A Comment on the City Council Election and a Recommendation

By Arthur Schwartz

I am writing as an individual and not on behalf of Village View.

In this issue we ran three articles about the April 28, 2026 Special Election for City Council District 3, which is the district which runs from Houston Street up through the mid -50s, west of 6^th Avenue. I have been your Democratic District Leader since 1995, and ran for this very seat in 2021, coming in second to Erik Bottcher. It is an amazing district, which includes the West Village, Chelsea, and Hells Kitchen. It is vibrant, diverse, and ever changing. It deserves a vibrant, rooted City Council Member.

Our front page article reports presentations by the four candidates running in the 3^rd at a forum organized by Village Preservation. Page 2 has a piece written by our newest regular contributor, Audrey Hill, a recent college grad who was blown away by the enthusiasm and positive energy reflected in Lindsey Boylan’s campaign. The third piece was about a Board of Election challenge filed against Layla Law-Gisiko, a current District Leader in Chelsea. That third piece was a negative piece, characterizing the ballot challenge as “Trumpian,” baseless, cruel and mean. The article got many details wrong, but the challenge was filed because Law-Gisiko was gaming the system. She started petitioning the morning that the Mayor was expected to sign a proclamation calling the Special Election. The other three candidates waited for the resolution. Law-Gisiko collected less than the required number signatures by the end of the day and filed with the Election Board. That got her the first position on the ballot (which in my opinion doesn’t matter) and she got first dibs on a “party” name that was similar to Boylan’s. Boylan filed an objection. She lost. Does that mean we should vote for Law-Gisiko, and against Boylan? I would have preferred to read about why we should vote FOR Layla, who works very hard for her community.

What we didn’t discuss in this issue is the fact that there is Ranked Choice Voting, which means you, the voter, get to vote for all four candidates, ranking them 1, 2, 3 and 4. After the first round is tabulated , the person who comes in 4^th gets eliminated, and the people who voted for that candidate as their No. 1, have their 2^nd place votes distributed. That continues until a candidate gets 50% plus 1.

I have endorsed two candidates in this race, Lindsey Boylan and Leslie Bogosian Murphy.

Lindsey is an amazing person. She is a graduate of Columbia Business School. She served in an executive role steering operations and business development for three interconnected New York City business improvement districts, private-public partnerships best known for their restoration of Midtown’s iconic Bryant Park. Then she was appointed Chief of Staff at Empire State Development, New York State’s economic development arm, overseeing 10 regional offices and 75 full-time employees where she promotes job growth around the state. In that position she worked closely with Governor Cuomo who decided to ask her to play strip poker with him. She went on to become the first woman to expose Cuomo’s disgusting , lasciviousness. This made her a target of the Governor, but she led the effort to take him down. While all of this was going on she has been raising a smart vibrant daughter. When Cuomo decided to run Lindsey helped lead the fight to defeat him, ultimately as a key player in Zohran’s campaign.

Leslie Murphy and I ran against each other in 2021. What I discovered was a down to earth, creative woman, who had an astounding career as a journalist. She spent over 20 years as an investigative journalist and proud SAG-AFTRA member. She traveled the globe, working with world leaders and dealing with issues like food security in Africa, new green energies in Europe and humanitarian relief efforts in Venezuela and Sri Lanka. Her career culminated in an Emmy award for her coverage of the Harlem Little League. She settled down with her husband in Hell’s Kitchen, had a daughter, joined her co-op board, and got appointed to Community Board 4, which recently elected her to be Chair. Some stories about Leslie stand out to me. In Fall 2020, when students were missing out on live instruction, Leslie worked with local universities to deploy student teachers, who needed credit hours with classrooms closed, to fill the gaps at Title 1 schools (which have high numbers or high percentages of children from low-income households) and provide live distance learning. She convinced a Brooklyn-based startup, ShopIN.NYC, an E-commerce site offering products from local businesses, to expand to Hell’s Kitchen both to help Manhattan small businesses and offer an alternative to big online retailers. When she learned that cruise ships idling at the piers on the West side can emit as much diesel exhaust as 34,400 idling tractor-trailers in a single day, she reached out to Con Edison and the State Sen. Brad Hoylman and kickstarted the first steps in bringing shore power – an electric source of energy for ships – to the West Side.

These two women are getting my No. 1 and No. 2 votes, and I urge you to do the same. Lindsey, who has economic development skills that no other City Council member has, and Leslie, who was an investigative reporter who has the skill to put a lot of pieces together on a local level quickly.