1. What is the most important issue in the city you would address if elected?

Creating a friendlier atmosphere for business – both big business and small – and consequently establishing a stable base of employment in a range of diverse fields. This clearly entails tax, zoning, and regulatory reform, with special encouragement (and the end of harassment) of neighborhood entrepreneurs. Available housing becomes part of the same picture. Not simply a question of “If you build it, they will come,” but for the all-important New Yorkers, “If you build it, they will stay.” This too requires reducing taxes and rethinking of zoning and regulation.

2. What other important issues would you address if elected?

Repealing the smoking ban. Yes, I’m the founder of a city-based smokers’ rights group, but still, I’d oppose the smoking ban even if I weren’t. Because the issue is broader than smoking. Clearly this is an issue of citizens’ civil liberties and private property rights. Private sector workplaces are not “public places” in the usual sense of the term. These are actually private places to which the public has been invited and is free to enter or not. So unless what’s under discussion here are actually public places – enclosed indoor areas “owned” by the general public and supported by public tax – local government has no right to regulate private behavior or to criminalize a proprietor for creating his own rules. Nor is this legitimately a question of Public Health. And for more about “secondhand smoke,” see www.nycclash.com/CaseAgainstBans/Introduction.html. Lifestyle legislation, once accepted, can only expand till every aspect of personal choice becomes a matter of “public health” and then a matter of local law. The other “Other Issues” seem obvious to anyone who lives and works in New York: the schools need less bureaucracy and better, more efficient management of their funds; the police, the firefighters and other “first responders” all need to be better-equipped and deserve, along with the teachers, to also be better paid. For more, see my web site.

3. What makes you the best candidate for this office?

My love of New York City. As a lifelong resident, my goal, attainable through policy reform, is to set my great city back on the right track, before it loses its heart and soul and its diverse and creative character.

(Reprinted as supplied by the candidate.)

Not participating in the Campaign Finance Program.

View Candidate Statement Disclaimer

PARTY KEY
C = Conservative D = Democratic EP = Education Party G = Green I = Independence L = Liberal	LBT = Libertarian R = Republican REB = Rebuild Party REF = Reform Party RNY = Reform Pary of N.Y. Party RTD = Rent is Too Damn High Party	SCS = Smaller Class Size Party SW = Socialist Workers Party VOP = Voice of the People WF = Working Families WVP = War Veterans Party