As two would-be Republican challengers to Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York addressed dozens of Republican Party members and well-heeled donors at a political club in Midtown Manhattan, the specter of President Trump loomed large, in every sense.
Stop scratching on holidays
Off Track Betting in New York State has been racing into a crisis called shrinking revenue. Some people have spitballed a solution: Don’t close on holidays.
New York State Racing Law bars racing on Christmas, Easter and Palm Sunday, and the state has ruled OTBs can’t handle action on those days, even though they could easily broadcast races from out of state.
“You should be able to bet whenever you want,” said Jackson Leeds, a Nassau OTB employee who makes an occasional bet. He added some irrefutable logic: “How is the business going to make money if you’re not open to take people’s bets?”
Elias Tsekerides, president of the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York, said OTB is open on Greek Orthodox Easter and Palm Sunday.
“I don’t want discrimination,” Tsekerides said. “They close for the Catholics, but open for the Greek Orthodox? It’s either open for all or not open.”
OTB officials have said they lose millions by closing on Palm Sunday alone, with tracks such as Gulfstream, Santa Anita, Turf Paradise and Hawthorne running.
One option: OTBs could just stay open and face the consequences. New York City OTB did just that back in 2003. The handle was about $1.5 million – and OTB was fined $5,000.
Easy money.
Claude Solnik
Long Island Business News
2150 Smithtown Ave.
Ronkonkoma, NY 11779-7348
Home > LI Confidential > Stop scratching on holidays
Stop scratching on holidays
Published: June 1, 2012
Off Track Betting in New York State has been racing into a crisis called shrinking revenue. Some people have spitballed a solution: Don’t close on holidays.
New York State Racing Law bars racing on Christmas, Easter and Palm Sunday, and the state has ruled OTBs can’t handle action on those days, even though they could easily broadcast races from out of state.
“You should be able to bet whenever you want,” said Jackson Leeds, a Nassau OTB employee who makes an occasional bet. He added some irrefutable logic: “How is the business going to make money if you’re not open to take people’s bets?”
Elias Tsekerides, president of the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York, said OTB is open on Greek Orthodox Easter and Palm Sunday.
“I don’t want discrimination,” Tsekerides said. “They close for the Catholics, but open for the Greek Orthodox? It’s either open for all or not open.”
OTB officials have said they lose millions by closing on Palm Sunday alone, with tracks such as Gulfstream, Santa Anita, Turf Paradise and Hawthorne running.
One option: OTBs could just stay open and face the consequences. New York City OTB did just that back in 2003. The handle was about $1.5 million – and OTB was fined $5,000.
Easy money.
Official portraits of Mr. Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, were projected on the wall, the two-story-high images sandwiching the two candidates, Paul J. Massey Jr. and Nicole Malliotakis.
For Ms. Malliotakis, an assemblywoman and a late entrant into the mayoral contest, the scene on Monday night embodied her biggest challenge: to distance herself from Mr. Trump — for whom she voted — and appeal to moderate Democratic voters while sticking to her aggressive opposition to Mr. de Blasio’s policies on immigration and public safety.
“I want to be judged for me,” she said after the event, in which she emphasized her middle-class roots and tried to draw a contrast with Mr. Massey, a millionaire real estate sales executive who has shown a prodigious ability to raise money.
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Ms. Malliotakis, 36, has positioned herself as the antithesis to Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat she accuses of neglecting average New Yorkers and letting quality of life deteriorate in the city, and as a more formidable candidate than Mr. Massey, who she has suggested is bland and less capable of courting Democrats in a general election. For any Republican to win, he or she would need a considerable number of city voters to cross party lines, given that Democrats hold a six-to-one registration advantage.
“I’m somebody who the Republican Party has never offered before,” she said on Monday, citing her personal biography as a product of Staten Island public schools and the daughter of a Cuban mother and a Greek father.
It will be an uphill battle.
Ms. Malliotakis raised $94,000 in the latest matching period, her first. Only about a third of that counts toward the threshold for the city’s generous public matching program, which she hopes to qualify for. (To get into the program, a candidate for mayor must raise at least $250,000 from at least 1,000 contributors inside the city, and only the first $175 of each contribution counts toward the threshold.)
She also must contend with her record in the Assembly, where she is in her fourth term representing parts of Staten Island and southern Brooklyn. Recently, Ms. Malliotakis sued the city unsuccessfully to halt the destruction of records from its municipal identification program. And she has embraced the Trump administration’s idea of withholding federal funds from New York City until it cooperates with immigration agents on deportations.
In recent days, Ms. Malliotakis has tried to clarify her stance on immigration, saying she believes city agencies are right not to ask about immigration status. “A victim of a crime wants to come forward to the Police Department, they should feel comfortable doing so,” she said in an interview. “We want to continue that.”
But her positions — anathema to many New York voters who rejected Mr. Trump in the election last fall — helped her secure the endorsement of the city’s Conservative Party. Mr. Massey, who presents himself as a centrist modeled somewhat after former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, received the endorsement of the Independence Party, similar to Mr. Bloomberg during his three successful runs. (No candidate running on the Conservative line has become mayor.)
“She’s almost an antithesis of Paul,” said Edward Lurie, a former executive director of the New York State Republican Party, who has been doing volunteer work for Ms. Malliotakis’s campaign. “You’re talking about a person who is more of a New York person, from the grass roots. More of a party person, too. You’ve got a rich guy versus a grass-roots person.”
The question, he added, remains whether she can raise enough money to be competitive.
“It’s harder than it looks,” Jessica Proud, a Republican consultant unaffiliated with either campaign, said of Ms. Malliotakis’s plan to qualify for matching funds.
Ms. Malliotakis has been buoyed by a recent poll from Quinnipiac University that found her losing badly to Mr. de Blasio — 64 percent to 21 percent — but doing so by roughly the same amount as Mr. Massey, despite his months of campaigning. (Mr. de Blasio, in the same poll conducted in mid-May, had a 60 percent job approval rating, the highest rating of his mayoralty.)
While Ms. Malliotakis and Mr. Massey refrained from attacking each other on Monday, that posture has not extended to other corners of the campaign.
“Assemblywoman Malliotakis has been an ineffective legislator, passing only four bills over her entire tenure in office,” Mollie Fullington, a spokeswoman for Mr. Massey, said in a statement. “Paul Massey built a successful business in the five boroughs over 30 years.”
Ms. Malliotakis, for her part, has endorsed a bread-based metaphor for describing Mr. Massey that was first used by another mayoral candidate, Bo Dietl, while adding her own personal flavor.
“You ever watch the movie ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding’?” she told reporters during a news conference that officially kicked off her campaign this month. “One of my favorite lines is when they bring the in-laws to come in and he says: ‘They’re so boring. They’re like a piece of toast — no butter, no jam.’ I’ll just leave it at that.”
Questions of campaign spending have arisen for Mr. Massey, who has raised $3 million and banked another $2.7 million in loans from himself but has spent it almost as quickly.
He was asked about the pace of spending on Monday night by one of the attendees. “I have spent generously on putting a great team together,” Mr. Massey said in response to a question, calling campaign expenditures investments of the sort he made during his business career.
But after pulling in more money than Mr. de Blasio for two fund-raising periods, the pace slowed and Mr. Massey fell behind the mayor over the past two months.
In an apparent indication of concern within the campaign, a prominent national Republican fund-raiser, Ann Herberger, recently stopped doing day-to-day work for Mr. Massey. (She collected $110,000 for her work since December, the latest campaign filings show.)
Mr. Dietl, the former police detective and television personality who was effectively booted from the Republican Party in a paperwork error, held a fund-raiser on Tuesday night at the Manhattan apartment of the billionaire investor Steven A. Cohen. Tickets cost $4,950, the city’s maximum donation. Twenty people attended, Mr. Dietl’s spokesman said, including the billionaire and former Republican mayoral candidate John A. Catsimatidis, whom Ms. Malliotakis has described as “my good friend.”
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