MILLER Aims high
by john toscano

City Council Speaker Gifford Miller, a Democrat from Manhattan, hopes to win the Democratic primary and oppose Mayor Michael Bloomberg in the November general election.

Gifford Miller has been the second most powerful public official, next to the mayor, since ascending to the position of Speaker of the City Council almost four years ago.

In this year’s elections, the energetic veteran public official is determined to move over to the other side of City Hall to become the city’s 109th mayor.

“I want to be mayor because you have the chance every day to change people’s lives,” he declared in an interview with the Gazette last week. “I think the right leadership will make the city stronger and keep young families here. I have a proven record of tackling the tough issues and I bring energy and ideas to this race, combined with my experience at City Hall.”

Prior to his election to the City Council in 1996, Miller served as chief of staff to Congressmember Carolyn Maloney when she served in the council.

As Speaker of the new city council, the first elected under Term Limits, Miller molded the 51-member body into an independent, innovative force determined to provide real solutions to the city’s problems.

In the interview, Miller listed the accomplishments of the council under his leadership, among them creating the city’s first Earned Income Tax Credit to help lift thousands of families out of poverty, requiring hospitals to provide emergency contraception to sexual assault victims, providing living wage to workers and mandating school nurses be provided for more public school students; instituting protection from lead poisoning for children and reducing diesel emissions to provide cleaner air.

When the mayor tried to eliminate $1.3 billion dollars from the budget earmarked for building new schools and renovating many others, Miller and the council stood firm and restored the funds.

Likewise, in almost every budget negotiation since 2002, whenever the mayor has proposed cutting senior, library and health care services from the budget, Miller and the council have resisted and kept them in.

Miller declared that in bringing together one of the most diverse legislative bodies in the nation, he had led the city lawmakers through their most successful period, passing more laws and overriding more mayoral vetoes than ever before.

Before getting to challenge the mayor in November, Miller will first have to get by three Democratic rivals in the September 13 primary: former Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer, Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields, and Congressmember Anthony Weiner (Queens/Brooklyn).

Ferrer has been leading the group consistently in the polls, but according to the most recent Quinnipiac University survey, released a few days ago, Fields has begun to loosen her hold on second place while Miller is beginning to advance in the standings.

In the campaign, Miller has garnered the support of the Queens Democratic organization led by Thomas Manton and the Manhattan Democratic Party organization, as well as a host of public officials and others.

He has built a war chest of about $18 million (at present), which he considers “enough to get my message out.”

Miller, besides his improved showing in the polls, also showed another indication of a healthy campaign when nominating petitions to get on the ballot were handed in at the Board of Elections last week. Miller submitted the most signatures, 158,000, 50,000 more than his closest rival. Political observers usually view the petitions as a good way to gauge candidate support.

Miller’s top priority in the campaign is education. He points out, that since the first day of mayoral control over the 1.1-million-student public schools, all the mayor has done is “put out press release after press release trumpeting one bit of bureaucratic reshuffling after another—all while our classrooms remained overcrowded, our schools became more violent and teachers, parents and students struggled with a new regime that was just as opaque and just as unresponsive as the old Board of Education.”

Miller has offered a six-point plan “to lead our schools in a different direction.” In a speech he delivered last month at Pace University, Miller declared:

“Education is the defining issue of this election because this is the first election we’ve had since the establishment of mayoral control and also because nothing matters more to New York’s tomorrow than giving New York’s kids an excellent education today.”

Miller’s plan would:

1) Reduce class size. “Kids learn better in smaller classes,” he says, “but Bloomberg has allowed record levels of overcrowding.”

Miller would reduce class sizes by 20 percent across the board with no more than 17 students in kindergarten through grade 3, 20 students in grades 4 and 5, and 23 in junior high school classes. Where class sizes are too big, he would provide a second teacher.

2) Recruit and retrain quality teachers, “Bloomberg has lost over 8,000 teachers,” Miller states.

Miller would keep the best teachers by revamping the career ladder to tie salary and advancement to performance and responsibility, not just seniority. And he would provide bonuses for good teachers to work in underperforming schools.

3) Safeguard the schools. To stop the crime wave which has occurred under Bloomberg, according to Miller, he would eliminate quotas on the number of students a principal may discipline, track school safety incidents in real time and change the climate of schools.

4) Provide after-school programs for every child, including one hour of homework assistance and two hours of arts and sports. “And every child will receive a nutritious meal, a substantial step in the fight against hunger,” Miller says. “Every night in this city, 571,000 children go to sleep hungry.”

Miller bases his plan on a Children’s Defense Fund/New York statement that maintains: “out of 1.8 million children under 18 years old in New York, there are 571,756 that live below the poverty level (30 percent).” And he sees a direct relationship between hunger and the 500,000 kids he says are failing in schools every year.

6) Reform the schools with innovative ideas. Miller would create a state-of-the-art, interactive system to foster parent-teacher communication, use technology to convey lesson plans, assignments and test results to parents and institute a service learning program so that every high school student performs community service.

To provide the funding to pay for his six-point education program, Miller proposes to extend the personal income tax surcharge, which is due to expire shortly, for those earning over $500,000 a year.

Regarding the education issue, Miller says he didn’t just start thinking about it when he