AG-candidate-turned-goo-goo Sean Coffey today blasted the legislative drawn lines for falling “shockingly short of what the people of New York deserve.”

In testimony to LATFOR’s public hearing in the Bronx this afternoon, Coffey says that he hopes the lawmaker-driven commission at least pretends to be non-partisan when revising the lines.

The failure of this Legislature to keep its members’sworn promise to refer the drawing of district lines to an independent, non-partisan committee was acynical breach of trust , even by the low standards that News Yorkers have come to expect of Albanypoliticians. Having ignored their commitment to an independent commission and opted, yet again, todraw the lines themselves, one would have hoped that this Task Force would have mitigated the harm by drawing the new lines in a manner that at least approximated what an independent commission would have done.

Interestingly, Coffey, a Democrat, devotes equal time to both the Senate lines and the maps proposed by the Democratic-led Assembly, which have largely escaped scrutiny as the press and advocacy groups focus on the upper chamber.

The Westchester resident singles out lines in the Bronx:

We do not take this lightly –counties should only be crossed with significant justification. But crossing the Bronx-Westchester line in the Mount Vernon-Wakefield area allows two majority Non-Hispanic Black Assembly districts to be drawn where currently only one exists. Like Ridgewood-Bushwick in Brooklyn-Queens, this is an areawhere a compact community of interest extends uninterrupted over the county line.

As Liz scooped earlier, the businessman who ran a dark horse campaign for AG in 2010, has been approached as a possible candidate to run against Republican Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino in 2013. Coffey hasn’t completely shut the door on that idea.

Sean_Coffey_–_Bronx_LATFOR_Testimony

Share|