Council Speaker Quinn’s State of City speech will cost taxpayers $12K
February 11, 2008
When City Council Speaker Christine Quinn delivers her State of the City speech Tuesday, listen carefully: you’ve paid for every word.
An outside consultant is to be paid $12,000 in taxpayer funds to write the speech for Quinn, who is expected to run for mayor next year.
A city purchase agreement dated Jan. 9 and obtained by the Daily News details that consultant Dan Gerstein was hired with taxpayer funds to “provide speech-writing services for speaker’s 2008 State of the City speech.”
Quinn’s office, when asked about the consulting fee, argued that this isn’t profligate spending.
In fact, an aide said, it’s smart shopping - and not without precedent.
“Like prior Council speakers and other electeds across the country, Chris is working with an outside speechwriter for her State of the City address,” Quinn spokesman Jamie McShane told The News.
He revealed that Quinn (D-Manhattan) also contracted out for help with her 2007 speech.
“Doing so, rather than having a full-time speechwriter on staff, saves taxpayer dollars and is a smart use of city resources,” McShane said.
Gerstein, a political communications consultant who has worked with Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and for the failed 2006 gubernatorial campaign of Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi, said he bid on the contract in December.
“I was thrilled that they asked me to help,” Gerstein said, declining to give details of the speech or how much work he did on it. “I’m a big fan of the speaker’s, and I really enjoyed working with her and her staff.”
“A speech of this size, it’s pretty time-intensive,” Gerstein said. “That’s pretty standard.”
Neal Rosenstein, government reform coordinator at the watchdog New York Public Interest Research Group, blasted the speaker’s bill.
“New Yorkers, they deserve to hear what the second-most-powerful person in city government has to say,” he said. “But even if we weren’t in a time of tight budgets, spending 12 grand on a speech is pretty hard to justify as a necessary expense.
“With a full-time communications and public policy staff, we would hope she would do better by the city in the future,” Rosenstein continued. “It’s just not right.”
Stu Loeser, a spokesman for Mayor Bloomberg, declined to comment as to who wrote the mayor’s State of the City speech this year and whether the mayor’s office contracts out for speech-writing services.
Source: NY Daily News
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