City Council Speaker/mayoral hopeful Christine Quinn has been getting a lot of flack for refusing to let a paid sick day deal come to vote. Quinn argues the proposal will hurt small business owners, but is there anything more to her position? Correlation does not imply causation, but today the Daily News notes that a significant chunk of Quinn big campaign donors don't support the bill.
About 180 people sent a letter to Quinn last summer asking her to keep the bill mandating paid sick days from going to vote, arguing that it would hurt small business owners if enacted. And among them were four business leaders who donated big bucks to Quinn's campaign, including CB Richard Ellis CEO Mary Ann Tighe, who gave Quinn $33,550, MacAndrews and Forbes senior vice president Christine Taylor, who gave Quinn $48,000, and Estee Lauder executive Sally Sussman, who donated a whopping $126,000 to the campaign. Of course, Quinn probably considers these few thousand dollars a trifling drop in the bucket—after all, she says Coca Cola's $10,000 donation to her campaign also had nothing to do with her badmouthing Bloomberg's soda ban.
Elsewhere in the Quinnhateverse, the Speaker got booed by more NIMBYs for championing that UES waste station at a mayoral forum at the 92nd Street Y yesterday, while GOP contenders Joe Llhota, John Catsimatidis and George McDonald added fuel to the fire by promising they wouldn't support such a facility.
And Quinn's also been slammed this week by the Department of Investigation and Detectives Endowment Association President Michael Palladino for her proposal to install an inspector general to monitor the NYPD. “I think it’s essentially a power grab by a segment of the City Council who are looking to have the authority to appoint their own police commissioner,” Palladino told the Daily News. “Quinn is willing to hand over that authority to them in exchange for support in the election.” The claws are out, folks.
