The Sierra Club today is launching an attack ad against Mayor Giuliani, charging he hasn’t done enough to protect the environment and the city’s water supply.
As the environment became the latest battleground in the Senate race, the state chairman of the Independence Party insisted that the first lady is still interested in running on its line and will show up at an upstate party gathering Saturday.
“We’re expecting her,” said Frank McKay, the chairman of the party, which has been embroiled in a bitter internal conflict.
McKay’s statement came just hours after a Sierra Club official explained why the group was going after Giuliani.
“His performance on clean water is very, very poor and it raises questions about his environmental record,” said Susan Holmes, a spokeswoman for the group, which also ran ads against Al D’Amato in the 1998 Senate race.
Holmes wouldn’t say how much the club would be spending on the ad, which is airing on cable stations in New York City and its suburbs.
The Sierra Club’s “air strike” comes less than a week after Giuliani’s Senate opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton, criticized the mayor’s environmental policies during a policy speech on Long Island.
Giuliani aides dismissed Clinton’s attack, saying the mayor has increased the number of city workers patrolling the city’s upstate reservoirs.
“The reason why we have to raise and then possibly use soft money is because left-wing groups go around spending lots of money,” Giuliani said.