Staten Island, Trump’s New York redoubt, talks secession

NEW YORK — Staten Island — the only city borough to vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 election — is talking secession again.

The borough has a long history of wavering in its commitment to New York City. And the resurgent talk of withdrawing from New York City is feeding on distaste for Mayor Bill de Blasio and a sense that the chasm is growing between the center-right island and the Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez trajectory of New York City’s political leadership. Trump’s stoking of tribalism and anti-government furor is probably playing a role, too.

Following the well-worn path of early-20th century Staten Island secession clubs and a late-20th century secession movement that quite nearly succeeded, City Council Member Joseph Borelli is lining up support for a bill to study the feasibility of “an independent city of Staten Island.”

“I think Staten Island is more akin to the rest of the country than the rest of the city,” said Borelli, a Staten Island Republican.

Borelli — secession’s newest champion —is well-versed in New York history. And though he likes Trump so much that he asked the Queens native to house his presidential library on Staten Island, his campaign to consider secession is attracting at least some bipartisan support.

Rep. Max Rose, the freshman Democratic congressman from Staten Island, argues that Borelli’s legislatively mandated study can have only salutary effects.

"The most recent study we have on this issue is 30 years old, so bringing some new facts and data to the conversation is never a bad thing,” Rose said in a statement. “[And] regardless of whether secession ever becomes a reality, it will help us inform our discussions with the city to make sure Staten Island isn’t ripped off under this mayor or the next."

That Borelli is able to cross party lines on this issue is a testament to both Staten Island’s political moderation and its pervasive culture of grievance. It’s also a posture that belies the disproportionate clout the borough sometimes wields in city politics. In the Council, Minority Leader Steven Matteo, a Staten Island Republican backing Borelli's legislation, gets more funds to run his office than all of his Democratic colleagues save the speaker. It’s the only borough that doesn’t have to host a new jail, as part of de Blasio’s bid to close Rikers Island. It gets free ferry service to New York City.

And yet.

“Years ago when the city eliminated Staten Island Ferry fares, I rode with Staten Islanders,” tweeted former New York Times columnist Clyde Haberman recently. “Overwhelmingly, the mood was not ‘thank you’ but, rather a grumbled ‘Yeah, now they'll reduce our ferry service.’” (In the end, ferry service increased.)

Borough President Jimmy Oddo, who supports Borelli’s bill, understands why non-Staten Islanders can find this culture of grievance irritating.

“I’m sure the rest of the city is tired — I get the fatigue of Staten Island saying, ‘Oh what about us, oh what about us, oh what about us,’” he told POLITICO.

The svelte 53-year-old was sitting beneath his law diploma, and behind a weighty wooden desk of indeterminate historical provenance, next to a lavender vanilla candle and a potted plant.

“And I get that some of that is just reflexive on the part of Staten Island and maybe on the part of Staten Island’s electeds, myself included,” he continued. “But it’s grounded in reality.”

That reality is Staten Islanders have their own identity, which is only loosely connected to the larger project of New York City. Staten Island natives say the sense of being a Staten Islander, as opposed to a New Yorker, is palpable. For generations, that has manifested itself in the borough-wide newspaper, the Staten Island Advance.

By virtue of its status as New York City’s least-populated borough, Staten Island has only three members on the 51-person New York City Council. Most of the island’s residents are homeowners in a city of renters, and while most of them are also registered Democrats , they are historically the city’s most Republican borough — they went for Trump with 56 percent of the vote.

Staten Island’s 500,000 residents are mostly white in a majority-minority city. In an administration keen on bus lanes, speed cameras and bike lanes, Staten Islanders are relatively car-dependent. To access the rest of the city by car, they pay tolls. They have only a stump of a rail system. The buprenorphine ads at the ferry terminals attest to an opioid problem that’s suburban in scale. The local deer population breeds fear of Lyme disease.

“I don’t even send my kids out into the park, and our natural areas are getting destroyed by deer and the government solution is a vasectomy program,” said Borelli. “Staten Island officials would be fine with a cull.”

Staten Islanders — or at least the white Staten Islanders who reside south of its so-called Mason-Dixon line — are politically and culturally at odds with much of the rest of New York City, or so the argument goes.

Other neighborhoods — like Broad Channel and Breezy Point in Queens — have similar vibes.

“But they’re not knitted together,” said Richard Flanagan, the co-author of "Staten Island: Conservative Bastion in a Liberal City." "They’re not on an island altogether."

Elected officials argue that Staten Island’s physical isolation and political leanings relegate them to second-tier status. Oddo laments having to deal with assistant commissioners, not actual leaders of city agencies, even as he admits he often speaks directly with the mayor. He can’t, try as he might, get City Hall to focus on the rampant conversion of single-family homes into multifamilies. Both he and Borelli suggest Staten Island could manage itself better.

The argument gets gnarly, though. Staten Island public schools and public parks, its new public health clinic and its recreation centers all rely on New York City’s tax base. Back in the 1990s, the Charter Commission for Staten Island, consulting with a financial advisory firm, got an “informal” assessment indicating “that a City of Staten Island would be credit worthy, and suggested that it might even merit a rating higher than New York City because of its more modest service needs,” according to a 1995 paper written by the commission’s former executive director, Joseph Viteritti.

But the hypothetical city’s financial viability was partially predicated on the notion that New York City would pay to use the Fresh Kills dump, noted a recent Staten Island Advance article. The city is now transforming Fresh Kills into a park that, once complete, will be almost triple the size of Central Park. Borelli argues that Staten Islanders don’t need, or even use, all the services New York City pays for citywide.

Edward Josey, president of the Staten Island branch of the NAACP, suggested that’s bunk and that the secession movement is being driven by the island’s “white power structure.” Today, black residents on the North Shore can seek political support from the city at large. If Staten Island were to withdraw from New York City, they’d be isolated.

“If we secede, how’s that going to benefit the North Shore or the so-called black community?” Josey asked. “Are they going to be under more pressure to make these disparities any better?”

Staten Islanders have tried this gambit before. Many times.

“It’s been talked about by Staten Island politicians since almost a few years after consolidation in 1898,” Flanagan said. “ If you look at their history, within five or six years, there were secession clubs being formed among civic groups, and there were bills in the state Assembly introduced over the decades by Staten Island Albany politicians. So yeah, it’s always struck a chord, for over 100 years.”

In 1989 — nearly a century after consolidation and, arguably, in response to displeasure with Mayor David Dinkins’ administration — New York state formally launched a process that almost culminated in secession.

At the time, Staten Island was in the process of political disembowelment.

The Supreme Court had upheld a lower court decision finding that the city’s powerful Board of Estimate violated the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution, since Staten Island’s borough president, representing the least-populous borough, had the same single vote on the board as the Brooklyn borough president, representing the most-populous borough.

The Board of Estimate was abolished.

“No borough was penalized by the new arrangement as greatly as Staten Island,” wrote Viteritti, who now chairs Hunter College’s urban policy and planning department. “Once an equal player in the policy deliberations of the Board of Estimate, its political needs were now represented by three members in a fifty-one person legislature.”

Thanks to the Fresh Kills landfill, it was also, quite literally, the dumping ground for New York City. The state senator championing the secession effort, two-time mayoral candidate John Marchi, was revered as a statesman of unusual scholarliness and ethical rigor. He almost pulled it off.

The Senate Republicans seemed willing to let it happen. Gov. Mario Cuomo kept his cards close to his chest.

It was only after then-Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver argued that the bill needed a “home rule” message from New York City — an indication that the city supports the change and one the city government was not inclined to provide — that the effort died.

In the ensuing decades, Staten Islanders have continued to complain. They have no subway access to New York City. They wield too little influence over their own governance. Consolidation was supposed to lead to the physical knitting together of the five boroughs, via rail lines and bridges. But it took until 1964 for the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority to build the Verrazzano bridge, connecting Staten Island to Brooklyn.

“It’s almost objective that it’s been a failed experiment,” Borelli said.

Robert Olivari, a Staten Islander who was active in the pro-secession camp of the early 1990s, suspects that this latest effort is more about politics than substance. He says the financial construct that made secession possible in the 1990s, which included charging New York City to dump in Fresh Kills, no longer exists.

“For someone like me, who’s policy driven, the bombast about secession masks the reality of electoral politics in Staten Island,” he said. “It goes back to whether or not people like the mayor.”

Like de Blasio, early-1990s mayor Dinkins was unpopular on Staten Island.

“We never vibed with Dinkins,” wrote the Staten Island Advance’s Tom Wrobleski in November. “Profound political and policy differences played a part. So did race. But even Staten Island Democratic lawmakers eventually broke with Dinkins.

The secession fervor largely — though not entirely — died down during the ensuing Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg administrations, only to arise again during the age of de Blasio. It will probably die down again. This effort, like the prior ones, is a long shot.

“Mike Bloomberg treated us as one of five,” Oddo said. “That’s all he did. He didn’t treat us any better than Queens or the Bronx. He treated us as [if] we were one of five, which we are. And for that, he’s looked upon in many circles on Staten Island as this great mayor.”

A reporter noted that Staten Island is really just 500,000 people out of a population of more than 8 million.

“Are the two mutually exclusive?” Oddo asked. “I don’t think they are.”