UFTer’s Assembly bid picking up steam

Photo - Miller Photography

Gregg Lundahl (right), with City Council members Daniel Dromm and Rosie Mendez at a breakfast for Lundahl’s Assembly campaign.

Lundahl (left), longtime chapter leader and social studies teacher at Washington Irving HS, tells passers-by of his plans if he’s elected to the state Assembly.

While other UFT members took graduate courses, worked summer school and at children’s camps, and vacationed, high school social studies teacher Gregg Lundahl was petitioning for a place on the Sept. 14 Democratic Primary ballot.

That meant ringing doorbells, attending community meetings and pressing the flesh in 95 degree heat on the Upper East Side — all to promote his candidacy for Assembly and defeat an anti-union incumbent. With help from his volunteers, the Washington Irving HS chapter leader made the ballot with ease.

Lundahl, a 20-year classroom-teaching veteran, tall, with a neatly trimmed beard and a voice betraying his Lutheran Minnesota roots — think Garrison Keillor — is working to oust five-term incumbent Assemblyman Jonathan Bing in Manhattan’s 73rd Assembly District. Bing was the notorious chief Assembly sponsor of the Bloomberg-Klein initiative to eliminate tenure as job protection during layoffs and give school principals sole discretion to furlough whom they choose and for whatever reason they choose.

In June, the UFT Executive Board unanimously endorsed Lundahl’s election bid.

“When Gregg told us he was running, we were thrilled,” UFT President Michael Mulgrew said, “because the district needs new leadership. Unions have always believed that in politics you reward friends and punish enemies. The incumbent is no friend.”

He’s also no pal of middle-income district voters, Lundahl says, citing Bing’s failure to rein in or even address MTA misspending, even as the authority cuts service and raises fares. His disinterest in easing disruption to pedestrians and small businesses caused by the MTA’s Second Avenue tunnel dig is well-known. Bing gets big knocks, too, for his acquiescence to Sanitation Department plans for a marine transfer station that will attract hundreds of air-polluting trucks to the district daily.

Lundahl also slams Bing for ignoring the need for affordable housing in a district that is increasingly segregated by income.

“Everyone in this silk-stocking district doesn’t wear silk,” Lundahl said. “There are lots of middle-income voters, including UFT members, who are struggling and for whom Bing is AWOL.”

Lundahl said he’ll work to make sure public-sector jobs aren’t left to wither on the vine even as the state outsources jobs and promotes privatization.

“I’m about protecting jobs, and not just teachers’ jobs, and not just public service jobs, but the jobs of anyone who lives off a paycheck. People with decent pay and good benefits are threatened. They’re tired of the dysfunction in Albany and they want a change. I’m about that change.”

Voters are listening.

Besides his endorsement from the UFT, Lundahl’s backers include Hospital Workers 1199, Musicians Local 802, the Uniformed Fire Officers Association, the state AFL-CIO and the Working Families Party.