Norwood News

Jose Rivera, the Bronx assemblyman, remembers the first time he met Council Member Maria Baez.

The year was 1982, and Rivera, having just been elected to the Assembly for the first time, was taking inventory in his district office, when he received a rude awakening.

“Twenty women, black, white, Hispanic, they stormed in,” he recounted recently.

An 11-year-old girl had just been hit and killed by a car on the Grand Concourse at 183rd Street, and the women wanted the driver prosecuted.  

Rivera told them his powers were limited, he’d yet to hire any staff, and he didn’t even have a typewriter. But they persisted, and turned to one of their own, a 20-something Maria Baez, for a solution.

“They said, ‘We’ve got your secretary, you get the typewriter,’” Rivera said. “I said OK, so I hired her. It was a two-people operation. And the rest is history.” 

A Single Mom on Welfare
Baez was born in Brooklyn and moved to the Bronx with her family at age 10. As a teenager, she attended Walton High School, but dropped out. “[After that] I literally did nothing with my life for a while,” Baez said.

It was a difficult time: she was a single mom reliant on public assistance. But slowly she began to get to her life together. She helped start a block association on East 183rd Street, near where she lived. And she earned her GED and a secretarial certificate from Monroe College.

Baez had not long graduated when she found herself standing in Rivera’s office. She became his receptionist and eventually, when he was a councilman, his chief-of-staff. “Honestly, at the time, he saw potential in me that I didn’t see myself,” she said. 

Baez later became the executive director of the Housing Workshop, a now-defunct affordable housing group that was based on Fordham Road; and, in the late 1990s, the chief clerk of the Bronx Board of Elections.

In the spring of 2001 Baez says she reached out to Rivera and Roberto Ramirez, the then-Bronx Democratic Party chairman, to ask if they would support her if she ran for City Council in the 14th District.

They gave her the thumbs up, and Baez was swept into office. She was reelected in 2003, and again in 2005.

In many ways, Baez’s story is inspiring. Thirty years ago she was on welfare; today, she’s a veteran councilwoman and the dean of the Bronx council delegation.

But is it all about to come crashing down?  With the Sept. 15 primary fast approaching, the Bronx Democratic Party has thrown its weight behind political rookie Fernando Cabrera.

To make matters worse, Baez has been hit by a tidal wave of negative press these past two years.

Scandal Upon Scandal
Baez brushes off the criticism. Her dismal attendance record at mandatory Council meetings and hearings? “I’ve been very ill,” she says.

Her initial refusal to support a housing bill which allows tenants to sue their landlord for harassment? “I was trying to be fair to everyone,” says Baez, who co-sponsored a rival bill that would have enabled landlords to sue tenants for harassment, as well as vice versa.

Her attempts to fund a Davidson Avenue tenant association that no longer exists? It still exists, she says.

Her office’s extravagant cell phone bills?  “There was an issue where we had got the wrong plan,” she says.

Her district office’s sky-high rent? “You’re going to tell me I pay the most?” she says. “I pay more rent on the Grand Concourse and 176th Street than someone… in Manhattan!” 

“It really, really hurts me when I hear about the negative things people say about this person,” said Elaine Watts, a friend of Baez’s.

Watts and others use words like “loyal” and “caring” to describe her. And they like the fact that she’s from the community and lives in the community.

Baez says she resides full time at 2415 Davidson Ave. It seems an unlikely spot for a politician with a six-figure salary; it’s no Fordham Hill, the gated community a few blocks away. The apartment she rents, moreover, is on the fifth floor of a non-elevator building – quite a climb for someone who’s been too sick to work.

On a recent visit to her building, several tenants were able to point out her apartment; others said they’d never heard of her.

Certainly, Baez doesn’t seek out attention. One community leader says she’s shy. But that’s scant consolation to Bronx community groups who have long griped about her reluctance to show up to events and meetings.

Desiree Pilgrim-Hunter, a Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition board member and a founding member of KARA (the Kingsbridge Armory Redevelopment Alliance), says KARA is still waiting for Baez to show “leadership.” (She’s been absent from major public hearings at which the Armory’s future was discussed.)
 

Pilgrim-Hunter also serves as the president of the Fordham Hill Owners Corporation; to residents there, Baez has been “invisible” she says.

Proud of Achievements
Since being elected eight years ago, Baez says she’s secured $40 million in capital funds for her district. Major projects to which she’s contributed include Mount Hope Housing Company’s new community center on Townsend Avenue.

Then there’s her legislative record. Over the past eight years, Baez has been the primary sponsor of six bills that became law, more bills, she says, than any other Bronx Council member.

But Dick Dadey, the executive director of the Citizens Union, a good government group, is unimpressed with Baez’s record as a lawmaker. “She has been a Council member who has not distinguished herself,” Dadey said, who also criticized her attendance record.

Baez, who has retained the support of Rivera, her loyal mentor, is unfazed. “I’ve heard remarks saying we need change,” she said. “No, this district needed change a long time ago and I’ve provided that.”

Ed. note: A longer version of this story is posted at www.mounthopemonitor.org, where it originally appeared.