Cesar Zuniga, Community Board Chair, wants to be your next City Council rep

Red Hookers got their first view of Cesar Zuniga back in 2014, when, with the support of our council member Carlos Menchaca, he ran against Assemblymember Felix Ortiz.
He didn’t do that badly, but it was not yet Ortiz’s time to lose.

Here is what he told the Star-Revue then, as part of our ask-the-candidates story:

“As the son of hard working immigrants, Cesar Zuniga knows what it takes to succeed and raise a family in Brooklyn. Cesar lives in Sunset Park with his partner and his two young sons. He currently serves as the Director of Research and Evaluation for the Parent-Child Home Program, a national early childhood education program. In this capacity, he has helped bring early childhood education programs to families both nationally and throughout New York City, including Sunset Park. A member of Brooklyn Community Board 7 for the past 5 years, Cesar is also a member of the Council of the Sunset Park Promise Neighborhood Initiative.”

Since then, he has graduated to be Chair of the community board, a position he has held for four years. Now he is running to replace Carlos Menchaca, who is term-limited.

I caught up with him at George’s Restaurant in Sunset Park a few weeks ago and had a nice chat. We started by talking about something that Menchaca had promised, but not followed through on – a local office in Red Hook.

Have you thought about your Red Hook presence?
CZ: I certainly want to commit to exploring, whether it’s with one of the non-profits, or in some other way, a presence of an office in the neighborhood, particularly because back in 2014, when I did an extensive amount of outreach in the Red Hook Houses, I saw that it’s a disgrace that people live in those conditions – they have a lot of needs, and they need proximity to local government. If you are creating barriers to having access to your local government representative – that speaks volumes about your commitment to really serving at the local level.

I keep reminding people – I’m running for Council member – that requires a real intentionality about staying super hyper-local, focusing on the issues that may not be sexy, may not be headline grabbing, but it’s what you are getting elected to do.

What committees would you be interested in joining at the Council?
Well, my professional work is early childhood education – that’s what I’ve done for the past two decades. I have a real passion for that, and I have some really bold ideas around how to leverage that space to address a lot of the social justice issues that we’ve all been debating as of late. Some of the equity issues in education, some of the social determinants of health – we know that people who are underserved have health outcomes that are a direct relationship with their social mobility. So the Education Committee is a top priority.

I also am interested in serving on finance. A big part of the job that you are elected to do is to bring home the bacon – bring home needed services. The Finance Committee puts me at the table around conversations related to budgets.

Having conversations is a big part of the job. For example, Department of Transportation funding stretches outside of each district, in many cases. Thinking of things holistically is very important. For example, trucks – obviously, a big problem – is bigger than one district. The problem doesn’t end at the district line. The truck route problem extends out into other districts. The idea that if you can just fix the truck situation in my district will magically solve the truck problem is not the right way of thinking about it.

Maybe we will have to bring into the conversation Districts 39 and 40 and work together as a team to say, ok, this is what we need for all our districts.

Have you done some of this at the community board level?
Why yes – as an example I can tell you that DOT (Dept of Transportation) is proposing to make Seventh and Eighth Avenue one-way. We’ve (CB7) taken it upon ourselves to get to the table with Community Boards 10 and 12, and jointly talk about a strategy for asking DOT to take the feedback of all of the areas. For example, the west side of Eighth Avenue is CB 7, and the east side is CB 10, while 12 gets part of both sides. I told my District Manager that we can’t sit at the table with DOT arguing about just our piece of the Avenues, because that’s short-sighted. That’s how we lose battles, by not being in sync with our neighbors. The agency will divide and conquer. But if we all sit together, we have a better chance at a better outcome for all of us.

Red Hook will soon have three new Amazon warehouses – two of them on the water. Don’t you think they should consider easing some of the truck traffic using the waterway?
Well, the idea of the last mile brings huge amounts of new traffic. Third Avenue is a mess, Hamilton Avenue is a mess, there’s no doubt about it. Launching headstrong about new developments on the water without thinking about traffic is for me, a non-starter. We talk a lot about the waterfront, about improving the waterfront, building it out, really building the underlying infrastructure to deal with some of these traffic issues. The conversation that is not given enough attention though, is the waterway. How can we use the water to help mitigate some of the transit problems that we are having on land.

We need to really explore ways of moving goods in and out of the district using the water. There are some really good examples of this in other places, where the waterway is actually utilized in a much more intentional way. I’m not an expert, but I’ve read about places where you are using as the water as much as possible to move goods in and out of the area.

Right now the model is that everything comes into the district by land, sorted and distributed, and everything goes out by land.

The history of Red Hook is shipping by water and it makes sense for that to be the future as well. What kind of influence could a City Councilman have?
That’s a great question. For one thing, local government doesn’t operate in a bubble. Local government is part of state government, and of course part of the federal government. We are operating in a big, influential city. As Council members, we need to use our voice to get our State and Federal counterparts to work hand-in-hand with us to address some of these situations, whether it’s transportation, housing, or economic development. Local council members have a responsibility to leverage their state and federal relationships to make things happen locally.

Would you then be dealing with our local State reps in the Assembly and Senate?
Absolutely. Part of my style of leadership is convening people to have conversations.

How do you feel about the new Assemblymember – Marcella Mitaynes?
I respect her tremendously. I believe in her ideas, the work that she’s done on behalf of tenants. I’m on record as saying that one of the solutions, not the only solution, but one of the solutions to the affordable housing crisis is to have more Marcellas on the ground where, you know, this is a woman who who’s made a life out of educating tenants about their rights, really counseling them and really taking on some of these, like really awful landlords.

On another topic, what do you think about density in Red Hook. A lot of us like it the way it is, but others believe that much more building is needed.
We already have density. The Red Hook Houses is the second largest NYCHA development in the city, is it not? To pile luxury waterfront housing on top of that is a non-starter. That’s not going to happen under my watch.

We also can’t be building out the IBZ for housing purposes. It’s not sustainable, it’s not smart
I will continue to be on the record to say that the waterfront is this district’s most valuable asset. We need to go in and make sure that we maximize the benefit of that asset for the local community, and if we are really smart about it, to really serve the region.

For me, the only way we can do that, and I can’t stress this enough, is that we codify the 197A plans through some sort of legislative process to ensure that both the Red Hook and Sunset Park waterfronts will always remain industrial, working waterfronts, including some recreational use.

There are plenty of models throughout the world where these uses are tremendous economic engines for not just the local community but for their entire region.

I think that’s the kind of vision that we need to have for the waterfront. Do we have to have a conversation about what industrial jobs are? Of course, and that will always be a continuing discussion.