We will always remember Claire Shulman's outright refusal to help Willets Point taxpayers to obtain basic municipal services that are available to every other City neighborhood. And, we'll remember her brazen illegal lobbying scheme, persuading the City Council to destroy our industrial business community and take all of our private property. We are proud of exposing her scheme, and of successfully demanding an Attorney General investigation that ultimately "validates years of complaints from Willets Point business owners [that] the Flushing Willets Point Corona LDC and specifically, its president, Claire Shulman, curried favor for a plan to take properties through eminent domain."
As President and CEO of the Flushing Willets Point Corona Local Development Corporation, an entity that she established, Shulman aggressively lobbied the City Council during 2007-2008 to approve controversial legislation intended to remove all of the existing private property owners and 250 industrial businesses from Willets Point, for redevelopment Shulman conducted the lobbying for more than one year without filing any of the required public disclosures, until finally investigated by the City Clerk’s Lobbying Bureau – which levied against Shulman’s LDC a penalty of $59,090.00, the then-record, highest New York City lobbyist penalty ever paid. Acting on a complaint by Willets Point property and business owners – that Shulman’s lobbying also contravened New York state Not-for-Profit Corporation Law § 1411, which prohibits all local development corporations from attempting to influence any legislation – the New York State Office of the Attorney General, under then-AGs Andrew Cuomo and his successor, Eric Schneiderman, investigated Shulman’s lobbying campaign over a three-year period. AG Schneiderman found that Shulman’s LDC indeed “flouted the law by lobbying elected officials, both directly and through third parties, to win approval of … favored projects”. We find this sentiment apropos:"I don't care if you're a Republican or a Democrat, there is something profoundly un-American about using the brute force of government to bully someone." – Rand Paul
