Kathryn Garcia, above, at the Queens County Farm Museum on March 27 for the Easter Egg Hunt (Photo: Queens Post)
May 18, 2021 By Ryan Songalia
Queens Assemblywoman Cathy Nolan endorsed Kathryn Garcia on Monday in the race for New York City mayor.
Nolan cited the former Sanitation Department commissioner’s experience in government for her endorsement, saying she is the right person to lead the city out of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Kathryn Garcia is the only candidate with the vision and experience to lead our city to recovery,” Nolan said in a statement.
“It will take a well-practiced manager with the government success that Kathryn has to ensure we get back on track.”
Garcia returned the praise for Nolan, who has represented the 37th Assembly District since 1985. Nolan’s district covers Long Island City, Sunnyside, parts of Astoria and Ridgewood.
Assembly Member Cathy Nolan (Facebook)
“Over the years, I have seen her work tirelessly to deliver a more livable Queens for her constituents and a fairer education system for all New York’s schoolchildren,” Garcia said.
Garcia served as sanitation commissioner under Mayor Bill de Blasio from April 2014 until September 2020.
Nolan is the second Queens elected official to endorse Garcia, following Assemblymember Nily Rozic. Garcia also picked up the endorsements of the New York Times and New York Daily News.
Garcia checked in at fourth in the most recent Emerson College/PIX11 mayoral poll, which was conducted from May 13 to 15.
She garnered 8 percent of the vote, behind Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, whose support was at 18 percent, and NYC Comptroller Scott Stringer and businessman Andrew Yang, who were both at 15 percent.
Featured Events
10 Comments
Garcia is not a good choice:
She is super competent in getting things done, but is lacks a vision of fairness. Yes, she is endorsed by the Daily News and NYTimes, but also Alicia Glen, who is a longtime advocate of developing Queens and Sunnyside Yards. Mayor Garcia would be big real estate win, and Western Queens will continue to be rapidly overdeveloped.
Garcia bad on NYCHA:
Garcia is for “Blueprint,” which is the privatization of NYCHA, meaning giving over the property to for-profit developers. Repairs were left undone to set up a situation where private developers would need to “rescue” NYCHA. We, the public, created public housing to help people. Now that the land is worth billions, big real estate wants it. We don’t need our paid officials to help them to take it. Why have the feds give Section 8 money to private developers? Why not work on a program to help tenants buy their own apartments?
Garcia bad on Sunnyside Yards
Garcia is for proceeding with the Sunnyside Yards decking plan, meaning adding hundreds of thousands of residents, noise, dust, and congestion for decades, and great height on 200 acres right here. There will be luxury housing in addition to the more positive aspects of the plan. This would be another big real estate dream come true at our expense. We see that there are no original reasonable housing or original small businesses left near Hudson Yards, wrongly built with tax breaks, Opportunity Zone $, and Eminent Domain.
I do not favor any candidate at the moment, but I am trying not to be distracted by other important issues which hide the biggest issue facing us in Queens, the loss of our neighborhoods, small businesses and dwellings. Our sky, land, quality of life on the block.
There are decades of construction work for building projects in the pipeline, and desperately needed repair of our infrastructure would also provide construction jobs.
Might be the best of a bad bunch; we are very screwed this year.
MATEOTHEMAYOR!! Time for a change. Enough is enough.
Fernando Mateo
Absolutely! We are going to give him a shot because so far I like what he’s saying!! We need a whole new team with a whole new approach.
When Garcia was head of Sanitation Dept. we had 6 inches of snow in November of 2018 and she was an epic disaster…not one sanitation truck had chains on the tires and no plows were installed on them and no salt spreaders were prepared….the street went unplowed for endless hours…the GW Bridge had a 4 hour wait to get across and children were trapped in school buses stuck in snow banks overnight…she was the biggest disaster this city has ever seen…
The fact she oversaw hundreds if not thousands of other snowstorms without incident speaks volumes.
She was Sanitation Commish for about 5 years…she saw a grand total of about 20 snowstorms with only a handful being major storms…not hundreds or thousands…maybe you are thinking about Princess Elsa from Disney’s “Frozen”….”…Let it go…Let it go….the cold never bothered me anyway!!!…”
Yes. Garcia was a manager at the NYCDEP. DeBlasio promoted her to DOS commissioner over many more qualified people with decades of experience with storms because she is from Park Slope and friends with the mayor.
Nolan is right. Garcia is the ONLY candidate with the vision AND experience needed for the job of Mayor.