***FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE***

 

Contact: Dana Popovic (Media Coordinator)               Date: September 22, 2005

Tel: 212-348-3299

Fax 212-748-7731

Email: dana.popovic@gmail.com

              

Green Party Mayoral Candidate
Challenges Democrats / Republicans to Debate

On October 6^th Democratic Candidate Fernando Ferrer will debate current Republican incumbent Mayor Michael Bloomberg
on the issues facing New York City; Green Anthony Gronowicz brings challenge to both.

 

Anthony Gronowicz needs to be heard as a candidate on October 6th. Gronowicz is a proponent of affordable housing for New Yorkers, strengthening rent control and rent stabilization, and spending public money for science, language, arts and music programs in the public schools for our children. If elected, he would enforce the New York State Supreme Court decision demanding that the state release the $10 billion owed by the state to New York City schools.

Anthony Gronowicz would expand our mass transit system by extending subway lines and adding on light rail and trolleys to provide a clean, energy efficient alternative to auto traffic.  His emphasis is on energy conservation and decentralized alternatives to fossil fuels – such as neighborhood co-generators, solar cells, and wind or wave turbines. These will replace energy dependence, price gouging blackouts, and projects to build more dirty power plants—all of which have led to record annual oil company profits at the expense of public health and pocketbooks.
 

We can vote for a Green Mayor who will implement Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1944 Economic Bill of Rights that called for:
a living wage through full employment through public works as in the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration program, affordable housing, free health care, free college (as was the case with the City University from 1847 to 1975)

Anthony Gronowicz will conduct city business transparently (as the current New Paltz Green Mayor and City Council do). He will not engage in any backroom deals on city contracts.  He will hold public hearings with public bidding.  He will open the books to public inspection of the MTA and all other city agencies.  Gronowicz will support city workers. Municipal employees of New York have the right to a good, expansive system of public services, and to go on strike for a decent contract. The Taylor Law, enacted in 1967, forbids municipal workers (Transit, Police, Fire, Teachers, Professors, etc.) from striking, unlike the situation in other industrialized nations. An important objective of Greens is to get workers of all kinds unionized and to insure the right of all workers to unionize. The union movement is in a tragic decline and the Green Party stands for reinvigoration of the union movement.

To pay for these services AND make NYC more liveable, Gronowicz will enforce a carbon tax on fossil-burning fuels – that cause asthma and other health problems – instead of a sales tax that discriminates against poor and working people.   He will apply the Helsinki fine system that fines people according to income--not a fine system that penalizes poor and working people.  Gronowicz will place an annual tax of 1/100 of 1% on the net assets of all stocks represented, on private estates, banks and corporations worth over $2 million, and restore the progressive income tax we had in the 1950s when top income earners were in the 91% tax bracket.