Desperately Targeting Voters

On the stage, sometimes a performance turns desperate because the performer is losing the audience, but the desperation shows, so he just keeps losing more of the audience.  That self-sabotaging desperation is called “flop sweat.”

Given the cascade of GOP attacks that’s been tumbling into my mailbox of late, I’m starting to think that the Tony Team is getting desperate. The Tony Team couldn’t bring themselves to acknowledge the finding by the Fair Campaign Practices Committee that they were dead wrong to blame the utility tax on the Foster administration.

On Friday they held a news conference about Lower South Street to attack the city’s acquisition of several properties there. According to their press release, one property they are worried about is the former site of the L and L Metals scrap yard. They are right to worry about that one. Problem is, L and L was acquired during the Testa administration, which threatened the owner with eminent domain to force him to sell. The city has little recourse on environmental clean-up of L and L. The Karta sales contracts negotiated by the Foster administration, in contrast, make the seller liable for all environmental clean-up and put the money in escrow. The seller will get any money left over after all necessary clean-up has been completed.

Then on Saturday morning I turned to News 12 and found the GOP candidate for mayor trying to revive the long-since debunked myth of the “Target deal.” During the last election the Republican mayoral candidate flashed a letter, supposedly documenting the “Target deal,” to the audience at a debate. John Testa even put the letter on one of his web sites. Guess what? It was a very brief, cautious expression of interest in developing a store “in the Peekskill market” if a “suitable development can be put together…” from a Target executive to an independent, New York City developer who had been trying to interest Target in the area. By the end of Mr. Testa’s last mayoral term, a year and a half after the date of the letter, there was still no deal, not even a proposal. GOP candidates have never produced even a noncommittal letter to the city government from either Target or the developer.

Desperation? Well, I’m pretty sure I’m catching a whiff of flop sweat.

*Read the Target letter at

http://johngtesta.com/pdf%20files/Peekskill_RFQ_Letter_from_Target.pdf