An angry Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito lashed out at Mayor de Blasio for hogging credit for a deal to drop a cap on Uber — and said it was sexist to assume powerful men tell her what to do.
“I’m not going to allow anyone to attempt to save face at the expense of this Council,” Mark-Viverito, usually a de Blasio ally, told reporters at City Hall on Thursday.
“This Council decides what bills will be discussed, what debates we will have, what will be taken off the table, what will be put on the table. No one else leads that discussion. No one else influences that discussion.”
The Council dropped a bill to sharply limit Uber’s growth to 1% for a year after the e-hail company agreed to keep its growth steady while a traffic study is done, to consider paying fees to support the MTA and to share more data with the city.
De Blasio’s office presented the agreement as a deal they had struck — angering Mark-Viverito, who said she was in driver’s seat for negotiations.
“Let’s be clear — this had nothing to do with the mayor,” she said in Spanish at a bilingual press conference.
The deal came together after a meeting at the speaker’s office Wednesday between Council, administration and Uber officials. Gov. Cuomo also came out publicly against the cap and talked on the phone with Mark-Viverito to make his case.
The Council went ahead with legislation to order a study of Uber and other for-hire cars‘ impact on congestion, which was set to pass Thursday afternoon.
De Blasio said Thursday he might revive the cap — but Mark-Viverito quickly slapped that down.
“It’s really not for him to decide,” said the Speaker, who at times appeared to some observers to be near tears, though her office said she absolutely was not.
“The facts can’t be distorted, and the fact is that this was a process that belonged solely to the City Council,” she said. “Unfortunately, the mayor seems to have a different opinion. And so I don’t agree with the way he has presented it.”
Mark-Viverito said she had the votes to pass the controversial cap bill, which unleashed a furious backlash from Uber, but preferred a compromise.
The deal was widely portrayed as de Blasio caving in the face of pressure from Uber, Cuomo and others — a perception Mark-Viverito slammed as sexist for minimizing her role.
“I find it offensive as a woman, and as a Latina who is leading this legislative body that somehow the impression is that I was forced to my position, that I couldn’t possibly have arrived at this position on my own, that it was others — predominantly men in this case — that got me to this point,” she said. “That’s completely erroneous.”
She added that “the idea that somehow I can be influenced, or somehow that others are leading the charge in this conversation, I find to be sexist.”
The congestion study bill passed the Transportation Committee unanimously Thursday morning.
Mark-Viverito had previously spoken favorably about the cap bill, though she never took a formal position.
Many on the Council said it would have passed if brought to a vote, but Mark-Viverito was reluctant to bring it up because an increasing number of members opposed it, and she did not want to expose others to a politically risky vote on an issue few saw as crucial.
“She made it clear that many of her members had issues with the legislation and she played a pivotal role brokering a deal,” said Councilman David Greenfield (D-Brooklyn). “I think if push would have come to shove, certainly the votes would have been there. But that wasn’t the ideal outcome. I think the role that she played was bringing folks together and really bringing the administration and Uber away from the abyss.”
Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez (D-Manhattan), chair of the Transportation Committee and a leading cap supporter, said he wasn’t disappointed the proposal was dropped.
“For the record, we had the numbers to pass both bills. We decided to move only on one because Uber, probably for their own PR, decided to compromise,” he said.
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