Press Releases

New York, N.Y. – Council Candidate Ben Kallos is offering free voter file access starting today to all 2013 City candidates in the hopes of electing a better City Council. Free voter file accounts will allow Democratic and Republican Party Primary candidates to verify petition signatures so that they can get the 450, 2,000 and 3,750 signatures from registered voters in their party to get on the ballot for City Council, Borough President and Citywide office, respectively.  These petitions must be filed with the Board of Elections between Monday, July 8 and Thursday, July 11.

Today marks a crucial step forward for justice: the sentencing of Pedro Espada, corrupt former state senate majority leader, to five years in prison. Pedro Espada stole from his own nonprofit hundreds of thousands of dollars meant to serve the poor in the Bronx, and then had the audacity to run for reelection.

New York, N.Y. – Yesterday, Council Candidate Ben Kallos joined seniors, NYCHA residents and members of AFSCME Local 371, offering testimony to rethink cuts to senior services for NYCHA before the City Council Committee on Public Housing. Kallos, whose district encompasses the Upper East Side and Roosevelt Island where Stanley Isaacs and Holmes Towers have a NYCHA Senior Center, urged the City Council to help NYCHA keep senior centers well staffed and well funded as the agency faces a $205 million shortfall as the result of federal sequestration. 

Were the United States Government to begin developing all new code using a free and open source license, it would mean hundreds of billions of dollars in cost-savings for the public. The IT sector would flourish with thousands of new jobs and the improvements created by efficiency of software sharing between agencies would improve government, bringing it into the Internet age the right way.

"Fares keep going up, while service keeps going down, and that doesn't make any sense," said Ben Kallos, City Council Candidate for the Upper East Side. "We've collected over a thousand signatures on the Upper East Side as part of the Bring Back Our Booths campaign that we launched earlier this year when riders grew concerned about inaccessibility and safety after agents and booths were removed from subway stations at 77th and 86th Streets.  We’re thrilled to work with Transit Forward and TWU Local 100 to take this campaign for a better commute Citywide."

Kallos to support slate of young democrats for county committee to achieve policy platform

Roosevelt Island, N.Y. – Much of Roosevelt Island is in blackout this morning, as emergency responders from Con Edison and the 144^th precinct seek to restore power. Residents seeking emergency support should call 911.

City Council candidate Ben Kallos has provided a hotline for residents to seek non-emergency assistance from his team of volunteers. Residents can call 855-2KALLOS (855-252-5567) while the blackout persists.

“Child care helps New York’s single parents escape poverty,” says Kallos.

“City-subsidized child care pays for itself.”

New York, NY – Following child care funding cuts in the Final Executive Budget affecting thousands of working families, Council Candidate Ben Kallos joined Executive Director of DC 1707 Raglan George, Jr. at the “One Man One March,” along with Mabel Everett, President of Local 205 Day Care Employees, to call on Mayor Bloomberg to restore funding to help provide for New York City’s children, single parents and families living in poverty. 

Twitterverse – A new kind of political platform has been launched by Ben Kallos, candidate for City Council on the East Side of Manhattan and Roosevelt Island. The candidate is putting his open, participatory platform on twitter to spark conversation. Between now and primary day, Kallos will tweet his 125 solutions for a better city using the hashtag #BetterCity. The #BetterCity tweets are intended to leverage the unique power of twitter to generate an exchange of ideas between elected officials, interested groups and constituents.

Kallos Campaign testifies before City Council: “Cornell NYC Tech can’t claim to be sustainable unless it supports the local infrastructure of Roosevelt Island on which it relies.”

Key points from the testimony include:

• Require Cornell NYC Tech to be truly “sustainable” by supporting their own infrastructure;
• Direct tax revenues from businesses on the Cornell NYC Tech campus to RIOC;
• Require transportation improvements ahead of Cornell NYC Tech’s move-in day; and
• Support local renewable energy through the Cornell NYC Tech “applied sciences” mandate.