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Max & Murphy Podcast: Breaking Down the Queens Borough President Special Election


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Queens is the world's borough - and there'll soon be a new borough president (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)


March 11, 2020 - Max & Murphy Podcast: Breaking Down the Queens Borough President Special Election

chrisy chung david f brand 150There's a Queens Borough President special election fast approaching! Early voting starts Saturday, March 14, and election day is Tuesday, March 24. It's a crowded, competitive race to replace Melinda Katz, now the District Attorney, and all registered voters can participate. David Brand of the Queens Daily Eagle and Christine Chung of The City joined the show to discuss the race, the candidates, the forces like coronavirus impacting who might show up to vote, and more.

Listen to the conversation and let us know what you think -- we're on Twitter @TweetBenMax and @JarrettMurphy. You can listen to the show through the embedded audio below or download the episode wherever you get your podcasts, under "Max & Murphy," and listen to Max & Murphy live on Wednesdays at 5 p.m. on WBAI radio, 99.5FM or wbai.org.

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by Ben Max, Gotham Gazette
     

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Spread of Coronavirus Heightens Concerns About Especially Vulnerable Seniors


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Department for the Aging Commissioner Cortés-Vázquez (photo: John McCarten/City Council)


“We’re going to protect our senior centers,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said Monday during his latest briefing on the spread of the new coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, adding that city health department officials are visiting all of the city’s 600 such centers to ensure proper protocols amid the virus outbreak that has now led to 20 confirmed cases in the city, with more expected.

According to the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC), older adults are at higher risk for contracting the new coronavirus that is spreading across the globe and here in New York City, and “early data suggest older people are twice as likely to have serious COVID-19 illness.”

During his Sunday briefing on the new coronavirus, Governor Andrew Cuomo also again stressed that seniors are among the most vulnerable populations to COVID-19. “Most people have mild symptoms, most people don't get hospitalized,” Cuomo said. “The dangerous aspect again is people in that vulnerable population -- senior citizens, the elderly, et cetera. So we are trying to contain it.”

Also on Sunday, the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Oxiris Barbot, pointed to the additionally dangerous combination of age and underlying conditions. “We want to make sure that elderly folks who have chronic underlying illnesses, we do everything that we can together as a community not to increase their risk,” Barbot said alongside the mayor. The underlying conditions that have been identified to exacerbate the risk of coronavirus are chronic lung disease, cancer, diabetes, immuno-compromised, heart disease.

“As our senior New Yorkers, as you've heard today, are especially vulnerable to the effects of this virus, we are also working very closely with the Department for the Aging and our other human service partners to ensure our senior centers, adult care centers, nursing homes, receive up to date guidance on how to limit the spread of the disease,” said Deanne Criswell, head of the city’s Office of Emergency Management, also during Sunday’s press conference on how the city is trying to contain and combat the new coronavirus.

Amid rising worries about older New Yorkers and senior care facilities, on Friday the New York City Council’s Committee on Aging held a regularly-scheduled budget hearing with representatives of the city’s Department for the Aging (DFTA) where coronavirus concerns were front and center in the discussion. It was one in an ongoing series of hearings on de Blasio’s $95.3 billion preliminary budget plan that the Council is holding over the course of weeks, with some taking on new importance relative to the spread of coronavirus and its impact, which could include undermining revenue sources for the city’s budget while creating new city government expenses.

City government is developing a plan to try and ensure New York City’s seniors stay healthy as the coronavirus concerns continue, although no additional funding has been requested by DFTA to provide further protections.

DFTA currently has a $434 million budget and oversees “230 neighborhood senior centers, 16 innovative senior centers, and 39 sites affiliated with senior centers” across the city and has 1,393 contracts with agency providers to deliver services, according to budget documents.

DFTA Commissioner Lorraine Cortés-Vázquez, along with the department’s chief financial officer, Jose Mercado, outlined the agency’s work and budget, and responded to questions from Council members, especially Margaret Chin, a Manhattan Democrat who is chair of the Council Committee on Aging and whose lower Manhattan district includes several senior centers.

Cortés-Vázquez was asked multiple times by Council Member Ruben Diaz, Sr. if DFTA is asking for or plans to ask for any additional funding to address coronavirus.

“I have the utmost confidence that the mayor is going to do all he can and has made it very clear that this is a priority and that resources will be made available to combat this disease,” Cortés-Vázquez responded.

Pressed further by Diaz Sr. about limited testing for coronavirus and what DFTA is going to do if the virus begins to enter senior centers.

“Our Department of Health and our commissioner of health has been having tabletop meetings on a daily basis with the mayor around this same issue,” Cortés-Vázquez said. “We have the utmost confidence that this administration and this health commissioner made all the provisions necessary if it were to reach that level. It has not reached that level and we do not want to cause chaos or alarm in our senior centers or in the population as a whole.”

Council Member Chin brought the mayor's plan to have city workers visit senior centers to the attention of Cortés-Vázquez, who then provided further information on the plan.

“We have been given incredible amounts of guidance and information,” Cortés-Vázquez said. “The mayor wanted to ensure the information was being implemented, so we have an emergency plan that we have devised that involves DFTA staff as well as additional staff to visit the congregate sites throughout the city precisely to ensure they are posting the information, that the information is being distributed to the consumer population and the population staff is responsible for; to ensure that the professionals have the guidance to know what to do should any incident occur and also to inform the staff, the non-medical staff, know what the protocols are. It’s a widespread effort to ensure everyone is taking the proper precautions and using the guidance that has been distributed to them.”

Cortés-Vázquez said the effort will reach over 600 senior centers, including those not funded by DFTA.

“To ensure that older New Yorkers are staying informed about coronavirus, starting today, DFTA staff will be visiting over 600 congregate sites to check that Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) COVID-19 informational fliers are on display and share DOHMH resources,” said Suzanne Myklebust, Deputy Director of Public Affairs for DFTA, in a Friday email to Gotham Gazette just after the hearing, answering follow-up questions.

“DFTA is working closely with its partners to distribute information and guidance on coronavirus. As a preventative measure against the spread of COVID-19, we have asked providers to continue to follow standard cleaning protocols and be extra diligent in their disinfecting practices,” Myklebust said.

Council Member Mark Treyger, a Brooklyn Democrat, also inquired about DFTA’s preparedness for the spread of coronavirus, citing the example of the city Department of Education asking for additional funding to provide the resources to deep clean the city’s schools and to contract with more nurses so that every school building has at least one nurse.

“My concern is that if we don’t have a health care professional at the front end and proactively helping the population, the worst thing that can happen is that seniors end up in emergency rooms and hospitals which are very dangerous because of the spread of other very serious diseases and can really compromise their health. I think it is wise for us to proactively provide health care professionals,” Treyger said.

Cortés-Vázquez responded that providers have enough resources and to the best of her knowledge no senior service providers have asked for additional funding. She also emphasized that this is an ongoing conversation in conjunction with the Department of Health and the Mayor’s Office, and that maintenance and sanitary conditions are always a priority given that senior centers provide meals, so it is not a new area of concern.

DFTA congregate sites also have a procedure if seniors begin to show symptoms or are found to have the virus.

“If a senior center member displays symptoms of sickness while at that center, senior center staff has been instructed to immediately restrict the movement of that person within the facility, by isolating the suspected case and minimizing interaction with staff and other members, and from leaving the facility,” Myklebust said by email. “The senior center staff should then call 311 to contact the nearest healthcare provider who can provide additional guidance. If an individual is found to be confirmed for COVID-19 infection, the individual should follow the recommendations of healthcare professionals and refrain from visiting any congregate sites altogether.”

Some emergency action was triggered when it was learned that a health care worker who has tested positive for coronavirus had been in contact with residents of a nursing home in southern Brooklyn.

Brooklyn City Council Member Justin Brannan tweeted on Sunday an update that the healthcare worker, who lives in New Jersey but works at King David Nursing Home, had come into contact with eight residents of the home, but that none of them were showing as symptomatic of COVID-19. Each family has also been notified, Brannan said.

At Mayor de Blasio’s press conference on Sunday, he was asked about the King David Nursing Home case, and Commissioner Barbot responded that each of the individuals who were exposed “are all in private rooms and being monitored daily. So they're in the appropriate level of isolation.” De Blasio also added that all were asymptomatic.

Also Discussed at the Hearing
Other topics that were brought up during the budget hearing with DFTA representatives included increased funding for the home delivered meals program, and what DFTA is going to do about the growing waitlist for homecare and case management.

The Council committee report in response to DFTA’s preliminary budget highlighted that there has been “persistent over-serving against the home-delivered meals target,” which presents higher demand than has been accounted for. Council members raised concerns about this in addition to rising food costs, advocating for higher funding for home delivered meals to preemptively address the concern so they can meet demand.

Cortés-Vázquez said of the home delivered meals that they will consider budgetary changes to address rising food prices, and said that saying there’s a waitlist for home delivered meals is misleading.

“We triage it and those with the greatest needs get priority. Everyone gets a phone assessment so we can assess. If someone needs a meal, that meal gets turned on immediately. So it is not a waitlist in a traditional way you think of a waitlist. Is it a problem, is the need growing? Absolutely. But it is not a problem that is not being managed,” Cortés-Vázquez said.  

Cortés-Vázquez emphasized multiple times during the hearing that combating social isolation and geriatric mental health, and confronting ageism as a whole are also priorities for DFTA.

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by Katie Kirker, Gotham Gazette

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NYPD Watchdog Set for Personnel Boost as Voter-Approved Mandate Begins


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NYPD officers (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)


The Civilian Complaint Review Board will be increasing its capacity to investigate police misconduct thanks to a City Charter amendment approved by voters last fall, agency officials explained on Wednesday.

At one in a series of City Council hearings on Mayor Bill de Blasio’s $95.3 billion preliminary budget, CCRB Chair Fred Davie and Executive Director Jonathan Darche said the city plans to add 17 additional staff members to the currently 206-person agency to meet a new formulaic mandate now written into the city’s central governing document. The new positions, which are yet to be determined, will be essential for the agency as it tackles an increasing docket of cases -- a result, the officials said, of its outreach efforts, the agency's prosecution of Daniel Pantaleo, which boosted its public profile, and a growing backlog of body camera footage requests.

The additional staff in the upcoming city budget, which is due by the July 1 start of next fiscal year upon agreement by the Mayor and City Council, will be on top of 24 new personnel already secured by the CCRB during budget negotiations last year.

"I think [the increased headcount] has been vital...to letting us stay as effective as we have been," Darche said, answering questions from members of the Council's committee on public safety. "Body-worn camera footage has really almost swept through the agency in the investigative process, which has caused our dockets to increase and case investigation times to increase, and without those new staff we would have suffered even worse."

The charter amendment, which takes effect for the upcoming 2021 fiscal year, links the police watchdog's headcount to the number of uniform police officers at a ratio of .65 percent. The police department has 36,201 uniform members in the preliminary budget.

The amendment was part of a package of proposals placed on the ballot by the 2019 Charter Revision Commission to reform a number of areas of city governance, including changes to the CCRB's jurisdiction and operations. CCRB officials have said the measure gives the agency a baseline in budget negotiations, which have historically been characterized by uncertainty.

"You have to negotiate the details of your budget every year, and those fluctuate up and down in some significant ways for the agency," Davie told Gotham Gazette in October, before the ballot proposals were approved by voters. "Knowing that [the headcount] is tied to a percentage of a portion of the NYPD’s budget means that you can sort of baseline what you’ll have and then you can negotiate around that baseline."

The CCRB is a police oversight agency tasked with investigating and, in serious cases, prosecuting certain kinds of alleged officer misconduct. The Charter gives it jurisdiction to pursue so-called "FADO" complaints: allegations of excessive force, abuse of authority, discourtesy, or offensive language. Other types of misconduct get referred to the NYPD's internal affairs bureau.

In fiscal year 2020 (July 2019 through June 2020), the CCRB had a $19.6 million budget. The mayor's new preliminary budget, increases the agency's bottom line by $1.1 million, or 6 percent, to $20.4 million, including the 17 additional staff.

The CCRB can only open a case if it receives a complaint from the public. More than half of the agency's staff are in its investigations unit, which is responsible for receiving complaints, collecting evidence, and substantiating claims. It also liaises with the police department, an increasingly central task as the CCRB has come to rely on evidence from body camera footage, which is controlled by the NYPD.

In fiscal year 2019, there were 5,236 complaints made against uniform police officers, a 20 percent increase over the previous fiscal year, according to the Mayor's Management Report. The report shows the average length of time to complete an investigation rose from 190 days in fiscal year 2018 to 249 days in fiscal 2019.

With the proliferation of police body cameras and the resulting footage, the CCRB has been able to substantiate complaints at a significantly higher rate. But as the agency has come to rely more on body cameras, it has also faced increasing delays in receiving requested video from the NYPD. A new memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the CCRB and NYPD is intended to speed up the evidence sharing process by giving CCRB staff more direct access to video early on and setting timetables for the NYPD.

At the same time that body cameras are transforming the CCRB's abilities, the voter-approved Charter amendments also expand its jurisdiction, which promises to further increase the caseload. The CCRB now has the authority to investigate and recommend discipline for false statements made by police officers during the course of its investigations (when they are the subject the investigation), a form of misconduct that previously would be referred to the police department to be handled internally.

Police unions and their allies strongly opposed the ballot measure containing the CCRB amendments, while police reform advocates supported it. It passed with roughly 75 percent of voters in favor in a low turnout, off-year election with few races on the ballot.

The new powers won't require additional staff training, according to Darche, but agency officials sought new personnel to handle the additional cases. "The CCRB has been studying false official statements and then referring them to the department for them to determine whether misconduct occurred for many years now, and our investigators are trained to make those determinations," he said.

Even with the Charter-mandated personnel ratio, the number of new staff is still up for negotiation as the city's budget season unfolds.

The 17 it looks like the CCRB is due for next fiscal year is based on a calculus by the Mayor's Office of Management and Budget, which includes consideration of the number of per diem employees that the agency doesn’t include in its official headcount.

"We're still in negotiation with them. I'm hopeful that maybe we can get one or two more bodies out of them," he said, on top of the projected 17.

The agency is still determining what the new positions will be. "Clearly we need more investigators to meet the increased demands of caseload on the staff that we have to investigate the cases we have," Darche said. As of February, the CCRB had 131 investigators, roughly two-thirds of its full-time staff.

"We've already taken steps with our training staff and with the investigations division to make sure that when those positions become available we're ready to bring them on board," Darche said.

"Do you still believe you need more staffing," asked Council Member Donovan Richards, a Queens Democrat and chair of the committee on public safety.

"Always," Davie replied.

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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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