Cude and Gault win big in district leader election

BY LINCOLN ANDERSON | Updated Thurs., Sept. 17: As Mel Brooks might say, “It’s Cude to be the district leader.”

Add in Gault, and you’ve got the winning ticket for a small race that felt like it had a huge meaning for the future of the Village area.

Terri Cude and Dennis Gault easily beat incumbents Jean Grillo and John Scott in Thursday’s election for Democratic district leader in the 66^th Assembly District, Part B, winning more than two-thirds of the vote.

The district stretches from the Washington Square area down to Battery Park City.

More than 1,200 voters cast ballots in the race for district leader, which is the lowest political office and is unsalaried.

Cude and Gault won the district’s Greenwich Village portion by more than 280 votes — with 120 of that coming from 505 LaGuardia Place. They took Soho by more than 200 votes and Noho by about 50. Scott and Grillo carried Tribeca by around 100 ballots cast, most of that from Independence Plaza North, where Scott lives. The votes were roughly even in the district’s East Village portion, while Cude and Gault won Battery Park City, where Gault lives, in a low turnout.

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Cude and Gault had the support of three local political clubs, Downtown Independent Democrats, Village Reform Democratic Club and the Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club, while Grillo and Scott were backed by their own club, Downtown Progressive Democrats. Scott and Grillo had broken away from D.I.D. and formed D.P.D., largely over their support for Councilmember Margaret Chin.

Speaking on Friday, her first day as an elected district leader, Cude said that she worked hard to win, over the course of three months talking to constituents — and, most of all, listening to what they had to tell her about their issues of concern.

“I was out every day,” she said. “When it rained, I made phone calls or hung out under the canopy at Morton Williams supermarket. My God, do the people at Morton Williams know me!”

These issues ranged from, of course, New York University’s mega-development project in the South Village and overdevelopment, in general, to schools, parks and lack of bus service —“transit was huge, it’s huge throughout the district,” Cude said — to, specifically in Soho, “over-illumination” by ads and illegal, oversize retail stores.

She wrote down a list of the issues that people voiced to her, and plans to follow up on them.

It was really the N.Y.U. project, however, that inspired Cude — who is currently also first vice chairperson on Community Board 2 and has been on the board for five years — to start thinking of running for office. Cude lives on Bleecker St. just a half block from the university’s South Village superblocks, for which the nearly 2-million-square-foot project is slated.

She is co-chairperson of Community Action Alliance on N.Y.U. 2031, a coalition of more than 30 neighborbhood groups that have been battling the plan. She was also co-chairperson of the C.B. 2 N.Y.U. Working Group, which ultimately issued an advisory resolution that rejected the university’s entire plan as inappropriate for the location.

City officials, though, did not subsequently  do much to trim down the project, in the view of Cude and many others who voted for her.

“All we got was a haircut,” she said of the changes that were made to the height, design and square footage of the four-building scheme between its review by C.B. 2 and the City Council’s final vote in the summer of 2012. Charles Barron was the only councilmember to vote against the plan.

“What happened with N.Y.U. really opened my eyes,” she said.

Meanwhile, her election opponents had the support of numerous local politicians, including Congressmembers Jerrold Nadler and Carolyn Maloney, Assemblymember Deborah Glick, state Senators Daniel Squadron and Brad Hoylman, Borough President Gale Brewer, City Councilmembers Chin, Corey Johnson and Rosie Mendez, Public Advocate Letitia James and Comptroller Scott Stringer.

Cude said she even received robo-calls from Nadler and Glick urging her to vote for Scott and Grillo.

Twenty-two other district leaders from neighborhoods all over Manhattan also endorsed the incumbents.

But at the end of the day, it didn’t matter what the elected officials said: The voters knew exactly who they wanted representing them.

Cude said she won’t be holding any grudges over the lack of political support.

“I feel the electeds endorse incumbents,” she noted. “They circle the wagons. I’ve worked well with electeds. I’ll work even better with them now. As a district leader, I hope to be a more effective representative. Now I’m an elected, too.”

Meanwhile, asked for comment, Scott, in an e-mail response, complained of “character assassination” on the part of Cude and Gault’s supporters. “A picture is worth 1,000 words,” he said, referring to a particularly negative campaign flier sent out by D.I.D. He apparently was referring to the one that portrayed him and Grillo as caricatures dangling from puppet strings with Chin’s face looming  huge between them.

Scott, who had been district leader for four years, blasted The Villager’s recent editorial endorsement of Cude and Gault. He said it failed to mention that he, too, opposed the N.Y.U. plan and that he had stood with seniors at Our Lady of Pompeii Church in the Village when their day center was threatened.

Grillo was angered by a mailing of the D.I.D. “D-Notes” that were sent out to registered Democrats before the primary, which she said falsely inflated her salary and raised untrue allegations about the funding of the Tribeca CERT (Community Emergency Response Team) that she is a leading member of.

“I have proof from the Office of Emergency Management [about the CERT], and I have proof from the Board of Elections that my salary was nowhere near what was mentioned,” she said.

“I’m not challenging the election,” she added. “The voters made their choice. I’m proud of my 10 years as district leader, and I’m proud of the ethical campaign we ran.”

Yet, she accused of her opponents, “They ran against Chin not against us.”

For now, she said she’s looking to getting back into playwriting and doing community work.

For her part, Glick called The Villager shortly before the election and said she would like to know if Cude and Gault planned to “repudiate” what she called “some of the most despicable, negative campaigning, with innuendos not founded in fact” that she said was sent out about their opponents.

Asked if she would distance herself from the alleged negative campaign materials, Cude said she had not seen any, and could not comment on something she had not seen. She, in turn, sent The Villager a copy of one of her and Gault’s mailers, which took the high  road and only talked about themselves, and did not even mention their opponents or Chin.

At any rate, she assured that she would be ready to do her job in the next election: District leaders’ main responsibility is to turn out the vote during elections and make sure the polls are running smoothly.

“I’m learning about poll site operation,” she assured.

Above all, she said she is proud and grateful that voters valued the things she has been working on on C.B. 2, such as zoning and overdevelopment and fighting N.Y.U. 2031.

“I’m not interested in running for a higher office,” she stated. “I just want to get attention for these issues.”

Working on her own and with local community groups, she also has held free events to help tykes learn to ride bikes and provide them with ID cards, as well as give people access to a document shredder.

In addition to their being for a good cause, Cude also simply enjoys organizing community efforts like these.

“The city can be very cold,” she said. “But when we get together, we can have a lot of fun.”

In a statement to The Villager, Sean Sweeney, a leader in D.I.D., said Cude and Gault’s win is par for the course for the powerful Downtown political club.

“D.I.D. has never lost a district leadership challenge — whether on the East Side or the West Side — batting 9-0 since 2009,” he proclaimed. “And our victories usually are in the 80 percent range.

“This year’s landslide result — 68 percent over all and as high as 94 percent in some election districts — demonstrates once again that a dedicated group of grassroots activists have far more influence and garner a lot more respect from the voters than do all the endorsements of the career politicians.

“Despite endorsements from the public advocate, the comptroller, the borough president, two members of Congress, two state senators, an assemblywoman, three city councilmembers and dozens of party functionaries, our opponents were soundly defeated by grassroots organizing, winning only four of 54 election districts.

“The politicians robo-called; we made hundreds of personal phone calls. They sat in their offices; we drove seniors in taxis to vote. They bulk-mailed form letters from their campaign accounts; we hand-delivered absentee ballots to the homebound. They gave glib quotes to the press; we spread our message by old-fashioned word of mouth and modern social media.”

Sweeney concluded: “Margaret Mead says it best, ‘Never believe that a few caring people can’t change the world. For, indeed, that’s all who ever have.’ ”

Regarding Scott, Grillo and Glick’s charges that the mailers were smears, Sweeney shrugged that they were, to the contrary, “informative.”

He noted that the last time a district leader bucked D.I.D. and didn’t back the club’s chosen candidate for City Council, the same thing happened: In 2009, the club unseated the late David Reck when he declined to endorse Pete Gleason over incumbent Alan Gerson.

In addition, in the election for judicial delegates — which covered the entire Assembly district — all six candidates on the slate backed by V.R.D.C., D.I.D. and Jim Owles, as well as the Village Independent Democrats, were elected. Scott and Grillo, along with two other candidates, ran on an opposing slate — though, as previously reported by The Villager, they actually had hoped to avoid having this election in one part of the Assembly District, namely Part A, since there was no district leader race in this part. Thus, Scott and Grillo did not file the required cover sheet with the Board of Elections — thinking the board would call off the judicial delegates race for Part A. Yet B.O.E. this year made an exception, deciding that a cover sheet was not required, so the polls in Part A — which covers most of the Village — were open, but with only judicial delegates on the ballot. The results below are for the entire Assembly district.

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Jenifer Rajkumar, the second highest vote-getter among the judicial delegate candidates, is the female district leader for the 65^th A.D., Part C, and was the get-out-the-vote coordinator for Cude and Gault’s race.

Arthur Schwartz, district leader for the 66^th A.D., Part A, said, “I will miss John Scott; he was a unique person in New York City politics, a working-class radical doing politics in one of the richest communities in the country. Jean Grillo was also cut from a different mold than most district leaders. But Dennis Gault and Terri Cude will be exciting additions to Downtown politics.”

That said, Schwartz then blasted his political nemesis, Glick, calling her the “biggest loser” for working hard to support the incumbents, but getting soundly beaten.

Sweeney — angry that Glick got involved in the race — also participated in post-election sniping, saying, “The community’s clear victory must be an embarrassment, particularly to Deborah Glick, who, more than all the other politicians, campaigned so hard all summer long for Scott and Grillo, investing her political backing, campaign money, personal mailings, photo-ops, petitioning and phone calls — all to no avail.”

But Glick brushed off Schwartz and Sweeney’s barbs.

“These unpaid party-position elections are totally inside baseball,” she said. “The average voter doesn’t really focus on them. But I’m proud to have supported two hard-working people. They did a good job, and they did a lot of good work for the community. As for Sean’s comment, perhaps he has forgotten that less than a year ago I won my re-election with 80 percent of the vote.”

In that race, Glick beat a third-party candidate, Alexander Meadows, who was running as a Green.

Sweeney retorted, “Tell her she lost by 68 percent in her assembly district this time — when she had a real challenger, not Alex Meadows.”

D.I.D. President Jeanne Kazel Wilcke said Cude and Gault “rocked the vote,” and that it “sent a message” to area politicians.

“The community has been pounded in this district for a number of years,” Wilcke said. “People feel their voice is not being heard by the electeds. They have to scream, file a lawsuit or spend countless hours of their own personal time to prevent harm.

“And here were two seasoned community leaders, Terri Cude and Dennis Gault, who really spoke to the heart and soul of the community — and I don’t mean to be over-sentimental, it’s true. I never saw such breadth and depth of coalitions that formed to support them. A real groundswell as the weeks wore on became an avalanche of support.

“Their base of support was not numerous elected officials. It was the grassroots, local residents, small business owners and neighborhood leaders.

“We had a startling turnout for Zephyr Teachout and Timothy Wu just last year — highest in New York State at 70 percent, ” Wilcke said. “A number of significant historical movements have started right here in this district. Our votes send a message. Electeds should take notice.

“Now we’ve done it again to elect two solid district leaders. When this smart and feisty community comes together, we rock. Terri and Dennis and all the great people volunteering — they really rocked the vote!”