Local 375 is concerned. Read on:
A. Mayor Bill de Blasio and Rep. Joe Crowley were all smiles at a Three Kings party in Corona yesterday, not long after the two engaged in a protracted fight to decide the Council speaker’s race. De Blasio won the proxy battle last week, when Crowley, the Queens Democratic chairman, couldn’t peel away enough votes to block the election of Melissa Mark-Viverito, who also attended the Corona party.
Crowley might not be smiling in a couple of weeks, when Mark-Viverito announces which Council members will receive committee chairmanships, and the thousands of dollars in extra pay that comes with them.After helping elect the last speaker, Queens members chaired some of the best committees: Land Use, Public Safety, Economic Development and the Zoning and Franchise sub-committee, to name a few.
Asked if he expects to retain some of those chairmanships for Queens, Crowley told reporters yesterday, “You know, that’s entirely up to the City Council to decide and the leadership there. I don’t know what’ll happen in the future. I do expect that Queens will hold on to a number of those leadership positions. Yes.”
“We’ve all been in political bouts before. I’ve won some, I’ve lost some,” Crowley said Sunday. When asked how to pay for universal pre-K, Crowley balked: “At this point, I would not want to put my legislators in a more difficult position than they are now.”
B. HILLARY CLINTON’S HIT LIST
“‘We wanted to have a record of who endorsed us and who didn’t,’ said a member of Hillary’s campaign team … ‘And then, of course, those who endorsed him but really should have been with her … that burned her.’ ...
“There was a special circle of Clinton hell reserved for people who had endorsed Obama or stayed on the fence after Bill and Hillary had raised money for them, appointed them to a political post, or written a recommendation to ice their kid’s application to an elite school.
“On one early draft of the hit list, each Democratic member of Congress was assigned a numerical gradefrom one to seven, with the most helpful to Hillary earning ones and the most treacherous drawing sevens. The set of sevens included Sens. John Kerry, Jay Rockefeller, Bob Casey, and Patrick Leahy, as well as Reps. Chris Van Hollen, Baron Hill, and Rob Andrews.”
C. 11 state workers earned $100k in OT in 2013
ALBANY – Eleven state workers pulled down more than $100,000 in overtime alone last year. In 2012, five state workers did.
James Weeks, a corrections officer at the state prison in Coxsackie, Columbia County, earned the most overtime, a whopping $119,000 in 2013 — on top of his $90,000 salary. He worked 3,067 hours of overtime, according to records released Friday by the state Comptroller's Office.That equates to 59 hours a week in overtime.
Second on the list was Robert Henry, a treatment assistant at the Mid-Hudson Psychiatric Center in New Hampton, Orange County. Henry was second last year too. In 2013, Henry received nearly $116,000 in overtime in addition to his $68,312 salary.
The Comptroller's Office on Friday released the top 20 overtime earners in 2013. The office said it did not have a full tally of total overtime cost in 2013 at state agencies.
Three top overtime earners worked at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County. The most there went to Osas Imafidon, a corrections officer who got $99,000 in overtime, the records showed.
Imafidon earned slightly more in overtime than William Comfort, a corrections officer at the Elmira Correctional Facility, who received $98,736 in overtime.
