Councilman James Gennaro enjoys a Newtown Pippin on the steps of city hall.

As City Councilman James Gennaro took to the microphone at a crowded public hearing last month to argue against natural gas drilling near New York’s upstate water reservoirs, the rowdy auditorium that had just mauled the deputy mayor during his remarks grew quiet. This man they let speak.

The tall, salt-and-pepper-haired Queens native proceeded to read a statement off a printed script, eyeing every word studiously through a pair of thick spectacles he put on just for the occasion.

Shortly after he finished speaking, Gennaro took a seat on a bench in the lobby. There, in between conversations with supporters and journalists, he pored over the speech, marked up with blue ink, and pondered aloud what he could have done better. “What word couldn’t I say?” he thought out loud. “I had to make a change on the fly. ‘Ironic’ worked. ‘Iconic’ was a no go,” he added, concluding: “I did ok.”

The younger James Gennaro might well have disagreed. Both he and his older brother John suffered from a stuttering problem growing up. And though John will freely admit that Jim’s stuttering was much worse, his little brother has nonetheless thrived in a career where public speaking is as important to him as a hammer to a carpenter or a violin to a violinist.

Now in his seventh year as the chairman of the New York City Council Environmental Protection Committee, Gennaro has become an outspoken champion of some of New York’s most important environmental initiatives, including the 2007 act that mandated a 30 percent reduction in the city’s carbon footprint by 2030. He’s done so by campaigning long and hard both in the legislative chambers as well as in the streets to make sure he got every vote he needed. He’s made countless speeches and given innumerable interviews, in each one trying to balance his concern over the patterns of his speech with the passion he feels for the environment.

He hasn’t always succeeded, but the competitive spirit has helped him overcome numerous obstacles just as he has managed to tame his speaking impediment. It’s also landed him in some trouble and caused some who know the geologist-by-training to question his temperament.

Gennaro says he inherrited his competitive nature from his father Lou – a jeweler by trade who also loved baseball and once tried out for the Brooklyn Dodgers. He used to play the game with his sons on family outings up in the Catskills. “We were playing for blood. It was really, really serious,” Gennaro recalls. “To go back to the dugout and face him, that was not pretty.”

Renee Lobo, a Queens community activist who challenged him for his seat in 2005, considers him a tough, all-or-nothing competitor. “We sparred,” she says. When she called to congratulate him after losing the primary, she says he asked her, “’How dare you run against me?’”

“I definitely thought he had anger issues at the time,” Lobo recalls. “I think down the road he learned how to manage his anger.”

Lobo says she admires Gennaro’s environmental record and now sees him as a friend and ally. After a long post-election silence, the two met again at a city council hearing in 2008. Lobo then suffered a broken leg while Gennaro was hobbled by a broken ankle. Gennaro recognized her and initiated some small-talk over their injuries, she recalls, and the two bonded and have been on good terms ever since. Lobo even supported him in his ultimately unsuccessful bid to unseat State Senator Frank Padavan (R-Queens), who’s held the 11th senate district seat since before Gennaro was a freshman geology major at Stony Brook University in 1975. The race triggered a recount since only a few hundred votes separated the two men.

“It was courageous to go up against someone like that. And to get that close was nutty,” says his brother John. He credits the near-win to his brother’s all-or-nothing attitude: “He has no ‘plan B.’ He just plans on winning.”

In previous campaigns, his competitive attitude ignited controversy. In 2007 the New York City Conflicts of Interest Board fined Gennaro $2,000 because an aide who volunteered for his 2003 re-election campaign used his government office computer, printer, and paper for the campaign, the board said. Gennaro took responsibility for not having known about it. “The lesson learned is that I am responsible and accountable for everything and anything my people do. The buck stops with me no matter what. This episode etched that credo into my bone marrow,” he wrote in an email.

In the legislative chamber, Gennaro can also be a formidable competitor, doing everything he can to get serious consideration for his bills – no matter how big or small. On a rainy Monday morning in November, for example, he called a news conference to hand out dozens of Newtown Pippins, sour green apples native to Queens, as an effort to urge city council members to pass his resolution naming Pippins the official apple of the “Big Apple.” Boxes of apple muffins destined for the city council also quietly piled up, prompting a reporter to ask whether he is attempting to sweet-talk his colleagues into backing the bill. Gennaro smiled, bit an apple and demurred. But he stuttered a bit when asked why the seemingly innocuous proposition hasn’t passed city hall months after being introduced.

“You know, it’s just there’s a lot of very important business that the city council has to do and something like this is something that is never going to be, you know, [a] front-burner issue,” he answered.

Among the “front-burner” issues was a proposal before City Hall this year to force building owners in New York City to audit and re-fit their buildings for energy efficiency. Also sponsored by Gennaro, the bill faced intense opposition from the city’s real estate industry, which has argued that the measure would force them to make expensive upgrades but not realise any of their benefits. “You want the entity that bears the cost to get the benefit. And in some cases that just wasn’t the case and that’s just patently unfair and we’re not going to pass a bill that’s not fair,” says Gennaro. Ultimately, he stood next to City Council Speaker Christine Quinn at a City Hall press conference triumphantly announcing the bill’s passage. But it ostensibly lacked the initial re-fit language.

Despite these setbacks, Gennaro has had more than his fair share of legislative successes. He chuckles as he points out he needs an intern just to compile his record, which includes committing the city to green building principles, the 2030 carbon reduction targets and standing firm against any encroachments on New York’s upstate water supply.

“He really has been in many ways the conscience of the city council on a broad array of environmental issues,” says Eric Goldstein, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council who has known Gennaro for 20 years. Most notably, says Goldstein, “he’s really been the ‘Paul Revere’ of drinking water protection in New York.”

The sentiment was echoed by some of those who attended the public hearing at which he spoke last month. As he sat on the bench outside the auditorium, a visitor from West Virginia, a former commissioner of the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, and one of Goldstein’s colleagues from the Natural Resources Defense Council all paid Gennaro a visit to thank him for protecting the city’s water resources.

He hesitated over a word here or there. But he did not need a script to keep the lively conversation going well after other city council members had already left.

Tags | City Hall, Environmental Protection Committee, Eric Goldstein, James Gennaro, Natural Resources Defense Council, New York City, Newtown Pippin, PlaNYC, Queens, watershed