A last-minute bid by the city Board of Elections to appoint an executive director failed Tuesday — increasing the odds the embattled agency will be leaderless when New Yorkers vote this fall.
The expanded version of my piece for Wednesday’s editions:
After their 5-2-3 vote not to appoint Staten Island’s Michael Ryan, Board commissioners gave varying reasons why the last-minute move failed.
As I noted in
I posted from Board HQ, Ryan — a Democratic lawyer who once served on the BOE — had the support of all five GOP commissioners. Not a single Democrat supported Ryan for the job, which has been vacant for going on three years, leaving him without the sixth supporter needed to clinch the position.
Although she’s Ryan’s fellow Staten Island Dem, Commissioner Maria Guastella abstained from the vote — a last-minute add to the agenda.
“You don’t do a very important vote in two seconds… You wait so we can properly discuss it among us,” said Guastella, who succeeded Ryan (
pictured
) when he left the Board to run for DA against Republican Daniel Donovan.
“You don’t just throw it out there [and] expect us to just jump up and vote,” she said.
Another name floated for executive director,
as I reported for Tuesday’s editions
: Democrat Erik Dilan of Brooklyn, who must leave the City Council at the end of the year thanks to term limits.
As of Tuesday evening, Dilan had not submitted an application for the ED job — or responded to repeated Daily News requests for comment about it.
But if he did leave the Council early, Dilan would take with him the critical 34th vote to override Mayor Bloomberg’s veto of a bill expanding the right to sue cops for racial profiling.
Multiple sources — both Democratic and Republican — have told the News they’d heard Dilan’s name floated.
Several said Bloomberg and his allies had expressed support for Dilan. But a mayoral spokesman said that’s not the case, and that all Hizzoner wants is for the Board to hire someone who can get the “broken” agency back on track.
Ryan’s interest in the ED job in May. He couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
Naomi Barrera of the Bronx, one of two Democrats who voted against Ryan, called him “a very nice person,” but said “that position requires someone with more managerial experience… I think Mike would be lacking some factors there.”
(Barrera herself had been talked about in the past as a possibility for the ED job, which pays about $173,000 a year, but “at this point, that’s not a consideration,” she said. “It’s just not something that came to fruition.”)
Julie Dent, the Brooklyn Democratic commissioner, abstained from voting on Ryan.
“I respectfully say ‘no comment,'” she responded when asked by the News for her rationale — and said the same when asked about Dilan.
Manhattan Democrat Gregory Soumas abstained as well, while Queens Democrat Jose Miguel Araujo voted against Ryan, who was formally nominated Tuesday by Queens Republican Michael Michel.
Board President Fredric Umane, a Manhattan Republican, said the GOP commissioners backed Ryan as the most qualified person who’s expressed interest.
“We’ve been criticized for two years about not doing anything [to fill the position], and so we wanted to take a stand and come up with somebody we feel could do the job. It’s as simple as that,” Umane said.
There’s been no advertisement or national search launched to get someone into the seat.
While the Board hasn’t said “anybody from California or Oklahoma or Dubuque, Iowa” who’s qualified wouldn’t be considered, Umane said the preferred candidate would tend to be someone familiar with “local issues.”
Alex Low, president of the New Kings Democrats, railed against the idea of Dilan scoring the six-figure ED job: “This move would be doubly-disastrous, appointing an ethically-challenged [councilman] to run the Board of Elections, and derailing common sense efforts to prevent policing abuses like stop-and-frisk,” Low said in a Tuesday statement.
IMAGE: AARON SHOWALTER/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
(Footnote: Another reporter and I seated in the audience both noted Guastella appeared to have raised her hand to vote against Ryan and then again immediately afterward to abstain. Following the vote, Guastella emphatically said that she only abstained; her vote was so recorded in the Board’s records of the meeting.)