The lone dissenter in the City Council’s vote to kill the Kingsbridge Armory mall says the city’s poorest borough, The Bronx, is getting burned again.
“We shouldn’t cut down the economic engine that creates the jobs we need,” said Councilwoman Helen Sears, a Queens Democrat who was the only “yes” in the 45-1 vote Monday that quashed the Bronx plan.
“You don’t throw out the baby with the bath water,” she added.
“The fact is that it would create new jobs, and the money that would have poured into the city and into The Bronx would have been huge.”
Council members voted down the project — which would have converted the vacant building into a retail mall — saying it failed to meet their demands that retailers pay a “living wage” of $10 an hour with benefits.
Insiders said the Bronx delegation put pressure on the lawmakers.
“If you don’t vote for what they want, they won’t vote for what you want,” one insider said. “They screwed over their constituents.”
Mayor Bloomberg, who backed the armory project, last week vetoed the council’s vote. But Council Speaker Christine Quinn has the two-thirds majority vote needed to override the veto.
In a borough with a 13.4 percent unemployment rate, 28 percent of residents living below the poverty level, and 9,000 victims of foreclosures this year, many Bronx residents told The Post that they’d jump at a chance to make the $7.25 hourly minimum wage.
Angelique Cruz, 37, who lives in Kingsbridge Heights and whose husband recently lost his job, said Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr., lawmakers and the unions that opposed the mall betrayed their constituents.
“We would both most definitely look for a job [at the armory] to make ends meet,” she said. “They should see this from a poor person’s perspective.”
Opponents insisted that retailers pay well beyond the $7.25 minimum wage at the government-subsidized mall — a demand not in place anywhere else in the state.
“He’s not poor, so he doesn’t see this the way we do,” Kingsbridge Heights resident Keith Clark, 28, said of Diaz.
“He doesn’t get it — a job that pays the minimum wage is better for us than no jobs at all.”
A council source said: “This happens all the time. It’s just bribery. If you want something done in The Bronx, they ask, ‘What are you going to do for me?’ It happens here more than anywhere else.”
Battered borough
13.4% borough’s unemployment rate, up 4% from last year
13.5% Kingsbridge area’s unemployment rate
10.3% city’s unemployment rate
25.4% Bronx families living below the poverty level
58,605 Bronx residents on Medicaid in 2007
29.6% Bronx residents on food stamps in 2008
59.2% Bronx residents receiving some form of government assistance
16.2% make less than $10,000 a year
9.8% make between $10,000 to $14,999
15.8% make between $15,000 and $24,999
13.7% make between $25,000 to $34,999
5.5% make less than $35,000
$30,782 median household income