Met Council’s Annual Assembly
By Jenny Laurie

At Met Council’s Annual Assembly on March 17, all four speakers in the featured panel discussion agreed that the Democratic Party was not representing tenants well. Margarita Lopez, Democratic City Councilmember from the Lower East Side, and Assemblymember Scott Stringer, an Upper West Side Democrat, fell mostly in agreement with the two third-party speakers, Brenda Stokely from the Labor Party and Luis de Jesus from the New Party.

While moderator Kenny Schaeffer, vice-chair of Met Council’s Board of Directors, tried to get a real debate going, the panelists ended up mostly in agreement. Led by Lopez and Stokely, the panelists joined in a call for tenants to get active in organizing other tenants in order to get a more responsive government. Lopez pointed out that she started organizing for her election three years before she beat Judy Rapfogel, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s chief of staff and the hand-picked candidate of the Democratic party regulars. Her organizing focused especially on the tenants living in public housing in her district.

Stokely recounted tales of organizing tenants against Helen Daniels, a landlord leader who had been proposed for a position as a commissioner with the state Division of Housing and Community Renewal, even though she had been convicted and jailed for harassing tenants in an SRO hotel she owned. De Jesus ran against a machine incumbent (although he lost, another insurgent won the seat) in his district, going door to door in his Bronx neighborhood where he was the president of his tenants’ association. “Many residents told me that I was the first candidate who had ever come to their doors asking for their vote,” he told the audience.

While the panel discussion did not settle the issue of whether or not tenants would be using their time and energy most effectively by working for the Democrats or for third-party efforts, panelists and audience agreed that tenants and tenant organizations (including Met Council) needed to organize more around progressive issues.

To close the meeting, the assembly elected the board of directors for Met Council for 1998. Those elected were: Angelita Anderson, Jane Benedict, Susan Howard, Vajra Kilgour, Jenny Laurie, Franz Lehman, Jon Lilienthal, Henrietta Lyle, Seth Miller, Dave Powell, Alan Reich, Bill Rowen, Deborah Schutt, Kenny Schaeffer, Scott Sommer, Gloria Sukenick and Maurice Trauring.