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Especially Hard-Hit by Coronavirus, City’s Bangladeshi Community Sees Failure of Government to Help Vulnerable New Yorkers


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Bangladeshis at a past gathering (photo: John McCarten/City Council)


When Shippon Hoque, a Bangladeshi green cab driver from Astoria, Queens, started to feel unwell in early March, it quickly dawned on him that he might have COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

When he developed a high fever and dry cough, the 65-year-old made his way to Elmhurst Hospital. There he was tested for the coronavirus and told to self-quarantine. Given his struggles with diabetes and high blood pressure, his nephew Naiful Bahri thinks that the hospital should’ve admitted him immediately. “He’s older, yet for three days he was home while his condition got worse,” said Bahri. He thinks his uncle’s limited English made it hard for him to advocate for himself. 

Finally on March 18, Hoque was hospitalized. During his first four days at the hospital, Hoque FaceTimed with his family and told them about the scene at an emergency room that would soon be drawing national attention. ‘It’s overcrowded, I feel like I’m in a warzone, people are dying,” Bahri recalled his uncle saying. “He was just really worried for his life.” Soon, the brother Hoque had visited days before he was hospitalized also tested positive for the virus.

Shippon Hoque and his 60-year-old brother, Iqbal Hoque Bhuyian, were close. Both migrated to Queens in the 1980s. Bahri said during his uncle’s last days, Shippon Hoque seemed more concerned about whether his younger brother, who had the same pre-existing conditions, would make it. As Shippon’s organs failed, doctors placed him on a ventilator, but on March 29, he passed away. His brother died six days later. 

Hoque and Bhuyian are part of a long list of Bangladeshi New Yorkers who have died due to the coronavirus. The virus is hitting low-income communities of color especially hard and while much attention has been on the toll on Black and Latino communities, the Bangladeshi community is similarly largely confined to less-affluent corners of the city, in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, and crowded living spaces. 

Near the end of May, JamunaTV, a Bengali language newscast, estimated that 239 Bangladeshis had died of COVID-19 in New York City. That number is an estimate based on word of mouth accounts since the New York City Health Department has not released specific data for the Bangladeshi population.

On June 8, the city Health Department reported that 7.6 percent of the city’s coronavirus victims were of Asian descent. If the word of mouth counts are correct, the Bagladeshi community, which makes up less than 8 percent of the city’s Asian population, accounted for about a fifth of those deaths. 

“Often our community isn’t seen because it falls into the South Asian category,” said Thahitun Mariam, a Bangladeshi activist and community organizer from the Bronx. 

While other South Asian groups like Indian-Americans rank near the top of many socioeconomic measures, Bangladeshis are among the poorest ethnic groups in the city, constituting an outsized share of New York’s working class—they drive cabs, cook in restaurants, serve fast food, sell clothes, and run grocery stores. And many have risked their health by continuing to report to work for the much-needed income and to keep the city running to the extent it has.

Accurate data is crucial to identifying and helping vulnerable populations, advocates say. 

“We see the South Asian data and we know it’s mostly us, and the city needs to acknowledge that,” said Moumita Ahmed, a Bangladeshi-American activist from Jamaica, Queens, who ran for a local District Leader position this past election, referring to the positive cases amongst Asians. “Bangladeshis need to understand the data so the people in the community can take measures and precautions they need to take as a collective. We didn’t get a chance to do that.” 

Bangladesh is among the top 10 countries of origin for the city’s 3.1 million foreign-born residents. The Bangladeshi population of the city stands at around 100,000 according to a 2018 report by the Mayor’s Office for Immigrant Affairs. Yet many in the Bangladeshi community feel ignored by those in power.

An outbreak in the Bangladeshi community should have been anticipated and addressed, critics said. The Bangladeshi diaspora live in many of the city’s hardest hit neighborhoods and many are undocumented and lack health insurance. Plus the community as a whole has high rates of diabetes and other underlying health conditions that are known to cause complications with the virus and lead to higher fatality rates. 

Among the most glaring failures, critics say, is that information about the virus wasn’t translated into Bengali and there was no outreach to the community despite the fact that it is the fourth most common language among foreign-born New Yorkers. Critics also said the city's limited halal food distribution system left many Bangladeshis, who are predominantly Muslims, hungry during Ramadan. Additionally, many Bangladeshis are self-employed and service workers who are encountering complications and delays in receiving unemployment benefits with little guidance and clarity from the state. 

“What ends up happening when there isn’t any government attention to reach vulnerable populations, we get left out,” said Shahana Hanif, Bangladeshi-American who currently works as an aide to Brooklyn City Council Member Brad Lander and is running to replace her term-limited boss in next year’s election. “We don't receive any real-time information and it creates a gap.”

The de Blasio administration has pointed to its launch of a multi-million-dollar media campaign in multiple languages including Bengali to reach vulnerable communities. City officials also stress they have worked closely with Muslim New Yorkers to establish their halal food distribution, with served hundred thousands of halal meals provided during Ramadan. 

While the community feels too-often ignored by city and state officials, Bangladeshi community leaders and activists are stepping up during the pandemic. “It's their job to serve us and I don't think they have and so the gap was created and we organizers have to fill that gap, find the resources, and disseminate to our community,” said Mariam.

Why Bangladeshis? 
Bangladeshis are among the poorest Asian ethnic groups in the city according to the AAFNY. The organization found that one in three Bangladeshis live in poverty, which is much higher than the citywide poverty rate of about 21 percent. They’re also more likely to live in overcrowded households with 42 percent of households having more than one occupant per room compared to 9 percent citywide.

“Usually in Bangladeshi households, women will take care of the children and won’t work. The single-income household makes it hard for those families to mobilize and save,” said Mariam. 

Pre-existing conditions also made the community especially vulnerable. Diseases like diabetes are common in Bangladeshi adults making them more susceptible to the coronavirus, according to the American Diabetes Association. “From a holistic medical perspective, the combination of chronic conditions such as diabetes compounded with socioeconomic factors such as being undocumented, uninsured, and coming from a low-income neighborhood is leading to a very high true mortality rate of Bangladeshi COVID deaths in NYC,” said Bangladeshi internal medicine physcian Raihan Faroqui, who is also a community organizer. 

Many Bangladeshi immigrants work at McDonalds and other restaurants around the city, Mariam says, which have remained open for pick-up and delivery throughout the pandemic. “Our community members are the essential workers at Dunkin Donuts and fast-food places," she said. "That consideration should’ve been made.” 

Among these workers are many undocumented Bangladeshis who are ineligible for unemployment and other government assistance programs. Hanif, along with her sister, Sabia Hanif, started a fundraiser for vulnerable undocumented Bangladeshis.

“With no clear timeline of when they can return to work, guarantee that they'll have a job, and savings to survive the upcoming waves of the pandemic, they are disproportionately overburdened by the impacts of COVID-19,” the sisters wrote on their Launch Good Campaign. So far, they have raised over $40,000 as of July 9. 

“We need representation and policy changes to shift the way we care about our family members who work in Dunkin Donuts,” said Shahana Hanif. 

The city could’ve also better prepared the low-income communities where many Bangladeshis live, Mariam said. “It’s unfortunate, instead of doing work to prevent more deaths, they did flashy shows in Manhattan like setting up the Javits Center and having the [USS Comfort] ship come dock. But the deaths are happening in the Bronx, where are the makeshift hospitals here?” In the Bronx, there have been twice the amount of positive cases compared to Manhattan.

Language Gap
When news first broke about the importance of social distancing, the Trump administration had only released the guidelines to address coronavirus in English. After outrage from Congress and Latino groups, they released it in Spanish but the guidance was never released in other languages.

State and city officials failed to quickly communicate the severity of the virus and importance of staying home to low-income neighborhoods where languages other than English are prevalent.

During the early critical days of the pandemic, Bangladeshis, unaware of new social distancing rules, were living their daily lives like they always had. “Part of the issue is people weren’t understanding the severity of the virus and were still going out,” said Mariam. “Our community is full of essential workers, people continued to work and were pressured to show up to work in lockdown.”

The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene published coronavirus fact sheets in nine languages including Bengali on March 15, but the site was only interacted with 92 times from March to June. The city also created other content in several languages about social distancing, COVID-19 testing, and available city resources, distributed through businesses and community partners. 

Although virus information was available online, Bangladeshi activists say community members are often connected by phone. Navigating the internet is a challenge for many elders, says Hanif, who regularly finds herself on the phone walking Bangladeshis through applications, like for unemployment. 

In April, when the city released data on the hardest hit zip codes and ethnicity groups, showing stark disparities wherein New Yorkers of color were the most devastated by the virus, the mayor launched an additional $10 million media campaign in more than 15 languages to inform people and attempt to slow the spread in those communities. Efforts included TV, radio, and digital ads in those areas as well as individual phone calls and texts, according to the city. 

The health department also created an Emergency Partner Council, an advisory group including 80 community partners, to better inform New Yorkers through neighborhood-based sessions, according to a spokesperson. And officials participated in dozens of press and community events to ensure residents received up-to-date information in the languages they speak. 

The mayor’s office mass texted and shared messages in Bangla with hundreds of community members and organizations serving Bangladeshi communities. But their outreach wasn’t as effective and didn’t equip the community with accessible information from the start, community members said. “The city officials did not work with community members or leaders to make information language-accessible. There was no outreach to mosque leaders, there were still prayers going on,” Ahmed said of the early going as the virus spread. 

Hanif said the community should be able to rely on local City Council offices for adequate information and help with any concerns. But when people call, those offices likely don't have someone who speaks the language on staff.

Thousands of Bangladeshi New Yorkers tune into Bangla networks like TBN24 for coronavirus news. The television network is based out of Queens and translates news that runs on the mainstream media networks to Bangla. Habib Rahman, an anchor at TBN24, said he quickly realized the level of misinformation and confusion surrounding the virus in the Bangaldeshi community.

“We took the burden on our shoulders to translate the news. The people who live here should know what’s happening here,” said Rahman. The 24-hour network has 2.7 million followers on Facebook, averages roughly 20,000 views per show over multiple outlets, and has been a main news source for Bangladeshi New Yorkers.

But still the gap in language access left thousands of Bangladeshis at a disadvantage, Mariam said. “Lots of working class Bangladeshis don’t speak English very well and a lot gets lost in translation,” she said. Bengali is the fourth most common language spoken by foreign-born New Yorkers with limited language proficiencies according to the 2019 Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs report. “There should’ve been a concentrated effort to get them the information they need because so many are immunocompromised” said Mariam.

Likewise Faroqui, the Bangladeshi-American physician, understood how the complex health-care system would leave Bangladeshis, especially those who aren’t fluent in English, vulnerable during the crisis. As a response, Faroqui and a team of volunteers created C-BASH, a smart hotline for Bangladeshis living in New York City experiencing coronavirus symptoms. 

The hotline asks pre-recorded questions in Bangla that are put into a database that tracks symptoms. Later on, callers receive a call back from one of the 600 Bangladeshi health-care volunteers nationwide with advice on their situation. Volunteers also speak with families of COVID-19 patients to assist them with any concerns or anxiety. “We’re not trying to be 911, we’re trying to guide people to call 911,” said Faroqui. 

Food Insecurity
Throughout the lockdown, many vulnerable Bangladeshi families, who have members who are immunocompromised, have been unable to leave their house. The city’s programs “were not designed to support certain neighborhoods and demographics,” said Ahmed, founder of Queens Mutual Aid Network, referring to the city’s coronavirus food assistance resources, which include meals provided at city schools and through the city’s delivery program. 

The city set up over 400 grab and go locations to give out free meals every weekday. It offers a halal option including peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and hummus. “The city’s food distribution, it’s very lazy,” said Mariam referring to the lack of quality in the halal food. 

For those unable to leave home, the city started a delivery program providing three days of food at a time for up to a month for two people and a maximum of 18 meals per household. 

Many Bangladeshi Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset during the holy month of Ramadan and accessing halal food was particularly difficult this year. The city announced that they would provide 500,000 halal meals distributed at 32 pickup locations, soup kitchens, pantries, and community organizations throughout the month. However, some say these halal meals have been unacceptable. “The relief was not a relief, it was terrible options given to people,” said Ahmed referring to the city’s halal food distribution. 

While filling out the delivery application, Rima Begum chose the halal preference and three days later, a box of nine halal meals showed up to her Queens home, she said. Inside were crackers, hummus, pretzels and a ready-made meal of chicken, beans, vegetables and potatoes. “It was mushy, had a bad smell and had ingredients we don’t use, like corn. The halal meal looked nothing like anything I’ve eaten at home,” Begum said. The readymade meal distributed by the city to Muslims was prepared by J&M Halal Foods, a U.S. military defense contractor. 

Begum says the city could have used this program to invest money back into the community. “The city chose to contract with a military ration company out in Illinois when they could have easily worked with the thousands of small businesses that have been struggling to stay afloat during the pandemic,” said Begum.

Representation matters, Begum said. “If the Muslim community was asked if they would eat these halal meals, you would have immediately gotten a response that the meals are not adequate for our community,” Begum said. 

Mayor Bill de Blasio named Department of Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia as “food czar” to coordinate emergency food distribution programs. Garcia told Civil Eats that the city has contracted with bigger firms to distribute food in a standardized way and avoid inconsistency. As of mid-July, New York City has served 83 million free meals since the covid outbreak led to a near-shutdown of the city. 

Joshua Goodman, a spokesperson for Garcia and the city’s emergency food program, told Gotham Gazette that their team has “been proud to work closely with groups representing halal-observant New Yorkers, serving hundreds of thousands of halal meals every month, including a major surge during Ramadan.”

Bangladeshis in need have been contacting their local Mutual Aid Network in Queens, a borough home to over 43,500 Bangladeshis, according to a 2019 analysis by the AAF. The group of local volunteers has been delivering food to several hundred families every week and has fed over 1,600 families from March to early July since the lockdown. During Ramadan, “the most requests have come from Bangladeshis, over 500,” said Ahmed. 

The network provides groceries and basic necessities while specifically catering to ethnicity and religion. With 150 active volunteers, they focus on the immunocompromised, undocumented, and elderly populations and ensure access to quality and fresh food. Their funding comes mainly from donations and some from their own volunteers. Ahmed, the founder, said “we’re neighbors who want to help our neighbors.” 

Mariam was inspired by her fellow Bangladeshi leader and created the Bronx Mutual Aid Network in early April, which has served over 600 families. “People have been waiting for a space like this in the Bronx,” Mariam said. 

About 16% of Bronx residents are food insecure according to the 2018 Food Metrics Report. “There's a high need in the Bangladeshi community,” in the Bronx where 10,000 Bangladeshis reside, said Mariam. “These families are unable to go out for food because they are immunocompromised, sick, or lost their loved ones.” The group has served over 150 Bangladeshi families multiple times as of late June. 

Due to the high need, the two mutual aid networks are specifically catering to Bangladeshis with a package that includes lentils, dates, and peppers, among other basics. “There’s a cultural and religious aspect to food,” Mariam said. The city has “the data on which communities are where and the diets they have. The food distribution model needs to change.” 

Pending Status
There has been a surge of unemployment filing in the Bangladeshi community due to layoffs, lack of work, and immunocompromised conditions. Filling out the lengthy application is a challenge for some. “Explaining these services is not easy. It shows how disconnected the Bangladeshi community is from our government,” said Hanif.

The New York State Department of Labor application isn’t built for self-employed workers without W2 forms and during the early days of the pandemic, “self-employed people had no clue they could even file and the state did not put out this information,” said Rahman, the anchor at TBN24. As a result many self-employed Bangladeshis like cab drivers and food vendors who had stopped working were in the dark with no guidance or outreach from the state. Some applied the week they stopped working without knowing if it was the right thing to do. Eventually, the city put out a guide for self-employed workers on April 4, weeks after many had stopped working. 

Since self-employed workers don’t usually qualify to receive unemployment benefits they were instructed to call the Department of Labor to verify their application. “I tried calling for days but was frustrated and gave up,” says Fakrul Islam, a 33-year-old yellow cab driver, who had an experience shared by many New Yorkers as the state’s system was completely overloaded by the unprecedented need. Islam stopped working night shifts in mid-March due to a lack of customers. For weeks, he was unsure if he would receive unemployment benefits and missed April rent. 

Since then, the state initiated a call-back system for applicants like Islam and instructed self-employed workers to apply for the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, which covers those who are usually ineligble for benefits. After almost two months of waiting with no response or outreach from the department, Islam woke up to a large sum of backdated payments in his account in late May. 

Bangladeshis frequently call or write into TBN24 asking for guidance with the process and delays. Rahman’s show, The Views, turned into a pandemic hotline for the thousands of Bangladeshis watching at home tackling many concerns but mainly unemployment issues. 

The show features guests ranging from Bangladeshi organizers like Hanif to certified public accountants to Congressional Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat who represents parts of Queens and the Bronx, to help answer pressing questions and address concerns the city and state aren’t. Throughout April and May, Rahman focused on assisting Bangladeshis who were stuck in pending status with the Department of Labor. 

On air, Rahman helps thousands at once but off the clock, he assists community members in dire situations. “This has become my 24/7 job,” said Rahman. While guiding Bangladeshis through the process, Rahman said he realized the system is set up so it can deny you for any small reason. “It’s a system of denial,” he said. 

Bangladeshi activists are individually supporting their local Bangladeshi communities during the pandemic but many are also part of Bangladeshi Americans for Political Progress, also known as BAPP. The grassroots group formed late 2019 to focus on creating a Bangladeshi-American voting bloc in the city to elect political candidates and advocate for legislation that supports working-class communities. 

Critics say that one of the reasons the community has been hit especially hard is because there are no Bangladeshis in elected office at city and state levels and very few on staffs, and thus no one to draw attention to the community’s unique challenges.

“Given the scope of how many Bangladeshis are in this city, there isn’t enough adequate representation,” said Hanif, who is running for City Council in the 2021 Democratic primary in Brooklyn’s 39th district. “It is not surprising to me that the community does not have what we need.” If elected, Hanif would be the first ever Bangladeshi in the City Council. 

City and state representatives don’t reflect the communities they represent, said Moumita Ahmed, who recently ran for District Leader in District 24. “If we had someone in office that understood the culture and understood that the virus can impact one group way more than others,” she said. 

Meanwhile Bangladeshi New Yorkers like Naiful Bahri, whose uncle died at Elmhurst Hospital, have been struggling to cope since the crisis has engulfed the city. 

By early April, Bahri organized two funeral services, known as a janazah for Muslims for his two late uncles. Bahri and his dad buried Shippon Hoque in Washington Memorial Park on March 31 and returned a week later to bury Iqbal Hoque Bhuyian.

“There was no one there by his side. No one from the family wanted to go to the burial site,” said Bahri. “I had the job of Facebook Live-ing it for our family who couldn’t make it. It’s the worst way to die.”

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by Afia Eama for Gotham Gazette
@GothamGazette

Note: this article has been corrected to remove mention that an email address is needed for emergency food, it is not.

New York City Mandated an Absentee Ballot Tracking System; The Board of Elections Never Implemented It


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Voting absentee (photo: @HelenRosenthal)


A law passed by the New York City Council in 2016 could have helped prevent some of the many problems plaguing the absentee ballot process from the June 2020 primary elections. But that law was never implemented by the New York City Board of Elections, a quasi-state agency that routinely refuses to abide by local mandates.

The June primaries saw a record number of absentee ballots cast by voters, facilitated by an executive order from Governor Andrew Cuomo that mandated that local boards of elections across the state send out postage-paid absentee ballot applications to all eligible, registered voters. But the multi-step process was riddled with problems and the New York City Board of Elections was ill-equipped to handle the crush of hundreds of thousands of new absentee voters. The city BOE sent out more than 778,000 ballots and more than 403,000 of those were mailed back by voters and marked as received by the board.

Ahead of the primary, voters complained for weeks that they hadn’t either received an absentee ballot application or the ballot itself after mailing the application to the BOE. Some even received the ballot after the primary election was over, while untold others may have their attempts at voting invalidated for various reasons.

City Council Member Ben Kallos, a Manhattan Democrat, said these issues could have been avoided. He sponsored the 2016 law that required the city Board of Elections to create an online portal that would allow voters to track their absentee ballot application and their ballot, along with giving them access to their registration status, voting history, and other election-related resources. The city BOE never created the portal.

“The biggest impediment to free and fair elections and democracy in the City of New York is the Board of Elections, and it really shouldn’t be that way,” Kallos said in an interview. “They only had one job and all they had to do was send people their absentee ballots and they couldn't even get that right. And because of the Board of Elections, tens if not hundreds of thousands of voters were disenfranchised.”

The city BOE has already begun throwing out thousands of ballots for errors small, large, and at times out of the control of voters. For instance, ballots had to be postmarked by June 23 and received by June 30 to be counted. But, as Gothamist first reported, the United States Postal Service does not typically postmark envelopes that already have postage paid, and despite instructions to postmark voter mail, some yet-to-be-determined number of ballots were not postmarked, which meant that otherwise valid ballots were not going to be counted.

Those rejections have prompted a federal lawsuit against the state BOE and the governor by two Democratic candidates and more than a dozen voters, alleging voter disenfranchisement. “Depending on where the voter lived and what their local USPS office was doing or told, two voters could cast identical ballots, at exactly the same time, on the same day, and yet one ballot would be counted and one would not,” the lawsuit states.

There are also other ongoing issues around which absentee and affidavit ballots will be counted because of issues like stray marks on ballots or missing signatures. Meanwhile, those who vote absentee have no way of knowing the status of their ballot.

Already, the mismanagement of and other problems with absentee balloting has prompted the state Legislature to consider ten pieces of legislation ahead of the fall general election to improve the voting process, including a bill sponsored by State Senator Zellnor Myrie of Brooklyn that would provide for the type of tracking mechanism that Kallos’ law envisions.

Activists from the Let NY Vote coalition are rallying behind those bills. “The June primary highlighted many of the obvious inadequacies in New York State's absentee ballot counting procedures,” said Jennifer Wilson, deputy director of the League of Women Voters of New York State, in a public statement. “Voters throughout the state were unsure whether their ballot would arrive in time to be counted, or whether their ballot would be rejected without their knowledge. This package of bills will address issues surrounding absentee voting in New York State as well as assuring voters that they will be able to continue to vote via absentee ballot during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.”

[Push Is On for 10 Bills to Strengthen Absentee Voting and More Ahead of Fall Election]

As it has done with Kallos’, the New York City Board of Elections regularly ignores laws passed by the City Council, on the grounds that it is only subject to mandates of the state Legislature. Though it is technically a state entity, it is funded by the city and its ten commissioners are appointed by the City Council. The Board has previously refused to implement other local laws, including one that required it to post signage when a polling site is moved. It also decided not to allow online voter registration after the state BOE’s Republican and Democratic commissioners provided a split opinion on the validity of electronic signatures.

But in the case of the absentee ballot tracking proposal, the BOE’s executive leadership seemed to agree with the intent of the bill. When Kallos held a hearing on the bill in March 2015, BOE Executive Director Mike Ryan testified to the relative ease of implementing an electronic tracking system, which is already used internally. “Well I think it would be a subset ultimately of the system that we already have in place...The question simply then becomes, we're gathering the information; the real question from a programming perspective is; how do we take the information that we're gathering and make it publicly available on a web and accessible?”, he said, according to a transcript of the hearing.

He even said that if the process was automated and did not require manual effort, that the BOE would likely not have any objections to it. “I would envision, if we were going to implement something like this, that the only way that it could work is if there was an automation to the process. You know, a barcoding, a QR coding that allows us to scan the envelopes when they come back in,” he said. “Given the amount of information and all of the tasks that we have to complete leading up to election day, having manual intervention without significant additions to capable staff that could do this, is not something that would be possible...But if it's all electronic we don't have an issue; if it's manual intervention we'd have significant issues trying to comply.”

BOE spokesperson Valerie Vazquez declined to comment for this story.

If the state Legislature fails to follow through on absentee ballot tracking and online voter registration, Kallos, who is running for Manhattan Borough President in next year’s city elections, said voters should reject them at the polls.

“As we head into the most important election in our lifetimes for the President of the United States, people will not be able to register online and they may not be able to request their absentee ballots online or even track and see whether or not their ballots are counted and all that just makes them lose faith in their elected officials,” he said. “And I hope that they will join me in voting out all the bums and going after all the corrupt party officials that are involved in a broken Board of Elections.”

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

Read more by this writer.

De Blasio Promised Another Charter Revision Commission; Electeds and Advocates are Ready with Suggestions


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Mayor de Blasio (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)


When Mayor Bill de Blasio said in late April that he was creating a task force to lead a “fair recovery” from the COVID-19 pandemic, nestled in his announcement was a brief statement that he also intends to call another Charter Revision Commission. But the mayor hasn’t yet convened that commission, which would be the third to be created while he has been mayor, the second by him alone, and hasn’t explained his rationale for it. 

There have already been two commissions created in the last few years to examine and propose amendments to the City Charter, the document that establishes the central functions of city government and its officials. Amendments considered and proposed by such commissions are placed on the ballot for city voters to approve or reject. 

A spokesperson for the mayor said there is no set date for when the mayor will create his new commission. The timing will depend on the city’s recovery planning process, the spokesperson said, and on whether the commission can help overcome any roadblocks to that “fair recovery.” The mayor’s announcement also stated that his Fair Recovery Task Force will consider questions that could be taken up by the commission. De Blasio said he expected a “preliminary recovery road map” by June 1, though his spokesperson did not say whether that plan had been created or if it would be made public.

De Blasio previously created a charter commission in 2018, convened, he said at the time, to improve voter participation and limit the influence of money in elections. That commission placed three questions on the November 2018 ballot, all of which passed with overwhelming support, that significantly reduced individual campaign contribution limits, established term limits for community board members, and created a new Civic Engagement Commission.

Another commission was created that year through legislation passed by the City Council, with commissioners appointed by various officials including the mayor, based on a push by Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer and then-Public Advocate Letitia James, which was embraced by City Council Speaker Corey Johnson. It was said at the time to be tasked with a more sweeping review, and potential overhaul, of the city’s key government functions and processes.

In the end, it also produced mostly modest reforms, put forth as five ballot questions in the 2019 general election, all of which also easily passed. The questions covered 19 specific proposals in all, including the implementation of ranked-choice voting in special and party primary municipal elections, expanded powers for the Civilian Complaint Review Board (a police oversight agency), independent budgets for the public advocate and borough presidents, among other technical changes to land use policy and the city’s budgeting process.  

It’s unclear what solutions to the city’s current crises might require or inspire a change to the city charter. “[W]e're going to build something new and we're going to build something better and not just better because it's more modern,” de Blasio said in his April 26 announcement of the Fair Recovery Task Force. “We're going to build something more fair. We're going to build something for everyone. This recovery has to have that spirit, that New York spirit, that everyone matters.”

He explained that a Charter Revision Commission would be part of that recovery “because if ever there was a moment, a breakpoint moment in the city's history, this is it. And it's time to look anew at everything we do and see what works, what doesn't work, what about our city government structure might be outdated or less effective, what do we need to build a fair recovery.”

More than two months later, the City Council is “not aware of any formal efforts by the administration to create another Charter revision commission," according to Jacob Tugendrajch, a spokesperson for Council Speaker Corey Johnson.

At this point, it appears all but certain that any charter revision commission assembled by de Blasio would do its work to put proposals to voters on the 2021 general election ballot, rather than this fall.

For some who participated in the previous charter amendment processes, a new commission offers an opportunity to revive proposals that weren’t taken up by the previous commissions as well as push for new needs that have become apparent in recent months.

Comptroller Scott Stringer pushed the previous commission to consider an amendment mandating the appointment of a chief diversity officer at City Hall and at every city agency, as he has done in his own office. Though Stringer insists the mayor could create that position administratively, it’s possible he may push a new commission to take up the proposition.

“A CDO for New York City would function as city government’s executive level diversity and inclusion strategist, driving the representation of people of color and women across government, tracking and overseeing the city’s M/WBE programs, and determining whether agencies’ daily practices are equitable,” he wrote in a July 8 op-ed at Gotham Gazette. “A citywide CDO could begin to tackle long-standing disparities that are now coming into stark relief -- from analyzing how taxpayer dollars are spent through an intersectional lens to removing barriers to doing business with the city to making sure public service is a viable option for people from diverse backgrounds and experiences.”

A spokesperson for Stringer did not provide comment for this article when asked for which proposals the comptroller may put forward for a new charter commission. When he testified before the 2019 commission, Stringer presented a 102-page booklet of 65 ideas and proposals, including the chief diversity officer concept, which was his number one focus. 

Public Advocate Jumaane Williams said he wants to see his office strengthened under the charter and would push for additional changes to the city’s budget process, where the mayor currently holds far more authority than the City Council. He also expressed support for a proposal to give the City Council advice and consent power over the appointment of the NYPD commissioner, an idea that was pushed by police reform advocates to the 2019 commission but not taken up and that could gather momentum following the recently renewed movement against police brutality that has subsumed New York City and the country at large. 

On that note, Williams said a commission could provide a valuable opportunity to reimagine the institutions of public safety in the city, beyond just the NYPD. “If all we do is look at the police, we’re going to miss the mark,” he said.

City Council Member Brad Lander, a Brooklyn Democrat who is running for city Comptroller in 2021 and pushed for a comprehensive city planning process to be taken up by the prior charter commission, has recently suggested that New York follow Minneapolis’ lead on police and public safety reform.

“If another Charter Revision Commission is truly on the table again, then New York City should consider following the lead of Minneapolis, where they are proposing a charter amendment to dismantle their police department and create a department of community safety and violence prevention that leads with a public health and restorative justice approach,” Lander said in a statement. “That would be a good use of a commission, to transform our city's approach to public safety.”

The previous commissions both considered issues of police reform but sweeping proposals were either rejected or watered down. The 2019 commission did lead to the adoption of certain transparency and accountability measures. The CCRB’s composition was expanded, giving the public advocate an appointment while another appointee chosen jointly by the mayor and Council will serve as chair. The Council also no longer needs approval from the mayor to appoint members to the board. The agency’s executive director also received the authority to issue subpoenas and the CCRB can now also prosecute police officers who make false official statements during an investigation of which they are the subject.

Carolyn Martinez-Class, a spokesperson for the Communities United for Police Reform coalition, hopes that the next commission will go further. But she has doubts since it will be appointed by the mayor, whose office attempted to sabotage some of the 2019 commission’s CCRB reform proposals and who has favored incremental changes to the police department through his own initiatives. 

“Mayor de Blasio has consistently undermined efforts to reform the police in New York City including the last charter revision process,” Martinez-Class said in a phone interview, noting how the mayor’s appointees on the Council-created commission voted against the CCRB proposals. “There's little faith that if the mayor’s the person who is going to control the process in its entirety, that substantive reforms can come out of this process,” she said. 

Among the reforms CPR would like to see included in the charter are increased accountability for police misconduct, greater transparency, particularly with regards to the NYPD’s notoriously opaque budget, and greater oversight of police surveillance technology. “The last few months have only reiterated how critical all three of these pieces are,” she said.

At least part of those demands have already been met with the Council’s recent passage of the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act, which will require the NYPD to disclose the types of surveillance mechanisms it uses. De Blasio has said he will sign the bill into law despite his initial reluctance to support the legislation. He has also promised changes to NYPD disciplinary practices, though administrative measures do not carry the same force as a charter provision.    

The police budget’s size and lack of transparency have been particularly pertinent considering the fraught passage of the recent $88.2 billion city budget for the 2021 fiscal year, where the central sticking point was a proposed $1 billion cut to the NYPD’s roughly $5.5 billion operating budget. The mayor and Council agreed upon a combination of cuts and cost shifts that amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars, though there has been debate over how significant changes really are, with many advocates and some elected officials disappointed.

Martinez-Class said the charter should be modified to require reporting on line-item spending, disclosure of funds raised by the department from private sources, as well as giving the Council and public the ability to weigh in on, and veto, the purchase and renewal of surveillance technology.

CPR does not have a position on a controversial proposal to create an elected CCRB that was advanced last year by some advocates but failed to be taken up by the charter commission. The group also has not weighed in on the police commissioner advise-and-consent proposal that Williams supports and was also pushed by a number of individuals who testified before the charter commission at its public hearings. 

The charter currently gives the mayor the upper hand in crafting the city’s budget, but the City Council and Comptroller Stringer have both previously proposed amendments that could redistribute some budget-making power while also bringing city spending in line with actual performance measures. Both the Council’s and comptroller’s reports before the 2019 commission advanced similar ideas including greater reporting on individual capital projects, allowing the Council to jointly decide on “units of appropriation” with the mayor, and creating strict deadlines for the mayor to seek the Council’s approval for mid-year changes to the city’s financial plan.

Both the 2018 and 2019 commissions barely touched on land use policy and comprehensive planning, which the Thriving Communities Coalition (TCC) of urban policy and housing nonprofits has repeatedly championed. 

“Our focus was in particular how to really change the way that the city does both land use but also planning more broadly so that includes budgeting, infrastructure investment, as well as land use,” said Emily Goldstein, director of organizing and advocacy at the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, a member of TCC. 

The coalition proposed a slew of ideas before the previous commission, including enshrining a “right to housing” in law, limiting the disposal of public land, equitable budgeting, and more. “Unfortunately, what we saw was that almost no changes were made. Only very, very minor modifications,” she said.

Goldstein also worried that the mayor’s commission will largely follow whatever direction he intends for it, rather than a broader mandate. “Charter commissions are not the most democratic process,” she said. “There's tons of space for input but in the end, it’s just whatever the appointed commissioners decide to do.”

If another commission is convened, Goldstein said the TCC will definitely push for the passage of comprehensive planning, something that Lander and Council Member Antonio Reynoso have been vocally supportive of and have said they are drafting legislation to pursue a version short of what a charter amendment could require.

“When we talk about comprehensive planning what we mean is actually looking honestly through data at the needs of the entire city,” Goldstein said. “Looking at existing needs, not just projected growth. Looking at, regardless of wealth or race, where and how can communities’ needs be met. Looking at historic disinvestment and patterns that sort of need to be made up for, looking backwards...and putting in place a planning process that grapples with those challenges and that equalizes the power balance.”

***
by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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