By Bill Parry
Mayor Bill de Blasio, former Mayor David Dinkins, and hundreds of current and former city leaders, family and friends joined Peter Vallone, Sr. to celebrate his 80th birthday with a surprise party at City Hall. The first and longest serving City Council speaker was overjoyed to see his former colleagues.
“It was a little disconcerting to have so many turn out and see how old I’ve become,” Vallone said. “I was overwhelmed to see so many old friends in one place. It was really heartwarming.”
To mark the occasion a portrait of the former speaker was unveiled and hung in the Members Lounge.
“That portrait is important,” Vallone said. “Not to me but to all the City Council members now and in the future. It stands for the independence of the Council and when they look at that portrait, they’ll be reminded that I led the fight to become an independent and an equal partner in government, that Council members are no longer agents for the mayor.”
When Vallone first went to the City Council to represent Astoria in 1974, he began a 15-year battle against the Board of Estimate. He won a Supreme Court ruling in 1989 that abolished the board and changed the way the city works.
“When they declared that damn thing unconstitutional, it changed the city,” Vallone said. “It let us fight for clean air, campaign finance reform and it allowed us to hire more cops.”
Mayor de Blasio hailed Vallone’s Safe Streets Safe City program that allowed the city to impose a surcharge on the personal income tax to hire more police officers.
“When you go back to the ‘80s, this was a lawless city with less than 30,000 cops,” Vallone said. “When I left there were 41,000. Now we’re down to 36,000 and we can’t go back to where we were.”
He added that he is alarmed to see anti-police rallies around the city.
“I hope it doesn’t all unravel,” Vallone said. “That’s why these anti-cop rallies in recent days are absurd. You can’t blanket the whole force because of a couple of bad cops.”
Reach reporter Bill Parry by e-mail at bparry@cnglocal.com or by phone at (718) 260–4538.
