State Sen. Jack Martins faced a political one-two punch last week with the mailing of two flyers to 33,000 residents in Martins’ 7th senatorial district that targeted him for not opposing the so-called Millionaire’s tax and a protest outside his Garden City office accusing him of reneging on his pledge to support a bipartisan redistricting commission.
A slick, full-color flyer was mailed by a Strong Economy for All Coalition, a group that represents several unions and community groups. The flyer carried the headline, “Maybe I were a millionaire, Senator Martins would look out for me too,” above a picture of a small child putting coins in a piggy bank. It was followed by a second one headlined, “In these tough economic times, who is Senator Martins protecting?” featuring a man in a tuxedo fanning dollar bills in the foreground and workers, an elderly person and a young boy in the background.
Martins dismissed the direct mail and radio publicity campaign by a statewide coalition of unions and other community groups targeting Martins for not opposing elimination of the so-called Millionaire’s Tax and also saying he favored making cuts to education.
“To say that we are putting the interest of millionaires ahead of the interest of our children and our senior citizens is an outright lie,” Martins said. “These special interests are looking for the state to tax people to pay for their own special interests.”
Local radio spots also aired by the group that represents the United Teachers Federation, New York State United Teachers, 1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, Communication Workers of America, New York City Central Labor Council, the Labor Coalition, Coalition for the Homeless, Citizen Action for New York, and the New York State AFL-CIO.
Michael Kink, executive director of Strong Economy for All Coalition, said the campaign targeted 20 Republican and Democratic legislators who had supported doing away with the millionaire’s tax and slashing education aid, targeting those who they had the best chance to appeal to, based on their overall political profiles.
Kink said the group aimed to appeal to legislators with “some reputation for moderation, for compromise and trying to find a firm middle ground.”
Martins also was targeted because of widespread support for the millionaire’s tax among 7th state Senate District voters, according to Kink.
“He’s a new senator. The majority of the people in his area are in favor of the millionaire’s tax. Because of the overwhelmingly populartiy of this in a fiscal crisis. When you have an $11 billion budget gap to fill, you cannot do that with tax reductions,” Kink said, adding that the ads sought to “galvanize” public opinion on the issues.
While Kink said he thinks the ad campaign mobilized people to contact their state legislators, he conceded that the campaign failed, in light of the announced budget deal, which preserves the main points of Cuomo’s proposed state financial package. But he still thinks it was worth the effort to raise public awareness – although he declined to reveal how much the coalition spent to send its message.
“I know people don’t like to get mail in their mailbox all the time, but we got good feedback,” he said. “The fact is this is harsh budget. It’s going to hurt schools. It’s going to hurt kids.”
From the coalition’s perspective, Kink said there were other ways to get this state budget done as the top one percent in income statewide watch their assets “soar.” Elimination of the tax, which will bring in an estimated $1 billion to state coffers this year, would bring in an estimated $4.5 billion to $5 billion next year
“What we’re going to end up with in this budget is Donald Trump paying the same tax rate as the janitors in his buildings,” Kink said, noting a 6.85 percent flat tax rate will apply to state residents at all income levels.
Martins said the state Senate version of the budget is similar to Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s version, with each originally proposing approximately $2.8 billion in cuts to Medicaid and $1.5 billion state education aid. Martins said the state Senate version restored $280 million in education cuts to its version of the budget. It also restores Medicaid supplemental prescription coverage “so that we don’t disproportionately affect senior citizens on fixed incomes.”
“We work within the parameters of the governor’s budget. Although we try to restore funding where we can, the bottom line this year was that we weren’t going to raise taxes and we would have a budget within the revenue we anticipated this year,” he said.
Cuomo was committed to ending the higher tax rates on households making more than $200,000 or $500,000 annually, Martins said, so that was never really on the table. But he said the Senate budget did put some funding back in education.
“Not only did we restore funds to education, the issue of the extending the [millionaire’s] tax was never even an issue,” Martins said, adding that in the middle of a recession, “It’s not a time to hurt small businesses buy raising their taxes.”
But he also suggested that school districts would weather the financial storm, noting that Great Neck school district, where the annual school budget is $170 million, the school district will only lose 0.9 percent of its current budget in the projected state education aid formula and Port Washington would lose 0.6 percent.
“Obviously nobody wants to see a reduction. But these school districts are not going to be crippled,” Martins said.
Martins acknowledged that his office received a number of phone calls about the flyers and the radio spots, which he said has afforded his staff to call people back and “set the record straight.”
He slammed the strategic intent of the coalition’s ad campaign.
“It’s bad that these groups try to manipulate public opinion in this way,” Martins said.
Martins also rejected cricitism from a group headed by former Democratic state Senate operative Bill Samuels who held a rally outside Martins’ Garden City Park headquarters on Saturday to criticize him for honoring his campaign pledge to support a bipartisan state redistricting plan.
Martins suggested Samuels’ group is proposing its own partisan redistricting program as a stalking horse for Cuomo.
“The legislation they are pushing disproportionately gives the governor too much influence in the legislative redistricting process. It isn’t bipartisan. It isn’t independent,” Martins said.
Martins also accused the group of trying to “hurry to jam the process into three months,” when the legislator still has until the end of 2011 or 2012 to complete work on it begun two years ago.
“We’ve got to remove politics from this process,” Martins said, reiterating his support for a bipartisan approach. “It has to be independent and it certainly has to be nonpartisan.”
Former New York City Mayor Edward Koch has criticized the Republican majority in the state Senate for wanting to require a constitutional amendment to implement redrawing legislative districts. Koch said the proposal was a ploy to evade the pledge they made during the past election campaign to support his redistricting proposal.
