By Jeremy Walsh
When Daniel Dromm launched his bid for the City Council last year, he did not expect to be the underdog. But when Mayor Michael Bloomberg succeeded in extending term limits, the public school teacher and Democratic district leader found himself pitted against incumbent Councilwoman Helen Sears (D-Jackson Heights).
“It does change my strategy,” he said. “But that’s going to be a problem for her, because I disagree with her a lot.”
Dromm, 53, has a history in the area. He lived in Jackson Heights from 1981-89 before moving to Flushing. He returned to Jackson Heights in 2002.
He was born in Rego Park, but his family moved to Long Island when he was 6. He grew up in a Catholic household that struggled to make ends meet after Dromm’s father died. He came out as a gay man to his mother at age 17.
“She began to cry,” he said. “It wasn’t that I was gay. It’s that she was afraid of the discrimination I would face.”
Dromm went to college at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, studying Spanish and journalism. When he could not find a job in journalism after graduating, he decided to earn his master’s degree in education from the City University of New York.
He started his teaching career at a Harlem day-care center in 1978 and joined the city school system in 1984.
Dromm’s coming of age as an activist was in 1992, when the controversy surrounding the Rainbow Curriculum led to harsh words from the school board president of District 24. Dromm, a teacher in the district, publicly announced he was gay in the efforts to defang the school board president’s rhetoric.
Dromm also founded the Queens Pride Parade that year. He said seeing the turnout of elected officials at the parade was the impetus for him to seek office. He first considered it in 2000, winning election to Democratic district leader status in 2002.
“We had to have a political base and we picked Jackson Heights,” he said, noting it was ideal because of the established lesbian and gay population and because of two high-profile murder cases of gay men: Julio Rivera in 1990 and Edgar Garzon in 2001.
“The Latino community knew that Julio was killed because he was gay,” Dromm said, noting Rivera’s murderers were white supremacists, “but he could also have been killed because he was Latino.”
Dromm said as a councilman, he would focus on overcrowding in schools, traffic congestion and health care.
He criticized Sears for not bringing additional school seats to her Council district, noting that Districts 24 and 30 are two of the most overcrowded in the city.
“We’ve got to build up [on existing sites] or we find other places to do it,” he said. “Just saying that we can’t do something is not acceptable.”
To alleviate traffic congestion, Dromm proposed redirecting and extending some one-way streets in the Jackson Heights Historic District, as well as commissioning a traffic impact study for the LeFrak City area, which he fears will be overwhelmed by vehicles traveling to and from the new shopping center along Junction Boulevard in Rego Park.
Reach reporter Jeremy Walsh by e-mail at jewalsh@cnglocal.com or by phone at 718-229-0300, Ext. 154.
