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“There’s just an enormous amount that was done to suppress democratic participation with COVID as an excuse,” Central Brooklyn Independent Democrats President Diana Gonzalez, a former executive director of the party, told City & State, referring to the long-delayed, two-part, 26-hour-long organizing meeting in Dec. 2020. “So I’m not surprised she tried to inappropriately break a contract.”

Diana Gonzalez, president of the Central Brooklyn Independent Democrats, a self-styled reform group frequently at odds with the county establishment, said that party leaders’ phones are “blowing up with conversations about who the next chair should be.”

“The writing is on the wall and everyone can read it,” she said. “There’s very little appetite for the chairwoman to continue to hold her position.”

 “This is not a new thing. This has been going for decades,” said Diana Gonzalez, a former executive director of the Brooklyn Democratic Party. “Everybody knows County just wants to control meetings by walking in with a boatload of proxies.”

“It’s not just that they’re appointed without their knowledge. It’s that when the county party needs to collect proxies, other people are forging their signatures,” she said. “So the person who put that list together, his or her work isn’t done. They have to forge proxies for the next county committee meeting.” 

 “We have a party boss who thinks that she can come in and take away the responsibility of these duly elected party officials and give them to people who are her loyalists and cronies. This is just a disgusting display of cronyism and patronage,” said Diana Gonzalez, president of the Central Brooklyn Independent Democrats, a progressive pro-reform club. “Here’s what we need to do: We need to vote her out. The way we vote her out is by electing district leaders who will stand up against this.”

"The party has hundreds of thousands of dollars and full time staff,” said Diana González, president of the political club Central Brooklyn Independent Democrats, which she said has been volunteering on behalf of Brooklyn Democratic candidates. “They could be organizing phone banks, canvasses, or text banks. They could be doing mailers or digital ads.”

“You can basically say to the campaigns, ‘What do you need?’ and then do it,” she said.

Diana Gonzalez, president of the Central Brooklyn Independent Democrats, another reform group, said the party leadership’s attempt to wrest away a seat goes against the whole point of the district leader role: to guarantee democratic input from every neighborhood across the borough inside the party.

“Instead, we’re seeing the reverse where the chairperson is choosing the district leaders,” she said. “It’s very clear in this case that Sabrina is supposed to represent the Chairwoman, and not Bay Ridge.”