With less than two years left as this city’s second most powerful official, Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito is already looking toward the future.
Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito is eyeing a run for mayor.
Unlike her friend and ally Mayor de Blasio, who is sure to run for re-election next year, Mark-Viverito, 46, is serving her second term in the Council, which means she is term limited.
But in her remaining time, she is determined to finish an agenda that will likely shape how voters remember her when, as many expect, she makes a possible run for mayor in 2021.
Among her top goals, Mark-Viverito told the Daily News this week, are the closing of Rikers Island, passage of a citywide housing plan that provides better “affordability” than so far proposed by City Hall, and reversing a recent decline in the number of women in the City Council.
“For too long, Rikers has not stood for more justice, but for revenge,” she said in a speech last month. “We must explore how we can get the population on Rikers to be so small that the dream of shutting it down becomes a reality.”
She has named a commission, chaired by the state’s former chief judge Jonathan Lippman, to study Rikers.
“I’ve asked Judge Lippman to issue some recommendations within a year,” Mark-Viverito said.
Closing the troubled Rikers Island is on Mark-Viverito's to-do list.
As for the Council’s shortage of female representation, “This is a serious problem,” Mark-Viverito said.
“When I was first elected, there were 18 women out of 51,” she said. “Today, we are down to just 14. And of the eight Council members who must leave next year because of term limits, five of us are women.”
She has held a series of meetings over the past few weeks with county Democratic Party chiefs and labor union leaders urging that they choose more women as candidates next year.
When she captured the speaker’s post in January 2014 in the wake of de Blasio’s landslide victory, Mark-Viverito was little-known outside her East Harlem district.
But the large group of progressive Democratic Council candidates who swept into office that year with de Blasio all backed her for speaker, as did the mayor. She thus became the first Hispanic in the city’s history to hold a major citywide seat.