Afro-Latina council member looks to upend Yonkers mayor's bid for fourth term

YONKERS — In the first episode of the HBO miniseries “Show Me a Hero,” Yonkers City Council member Nick Wasicsko plots his campaign against the city’s longtime incumbent mayor. He mulls over attacking his opponent for patronage posts and “tax breaks to fat cat developers.”

That was 1987, in the series based on a nonfiction book about the landmark federal court ruling that forced the city to construct public housing in the largely white section of Yonkers’ east side.

Nearly 40 years later, there is much about the state’s third-largest city that’s unchanged.

The boss-driven political machine maintains a stranglehold on local politics even though Yonkers is part of progressive firebrand Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s district and neighbors that of fellow Squad member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

But there are signs of fissures in the system this year with a deluge of bad news for Mayor Mike Spano about his 14 relatives on the city payroll and his attempt at a so-called “double Bloomberg” in seeking a fourth term.

Enter Yonkers Council Member Corazon Pineda-Isaac, 34, who is waging a similarly quixotic Democratic primary campaign on June 27 to the one Wasicsko won over three decades ago. The next-generation pol says she would represent the future of the “majority minority” city if she’s elected as the first person of color and woman to lead Yonkers.

“It’s about changing the face at the table,” she said in an interview from Paxos Grill, a local diner.

When Wasicsko was elected in 1987 at age 26, he became the youngest mayor of a major American city and a rising star in the national Democratic Party. Pineda-Isaac was just 25 when she won her first City Council bid in 2013.

Pineda-Isaac ran for the Council after she couldn’t get a response from her local representative — and figured other residents shared her frustrations. She became the first Latina majority leader in the council’s history.

The council member, whose parents immigrated to New York from the Dominican Republic, wears a bracelet that says “Dominican-ish.” She views her campaign as an invitation to young women of color who aspire to enter public office.

“What you can’t see, you can’t be” is her mantra.

Her platform focuses on increased access to affordable housing and more funding for public schools. One of her main attack lines against Spano, a former Republican, is his 2021 veto of a city ordinance that would have required new residential projects to set aside 20 percent of units for affordable housing.

“That was a slap in the face to the average Yonkers resident,” Pineda-Isaac said.

To prove her point, Pineda-Isaac knocked on doors at Palisade Towers, better known to “Show Me a Hero” viewers and current residents as the Schlobohm Houses before they were renovated and rebranded under Spano.

Shamika Swenson, 46, answered her door on a recent weekday to Pineda-Isaac, who campaigns in pink Nikes she considers good luck since she wore a similar pair in her previous successful races for City Council.

Asked about her top concerns for Yonkers, Swenson listed affordable housing in a city that borders the Bronx.

“If you want to move out of public housing, it’s hard to get an apartment that’s reasonable,” Swenson said from her doorway that opened to a strong stench of urine in the hallway.

Pineda-Isaac contends Spano has driven up the cost of housing in Yonkers by giving tens of millions of dollars in tax breaks to major developers building luxury housing on the city’s waterfront. Extell Development Company, the firm behind the One57 tower on Manhattan’s Billionaire Row, secured $21 million in tax breaks for a 1,400-unit residential development along the Hudson River in 2018.

There are also renewed questions about the influence of the Spano family — a name long synonymous with Westchester County politics.

Spano’s sister-in-law runs the city’s economic development corporation, the Industrial Development Agency, which approves tax breaks for businesses. His brother Nick Spano, a former Republican state senator who was convicted of filing fraudulent tax returns in 2012, runs a lobbying firm with nearly two dozen clients who have had business before either the city or the IDA, according to the New York Post. The Spano brothers have said the firm lobbies state lawmakers, not Yonkers officials.

But Mayor Spano is proud of the project he has brought to Yonkers, saying it has fueled economic growth in a city that has a median income of $72,000 — compared with much wealthier New York City suburbs in Westchester County whose regional median income is $105,000.

Spano also brought a $500 million Lionsgate film studio to Yonkers as part of his quest to make the city “Hollywood on the Hudson,” aided by the state’s lucrative film-tax credit program.

Bringing home the bacon to Yonkers doesn’t just benefit the wealthy, Spano said. He recalled that when “Show Me a Hero” filmed in the city ahead of its 2015 release, the production crew had to put abandoned cars and graffiti around the housing projects because they’d improved so dramatically under his watch.

Spano points to the public high school’s graduation rate as another big achievement. The rate went from 72 percent when he was first elected in 2012 to over 91 percent today. While former President Barack Obama recently named Yonkers a “model community” for increasing graduation rates for students of color, Pineda-Isaac has countered that the schools still lack full music, sports and arts programs. The student-to-guidance counselor ratio is 842 to 1, she said.

As for criticism that he’s blocking Yonkers from diversifying its leadership by running for a fourth term, Spano, 59, said he trusts the voters to say if he should stay on.

“I think when the public of Yonkers make a decision as to who they think the next mayor should be, then I guess it’s time,” he said in a telephone interview.

Like Mike Bloomberg, who got the New York City Council in 2008 to change its term limits to let him run for a third term, Spano has done it twice: In 2018 so he could run for a third term and again last year to seek a fourth. If reelected, he would be the city’s longest-serving mayor.

Spano is winning the money race. He had $646,510 left in his campaign account last month compared with $26,302 for Pineda-Isaac, campaign finance records showed.

Spano says there’s a simple reason why 14 of his family members are employed by the city he runs. “You know I’m one of 16 children, alright?” he asked, before explaining that his clan was so big they often didn’t get invited to weddings, dinners or neighborhood pools growing up.

“We got blackballed from all that,” he said.

His pitch for staying in office is to complete the Hollywoodization of Yonkers.

“We have MGM coming to Yonkers. There’s still a lot left to negotiate on public benefits,” he said.

The former state Assembly member added that his legislative experience in Albany is crucial to getting state aid for the city. (Bloomberg made a similar argument about management experience amidst a fiscal crisis when he ran for a third term.).

City Council President Lakisha Collins-Bellamy said Spano’s experience is the primary reason she’s backing him. Collins-Bellamy cast the deciding vote to allow him to run again

“In 2025, we’re coming up on a financial cliff because of our ARP [American Rescue Plan] money no longer being in play. We have a debt service that’s coming due, and we need someone that can hit the ground running, not someone that’s still learning the job,” Collins-Bellamy said in an interview.

Collins-Bellamy was a teenager when she moved out of a drug-infested public housing project in Yonkers called Cottage Place Gardens and into one of the east side homes a federal judge ordered built as part of the 1985 desegregation ruling.

“When I first moved to the east side I felt out of place, like I didn’t belong. I recall doing a tour of the seven scattered townhouse sites. When we arrived at the property there was a huge rock at the entrance that said, ‘Go home n-words.’”

Now she credits the move with the fact that she became an attorney and the first African American elected citywide.

Still, Pineda-Isaac’s pioneering bid isn’t enough to win her support.

“Don’t get me wrong, representation is important. I think the time is coming, but I haven’t seen a candidate that I can throw my support behind without including race,” she said.

But Jennifer Cabrera, a vice chair of the New York Working Families Party, said Pineda-Isaac’s identity is what’s driving her candidacy.

“People are excited to see a Dominican American woman coming in and challenging the status quo and trying to make actual change,” Cabrera said in an interview.  

Yonkers is stuck in the past, in part because the Spano family has controlled political power in Yonkers since the mayor’s father, Leonard Spano, entered office in 1971 as a county legislator, said one political insider who isn’t involved in the race.

“What you have is a very boss-driven system. In terms of its politics and government, it’s maybe 40 years behind the rest of where everyone else in Westchester County is,” said the Democratic consultant, who was granted anonymity to speak frankly about Yonkers.

“At this point it’s really the last vestige of any machine-line party system in the county,” he said.

While a majority of the city are people of color, likely Democratic primary voters are still plurality white.

“When you look at demographics like this you could very well say the trend is heading in the direction here where having a person of color in the highest office in the city is inevitable,” he said.

“Is it inevitable in 2023? My personal opinion is no.”

That inevitability is due in part to the vast fundraising chasm between Spano. Plus the power of incumbency. But the consultant mused that Pineda-Isaac still has a chance at an upset victory.

“What does she have? It’s identity politics and let’s be real, the Democratic Party certainly in 2023 isn’t shy of engaging in identity politics.”