As borough president, Elizabeth Crowley would fight for Queens’ ‘fair share’
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Former District 30 Councilmember Elizabeth Crowley has raised nearly $300,000 ahead of a likely run for Queens borough president. Photo by William Alatriste/New York City Council, Flickr.
By David Brand
Less than two years have passed since Elizabeth Crowley sat in a Glendale middle school gym, addressing constituents ahead of a town hall discussion with Mayor Bill de Blasio. Crowley had weeks earlier lost her District 30 council seat to civic association leader Robert Holden by just 137 votes, forcing her out of office for the first time in nine years.
Borough President Melinda Katz thanked Crowley for her council service at the event and a few local residents said farewell. But Crowley never really left.
Since she lost her council seat, Crowley has led 21 in ‘21, an initiative she co-founded to draft women candidates for City Council. She has raised nearly $300,000 in a campaign account as of July, and said she will likely run for borough president (though it would be “premature” to officially announce now, she said).
Nevertheless, a lot has changed in Queens since that December 2017 evening. A progressive movement rivals, and at times surpasses, the borough’s traditional nodes of political influence. There’s a new Democratic Party chairperson. There will soon be a new district attorney. Amazon dropped by before dropping out.
Even Crowley’s own last name has new significance to many residents. It was a trigger for many conservative voters in District 30 who chose Holden’s demagoguery on homelessness over Crowley’s Democratic platform, often emphasizing the perception that she was too close with her cousin Joe, the county party leader.
That last name has become shorthand for “establishment” to many progressives, especially in Western Queens. Those voters elected U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, carried public defender Tiffany Cabán to within 55 votes of the Democratic nomination for DA and now plan to challenge every longtime elected official in the borough, including district leaders.
But Crowley said voters have to look past superficial characterizations. She wants to unite the borough’s Democratic factions and replace Katz as borough president — perhaps during a February special election, should Katz win the November election.
She says she has the policy bonafides and the platform to lead the borough.
“If people were really paying attention, they’d know I was a leader in the borough,” she told the Eagle during an interview at the Atlas Park Mall in Glendale.
Crowley represented District 30 in the City Council from 2009 to 2017. Official NYC Council Photo by William Alatriste.
She said she won’t seek endorsements from the county party and from the Democratic Socialists because the politics are “too polarizing.”
“Are you on the left, are you moderate?” she said. “I don’t want that to factor into why I run.”
Her record on criminal justice demonstrates her commitment to reform and is an example of being ahead of the curve, she said. As chair of the Committee on Fire and Criminal Justice Services. Crowley long advocated for the Raise the Age measure that would move children off Rikers Island, something the city and state finally accomplished last year. The issue was not a pressing one for her D30 constituents.
Voters, she said “are going to compare me to whoever else has run, and there’s going to be someone they can find who’s more progressive, but nobody has done more for criminal justice reform.”
Crowley also wrote a 2017 petition, signed by 11 Queens councilmembers, to reopen the Queens House of Detention, the vacant jail behind the Queens Criminal Courthouse. The concept was part of a nascent plan to close Rikers Island, one finally endorsed by the mayor last year.
She said she supports the concept of the city’s plan to build a new jail at the Kew Gardens site, but she criticized the proposed size and scope. The proposal is currently awaiting a vote by the City Planning Commission before heading to a full Council vote as part of the city’s land use procedure.
Despite backlash from many local elected officials, including at least one of her likely opponents for borough president, Crowley welcomed Amazon last year.
She said Queens would be “open for business” if she were elected borough president, but she added that all projects should undergo land use review and community input — which Amazon avoided before ultimately fleeing.
During the tail end of her Council tenure, and in the time since, Crowley has focused on improving Queens’ public transportation system, including the reintroduction of a commuter rail line that linked Jamaica and Long Island City, and included stops in Middle Village, before it shut down in 1998.
That plan is part of a larger focus on making life easier for Queens’ families by improving access to transit and building affordable housing, primarily along transit routes, she said.
Crowley wants to rezone the borough’s M1 manufacturing districts to include residential development, which would enable Queens to “put in a real affordable housing plan,” she said.
“That’s what our borough president needs to be planning for,” she said.
“We can bridge income inequality by creating more local jobs close to transit and creating more housing close to transit,” she continued. “And by creating more transit.”
Crowley wants faster, free bus service. And while she won’t have much control over MTA fares, she can influence bus service by appointing community board members who are amenable to expanding bus lanes and reducing the number of cars on the street.
She said she would transform community boards by appointing members who “are reflective of the communities they represent.”
“It gets to the point where these community boards are out of touch,” she said. “I don’t know if there is a board that truly reflects the changing demographics of the communities they represent.”
Crowley appointed several members of Community Board 5, which skews overwhelmingly older and whiter than the district average. She pointed to a few examples of diversity on the board, but said Katz resisted some of her appointments.
“I was the first person to put someone from Nepal on the community board,” she said. “I probably was the first person to put a ‘hipster’ in.”
She also said she would attract younger people to community boards by promoting civics in local high schools via participatory budgeting. Crowley would allocate money from the borough president’s budget to each school in the district with the condition that students decide how to spend the cash. That initiative would introduce students to local politics and encourage them to join community boards later on, she said.
“There hasn’t been any effort to recruit younger people to community boards,” she said.
Regardless of their political stripe, Queens residents can agree that the borough does not get its “fair share” from the city and state, Crowley said. Queens lags behind in school funding, transportation, affordable housing development and business investment, she said. That’s what she plans to address.
“I’m not running on the agenda of ‘I’m going to be a different borough president than Melinda,’” Crowley said. “I just think we haven’t been able to express the feelings of the residents loud enough. We haven’t gone into the arena and fought for our fair share here.”
