Open Letter to 2012 DNC Chairman: New Rochelle Mayor Noam Bramson – My Way or the Highway

Hon. Antonio Villaraigosa, Chair
2012 Democratic National Convention

Noam Bramson is the part-time Mayor of New Rochelle, New York and he was recently selected as a delegate to the 2012 Democratic National Convention. Noam Bramson has been and continues to be a mayor who fails to include the Latino community in any aspect of city government. He does not visit or patronize any sectors of the city where Latinos live and work. Our neighborhoods, when compared with other neighborhoods in New Rochelle, lack the most fundamental of services. It is perhaps because very few were able to vote for him; we will never really know. New Rochelle is almost 1/3 Latino. But I wanted to alert you to a dangerous situation that he has devised which will bring terrible repercussions to our community. His tenure and approach to leading this City has resulted in a degrading travesty of the democratic process for the working class and the communities of color in New Rochelle.

He has singlehandedly devised and ordered the relocation of our City Yard with its huge salt mounds, a fueling facility, a recyclables storage facility and city-owned and employee vehicles with plenty of sanitation and public works trucks to be next to homes where children and senior citizens live. It is a compressed & crowded neighborhood where working class people of modest means live – the overwhelming majority are Latino. There is no need to move the City yard as it is being “self-evicted” at the behest of a developer who has made many monetary contributions to this Mayor.

The Mayor has afforded the community no opportunity for discussion or debate – no city-wide forums. It is a done deal. When confronted with questions at City Council meetings, no answers are ever provided except for the Mayor’s adolescent pouting and disrespectful body language of looking away from the member of the community asking questions. Muy malcriado! It is undeniably a situation of a Mayor who espouses a My Way or the Highway philosophy. The major has degenerated to governing in a Joseph McCarthyan way.

So what to do?

I’ve worked with community leaders of all political stripes in Texas, New Mexico, and upstate New York. It’s rare that I encounter this kind of intransigence with a community leader, but it does happen. So I approach it in three steps:

1. If doing it the mayor’s way would place me in an illegal or unethical position, I’ll walk away from the relationship, but I will not stop writing and suggesting change the way the Hon Barbara Jordan taught me.

2. If doing it the Mayor’s way will adversely impact my community, I’ll walk away and propose civil disobedience the way Cesar Chavez taught me.

3. If doing it the Mayor’s way is simply stupid in my professional opinion, but it won’t result in any legal/ethical/public relations, I’ll agree to consider the Mayor’s wishes only if he will give me something in writing that indicates that he understands the expressed wishes of my community, that I have attempted to make him aware of issues that may arise from his approach, and that I will not be held responsible for the outcome of work that he proposes to undertake.

In short, “I’ll make you a tuxedo out of toilet paper if that’s what you want, but don’t come crying to me after you wear it out on a rainy day.”

Martin Sanchez

“I always felt that Joe McCarthy lived in a different moral universe. He asked himself only two questions. What do I want and how do I get it. Once he got rolling, you had to step aside. It was every man for himself, sort of what anarchy must be like.” Edward Hart, staff attorney for Sen. Joseph McCarthy