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Tag: David A. Paterson

  • Paterson’s choice of lieutenant governor draws opposition in NY

    Richard Ravitch once got the subway trains to run on time in New York City.

    Now he is taking on the more difficult task of getting the New York Senate to run at all.

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    In a move that has already been challenged, New York Gov. David A. Paterson Wednesday named Ravitch, 76, the state’s lieutenant governor.

    Ravitch took the oath of office later in the day at the Peter Lugar Steakhouse in Brooklyn, signing the papers a few hours before Republicans got a restraining order blocking the appointment.

    Matters were further confused Thursday when State Sen. Pedro Espada Jr. of Queens, who had created a 31-31 deadlock in the Senate by defecting to the Republicans, returned to the Democratic camp, giving it a 32-30 majority. He will serve as Senate majority leader.

    Reportedly, Ravitch will not start performing the duties of office until the court issue is resolved. Andrew Cuomo, the state’s attorney general, has ruled that the state’s constitution does not allow the appointment.

    As lieutenant governor, Ravitch could break tie votes in the Senate.

    He would fill a position that has been vacant since March 2008 when then Lt. Gov. Paterson became governor after the resignation of Eliot Spitzer.

    Ravitch is accustomed to straightening out messes, so much so that Clyde Haberman of The New York Times once referred to him as “the designated rescuer.”

    A Yale Law School graduate, Ravitch chaired his family’s construction company, a builder of affordable housing, in the 1960s and 1970s.

    In 1975, New York Gov. Hugh Carey, a Democrat, named Ravitch chairman of the state’s insolvent Urban Development Corporation. Ravitch led a bailout that saved the corporation.

    In 1979, Ravitch became the chairman and CEO of New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority at a time when subway service was in disarray.

    Ravitch devised ways to raise the money that was needed to overhaul the system.

    Paterson turned to Ravitch last year to head a commission charged with coming up with ways to save the MTA once again.

    The legislature approved a rescue plan this May, before the current crisis in the Senate began the next month.

    Republicans took the Senate when Espada and Hiram Monserrate, of Queens, voted with them to depose the Democratic leadership.

    Dean G. Skelos, a Republican, became the new majority leader. Espada was named Senate president, making him first in line to succeed Paterson, should Paterson leave office.

    The Republicans control held for a few days. Then Monserrate chose to vote with the Democrats again, creating the 31-31 deadlock.

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    • Benjamin vows to be America’s family doctor

      July 14, 2009 at 9:22am

      Dr. Regina Benjamin, nominee for U.S. surgeon general, is a medical anachronism who rebuilt a microcosmic health care system.

    • NY’s top ethics officer accused of ethical breach

      The fallout from Eliot Spitzer’s short but contentious reign as governor of New York state continues.

      This week, Joseph Fisch, the state’s inspector general, charged the state’s top ethics watchdog, Herbert Teitelbaum, with acting unethically.

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      Teitelbaum, the executive director of the Commission on Public Integrity, should be fired, Fisch concluded.

      The charges came in a 174-page report (not counting appendices) that gives a detailed sense of the power of personal, professional and political connections in Albany.

      The report also recalls a scandal that erupted just a few months after Spitzer took office in January 2007.

      At first, the controversy focused on Republican Joseph L. Bruno, the then leader of the state Senate and a Spitzer opponent.

      Allegedly, Bruno had been using state aircraft to fly to political events, a violation of law.

      Rather quickly, the scandal did an about-face when it was reported that members of Spitzer’s staff had used state police to gather the damaging information on Bruno.

      The use of the police for political purposes violated the law and the scandal got a label, Troopergate.

      The Commission on Public Integrity launched an investigation, an investigation that posed a threat, if not to Spitzer, then to members of his inner circle.

      Fisch, the inspector general, claimed in a report issued Wednesday that Teitelbaum compromised the investigation by leaking confidential information to Robert Hermann, then the director of Spitzer’s Officer of Governmental Reform and a member of Spitzer’s cabinet.

      Hermann then passed information to Lloyd Constantine of Spitzer’s staff on several occasions, the report alleges. Hermann had once been Constantine’s supervisor in the state attorney general’s office.

      Hermann also supposedly talked once about the investigation with Peter Pope, Spitzer’s director of policy.

      Fisch also charges that the commission did not act properly when it was told of Teitelbaum’s conversations with Hermann.

      Both Teitelbaum and Hermann have denied that they did anything wrong, and Teitelbaum has resisted the calls for his resignation.

      Gov. David A. Paterson, Spitzer’s successor, has asked his seven appointees to the 13-member commission to resign. They, so far, have refused to step aside, just as they have refused to fire Teitelbaum.

      Teitelbaum and Hermann, both Spitzer appointees and Spitzer supporters, had known early for years before they came to be officials in Albany.

      As Fisch’s report explains, they first met when Hermann was at the law firm, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP.

      Hermann interviewed Teitelbaum for an associate’s position with the firm, a position that he took.

      However, Hermann had left the firm by the time Teitelbaum began work. (Eliot Spitzer would later be a lawyer with Skadden, Arps.)

      Later in their careers, Teitelbaum and Hermann worked together at Teitelbaum, Hiller, Rodman, Paden & Hibsher, P.C., another law firm.

      They had also served at different times as the legal counsel for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund.

      Paterson was Spitzer’s lieutenant governor at the time of the Troopergate episode, and he was not swept up in the investigation.

      However, he has a link to the latest news. In naming Fish inspector general last year, Paterson had returned a favor.

      In 1982, Fisch, the chief assistant district attorney in Queens, hired Paterson, who was fresh out of law school.

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      • ‘Hillaryland’ is reborn at the State Department

        May 18, 2009 at 6:58am

        Hillary Rodham Clinton may have reinvented herself (again) as Secretary of State, but she hasn’t exactly started with a blank slate.

      • Ex-priest is valued adviser to NY governor

        One day into his term as governor of New York State, David A. Paterson, in a kind of preemptive act, disclosed his past marital infidelities.

        Advising Paterson for sure is a well-connected lawyer and former Jesuit priest, perhaps just the right person to help deal with an issue that mixes political and moral realities.

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        Charles J. O’Byrne, who holds the title of chief of staff and secretary in the Paterson administration, is a Kennedy family friend who is seen by observers as a smart, caring, but tough political practitioner.

        “He was one of the few naturals in politics I have ever met,” Ethan Geto, who worked with O’Byrne on the 2004 Howard Dean presidential campaign, told The New York Observer.

        “I think his background prepared him in one critical way. Charles is extremely empathetic. He can really put himself in the shoes of another human being.”

        Born in New York City, O’Byrne, 48, graduated from Columbia University in 1981 and Columbia Law School in 1984.

        While he was in law school, O’Byrne met and became friends with Stephen Smith Jr., the nephew of former president John F. Kennedy.

        After law school, O’Byrne spent a few years at Rosenman & Colin LLP, a New York City law firm, before leaving to study for the priesthood, becoming a novice in the Society of Jesus, the Jesuit order, in 1989.

        O’Byrne took his vows as a Jesuit in 1991 and was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in 1996.

        That same year, he married John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette in a ceremony on Cumberland Island, Ga.

        In 1999, O’Byrne was the presiding priest at a memorial Mass in New York City for John and Carolyn Kennedy after they died in a plane crash.

        Later in 1999, O’Byrne unofficially left the Jesuit order. He was dismissed officially in 2002.

        In September 2002, O’Byrne caused some scandal with a first-person article in Playboy entitled, “Sex & Sexuality: One Man’s Story About Religious Life and What Seminaries Really Teach About Sex.”

        In the article, O’Byrne portrays his fellow seminarians as men who entered the religious life with “little or no sexual experience.”

        As recalled by O’Byrne, the seminarians made up for lost time. “There was sex all around me,” he writes, “including relationships between Jesuits.”

        O’Byrne describes himself as not so much shocked by the sexual activity as he is disturbed by what he sees as the order’s hypocritically advocating celibacy but allowing sexual activity.

        Not surprisingly, the Playboy story caused “resentment” toward O’Byrne, one priest told Jason Horowitz of the Observer.

        O’Byrne joined the Dean campaign in 2003. And after Dean left the race in 2004, he volunteered in New York City educational programs.

        He then went to work for Paterson, a Democrat who was serving as the minority leader of the New York state Senate. O’Byrne filled various roles before becoming then Paterson’s acting chief of staff.

        After he was elected lieutenant governor in 2006, Paterson named O’Byrne his chief of staff at an annual salary of $140,000.

        According to columnist Bob Herbert of The New York Times, Paterson turned to O’Byrne on March 10, soon after he got word that then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer had been implicated as a client of a prostitution ring.

        “Boy, I’m not sure how he gets out of this,” Paterson told O’Byrne.

        “This is not going to work out for him,” O’Byrne replied.

        Two days later, Spitzer announced he would resign. A week later, Paterson was sworn in as governor with O’Byrne looking on.

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