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When Hillary Clinton and Robert Kennedy moved to New York for the express purpose of running for Senate, they did it legally. They took their races and the office they were seeking seriously enough to make the move within all legal parameters.
Not so for Dr. Mathieu Eugene, whose 1000+ votes made him the winner of the Feb. 20 special election to fill Yvette Clarke’s old Council seat, but whose residency that day made him ineligible to take it.
As Eugene proved by asking the mayor to call yet another special election (forcing the city to pony up more cash for his selfish disregard for the law), the Council, lead by Christine Quinn, was right to be wary of swearing him in immediaetly. But to hold off swearing in Vincent Ignizio until the questions about Eugene’s residency were resolved was absurd. There is no question of Ignizio’s residency: he did, after all, win two races for an overlapping Assembly district, and no one pretends that any substantive reason kept him from taking his rightful seat in City Hall.
Though Ignizio missed a few weeks of paychecks, those really set to suffer are the residents of his new Council district—especially those who also live in his former Assembly district, who were without a voice in two chambers which supposedly represent them. Elected leaders in surrounding areas and adjoining districts suffered unjustly as well, forced to pick up the slack in constituent services and legislation in the interim. With city and state budgets being in process, this problem was of special concern.
Saying this does not matter is really saying that the city’s government structure is redundant enough to absorb any problems caused by the absence of two elected officials from the same area. If that is true, maybe this controversy has revealed just how much fat could be trimmed from the ranks of elected officials who vote themselves pay raises. If, on the other hand, Ignizio was kept from office because of the Council’s nervous prevarication about holding everyone up to the same standard, we should all be questioning the sensibility of both the leadership and those who back them.