Quinn Offers Apologies to Council

By DIANE CARDWELL

Published: April 18, 2008

In a series of private meetings with rank-and-file members of the City Council on Monday, Speaker Christine C. Quinn kept apologizing. She told them she had blundered badly in her response to revelations about the Council’s appropriation of money to fictitious organizations.

“I’m terribly sorry for the way I did this, with no consultation,” one council member recalled her saying. “You read in the paper about people in crisis situations doing things and you say, ‘How could they have been so stupid?’ And now I know how they could have been that stupid.”

But several Council members said that Ms. Quinn’s expressions of regret did little to ease their anger.

Two weeks ago, Ms. Quinn was facing her first major public embarrassment: the disclosure that she had not known, or had been less than forthright, about the strange way the Council handled its discretionary funds. Now she is facing what may be a more serious threat to her political future: the growing rebellion of council members who have criticized her attempts to limit damage from the revelations as amounting to a surrender of power to the mayor.

With little notice or briefing to council members, Ms. Quinn held a news conference last Friday to unveil a plan to allocate discretionary grants through a competitive process overseen by the mayor’s Office of Contracts, severely curtailing the Council’s latitude.

Some have called her dishonest. Some have called for her to resign. William C. Thompson Jr., the city comptroller and a potential rival in a race for the mayor’s office, has said he would police the Council’s spending. And Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said he wanted the administration to oversee all but the smallest Council appropriations.

So Ms. Quinn has spent days calling and meeting with council members; she has agreed to rethink the reform measures she championed a week ago; and she has hired her own lawyer. The full scope and impact of criminal investigations into the Council’s spending are unclear and may yet be evolving. But its specter — rising from fact or conveniently buoyed by competitors — is likely to continue to tax Ms. Quinn’s political survival skills as she pursues a run for mayor.

“That Friday press conference that she had was a last-ditch effort to save her political career at the expense of the institution,” said Councilman Tony Avella, “and that’s what I think really pushed people over the edge.” Mr. Avella, a Queens Democrat who plans to run for mayor, added, “She’s thrown everyone to the wolves except herself.”

For her part, Ms. Quinn acknowledged that she should have consulted more with her fellow lawmakers, but said she wanted to send New Yorkers a message that the Council was moving to fix what had gone wrong. She deflected questions about her political future.

“This is obviously a difficult time for, I think, everyone in the City Council and all of us are going to have to do what we’ve always done in the City Council, which is to pull together and keep moving forward,” she said in an interview at City Hall on Thursday, calling this period “perhaps the most tense time for us so far in the two and a half years that we’ve all been in this term together.”

But many council members said that Ms. Quinn’s political interests and those of the Council were colliding, and that they resented being tarred as corrupt and in need of reform by her proposals.

Indeed, as she has been quietly laying the groundwork for a mayoral bid during the past year, Ms. Quinn has been privately casting herself as a reformer who could best extend the legacy of Mr. Bloomberg if she became the next mayor.

“This was nothing more than trying to get some political cover for what had happened already,” said Councilman John C. Liu of Queens, “and it was problematic because calling it reform casts the whole body in a negative light as if somehow we needed to be reformed.”

Thus far there has been no serious internal push to oust her from the post she gained in 2006. But several lawmakers, many of whom would speak only anonymously for fear of retribution, said that even though there was still good will left for her in the Council, Ms. Quinn had severely damaged the trust of the Council and would probably find it increasingly difficult to win support for her agenda and her campaign for mayor.

Leroy G. Comrie, a Queens councilman who is the majority whip, said, “People want to see the speaker defend the institution and ensure that the institution at the end of the day stays what it was meant to be by its original mandate: a counterpoint to the executive branch.”

Ms. Quinn has not been fulfilling that role, said lawmakers stung by what they saw as her abandonment of their needs and her pattern of aligning herself with Mr. Bloomberg against the will of the Council.

As she ran for speaker, these lawmakers say, she promised to pursue extending term limits but then retreated after a poll came back with mixed results. She devised unpopular lobbying and campaign finance overhauls with groups outside the Council, and then muscled them through, lawmakers complained. And both she and Mr. Bloomberg promised council members that they would not be forced to take a politically risky vote on congestion pricing to improve traffic in Manhattan until there was an agreement in Albany to approve it as well, council members said. (The measure died in the State Assembly without reaching a vote.)

Ms. Quinn acknowledged that there were tensions on the Council, but said they were natural in a 51-member body.

“I think that on the vast majority of issues we’ve been incredibly successful working together,” she said. “I don’t think it’s realistic to expect that any set of elected officials are ever going to feel that their speaker or their leader is, you know, 100 percent in lock step with them all the time.”

But others said the situation was more dire.

Councilman Lewis A. Fidler, a Brooklyn Democrat, said he was “trying to help her out of this mess.” The way she moves forward, he said, is critical. “She’s got to reconcile the policy agenda she laid out with the constraints that are being placed on that by at least 48 of her colleagues who think what she suggested publicly without consultation was a huge mistake,” he said.