New York City – Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum: I Will Not Seek Re-election

New York City – Betsy Gotbaum, the New York City public advocate, will not run for re-election next year, she said in an interview on Monday, drawing a starting line for what is likely to be a robust race to succeed her.

With an extension of term limits approved last week, turnover in the 2009 election is expected to be minimal. The public advocate’s position may be among the few desirable posts open for the city’s up-and-coming politicians to pursue.

In the interview, Ms. Gotbaum, who was elected in 2001, said that she could not in good faith seek re-election, given how vociferously she had opposed the term limits legislation pushed by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and approved by the City Council. The measure extends the number of four-year terms city elected officials can serve from two to three.

Ms. Gotbaum, 70, who lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, argued that any change to the term limits law should be made through a public referendum, the same way the law was adopted in 1993.

“It would be very hard for me to benefit from something that I fundamentally disagree with,” she said.

But Ms. Gotbaum also said that personal matters had weighed in her decision to leave office. In particular, she mentioned the very public death of her stepdaughter-in-law in police custody at an airport in Phoenix last year.

“Every little thing counts a bit,” she said.

The field of hopefuls to succeed Ms. Gotbaum will most likely include Councilman Eric N. Gioia of Queens, who has all but declared his intention to seek the job and has raised $2.5 million for the campaign; Norman Siegel, the civil liberties lawyer who lost in a runoff to Ms. Gotbaum in 2001; and Councilman John C. Liu, also from Queens. On Monday, Councilman Bill de Blasio of Brooklyn, who had been campaigning to succeed the Brooklyn borough president, Marty Markowitz, also appeared to be strongly leaning toward entering the contest.

The public advocate serves as an ombudsman for complaints from the public about city government. The position comes with a salary of $150,000 and a staff of 47. Ms. Gotbaum has used the position to bring attention to education, child welfare and women’s issues, among others.

“The sort of Betsy Gotbaum theory of government,” she said, “is you’re not criticizing for the sake of criticizing. You’re criticizing to make things better and that hasn’t always been easy.”

The relationship between the public advocate and the mayor is typically strained, but the association between Ms. Gotbaum and Mr. Bloomberg has been icy. The mayor donated $4,500 to Ms. Gotbaum’s 2001 campaign, but later that year, she endorsed his opponent, Mark Green, a Democrat, and the mayor significantly slashed the public advocate’s budget. Ms. Gotbaum said the cuts forced the office to reduce its staff by almost 25 percent. (The budget was gradually restored to its current level of $2.9 million.)

“It’s been hard and it’s been difficult,” she said.

Still, Ms. Gotbaum has managed her victories.

She told the story of a man who called her office to say his request for food stamps had been denied, even though he and his children were living in a homeless shelter. From him, she said, she learned of an enormous bureaucratic obstacle that many people entitled to food stamps were struggling with: the length and complexity of the application.

“It was 16 pages long in New York City, whereas in this tiny little town upstate, it was four pages,” Ms. Gotbaum said. “So I was able to get the size of the application reduced.”

She also set up a nonprofit organization, which has raised more than $2 million in private funds, to pay for projects that the public advocate’s budget could not cover, including a guide to public benefits for immigrants.

“This is all part of my whole philosophy: You see a small barrier, sometimes a silly barrier, and you’re able to fix it,” she said.

Ms. Gotbaum, who is married to the former labor leader Victor Gotbaum, also served as city parks commissioner under Mayor David N. Dinkins. She joked that she came from a family of “WASP-y Republicans” and was the only one to end up a Democrat.

“I was the rebel,” she said.

Ms. Gotbaum was the second person elected to the public advocate’s job, which was established in 1993. Her predecessor, Mr. Green, was a thorn in the side of the administration of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who repeatedly tried to abolish the post, without success.

Scott Levenson, a consultant who has worked on many political campaigns in the city, predicted that whoever succeeded Ms. Gotbaum would be a more aggressive and confrontational critic than she has been. Among other factors, the candidates likely to run for Ms. Gotbaum’s job all opposed Mr. Bloomberg’s change to the term limits law and pointedly criticized him for it.

“You’d have to say that whichever of the them are elected, you’d certainly think you’re going to expect a more combative relationship with the administration than we’ve witnessed with the incumbent,” Mr. Levenson said.