Major + Brooklyn Yards = Campaign

Chris Owens has just released his petition numbers, touting the grassroots volunteer support through which he claims to have garnered 13,500 signatures. His strategic formula for collecting them seems to be the same as he's employing for his campaign as a whole: take Dad's pre-fabricated organization, add some Atlantic Yards opponents and see what it all adds up to.

While Chris decided against going it the easy way by simply replacing Major on his petitions from a previous campaign, it is interesting to note the level of support he got from his father's long time backers in his petitioning effort.

"The short answer is to say, a significant number," he said. "But the reality is also that a lot of those people are older people and they're not the people who can spend as much time hitting the streets to collect signatures and doing a lot of the things they used to do in his campaign. He was in office for a long time."

So who were his volunteers on the ground?

"What we have is essentially a group of folks who worked with my father for a long time who make their contributions in different ways. Some of them on the streets, some of them on the phones, some of them through money or whatever. Then we have a lot of new people who were not necessarily involved with my father's campaigns at all, who have been excited by our campaign. They met me, know me, and are motivated by the Atlantic Yards issue and feel this is the campaign they should be contributing to, that they should be involved with. So it's a whole fresh group of folks as well."