The current political stalemate, impasse or snafu – call it what you will – in Brooklyn’s contentious 40th Council District is having some very serious repercussions. Already plagued by one false start when the first Haitian-American candidate, Dr. Mathieu Eugene, won the special election on February 27 but was unable to be sworn in – a legal challenge that he violated a residency law that made him ineligible to hold the seat. The political chess pieces have been recently realigned; the end-game might just be decided by the Brooklyn Supreme Court on April 12 – twelve days before the second special election of April 24, 2007.
Already the wrangling has had a serious negative impact on the district, which is now without representation at the City Council and temporarily disenfranchised by an unnecessarily repeated political process, which the erring candidate set in motion, by political ignorance, poor political advice or an arrogance born of association with the ignorantly uniformed. Either way, there is to be a second special election, or maybe not – depending on the outcome of the court case.
On March 27, 2007, the Wellington Sharpe campaign filed a Request for Judicial Intervention (RJI) in the Brooklyn Supreme Court to invalidate Mathieu Eugene’s nominating petition on several grounds.
There will be a hearing to determine this matter on April 12. The suit claims that under New York State Public Officers Law Article 3: Section 30, Mathieu Eugene is ineligible to be a candidate in the April 24, 2007 special election.
On March 9, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that Mathieu Eugene, by letter, declined to accept the office of Member of the City Council from the 40th District, to which he was duly elected and certified as the winner by the New York City Board of Elections.
Consequently, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, by a proclamation dated March 9, 2007, declared the seat vacant and called another special election on April 24, 2007.
However the legal fight ends, the biggest losers are the over 150,000 residents of New York City’s 40th Council District, which is heavily populated by Caribbean and immigrant communities. With nobody to negotiate for them during this crucial budget season, community-based organizations like Caribbean Women’s Health Organization (CWHA), CAMBA, Erasumus Neighborhood Federation, a number of churches with food pantries and other programs and services that benefit poor people, and a host of others will get no funding unless they have already individually petitioned the Brooklyn delegation to the City Council.
And even that is no guarantee that funding and other help will be forthcoming. In fact, one informed source told CaribNews that a recent article by new Congresswoman Yvette Clarke in bashing the City Council for part of the mess in the 40th District did not sit well with members. Councilmembers, including Speaker Christine Quinn, are reportedly incesed and angry over what many have said were “statements in very poor taste,” by the Congresswoman.
Quietly, City Councilmembers say that even if Eugene wins the election he will become the first “elected backbencher” in City Council history because help will not come from colleagues who have been accused by Congresswoman Clarke of complicity – literally acting in concert – in a political mess created, fermented and organized in the 40th District. And, of late, there are some in the Eugene political camp who have been placing the blame for a mix of political incompetence and arrogance on the fact that “Eugene is Haitian.”
This new addition to the already explosive political mix raises the noise level up another decibel Eugene’s Haitian roots – a source of pride in the first special election is now twisted into something ugly and derogatory and posited as a political stain that reeks of discrimination.
And as residents start to come to the reality that little or nothing will come to the District from the City Council this season and its approximately $50 billion budget, fingers are being pointed at a larger fall out – a spread of growing dissatisfaction in the wider 11th Congressional District. Indeed, the split in the Haitian community has never been deeper and is getting wider every day since the Eugene Political Saga has embarrassed many Haitian Americans. Nor have the increasingly strident convoluted statements, coming from Eugene and his supporters, helped.
Only someone with his head lost in the sky, in La-La Land, or buried deep in the sand, would fail to notice the serious political fall-out and growing public disenchantment that this salacious political scandal has wrought.
And the fallout will get worse if the flurry of injudicious “Rambo-talk” continues as sides dig in and harden their respective positions, unmindful of the qualified negative impact on the general public and, indeed, on the voting population in general. Good political sense calls for an honest, sincere admission of mistakes and a commitment to do better in the future. That makes the political aspirant or seasoned politician look, well, human and humble. People detest arrogance and a “right is might” approach that is riveted in some grandiloquent warped sense of political importance.
There is a lot of talk bandied about that does the district no good. In the end, the community is viewed – from its political leadership on down – as inexperienced, incompetent and childish. What is needed is an honest, genuine approach that has the interests of the people of the 40th District at heart, an approach that engages the people in honest dialogue and conversation – from bottom up, not top down.
For in the end, while politicians win, lose, kiss and make up, act out the principles of “only permanent interests – never permanent friends,” the people who depend on their leadership are the biggest losers; they do not really understand all this bureaucratic nonsense and political shape-shifting.
They place their faith, cast their votes, for candidates who promise to represent them and improve the quality of their lives. That is all they ask. A positive outcome of this sordid and unfortunate political mess that is the 40th Council District would be for politicians – of all stripes of persuasions – to remember that, ultimately, it is the people that their actions hurt and that every betrayal of trust, even in small things, can and does have an incremental, cumulative avalanche effect that results – in change.
