Douglaston budget expert Richard Lee seeks seat in Council after behind the scenes career
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Richard Lee, the budget director in the Queens Borough President’s Office, is running for City Council in District 19. Photo via Lee’s campaign
By David Brand
A veteran political staffer running to represent Northeast Queens’ Council District 19 says his experience in the Council and the Queens Borough President’s Office will allow him to swiftly move from policy expert to policymaker without the sort of acclimation process that could encumber other candidates.
Richard Lee, the budget director for interim Borough President Sharon Lee, is vying to replace term-limited Councilmember Paul Vallone in a district that includes his native Douglaston, Bayside, College Point and Little Neck. The race has attracted five other candidates, including Tony Avella, a former councilmember and ex-Independent Democratic Conference state senator.
Lee said his work in the borough president’s office and as an aide to then-Councilmember Leroy Comrie leaves him well positioned to deal with complex budget and policy issues from the jump. Lee worked for Comrie when he was the Council’s Land Use Committee chair and head of the Queens delegation.
District 19 residents, Lee said, need a candidate “who knows how to navigate the budget, the single most important document in the city, without needing the training wheels.”
“I already have experience, so whatever the solutions are or need to be crafted, I have the experience to know how to address them,” he continued. “We need someone who is going to be able to navigate.”
Lee said his top priority is securing municipal funding and attention in order to resolve long-standing problems in the Northeast Queens district, home to some of the city’s most overcrowded schools and weakest public transportation.
“We’re still at a point where we don’t receive our fair share for a lot of services,” he said.
Lee, a moderate Democrat, said he would have voted for the most recent budget, which faced criticism on the left for allocating too much money to the police department at the expense of social services, and condemnation on the right for cutting any money at all to law enforcement.
“This was an austerity budget. We are rapidly running out of revenue and we need to look across the board to trim fat,” he said. “In some areas we could have done better to trim the fat.”
He specifically said the city could significantly cut consulting contracts.
Though councilmembers initially said the budget slashed $1 billion from the police department, much of the decrease depends on speculative overtime reductions and eventually shifting school safety agents from the NYPD to the Department of Education.
Lee said the police reform elements of the budget were “cosmetic” and “didn’t really do anything to address the systemic reforms that we needed.”
“It isn’t about reducing the police force, it’s about reform that is meaningful,” he said.
He said he supports an additional two years of training in racial bias and criminal justice education for city cops “to solve the underlying issues” of racist discrimination and violence.
Lee, who is Korean American, grew up in Douglaston and graduated from Bronx High School of Science before leaving Queens to attend college at Carnegie Mellon. He returned for graduate school at New York University and began working as a paralegal at a corporate law firm.
He later took on a job as a tenant organizer with the nonprofit Asian Americans For Equality and said he joined the Council with the mission of bringing information back to his community.
On addressing homelessness, Lee said he supports increasing the number and value of city-funded housing vouchers to enable individuals and families to leave shelters for permanent housing.
“It would largely provide a dignified way for a lot of these folks to start rebuilding their lives,” he said.
Lee and his wife are small business owners, giving him perspective on the issues facing entrepreneurs and local companies during the COVID crisis. They run a “play cafe” that allows parents to eat at a cafe-style setting while children play in a back room. They were forced to close the business in March as a result of COVID-19, but have still had to make rent payments.
Lee said indoor dining decisions must take health and safety into account before business owners’ financial concerns.
“We need to look at it from a public health perspective first,” he said. “Have parameters in place, have filtration in place.”
Small business advocates have for years called on the city to establish commercial rent control to provide stability to companies struggling even before the COVID crisis hit New York City.
Lee said he does not support commercial rent control, but wants to establish policies that provide small business owners with a way to “reasonably anticipate rents.”
“Let’s say they have a five-year lease, landlords should notify them a year and a half to two years beforehand that this is how much you can expect your rent to increase so they have time to prepare,” he said.
Current policy “doesn’t give businesses time to prepare if they decide to jack it up at the last moment in hopes of getting rid of tenants to get a big box,” he added.
Lee’s campaign has raised $32,450 as of July 15, more than twice the amount of money raised by Avella, the only other candidate to file a financial disclosure report before the most recent deadline.
The other three Democratic candidates are Adriana Aviles, a retired NYPD officer and member of the local Community Education Council; Austin Shafran, a vice president for the consulting firm Metropolitan Public Strategies, a 2013 council candidate and a former Working Families Party legislative director; and Nabaraj KC, a real estate agent and local Rotary Club president.
Vickie Paladino, a state senate candidate in 2018, is running on the Republican side.
Lee said winning a seat in the council would be the culmination of his career in public service.
“It’s a long standing hope that I had stemming from when I first entered the public sector, which is rooted in my sense of helping people and giving back to the community,” he said.
