Stepping In for Mayoral Candidates, Surrogates Are Left Out of a Debate

As latecomers slipped into their seats on Wednesday for an early morning mayoral debate on housing development, they could have been forgiven for feeling a bit confused.

On display were photographs of the four advertised speakers, including Joseph J. Lhota, a 58-year-old Republican candidate with a graying sandy beard and what nobody could describe as a full head of hair.

But standing near his photo was a clean-shaven young man wearing a badge saying “Joe Lhota, New York City M.T.A. Chairman, Speaker” who was less than half Mr. Lhota’s age and sported thick, dark hair with spectacles and a pinstriped suit. Needless to say he was not Joe Lhota and he had not been the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

A few minutes earlier, in exactly the same spot, had been standing another man who wasn’t who his name tag said he was. This man wasn’t John A. Catsimatidis, the Greek-born billionaire who owns the Gristedes grocery chain and is also a Republican candidate for mayor.

Enter the “surrogates,” a new and perhaps short-lived feature of the increasingly frequent mayoral forums being held across New York, sometimes twice a day.

Such is the profusion of these debates that busy Democratic and Republican candidates find themselves racing from borough to borough, juggling time, priorities and campaign resources as they compete for votes ahead of the election in November.

Hence the appeal of seconding someone else if you can’t be in two places at once. However, that tactic backfired on Wednesday, when neither of the surrogates was permitted to address a forum organized by the Associated Builders and Owners of Greater New York, a trade association of the real estate industry.

“We had confirmations up until yesterday morning from four of the candidates who were going to be here,” said Dan Margulies, the association’s executive director and moderator of the forum that was held at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. “Last evening Mr. Lhota and Mr. Catsimatidis found a conflict and are not going to join us in person. However they did send, or are sending, surrogates. It was decided that it was not appropriate for the surrogates to speak on the platform with the candidates who had the courtesy to keep their commitments.”

Even after the audience began filing in, name cards for Mr. Lhota and Mr. Catsimatidis were still on display, but were soon removed. This left the stage free for the two candidates who had shown up: George T. McDonald, an advocate for the homeless who is seeking the Republican nomination, and Adolfo Carrión Jr., an Independence Party candidate and a former Bronx borough president.

Both said they had arrived at the Javits Convention Center that morning expecting to be part of a foursome. “I’ve not seen surrogates in any of the debates,” Mr. Carrión said after the debate. “The hosts made the decision; I think they made the right decision.”

Mr. McDonald said: “I thought that they were going to be here. It’s a little insulting to send surrogates at the last minute to say you can’t make it.”

Watching from the sidelines were Mr. Lhota’s replacement, Eric Ulrich, a member of the City Council and a Republican who sits on the Council’s housing and buildings committee. In his place, Mr. Catsimatidis had sent Daniel W. Isaacs, the chairman of the New York Republican County Committee. Some audience members said they were “disappointed” at the absences, but one said he understood that candidates had to “pick and choose”, and others seemed unclear anyway about who had and hadn’t been scheduled to appear.

A spokesman for the Catsimatidis campaign said that the candidate did not mean to offend an industry in which he invests heavily as a real estate developer and builder, but explained that the candidate had to be at another mayoral forum on Staten Island.

“The main reason he went to that as opposed to this is that’s where the Republicans are,” the spokesman, Robert H. Ryan, said. “They’re in Staten Island, and that’s what we have to focus on right now, getting as many Republican votes as possible. Look, there is only so much time in the day, and every group that you can imagine, and some that you can’t imagine, are having forums. And a lot of times one comes up after the other. It’s not an act of disrespect towards anybody; it’s just he can’t possibly make everything, so he has to pick and choose what is the best thing for the campaign.”

Jessica Proud, a spokeswoman for Mr. Lhota’s campaign, said that he had also attended the Staten Island forum, but that he later traveled to the Javits Center and “met and spoke directly with many of the business owners there.” She said that as the campaign intensified, “there are going to be a lot of conflicts with the volume of forums that the candidates are being asked to attend, so if we are able to use a surrogate in a case where we can’t be in two places at once, we are happy to do that.”