Yonkers Mayoral Race Focuses on Desegregation Issue : Politics: The two candidates are on opposite sides of a court-ordered housing plan. The contest is too close to call.

Mayor Nicholas Wasicsko was not in a good mood. He had just returned to his City Hall office from a candidates’ forum at a nursing home where, he said, his Republican opponent in Yonkers’ mayoral race--three-term Councilman Henry Spallone--had been up to his usual political tricks.

“He got in there as if he were talking to a regular audience and started pounding the table and ranting about constitutional rights,” Wasicsko fumed. “These people are 80 or 90 years old. They’re about ready to drop. You should try to cheer them up and win them over with a little pleasantness. But he is fixated in his crusade on this one issue.”

The one issue, as no one in this Hudson River community of 190,000 needs to be told, is public housing desegregation. It is an issue that thrust Yonkers into the national spotlight last year when defiant members of the City Council refused to accept a federal court-mandated consent decree to build integrated public housing in predominantly white neighborhoods. Eventually, bludgeoned by heavy contempt-of-court fines that threatened the city treasury with bankruptcy, a majority of the seven-member council voted to go along with the order.

Wasicsko (pronounced wah-SIS-koh), a supporter of compliance with the housing plan, easily captured the Democratic mayoral nomination in September’s primary election. “There is a silent majority out there ready to put the issue aside because there are things that are more important in the mayoralty race,” he crowed.

Instead, the housing controversy has overshadowed other issues in the general election, such as mounting fiscal ills, lagging economic development and growing crime and drug problems.

Spallone, 63, a retired New York City police detective and Yonkers’ vice mayor, accuses Wasicsko of selling the city’s right of self-determination down the river.

“It’s not a housing question; it’s a constitutional question,” said Spallone, who is campaigning as “The People’s Choice.” “Consent decrees are striking at the very heart of communities. If we go with this (housing desegregation) program, we’ll destroy and bankrupt this city.”

In a campaign leaflet, Wasicsko retaliated by charging that “Henry Spallone voted to destroy us. Now, he wants to lead us.”

Wasicsko, 30, was first elected to office two years ago in a campaign opposed to placing public housing in white neighborhoods. But he characterizes Tuesday’s election as a vote for Yonkers’ future and contends that attempts to overturn the court-ordered housing plan are futile and costly.

He said the city has paid more than $25 million in legal costs to fight public housing desegregation in the eight years since the U.S. Department of Justice first filed suit against the city.

Wasicsko has picked up the endorsement of the local Westchester County newspaper, as well as those of the Daily News and the Times in neighboring New York City.

Still, Spallone seems to have a sizable body of support among Yonkers’ largely Democratic electorate. Most political experts say that the race is too close to call.

At a forum Monday on Yonkers’ predominantly white East Side, Wasicsko was greeted with boos and catcalls while Spallone met with enthusiastic applause.

Spallone was one of the two holdouts in the final City Council vote to approve the court-ordered housing plan. The vote came as the city reached the $1-million mark in fines levied by U.S. District Court Judge Leonard Sand in Manhattan for the city’s defiance of the consent decree.

Spallone is also one of the four council members who tallied individual fines totaling $3,500 each under the judge’s punishment. The U.S. Supreme Court will decide during this term whether the fines violated the four council members’ constitutional rights.

A victory on the question of the fines against the council members, Spallone argues, eventually could lead to the unraveling of the entire housing desegregation plan, which calls for the construction of a total of 1,000 units of low- and moderate-income housing at scattered sites on Yonkers’ East Side.

The city has not progressed very far in fulfilling the housing plan. Seven sites have been selected for the first 150 units, Wasicsko said, but no construction is expected to take place until spring at the earliest.

Black Yonkers residents, who make up less than 10% of the city’s registered voters, are overwhelmingly opposed to Spallone’s candidacy.

“If Spallone wins, there’s going to be a continuation of the squandering of the city’s money to fight public housing desegregation and a continuation of Yonkers’ poor public image,” said Henry Joseph, first vice president of the local chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.