Council candidate Gerald Esposito. — Photo by Aaron Short

To help you make the right decision in the upcoming Democratic primary — which is the de facto election in Brooklyn — BushwickBK will be running profiles on each of the three main City Council candidates for the 34th District this week. As the 37th’s Erik Dilan is running unchallenged in the election, he will not be profiled.

The first thing you notice when you visit the Community Board 1 office on Graham Avenue in Williamsburg, where City Council candidate Gerry Esposito has worked for the past thirty years, are the preponderance of maps. Maps of zoning regions, maps of bridge and subway construction plans, maps of voting districts.

Sure, there are awards, city proclamations, and photographs, but understanding how the infrastructure and development in North Brooklyn has changed over time is more important for Esposito.  Knowing where we’ve been helps him visualize where he wants to lead the community, if he gets that chance.

"I want to affect a change like nobody has seen in this community," said Esposito.  "I want to bring government back to the people.  I want to bring services to constituents of the 34th District."

He’s known the Williamsburg part of the district for half a century, where he was born and raised.  He grew up in a small house on Conselyea Street, between Graham and Manhattan Avenue.  His father was an auto mechanic with the Post Office, where he fixed large mail trucks, and his mother was a housewife.  He attended Public School 132 and Junior High School 126 before being admitted to Brooklyn Technical High School and earning an Associate of Arts degree from LaGuardia Community College, a Bachelors of Science with honors from CUNY Graduate Center, and a Masters Degree in Public Administration from John Jay College of Criminal Justice.  His immediate family has passed on, but he still lives in Williamsburg off Graham Avenue with his wife and six cats.

Esposito, District Manager for the Community Board since 1977, has had his hands in nearly every major campaign, development project, and zoning vote that has come before the Community Board over the past twenty years.  The campaign to save Engine 212 (the firehouse off Berry Street), cleaning up the Greenpoint Oil Spill and toxic brownfields around Keyspan, the Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront rezoning, the recent contextual zoning of Williamsburg, and the Department of Transportation’s plan to bulldoze the Williamsburg Bridge have all crossed Gerry’s desk.  Not everything the city has done, particularly the rezonings and the firehouse closures, have gone the way the community has wanted, but Esposito insists he has fought the good fight on every issue.

"We saved the Williamsburg Bridge at one point," said Esposito.  "The DOT was looking to remove it and shut it down."

He has been at the forefront of lower-profile developments such as trying to reduce the proliferation of bars throughout Williamsburg and save neighborhood institutions threatened by development, such as La Marqueta, the East Williamsburg indoor market off Moore Street.

"At one point, the city wanted to close it.  Nobody blinked an eye," said Esposito, who wrote a grant to improve the market’s renovations and led a campaign to keep the market open.  "Once you put hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of renovations into the market to ensure its sustainability, the city won’t close it.  It became a great asset to the city."

Esposito has been pondering a run for elected office for many years.  He thought he might have a chance at State Assembly when Assemblymember Joseph Lentol was offered a judgeship earlier this decade.  Lentol turned it down, opting to stay in Albany, and Esposito turned his eyes towards the Council.  He has seen Councilmember Diana Reyna occupy the seat for eight years and he feels she hasn’t done enough.

"I want to remove the possibilities of any councilmember having an affiliation with nonprofits and funding them through member items," said Esposito, referencing a slush fund scandal that has tainted council last spring.  "City Council has to clean up its act. I think you need to look at my record over the past 34 years. You have to look at her record for the past seven years she has served in City Council."

It is rare for a sitting incumbent to lose re-election in this city, barring an indictment, but Esposito has raised about $80,000 over much of the past year, and remains competitive financially. He said he would have run for the seat anyway, despite Reyna voting to pass an extension of term limits, and has made the term limits vote an issue in the campaign.  One of Esposito’s challenges is to reach across the different constituencies that make up the district, from the largely Puerto Rican and Dominican communities in South Side Williamsburg, to Mexican and Ecuadorans in North Bushwick, seniors in the southern parts of Ridgewood, and young professionals and artists who live off the-L train who don’t primarily identify with an ethnic group. 

"We all want the same thing.  We want a decent place to sleep at night, affordable, decent rent, a decent place to send our kids to school and an EMS program that is responsive," said Esposito.  "We don’t have a hospital in CB1.  We lost a fire station.  We have a new wave of immigrants.  The city has to maintain these services in this neighborhood."

Esposito is running on a platform of bringing government reform to the Council by changing the way discretionary funds are distributed, increasing the role of local community boards, regulating truck traffic and then enforcing the laws, and preserving essential services for the neighborhoods in the district. He wants to have an urban planner staff position on every community board and he believes that a contextual zoning program, similar to the one in East and Northside Williamsburg, would work well in Bushwick, where several tracts are not protected from large-scale development.

"The Bushwick community is being displaced and development is affecting new residents and residents that are already there.  New residents come in, bring new energy, and that helps make the community better," said Esposito.  "I don’t know any hipsters who want to kick Latinos out of their homes.  If anything, hipsters are the most focused on cohabitation, patronize local businesses, and are sensitive to the neighborhoods they live in."

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