(photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said. Nearly 53 years since his death, the causes for which he is most famously remembered – civil rights and social justice – remain just as urgent and relevant today. While it has long been true, this reality crystalized for many Americans over the past year as a result of high-profile police killings of unarmed Black men and women, including the brutal murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor. These events made it clear that there is an urgent need to address systemic racism in our society. An open, honest reckoning about racial justice must happen and we cannot make lasting progress without it.
That is why the City of New York is taking action to invite difficult conversations among employees about race equity. The New York City Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS) recently launched the Race Equity Initiative (REI), a model that offers a sustained focus on educating, engaging, assessing, and taking action.
REI takes a multi-faceted approach to promoting race equity through:
Inviting employees to participate in an employee-led learning series that features books, news articles, essays, podcasts, and other content focused on understanding race equity and its impact on all races. The learning series includes monthly selections that all employees are encouraged to discuss.
Offering unconscious bias training to all supervisors and managers across the department to ensure that agency leaders are aligned and cognizant of their actions, which inform workplace behaviors and decisions.
Hosting roundtable discussions to provide all employees with a safe space to engage in dialogue on an array of topics related to race equity, including but not limited to navigating racism in their personal and professional lives.
Enlisting outside facilitators to conduct voluntary and affinity-based focus groups so employees can share their experiences and thoughts on how DCAS and the city can further strengthen their commitment to race equity.
Collecting and analyzing data to identify opportunities to better support employees.
Taken together, this vital work is already sparking discussion and fostering greater understanding among DCAS employees. The department seeks to encourage other city agencies to replicate or learn from this initiative, which was just introduced citywide at the NYC HR & EEO Our Common Ground– A Transformative Workplace conference from March 1 through March 5.
As the most diverse city in America, New York City is unique in how it can serve as a leader for this important work. City government not only prides itself on the diversity of its workforce, but New York is a place where people of every background are inextricably linked and create what former Mayor David Dinkins called a “gorgeous mosaic.”
So much of what we must do goes back to a simple truth: it is easy to fear or distrust what you don’t know or don’t understand. Frank, honest conversations between people and candid sharing of truths should not be feared as a wedge to divide people, but as a strength in helping people understand one another and feel connected to one another. It is through openness and sharing that we can build understanding that invites empathy and builds stronger bonds.
We also recognize that leadership requires accountability and delivering measurable results. That is why it was important for our team to take a deep dive in using data to understand current circumstances and to build a roadmap for the progress ahead. We will be analyzing data we collect throughout the initiative to inform next steps and policy decisions.
Ensuring race equity in the city’s workforce is not only a moral and ethical imperative, but it is also a simple matter of good government. In a city with the richness and diversity of New York, our municipal government can best serve its constituents only when its workforce reflects the talents and diversity of all New Yorkers.
We profoundly believe in the power of public sector leadership and innovation and the Race Equity Initiative is a manifestation of that belief. All too often people think of the private sector as being the hub of innovation in the workplace, but government has a platform to affect major change on both the macro and micro levels. The City of New York and our team at the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS) is committed to being bold in promoting race equity and we hope the work we are doing will inspire you to be champions of change to create a more equitable future.
***
Dawn Pinnock is the Executive Deputy Commissioner for People Operations and Risk Management and Belinda French is the Diversity & EEO Officer at the New York City Department of Citywide Administrative Services. On Twitter @NYCDCAS.
***
Have an op-ed idea or submission for Gotham Gazette? Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Budget work (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography)
Of the endless forums that are being held in the mayoral primary race, the only one that has specifically focused on the City’s fiscal situation and budget was the one last week held by the Citizens Budget Commission, my former organization. (You can watch it here, or read Gotham Gazette’s detailed summary here.)
The event, with candidates appearing one by one, revealed a range of reactions to the fiscal challenge one of them will likely find him/herself tasked with solving when they take office in January. Some candidates seem not to understand the problem, others don’t take it seriously, and still others may understand it but don’t want to really talk about it.
One can only hope that the main question CBC President Andrew Rein posed to each of the eight candidates will cause them to think in greater detail about how they will deal with the budget if elected. He asked:
If you take office next January, you will have about three weeks to submit a preliminary budget for fiscal year 2022-23 to the City Council. With a deficit now projected at $5 billion that could well grow, how will you balance the budget? What combination of spending cuts and revenue increases will you propose?
Maya Wiley made what turned out to be a standard, generic claim that there is lots of waste to be eliminated and said that she would ask agencies for cuts of 3% and work with labor to achieve personnel cost savings. But instead of balancing the budget she chose to talk about her plan to invest an additional $2 billion in capital spending to create 100,000 jobs, as if that would make the rest of the $5 billion deficit go away.
Kathryn Garcia also cited agency savings as a major way to reduce the deficit and said she would ask for agency reductions of 3-5% but could see cutting as much as 10% from some agencies, for example, by combining redundant IT services. But she decried the cuts Mayor de Blasio imposed on the Department of Sanitation, which she led until resigning last year to run to replace him, such as the termination of curbside residential compost collection. This was in fact a wise decision by the mayor, since the program has been little used and extremely expensive. If programs that are not cost effective cannot be closed (or at least postponed) what will Garcia do as mayor when her agency heads protest cuts of programs they care about? Every program has a constituency.
Andrew Yang seemed to understand the magnitude and urgency of the deficit challenge but he offered more of a mélange of various long-shot ideas than an organized plan. He spoke about the need to reduce headcount through attrition. He also offered some long-time CBC recommendations such as requiring employee contributions to health care benefits, and getting nonprofits to pay real estate taxes on some of the property they own. Does he really have plans to implement these or will he back track on them when they are met with opposition? Can he show how they total $5 billion?
Meanwhile, Yang also acknowledged that his plan to provide families with cash payments will be expensive; he said philanthropy would partner with the city to finance half the initially $1 billion program (unlikely; the last time private philanthropy gave as much as $500 million to one initiative in New York City was just after September 11, 2001) and indicated that somehow calling the payments “borough bucks” and getting recipients to spend in local small businesses would offset some of the cost.
Yang said that reform of the property tax system is sorely needed and that while it would not help with city finances short-term, it would unlock value in the billions over the long-term. If the system were truly reformed to reduce the misallocation of value between and within property classes, it would surely be more fair and rational, which might, over the long-term have a positive effect on overall development, but the damage to real estate value due to covid could take years to overcome.
Dianne Morales made it clear that balancing the budget is not a topic that influences her thinking. She didn’t address Rein’s question but instead decried the concept of austerity (though neither Rein nor anyone else used that word), said she would cut the budgets of the police, correction, and perhaps children’s services departments but would re-invest the savings in other city jobs and community investment. Like several candidates, she generally criticized the number and size of city consulting contracts. She supports several state tax increases and a land value tax, but gave no numbers for any of her proposals, on the spending or revenue side.
Eric Adams had some concrete proposals and figures. He called for personnel attrition, which he estimates would save $1.5 billion a year after a two-year hiring freeze, and would also require agency savings of 3-5%. Once again, contract spending was cited as an opportunity for savings; he would appoint a contract efficiency czar. Neither Adams, nor any of the others who called for savings in the contracting process, gave an estimate of how much money this would save. He also wants to control police overtime, which is a perennial in mayoral budget proposals but never achieved.
There is no way Adams’ savings plans would add up to $5 billion so he has tax proposals, i.e. a two-year temporary surcharge on incomes of $5 million or more and a tax on social media data collection. If the $1-2 billion these would raise a year is used to fund operating costs including his plan to open public schools year-round, there is clearly the possibility that the surcharge would not be temporary.
Ray McGuire had a theme that sidestepped the deficit-closing question from the opposite end of the spectrum from Morales. He said we cannot cut and/or tax our way out of the financial predicament. He says we must grow our way out by incentivizing and helping economic growth through spending proposals, i.e. wage subsidies for small businesses and suspension of sales taxes as well as free license renewals. He did, at least, have an estimate for the cost of the subsidies, which, at $900 million over two years, might be on the low side. He also referred to the need for personnel attrition, pension reforms, 5% agency savings, and collaboration on savings with labor. There is no question that the city needs to grow its way to fiscal health over the long run, but that will depend on the extent to which the economy bounces back after the pandemic and on many factors outside the control of municipal government. And no matter how robust the recovery it won’t enable the mayor to present a balanced budget in January 2022.
For a public official who has been directly involved with city finances for years, Scott Stringer was vague about how he would balance the budget – no doubt purposely so. He asserted that his experience as comptroller makes him the best positioned to take the needed actions, but was short on specifics, repeating calls for contract savings and curbing waste in city agencies, citing the Department of Education in particular. But he didn’t estimate how much his proposals would save. Unlike others who called for reducing personnel through attrition, he said he thinks the current city headcount (20,000 more than when de Blasio took office) is appropriate but he is also in favor of early retirement incentives that would drive up pension costs and, if the retirees are replaced to keep up headcount, would not save much in the short-term.
Finally Shaun Donovan had many specific fiscal ideas, but most had no concrete dollar values attached. Moreover, he seems to misunderstand or miscalculate some of the topics he discussed. He made a point of strongly opposing layoffs or borrowing for operating expenses but the mayor has dropped these from his budget plans. Like Andrew Yang and Eric Adams, he called for property tax reform but did not claim it would generate revenue; he is in favor of a pied-a-terre tax and a high-income surcharge. And like all the candidates he is for agency savings, contract efficiency, and working with labor to achieve productivity savings. He also suggested a CBC favorite: consolidating public employee union benefit funds.
Donovan presented value capture as a key revenue-raiser. He spoke of congestion pricing, not seeming to realize that the money from this, once implemented, is already built into the MTA’s capital budget and is not controlled by the mayor. He cited the financing of Hudson Yards as an example of a way to generate more revenue, seemingly not recognizing that it took six years for the area to generate enough revenue to pay its own debt service. More projects that ‘capture value’ to finance development will divert, not generate, revenue for the city. If he has specific value capture projects in mind to add to the city’s coffers he did not offer them.
He was perhaps most misguided in his firm belief that there will be multi-year federal aid to cover city deficits. It is a hard-fought battle for the president and Congress to get immediate state and local aid in the pending covid relief bill; further support certainly cannot and should not be relied upon as a way to sustainably balance the city’s budget.
All of the candidates have been participating in forums covering an array of topics, from homelessness and housing to criminal justice and climate change, promising all kinds of new, expansive and expensive programs. Voters should be concerned about how realistic these campaign promises really are and which of the candidates understand the difference between aspiration and governing. More probing questions about fiscal management, by the media and the public, are needed.
***
Carol Kellermann was president of Citizens Budget Commission from 2008 through 2018.
***
Have an op-ed idea or submission for Gotham Gazette? Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
***
Have an op-ed idea or submission for Gotham Gazette? Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Dominican Day Parade (photo: Benjamin Kanter/Mayoral Photo Office)
In the coming months, leading up to the all-important June New York City primary elections, I will be writing a series of columns for Gotham Gazette exploring how the Latino vote can impact City Council races across the city. The series — Latino Vote ‘21 — will also highlight some opportunities that may increase Latino political representation and will at times touch on citywide or boroughwide races.
This series is, I believe, the first of its kind in a publication like Gotham Gazette. Past analytical pieces that have explored the Latino vote and Latino political representation, like those by the late Angelo Falcón, were published primarily in academic journals or for think tank-like entities like Falcon’s own National Institute for Latino Policy. I’m grateful for the opportunity to shed light on a pivotal ethnic group that could further shift the dynamics of our city’s politics.
The rise in the Latino voting population in New York City has long been explored, including by me at Gotham Gazette. Yet it is worth repeating here that Latinos are now the largest ethnic voting group in the city among all active registered voters, and among Democratic voters, they represent the second largest ethnic voting group in the city, ahead of white voters and just 80,000 behind African-Americans.
The one difference between Latinos and these two other largest racial groups is that Latinos have so far not been avid voters. But they could be. If they were, they could affect the course of New York City electoral politics quite significantly. And in fact, we have seen glimpses of hope for Latinos in the last two primary election cycles. According to voter data company L2, the 2018 and 2020 primary elections in New York each drew over 100,000 Latinos to the polls.
If these Latino voting patterns continue, Latinos could finally represent a quarter of the entire Democratic electorate in June. In turn this will determine who occupies the West Wing of City Hall, and the East Wing, where City Council Members do their business.
In the weeks to come, this series will take a borough-by-borough approach. It will look at specific City Council races in Latino-majority districts, and districts with a sizable enough number of Latino voters to affect the outcome of such races. The articles will be filled with demographic analysis, and information on candidates and stakeholders in the districts. That analysis and information will, I hope, help readers make informed voting decisions, and draw attention to important matters that may affect your life and those of your neighbors.
The implications of the 2021 New York City elections -- which will for the first time include ranked-choice voting in party primaries and special elections -- could have pivotal implications for our future as Latinos in the city. Anyone running for city office will need to listen to increasingly vocal and informed Latinos if they wish to pass by the store-front taquerias, cuchifritos, and barberias of our streets on their way to City Hall.
***
Eli Valentin is an adjunct lecturer at Union Theological Seminary, a frequent guest political analyst at Univision NY, and author of the forthcoming, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Political Life. On Twitter @elivalentinNYPA.
***
Have an op-ed idea or submission for Gotham Gazette? Email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.