AMY PAULIN IN THE NEWS
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Pilla Fights Uphill Against Issues-Oriented Paulin in Assembly Race
By Keith Eddings [The Journal News]
WHITE PLAINS - He's got $643 in his campaign account. His opponent has $374,043.
He's a conservative Republican running in a left-leaning district where Democrats outnumber Republicans 3-to-2, challenging a four-term incumbent who won her last election with 72 percent of the vote, in a year when the man at the top of his party's ticket is expected to lose the state in a landslide.
In his only other run for public office - for White Plains Common Council last year - he came in a distant sixth among the six major-party candidates.
What makes Anthony Pilla run?
"Someone has to step up," Pilla said, describing what has been a low-key campaign in central and southern Westchester's 88th Assembly District that seems driven more by a sense of obligation than fire-in-the-belly ambition. "Otherwise, you don't have democracy."
Adding to his challenge, Pilla is seeking a seat in a legislature where upward of 95 percent of the incumbents who seek re-election every two years are awarded it, and the ones who aren't typically have been indicted.
Amy Paulin, the assemblywoman Pilla would unseat, is more the squeaky-clean good-government type, regarded by government watchdogs as one of Albany's most serious policy wonks."The Assembly, like the public, has a range of people in it," said Blair Horner, legislative director of New York Public Interest Research Group, a reform lobbying group. "There are some people here just trying to get pork for the district, move up the political food chain. My experience with her is that she's a student of public policy."
"She comes out of a League mentality," said Barbara Bartoletti, legislative director of the state League of Women Voters, an organization in which Paulin was a vice president before she succeeded Audrey Hochberg to the Assembly after the 2000 election. "Open government, women's issues. She's been quite prolific in that arena."
Paulin introduced 104 bills in the two-year legislative session that ended this summer, including 17 that made it to the governor, according to NYPIRG. Most of the bills advanced the progressive social causes that Paulin has built her record on: banning smoking in college dorms and other group residences, adding sodomy to the list of crimes for which there is no statute of limitations, requiring government agencies that are found to violate the state's Open Meetings Law to pay the legal bills for both sides.
Pilla, 40, a Realtor, said Paulin's energy is misdirected.
"Putting out a bill for a smoking ban in college dorm rooms does nothing to keep families in New York," he said. "She's squeezing the middle class out of Westchester by not representing middle-class interests, the seniors, the working families that are struggling."
While Paulin has cast her legislative net across a swath of social issues in her eight years in Albany, Pilla's campaign has focused on tax relief. In his campaign's most high-profile event, Pilla last month joined about 25 people - including several GOP candidates from Westchester and Putnam counties - on a chartered bus they called the Tax Cap Express for a trip to Albany, where they excoriated the Assembly's lopsided Democratic majority for sitting on a bill that would limit property-tax increases to 4 percent a year.
"I prefer the circuit breaker," Paulin said, referring to a competing bill that would cap a household's property taxes based on income. She said it would direct more relief to lower- and middle-income households than the cap.
Her campaign Web page says Paulin "helped increase" state aid to the schools in her district by about 12 percent this year and "fought for a state budget" that included $13 million more in aid to the municipalities in the district.
In an interview, she said her seat on the Assembly Education Committee gives her a prominent role in crafting state aid to schools, but she was cautious about claiming full credit for the increased aid.
"I won't take individual credit, but I'll say that I believe my advocacy had a successful result in bringing more aid to Westchester and my district," she said.
Paulin was also cautious about accepting what Horner suggested was her lack of interest in a "move up the political food chain." The $370,000-plus balance in her campaign account would be enough to finance her Assembly campaigns far into the future - she spent $50,000 two years ago - and would give her a sizable head start against most other candidates believed to be interested in succeeding Westchester County Executive Andrew Spano, who is 73.
Her campaign fund includes a $100,000 loan from her husband, Ira Schuman, a commercial real estate broker.
"I'm happy in my job," said Paulin, 52. "Right now, I'm not anticipating the future."
The 88th District comprises all of Scarsdale, Eastchester and Pelham, and parts of White Plains and New Rochelle.