Politics

Clinton Real Estate Flap, Take Two

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

March 19, 2001 / 3:45 PM EST / CBS

It's been a routine couple of days for freshman Sen. Hillary Clinton: marching in parades, cutting birthday cakes and making speeches on the issues.

But as she spoke in Washington Monday at the Council of Great City Schools conference on issues affecting educators in big cities, her constituents back in New York were abuzz on a favorite New York topic: the high price of real estate.

The rental cost of Mrs. Clinton's midtown Manhattan offices, to be specific: $514,148 a year.

It's the most expensive hometown office of any U.S. senator.

The space is on the 26th floor of an East Side skyscraper, on Third Avenue at 48th Street.

The senator's spokesman, Jim Kennedy, says Clinton is actually saving taxpayers a lot of money by moving into 780 Third Avenue instead of taking over the more glamorous offices of her predecessor, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

His office suite, only a few blocks away from Clinton's new stomping grounds, is in the prestigious Chrysler building, famous for its historic role in the evolution of Art Deco design.

Moynihan was paying $280,000 a year, but Kennedy says that rent was about to jump to $627,000 under a new lease, quite a bit more than Clinton's paying for her new office.

Kennedy adds that the senator decided not to follow the example set by her husband, former President Clinton, who signed a lease in less pricey Harlem after an outcry over the unprecedented $800,000 a year cost of the office next to Carnegie Hall he'd originally planned to rent.

Kennedy said Sen. Clinton stuck to midtown Manhattan instead "because we believe that as a senator, her offices should be centrally located."

Kennedy also points out that the 5,650 square feet of office space will be put to good use, with much of it set aside for 60 volunteers working to help constituents with a wide range of issues.

"This is labor-intensive, and that's about five times as many volunteers as the average Senate office has working on constituent case work," says Kennedy.

The rent is $90,000 a year more than that paid by Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., and more than double the $209,532 paid by Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., for offices one block away.

Kennedy is philosophical about that, observing that "every year, somebody in the Senate has to have the most expensive offices and, probably through history, given the price of real estate, it is somebody from New York."

He says the rent on the Clinton offices amounts to $91 a square foot, just under the limit of $91.14 per square foot set by the General Services Administration, which pays the bill.