Sullivan hopes to win Pheffer’s seat

Gerald Sullivan likes Audrey Pheffer well enough - he just wants her job. That’s why the 41-year-old son of a retired New York City Cop is running for the State Assembly seat in the 23rd District.
“I’m sure she’s a nice person,” Sullivan said, adding, “But she’s been in Albany for 20 years, and she’s part of the problem … it’s time for a change.”
Sullivan is one of a number of candidates recently groomed by the Queens Republican Party to challenge long-time incumbent Democrats, or vie for open seats.
“Audrey Pheffer can’t help it, she’s part of [Assembly Speaker Sheldon] Silver’s team,” said Eric Ulrich, a Republican district leader and himself a City Council candidate. “Gerry’s right on the money on every issue important to his neighbors - he’ll make an outstanding public servant,” Ulrich said.
Sullivan said that the state has failed New York City, especially south Queens. “They’ve dug us into a hole financially, and now there’s nothing they can do to solve the problems we have,” he said.
The former stockbroker for Cantor Fitzgerald and employee of the New York Stock Exchange wants to rein in state spending. “We’re facing a huge deficit and they still raise spending,” he complains.
Sullivan points to the foreclosure crisis as one example. “South Queens is especially hard hit by this crisis, and there’s little the state can do to help because they’ve been fiscally irresponsible for years,” he said.
He sees his area of Queens as being hard-hit in a lot of areas, especially in the pocket book. “People are lucky if they get a 5 percent raise to deal with the increase in cost of living,” he said, pointing out that “When the state raises spending by 7 percent, it just eats it up,” Sullivan added.
“The worst of it is that people in my district, especially in the Rockaways, don’t see the benefits of all the government spending. They just have to struggle with higher taxes, higher tolls and higher bills, and feel like the government has forgotten them,” he said.
Though he was raised in Brooklyn, Sullivan considers himself “an Irish kid from Breezy [Point].” His parents had a bungalow near the tip of the Rockaway Peninsula before the area boasted a gated community.
Married for 11 years to Christine, Sullivan and his wife bought their own home in the area a few years ago, and are now raising their four-year-old daughter and nine-month-old son in the area.
“We used to summer there - for us it was ‘out in the country’ - no air conditioning and you couldn’t get decent TV reception, but we loved it,” he recalled. After his parents retired, they built a two-story house on the site in 2002.
Though it’s not strictly a state issue, Sullivan is also concerned about security. “The people in Howard Beach, Broad Channel and the Rockaways live under the most crowded flight pattern in the country and not enough is being said about it,” he declared.
Sullivan has personal ties to the security issue. He left the Cantor Fitzgerald office in the World Trade Center in August of 2001, just days before the September 11 terrorist attacks. “I lost a lot of friends and my younger brother that day,” he recalled, sighing, “He never came home.”
The incumbent Pheffer has been mentioned as the likely Democratic candidate to replace term-limited Borough President Helen Marshall. “I want her to move on from the Assembly a year early,” he quipped.