retrofitting the city’s housing stock, especially public housing and homes in vulnerable areas, instead of wasting money to protect lavish new developments.

From the NY Times:

Across the nation, tens of billions of tax dollars have been spent on subsidizing coastal reconstruction in the aftermath of storms, usually with little consideration of whether it actually makes sense to keep rebuilding in disaster-prone areas. If history is any guide, a large fraction of the federal money allotted to New York, New Jersey and other states recovering from Hurricane Sandy — an amount that could exceed $30 billion — will be used the same way.

Tax money will go toward putting things back as they were, essentially duplicating the vulnerability that existed before the hurricane.

From the Huffington Post:

Given the size and power of the storm, much of the damage from the surge was inevitable. But perhaps not all. Some of the damage along low-lying coastal areas was the result of years of poor land-use decisions and the more immediate neglect of emergency preparations as Sandy gathered force, according to experts and a review of government data and independent studies.

Authorities in New York and New Jersey simply allowed heavy development of at-risk coastal areas to continue largely unabated in recent decades, even as the potential for a massive storm surge in the region became increasingly clear.

In the end, a pell-mell, decades-long rush to throw up housing and businesses along fragile and vulnerable coastlines trumped commonsense concerns about the wisdom of placing hundreds of thousands of closely huddled people in the path of potential cataclysms.

And of course we have the real estate industry's damage control piece in the NY Times:

Mr. Romski said that a heavy-duty, sophisticated drainage system, designed to handle flood surges, was instrumental in mitigating flooding. The system — which features underground chambers, wide street mains and storm drains on each house property — connects to large sewer mains that the developer installed in public streets that they rebuilt around the project site, as part of an agreement with the city, Mr. Romski said. Also helpful was a natural buffer of sand and beach grass that was maintained near the boardwalk. It also helped that much of the boardwalk in front of the project stayed intact to break the roaring surf, unlike the long stretch west of 88th Street that was obliterated.

So what he is actually saying is that they were just lucky that the boardwalk stayed intact in that section and bore the brunt of the surge. They may not be so lucky next time.

And the Daily News:

Rosemary Scanlon, dean of New York University’s Schack Institute of Real Estate, said the market will rebound.

“The fears were widespread that people would move out of New York” after 9/11, she said. “It didn’t happen.”

But buildings — especially in Zone A — will need to be constructed differently, she said. Boilers and electrical equipment may need to be moved to higher floors, generators may become standard and towers may now be built further from the shore.

“Building on the waterfront was considered to be a great idea until the storm came,” she said.

Daniel Kessler, spokesman for 350.org, a climate change awareness group, said with rising global temperatures and sea levels, building in flood-prone areas isn’t a “very smart thing to do.”

Actually, building on the waterfront was always considered risky. We were warned. We didn't listen. Zone B areas flooded as well as Zone A. Wake up, people.

Dems suddenly against Asian prostitution

From the Politicker:

It looks like the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee will probably win the award for the most creative press release title this week.

“Foreign Chinese prostitution money is allegedly behind the groups funding Congressman Michael Grimm’s (NY-11) Republican Majority,” a statement sent out by the organization began.

The press release, sent out earlier this afternoon, proceeded to a fairly generic attack that has nothing specifically to do with Mr. Grimm: Casino mogul Sheldon Adelson is investing a lot of money into Republican efforts, Mr. Grimm is a Republican and Mr. Adelson allegedly approved of prostitution at his casinos in the Macau province of China.

So it's bad for a party to accept money from a guy who turns a blind eye to prostitution in another country, but it's ok to have your own party candidate's congressional campaign run by an outfit that accepts prostitution ads in its NYC-based newspaper?

I see a lot of irony in the Democratic pot calling the Republican kettle black.

The pipeline under Riis Park

From the Daily News:

Rep. Michael Grimm’s support for a natural gas pipeline through Queens is fueling criticism that he’s a pol courting powerful private interests — not the Tea Party reformer he claims to be.

Seven months after sponsoring legislation to run a pipeline under Jacob Riis Park, the freshman congressman has collected some $3,000 from its backers.

Grimm, a former FBI agent, won his Staten Island campaigning as an outsider who wasn’t going to buy into the crippling go-along, get-along ethos of inside the Beltway.

But the intersection of money, power and legislation is highlighted in the latest campaign financial disclosure statements, not just for Grimm but others in the New York delegation.

Disgraced Queens Rep. Anthony Weiner had shown interest in the project before he resigned in June. National Grid was among Weiner’s top campaign contributors in his last run for election, giving some $6,200, according to a review by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Veteran Queens Rep. Gregory Meeks and Republican newcomer Bob Turner, a former cable TV exec, co-sponsored the pipeline bill.

Since July, Meeks received donations totaling $2,500 from lobbyists pressing Congress to approve the pipeline project, according to campaign reports.

Turner received a $600 from a National Grid employee before he took office, campaign financial records show.