"A sorry excuse for a leader: Councilman Al Vann is neglecting his Brooklyn neighborhood,"

By Errol Louis - New York Daily News

As Primary Day approaches, it's time to declare openly what many political, religious and civic leaders are saying quietly: City Councilman Al Vann, who has spent a total of 34 years in the state Assembly and the City Council, has long since lost his fire, energy and effectiveness.

And his central Brooklyn district, which covers Bedford-Stuyvesant and part of Crown Heights, has paid a terrible price for returning an apathetic, semiretired pol to City Hall over and over.

The problem was on display this week at a candidate forum I co-moderated. Vann skipped the event, as he has half-a-dozen debates, including two televised ones.

A standing-room-only crowd of 100 or so anxious residents listened to six candidates challenging Vann in next week's primary talk about the district's pressing problems.

There was a lot to talk about.

Near the top of the agenda is the violent crime, including gangs and street crime, that continues to take a dreary toll on families and communities, in ways that are rarely reported on in mainstream media outlets.

One of the latest casualties, a 19-year-old named Royal McFadden, a reported member of the Bloods, was gunned down in the Marcy Houses in late August.

It happened a few blocks from the Tompkins Houses, a place I wrote about in 2007, when the Bloods had completely overrun the development, painting signs that read "DEATH ROW" in foot-long letters to mark a central walkway used for ambushes.

This is the same community where a 16-year-old honor student named Chanel Petro-Nixon left her home in 2006 and was found strangled days later. The slaying remains unsolved.
People are fed up and scared out of their wits by the gang violence. They have every reason to be.

Vann, who draws a salary of more than $112,000 a year, should have the decency to show up in public and explain what he plans to do about the crisis of violence.

But his refusal to speak out on crucial neighborhood issues - or even to show up - is nothing new.

According to the Council Web site, the committee met only seven times in the past year and introduced no legislation of any kind.

Vann, in fact, rarely shows up for work. He has the Council's second-worst attendance record (after the Bronx's Maria Baez), missing 30% of meetings between 2001 and 2006.
The good news in all this is that voters can choose among half-a-dozen replacements for Vann next Tuesday.

An ex-cop named David Grinage is running, as is Adrian Straker, an aide to Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz. Another candidate, Robert Cornegy, an ex-pro basketball player, puts the issue bluntly on his blog: "What more can Al Vann do in four more years that he hasn't done or tried? Isn't it time for a new perspective?"

The leading challenger, community organizer Mark Griffith, is the former executive director of the Drum Major Institute think tank.

Griffith actually raised more campaign money than anybody else in the race, including the longtime incumbent - $58,000 to Vann's $44,000 - and has run an intensive door-to-door campaign with help from ACORN, the Working Families Party and other left-leaning political groups.

He, like the other challengers, must convince voters that doing the familiar, lazy thing - returning an absentee pol to City Hall - will spell disaster for a part of the city in desperate need of new, active leadership.