Hillary’s Swank N.Y. Digs Raise Eyebrows

While her husband gave up pricey postpresidential quarters to move to Harlem, Hillary Rodham Clinton has rented space in a mid-Manhattan tower for $514,148 a year--the most expensive home state office of any U.S. senator.

The quarters, on the 26th floor of a building with an auditorium and conference center in the basement, are larger than the 17th floor office of New York’s senior senator, Democrat Charles E. Schumer, which is also on Third Avenue and which rents for $193,000 a year.

Clinton’s communications director, Jim Kennedy, said Monday that the rent the senator is paying is not unusual, considering New York’s booming real estate market.

“Throughout history, a New York senator was always the top or No. 2 on this kind of list because we have among the most expensive real estate in the country,” Kennedy said.

“We looked at a number of properties. This one suited our needs,” he said of the choice of 780 Third Ave., a 50-story building with a red marble exterior.

“We have 18 million people and a lot of constituent requests,” Kennedy added. “We needed space for more than 50 or 60 volunteers every day. That is five times the size of most senators’ offices.”

Kennedy said Clinton actually is saving more than $100,000 a year by moving out of the Chrysler Building offices once occupied by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, her Democratic predecessor in the Senate.

He said that under a new lease, the rent for those quarters would have increased to $627,000 a year.

But David Keating, senior counselor at the National Taxpayers Union in Washington, which studies the office rent paid by members of the Senate and House, was critical.

“The average person has to be worried,” Keating said. “A lot of people think if you take a certain view of how to spend your own money or your own office’s money, what are you going to do when it is not your money?

“We have looked at House office expenses. The House has better disclosure than the Senate and that is one of the problems with Senate office expenditures. . . . The members who spend less on offices tend to be more fiscally conservative with the taxpayers’ expenses. It is certainly not a good sign.”

Under federal law, the number of square feet of office space that a senator can rent is based on the state’s population. If suitable space is not available in a federal building, a senator can search in the commercial real estate market.

In New York state, 8,200 square feet of usable space is the maximum that a senator can rent.

Kennedy said that Clinton’s office contains 7,909 square feet, but that because of elevator shafts and other necessary building equipment, the actual usable space is 5,650 square feet. Schumer’s Manhattan office is 3,900 square feet.

Clinton’s rent is $89,516 more than that paid by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) for her office in San Francisco. Some media reports said she has the second most expensive Senate office in a home state.

Feinstein’s communications director, Howard Gantman, said the Democratic senator is paying $424,632 for 3,800 square feet. He said that during the campaign, while her fate was uncertain, she could not renew the lease on her old office and later found that the rent had escalated dramatically.

Gantman said space was later sought in a federal building but that none was available, and that finally, the senator found an office with adequate access and room for service to constituents.

Neither Gantman, a spokesman for the General Services Administration, nor the Office of the Senate Sergeant at Arms could confirm that Feinstein’s is the second most expensive Senate office.

Former President Clinton originally wanted his Manhattan office to occupy an entire floor of the posh Carnegie Hall Tower in midtown. But after criticism of the cost--which some estimates put at more than the combined total rent of the four other living former presidents--he decided to move to a building on West 125th Street in Harlem.

That lease is being negotiated, but the rent is expected to be far less than that of his wife’s Third Avenue location.