Taxi Commissioner David Yassky and Assemblyman Micah Kellner mix it up, on Facebook.

Kellner chided the city's "Taxi of Tomorrow" for being "the delivery van of yesterday."

Yassky - a bookish, former law school professor with a dry sense of humor - wrote "And can we please schedule time to debate what a 'van' is." That was a sarcastic reference to what Kellner wrote on Facebook on Tuesday.

(Kellner, that day, wrote, "Mayor Bloomberg and David Yassky would prefer to debate the definition of 'van' is instead of making all cabs accessible. Was a third term really necessary for this disgrace?")

After Yassky's comments today, Kellner, who has taken up the mantle of disability access as a key legislative aim, responded, "I'll leave that to the lawyers at the Department of Justice."

The Harlem Democrat had put in a call to the chair of the Council’s Small Business Committee, David Yassky, asking for a vote on the Small Business Survival Act, a bill of Mr. Jackson’s that would regulate commercial rents.

“I told David today on the phone, I said, ‘David, everyone who testified spoke in favor of the bill,’” Mr. Jackson said. “I asked him to just vote it out,” he went on. “It can be put on the calendar to be voted out. Period. He’s not willing to do that.”

This didn’t sit well.

“What are people afraid of?” Mr. Jackson said. “Let people stand up and say, ‘Yes, I’m in favor of it,’ or, ‘No, I’m not.’”

With a month left before the current Council term ends and legislation expires, Mr. Jackson is scrambling to bring his bill to a vote—it has the official support of 30 of 51 members—making noise, threatening and pressuring fellow members to help him move on his top priority. The main resistance comes from Speaker Christine Quinn—Mr. Jackson said Mr. Yassky was deferring to her on a vote as is customary—who says she believes the bill would be ruled illegal by the courts.

“We can’t pass laws that we don’t have the legal authority to implement,” Ms. Quinn said in a phone interview Monday. “That isn’t right. It isn’t fair, doing something that you know, five minutes after you do it, that the rug is going to get pulled out from under it.”

Mr. Jackson’s unusually strong push has sent a jolt of fear through the real estate world that had, until recently, paid the bill little attention, and industry advocates are now working to erode the bill’s support on the Council (though they do not seem to think there is much threat that the bill will come up this year). Landlord groups balk at the mere mention of new regulation on commercial rents, and seem to find Mr. Jackson’s legislation nauseating.

THE BILL IS DUBBED commercial rent control by both supporters and opponents, but in actuality is a bit less extreme. It would require binding arbitration between small commercial tenants—retail or office—and their landlords if the two cannot agree on the price and terms of a new lease. The arbitrators would rule on a number of factors, including the landlord’s ability to pay expenses and the tenant’s ability to move to determine what the new lease should be.

This legislation has made a showing in the Council before: The bill is essentially the same as one pushed in the mid- to late-1980s by West Side Democrat Ruth Messinger, who, like Mr. Jackson, had the support of most of the Council; she failed to win over the speaker or the mayor.

The bill’s backers, led by a large set of minority business owners, call it absolutely essential for the survival of small businesses in the city. Landlords’ ability to dramatically raise rents after a lease expires forces far too many neighborhood stores to shutter, the advocates say, leaving streets with a limited and unhealthy variety of retail.
Detractors counter that the bill is an extraordinary intrusion into the private market, one that would suck away investment as well as the incentive to improve properties.

The real estate industry is particularly incensed, as landlords far and wide—those with retail at the base of residential buildings, and those who own office buildings—would be hit by the legislation. Supporters’ rhetoric centers on corner mom-and-pop stores, but the legislation’s net is far wider: It would apply to any business with 100 or fewer employees. Thus landlords across the city would be unnecessarily hit, real estate groups argue, stifling investment.

“What the hell—let’s destroy the city,” said Joe Strasburg, president of the pro-landlord Rent Stabilization Association, which fought the bill in the 1980s as well. “It makes absolutely no sense.”

Then there is also criticism over the bill’s timing. In a recession, when rents are naturally falling everywhere, there is less hue, cry and demonstrated urgent need compared to the heady days of rapid gentrification and rent hikes a couple of years back.

Handicapping the bill’s likelihood of passage is difficult, but its chances rest on two main factors: whether Mr. Jackson will be able to force a vote on it, and if he is, whether the supporters can withstand a strong pushback by the politically powerful real estate industry.

Ms. Quinn’s staff, which recently brought in both supporters and opponents of the bill to query them over concerns, has told others that the bill would likely be ruled unconstitutional over contract issues.

(Of course, the Council has passed bills with questionable legality before, to see them later shot down by the courts, but Ms. Quinn said this bill would clearly be reversed by the courts based on the legal advice she has received.)

Mr. Jackson’s strategy seems to be to ratchet up the pressure on Ms. Quinn—he’s threatened a rare motion to force a vote, called “sponsor’s privilege”—making noise within the Council and calling out members who have withheld support or pulled their support.

“Comrie, Dickens, Joel Rivera—all members of color,” he said, referring to three who have pulled support or are not on the bill: Councilman Leroy Comrie, Councilwoman Inez Dickens and Councilman Joel Rivera. “I’m going after them, too. I’m going to be asking them myself. I’m trying to put pressure on everyone.”

Of course, his task is made a bit more difficult by the lack of a competitive race for the Council’s speakership, as Ms. Quinn has no extraordinary political need to cater to the legislative needs and desires of every individual member given her likely reelection.

The real estate industry has recently become a bit more concerned about the legislation actually moving forward, as the political arms of the Real Estate Board of New York and the Rent Stabilization Association have begun pushing back.

Already, at least three members who were signed onto the bill have pulled their support, including Mr. Comrie, bringing the number of sponsors down to 30. Based on its prior testimony of opposition to the bill, the Bloomberg administration seems likely to veto any legislation, and thus 34 votes would be needed to override a veto.

THE BILL'S SUPPORTERS are no political fools. A set of small-business owners appear to have formed a pact with the increasingly influential Working Families Party to push the legislation. At a hearing last week on the WFP’s top priority, a paid-sick-leave bill, the small-business owners testified in favor of the commercial rent bill, which generally is opposed by businesses, as it adds to their cost. The WFP recently sent a letter of support to the Council in favor of Mr. Jackson’s bill (the group has previously said it is in favor of the legislation).

Sung Soo Kim, president of the Korean American Small Business Service Center, said there was no official deal on the matter. He said he wanted to urge the WFP to lend more support to the commercial rent bill—his top priority—and the paid-sick-leave bill does relatively little harm, if any, to his members.

“This is a crisis,” Mr. Kim said. “We really need rent stabilization.”

A WFP spokesman said the group has been “actively reaching out” to council members on the rent bill.

What this all means for Mr. Jackson is unclear. He still has the option to try to discharge the bill from the current committee, a motion considered highly confrontational in the Council; the sponsor’s privilege option, which would force a vote, could take more than a month.

Ms. Quinn, meanwhile, suggested she was working on a set of similar measures based on Mr. Jackson’s and others’ concerns about small-business costs.

“We have six or seven different ideas we’re looking at,” she said. “We hope to move very, very soon.”

ebrown@observer.com

Yassky, joined by his community liaison Rami Metal, was facing several rows of dusty trucks, a wide expanse of Astroturf and the East River. We were there to look, four years after the fact, at what had become of the parks the city promised Yassky in exchange for a sweeping 2005 rezoning of the Williamsburg and Greenpoint waterfront.

“This happens every year at the end of the term,” said Yassky, 45, a boyish, emotionally transparent policy wonk who has represented his Brooklyn district since 2001. “There are things they really want to get done.”

“They” in this context is the city government: the mayor’s office, the planning department, the parks department.  That rezoning bore dozens of condominium projects in a feverish real estate market, but they have not, so far, produced any of the three parks that were part of the agreement.

The almost-park, called Bushwick Inlet Park, is far from completed, but it is happening. Asked how hard it was to get it to this state of readiness, Yassky said, "It was murder. It was a nightmare."

The Astroturf was very green and slippery, like a field made out of plastic leis. It didn’t seem ideal for any use, though Yassky told me the city parks department has been using it for years, because real grass is hard to maintain and gets muddy.

"The original plan for Bushwick Inlet Park was starting at North 9th, going through to the inlet," Yassky said. "If you go back to 2005 when Amanda Burden and Dan Doctoroff would come present the vision for the Brooklyn waterfront."

As sometimes happens, “the vision” has materialized more for the private sector than the public.

It's true that the neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Greenpoint are being transformed by condominium buildings. But what's less obvious is that the people who tend to mind the most--the ones who scrawl "condoburg" on the stairs leading up from the Bedford Avenue subway stop--are statistically likely to move away within a few years. The longtime residents of the neighborhood, the ones who have spent a lifetime cut off from the tantalizingly proximate water, are more likely to be interested in the prospect of thirty acres of waterfront park than they are in whether or not a building turns up nearby.

Case in point: Eric Gioia hammered away at Bill de Blasio for his ties to the Working Families Party, and ran several television ads making the point. Then, after losing the primary, Gioia endorsed de Blasio.

One knowledgeable reader suggested it was part of Gioia’s penance and first steps on the long road to making peace with the WFP, which would be helpful should he run for another office. One possibility could be the Senate seat held by George Onorato, the Democrat in northwest Queens who is not in favor of same-sex marriage, and has generally kept a low profile and avoided policy fights.

David Yassky's post-election attitude toward the WFP, by contrast, is suggestive of someone who's not immediately making calculations about his next bid for elected office.

He and the other comptroller candidates avoided any major criticisms of one another until he got into the run-off with John Liu. After losing to Liu, Yassky co-authored a column in the Daily News warning about the dangers of the Working Families Party's rising influence.

“The problem is that the WFP is driven not simply by ideology, but also by the very specific interests of its component parts,” which have “an interest that is often at odds with the public interest,” Yassky wrote.

Not mending fences with that one.

I emailed Gioia and Yassky and will update when I get responses.

UPDATE: Yassky emailed to say he does “not know what future plans are. Right now, making up for lost time with my family, trying to tie up loose ends of council term and ensure smooth transition to next councilmember and looking at job options for January.”

Bill de Blasio beat Mark Green pretty much everywhere.

“Two closest were 59 AD (Canarsie), where Thomas Jefferson Club supported Green and he lost 1,465 - 1,224 & 26 AD (Eastern Queens), where he lost 2,189-2,141,” Skurnik writes.

Only a handful of Assembly districts had more than 6,000 votes cast: 64 AD (Lower Manhattan), 66 AD (Village), 67 AD (West Side - only AD over 10,000), 69 AD (Morningside Hts), 52 AD (Brooklyn Hts).

In the comptroller race, the 64th AD, which includes Chinatown, went for John Liu. The others in Manhattan went for David Yassky. (The 69th was won by Yassky by only 24 votes, so, that may change when the machines are reexamined.)

Skurnik said there may be something to the notion that Liu was not helped by the W.F.P. pulling out de Blasio’s base.

“If de Blasio was pulling votes in those ADs, it might have hurt Liu a little,” Skurnik wrote.

Skurnik also came up with this broad conclusion about the results:

“The runoff may have finally put the nail in the coffin of the old wives' tale that blacks don't vote. In NYC, they do.”

CORRECTION :Skurnik emails this note about his analysis: "When I say Liu carried only 64 AD in Manhattan, I am referring to the 4 districts with heavy turnouts listed, not to all of Manhattan. People for John Liu is correct in the comment that Liu carried other ADs in Manhattan." We apologize for the error.

But some of Liu's advisers are now taking pains to say that their victory was not attributable to the W.F.P.'s help. (There is an obvious political motivation--now that he's gotten through the primary--for Liu to publicly put some distance between himself and labor, which will have a great deal of interest in his decisions as comptroller.)

In turning out the vote for de Blasio in the public advocate race, a high-ranking Liu campaign source said, the W.F.P. was also pulling voters likely to support their opponent in the comptroller race, David Yassky.

De Blasio and Yassky both were City Council members from Brownstone Brooklyn, and got endorsed New York Times and Citizens Union.

“In certain places they pulled voters, like the Upper East Side, Upper West Side, Brownstone Brooklyn. They clearly are not a Liu voters,” said the Liu campaign source.

The source said individual unions, particularly 1199 SEIU, helped out, and did extensive member-to-member contact and voter outreach.

“But as for the W.F.P., we got nothing,” this person said.

Also, this Liu source said the campaign refused to make changes to their staff, which the W.F.P. had strongly urged.

A campaign spokesperson noted that, unlike the de Blasio campaign, the campaign did not hire anyone from the W.F.P.'s campaign company, Data and Field Services.

The Liu field operation was organized by three people with no ties to the W.F.P.: Kirsten Foye, from the National Action Network, Kevin Wardally of Bill Lynch Associates and Josh Gold, who had worked at 1199.

The party only has 11,800 registered voters in New York, but it's been able to craft an oversized role thanks to an effective, if controversial, Get Out The Vote operation.

"[T]he Democratic Party is the label, and they [the W.F.P.] are the apparatus,” Michael Oliva, a Democratic consultant, tells Azi in a story about the party.

By “apparatus,” Oliva means the party’s Get Out the Vote Operation, which has been lauded as not only better than that of the Democratic Party’s, but the only real one left in New York.

In Oliva’s estimation, the Democratic organizations now amount to “a bunch of clubs with ten senior citizens who get five signatures on your petitions.”

In addition to the two winners last night, five of their Council candidates won in the primary, meaning seven people at City Hall will soon owe some loyalty to the W.F.P., and many more will be interested in getting on their good side.

"One good thing will be that with these people in office, it will force Bloomberg to talk about working class issues," Evan Thies told me at last night's party for David Yassky, Thies' former boss, who had just lost the comptroller's race to Mr. Liu.

The Post goes one step further, declaring "Lefties The Real Victors," and questioning whether "elected officials are going to be willing to take on an issue in the public interest if it's not in the WFP's interest."

"They are not doing this for holy reasons," Councilman Simcha Felder told the Post. "They're waiting for their piece of the pie. They're going to be eating it for the next four years."

And with Liu and de Blasio all but officially installed in citywide office, it could be much longer than that.

BLVD was the sight of Yassky’s would-be victory party, but an adjacent door led to the club’s other space, where something called the Meany Fest was taking place.

Inside the Yassky door, a hundred or so of his supporters streamed in, mostly wearing dark suits and hovering by the bar until it got too crowded. On one wall, Andre the Giant stared out from a floor-to-ceiling collage of OBEY posters at a makeshift stage. The bright lights of several NY1 cameras ricocheted off two disco balls above a dance floor. A beer was $9 dollars. “I heard it’s going to be open bar, but only if he wins,” said one reporter.

The televisions were all on mute, and a steady bass beat started just before the results started rolling in. Over a Phil Collins dance remix, supporters craned their necks to see the first returns: John Liu at 58 percent and David Yassky at 41. Then it was 57 to 42. And then, at 56 to 44—without so much as a pregnant pause—NY1 called it, and the race was over.

The music stopped and Yassky, now about to leave the City Council for, presumably, a job in the private sector, emerged onto the stage to a brief chant of “David, David.” His wife and two daughters held hands behind him.

“This is not the party that you hoped to come to and that I hope to have for you tonight,” he said. “But it is still a celebration of a vision of government that I believe in as deeply as I ever have and that I know all of you here tonight believe in deeply and that truly tens of thousands of New Yorkers share. It’s a vision that motivated people I have never met to send e-mails to their 100-person e-mail lists urging them to vote in this election.”

He said he already called John Liu to concede and urged his supporters to support Liu, who “earned a well-deserved victory, and I’m sure he will be a terrific comptroller for the city of New York.”

“When I got into this race, the city was in much better shape than it is today,” he said. “As the campaign wore on, I began to feel deeply in my gut that we care about the city have real work to do. So the campaign ends tonight, but the work that we have to do—all of us—continues.”

He thanked a number of elected officials who had supported him, pausing for a while to say Senator Chuck Schumer had just called him in between fighting for a public option-—which drew applause. “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Thank God for Chuck Schumer,” Yassky said.

“When you picture losing a campaign like this, I pictured it would be painful—and it is, of course, and I’ll have some pain to get over,” but because of his family, Yassky said, “I’ll wake up energized and ready to tackle the next chapter.”

He left the stage to roaring applause, and emerged a few minutes later, shaking hands and hugging supporters, over a dance remix of “More Than a Feeling.”

“There are some real tragic remixes in this place,” a man in a suit told the girl next to him.

Yassky left with his family a short while later, having declined to elaborate on what exactly the future might hold. “I’m exhausted,” he said.

I know, I know, we’ve got one coming up in five weeks and Michael Bloomberg, for all his money and inevitability, has hardly been lighting the world on fire with his poll numbers. Still, few (even in his own party) believe Bill Thompson will actually knock off the incumbent and—whether they’ll admit it or not—many Democrats are already beginning to assess the field for ’13, when the seat should be open.

In that sense, Tuesday’s run-offs for public advocate and comptroller were actually super-run-offs, with the winners cleared not only for cakewalks this November but also for potential mayoral bids in four years.

There is, for instance, a universal expectation that Bill de Blasio, a 25-point victor over Mark Green in the run-off for public advocate, will try to parlay his new gig—which will afford him a visibility-enhancing platform that the current office-holder, Betsy Gotbaum, never utilized—into a run for the top job in ’13. A political organizer by trade and a strategic thinker by nature, de Blasio is well-positioned to succeed where the camera-shy Gotbaum failed.

If he plays it right, de Blasio can spend the next four years reaping favorable headlines by championing popular causes and presenting himself as an aggressive watchdog. The scale is smaller (and the office far less significant), but his role model is probably Andrew Cuomo, who has transformed his image by pursuing popular, impossible-to-criticize prosecutions and investigations as attorney general. (And who, not incidentally, was de Blasio’s boss in the Clinton administration’s department of Housing and Urban Development.)

At the same time, de Blasio’s triumph on Tuesday extinguishes the final, faint flickers of 64-year-old Green’s mayoral dreams. After losing to Bloomberg eight years ago and badly misfiring in a 2006 bid for A.G., Green became something of a punchline—the perennial candidate with an addiction to losing. But had this comeback bid, launched 28 months after swearing off ever seeking office again, succeeded (and for a while it looked like it would) he could easily have turned around and did what de Blasio now stands to do, positioning himself for one final run for the roses in 2013.

Instead, Green’s career in elected politics is over. In defeat, he will lack a platform to rehabilitate his image, and—fair or not—his three straight losses this decade will now define him as a political entity.

Then there’s John Liu, who soundly bested David Yassky in the run-off for comptroller—a position, as Clyde Haberman pointed out on Tuesday, with a rich history as a springboard for mayoral campaigns.

The 42-year-old Liu’s ambition is well-known and he’ll have good reason to look hard at a ’13 bid, because if he were to pass, there’s no telling when he’d get another chance. The reason is simple: a Democrat will be favored to win the mayoralty in ’13 and with the two-term limit now a thing of the past, that mayor could end up running again in 2017 and 2021—meaning the next clear shot for a Democrat after ’13 might not come until Liu is nearly 60 years old. So if he’s got the fire, why not take a shot in four years?

Liu has a compelling (if somewhat disputed) biography, and the success he had in appealing to black voters could carry over to a mayoral bid, with (for now at least) no obvious black candidate on the horizon. On the downside, managing the city’s money and dealing with ballooning pensions during a brutal economic slump could earn Liu bad press and new enemies, and his investment choices will be scrutinized in the context of the political debt he now owes to organized labor and the Working Families Party.

Yassky, like Green, can now be scratched from the ’13 field. And while the outgoing councilman, two decades Green’s junior, will still have future opportunities to run for office, he is beginning to flirt with inheriting Green’s perennial candidate mantle. First, he moved into a majority-black district to run a divisive campaign for Congress in 2006 (and moved back out when he lost). Then came the abortive bid for district attorney in Brooklyn. And now this. One more loss might put him in Green’s league.

De Blasio and Liu, of course, will hardly be alone if they do run for mayor next time.

Christine Quinn, the Council Speaker (for now, anyway), clearly wants to be mayor and seems to believe she can get there by essentially running for Bloomberg’s fourth term. But her anemic showing in the September primary, when she barely cracked 50 percent in her own district, suggests much of her base sees her closeness to the mayor not as an alliance but more as an unhealthy dependency. And even if she holds on to the Speaker’s post, it may prove to be a burden as ’13 nears: just ask Gifford Miller.

It’s also assumed that Anthony Weiner will run again, trying to revive the outerborough strategy that nearly landed him in a run-off with Freddy Ferrer in 2005. But his sudden national visibility on health care can be read two ways: maybe it’s a shrewd effort to expand his base into liberal Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn; or maybe the newly-engaged congressman actually is—for the first time—more interested in Washington than New York.

Scott Stringer’s political aspirations extend much farther than the Manhattan borough presidency. He flirted with challenging Kirsten Gillibrand for her Senate seat next year, a campaign that he probably would have lost, but that would have enhanced his image in advance of a mayoral run. As it is, he seems likely to run in ’13—unless another inviting opening (a congressional seat?) comes along between now and then.

And then there are the wild cards. Who would have thought back in 1997 that the 2001 mayor’s race would include a media mogul named Michael Bloomberg—and that a stunning chain of events in the fall of ’01 would vault Bloomberg from doomed self-funder to mayor-elect? Surely there are one or two Bloomberg-ish plutocrats asking themselves: Why not me? Or maybe Ray Kelly will run. And others note that Bill Bratton will soon be returning from Los Angeles.

To draw a parallel to N.C.A.A. basketball tournament, Tuesday’s run-off was like the play-in game—it wasn’t very significant and almost no one paid attention. The real fun and excitement is still a ways off. But the madness has begun.

Because there weren't really any voters ("Turnout Is a Trickle" says the headline), there's a lot about how the poll workers react to the candidates, so let's read the tea leaves.

Comptroller candidate John Liu walked into his precinct, and shook everybody's hand, made a joke, voted, and shook hands with everyone again.

One poll worker raised her fingers, crossed, to wish Mr. Liu good luck. Her ankles were also crossed and he said, “Oh, you’ve got your feet crossed … that’s good.”

Mr. Liu then held court before a throng of Asian media waiting outside.

His opponent, David Yassky, was less relaxed, and less recognized. One of the poll workers asked the Times reporter who Mr. Yassky was. And then another one seemed to play a joke on him:

Mr. Yassky made his way inside the church, where another poll worker told Mr. Yassky it had been a busy day. “Was it really?” Mr. Yassky asked, his eyes lighting up. Several other poll workers said it had not, in fact, been a busy day at all.

Then, as Yassky was leaving, one of the poll workers chased him down to see if the candidate could bring them some coffee.

Among the would-be public advocates, the Times said no one voted in the 15 minutes they spent with Mark Green at a precinct in the Flatiron District, and when Mr. Green rode the subway up to 96th Street, he was immediately greeted by a supporter of his opponent, Bill de Blasio.

In Park Slope, Mr. de Blasio was welcomed by shouts and cheers from supporters outside his polling place.

“There’s nothing like voting at home,” Mr. de Blasio mused as he walked down the sidewalk with his wife, trailed by reporters and photographers. That feeling may have been reinforced a few moments later, when Mr. de Blasio entered a school where voting machines were set up, and was welcomed by poll workers, beaming and clapping.

Mr. de Blasio emerged to photographers and reporters, and then went outside to address his supporters.

On the Upper West Side, poll workers were so bored they were falling asleep. “Runoffs are terrible for the staff. There’s nothing to do, the time just drifts by," one poll coordinator told the Times. To accommodate voters, the polls will be open until 9 p.m.