Gotham Gazette

The Place for New York Policy and politics

Opinion

Opinion

Capital Project Delays are Stifling Growth and Hurting Communities


de Blasio ribbon cutting park

Mayor de Blasio, Parks Commissioner Silver & others (photo: Demetrius Freeman/Mayor's Office)


If you’ve ever wondered about the conversations that take place in the well-appointed inner sanctum of the City Council’s member lounge, you may be deeply disappointed to find the truth. Seldom are the chats like those you’d see on House of Cards; nor is the room even smoke-filled these days. We’ve banned that. The most common thing you’re likely to overhear is this: “Why does it take a decade to build a dang playground in my district?”

As the city grows, New York’s ability to effectively and efficiently deliver public capital projects is diminishing. This is no secret. Efforts to improve the system are not bearing fruit; all the while excuses for the delays, cost overruns, and errors become more commonplace.

New York City needs a drastic overhaul of the management of its capital program. The new approach should include the formation of a new construction authority, the ability to award design-build contracts, the appointment of a construction czar with a proven track record, the re-calibration of contracts to reflect a shorter timeline, and the reexamination of the existing and often duplicative approval processes through multiple agencies.

Speak to any City Council member. They can point to examples within their district that highlight the problem. In mine, on Staten Island, we’ve been waiting since 2011 for a glorified gazebo at Conference House Park, and since 2009 for a plaza and pathways at Crescent Beach. At Bloomingdale Park, our Borough President waited so long for a simple stretch of sidewalk delayed by the Parks Department’s own tree regulations that he re-allocated the money to the State Department of Transportation, which is performing the work in a quarter of the time at half the cost.

The Parks Department may be first up in the Council’s crosshairs as it was the subject of an April Parks Committee grilling on this topic, and there has already been the rumblings of legislation to form a Parks Capital Authority. Yet, the agency is far from alone.

The Department of Design and Construction, which was originally launched in 1996 to be the solution to these types of problems, is now part of it. I half joke and half cringe when reminding my constituents that both a DDC-managed little league field and the replacement of the Goethals Bridge were approved and funded around the same time, but there will be cars driving to Jersey before any fly balls are shagged in Tottenville.

Mayor de Blasio did not cause this current problem, but since it now falls in his lap, he should look to form an independent authority as one way to combat its growth. I have heard him publicly and privately praise the work done by the School Construction Authority and the efficiency at which it operates. Respectfully, Mr. Mayor, please take this as a not-so subtle hint, as I trust it may be something you’ve already pondered.

The difference in cost and pace between the SCA and mayoral agencies is enough to drive many City Council members to scrap funding for those like Parks in favor of the SCA. For example, I’ve received rough estimates for a new playground at over $1 million and three years on the Parks side of a jointly-operated schoolyard, while a similar project on the other side of the invisible line controlled by SCA is half the cost and time. As a result, we’re getting several new SCA playgrounds this year on Staten Island.

However, to blame the agencies without acknowledging that some of the delays stem from the design and procurement rules they must follow would be disingenuous. Appointing a Capital Construction “Czar” would allow an overarching review of these policies, primarily to see if they are causing unnecessary delays without meeting their own goals.

A good place to start would be where agencies like the Parks Department often place the blame themselves: right at the doorstep of the Public Design Commission. In the age of data-driven results, it is unclear what the PDC points to as a quantifiable success. To many in city government, it is simply a mysterious all-delaying entity that occupies secluded office space in the rafters of City Hall’s cupola, like a project-killing Quasimodo. All Council members have at least one anecdote about construction being delayed by the PDC. But much like the Hunchback, there’s a belief that it, too, may be a fictitious tale, and one which the Parks Department conveniently uses to account for any postponement.

A new authority led by a czar could reevaluate the usefulness of obstructionist procedural check-offs like the PDC and seek innovative ways to streamline the flow of capital projects. We need a top to bottom review of internal timetables we set, and the contract deadlines we impose. Much of this has already been attempted in earnest by Parks Commissioner Mitchell Silver. He should be commended, as there does seem to be a new focus by the agency on capital efficiency. Still, many of the factors are outside of his agency’s control and thus his reach extends only so far.

This new authority could also look at other municipalities for innovative ideas. Both Chicago and Los Angeles have significant capital programs, which go through similar procedural hurdles during design and contract procurement. However, both cities also split work between separate jurisdictions at the county and city level. Perhaps empowering borough presidents to shepherd and procure capital programs at our own county level could work in our favor.

Additionally, both cities have more liberal design-build laws. This is a policy that is already supported by Mayor de Blasio, who has tried to lobby the state to grant the city this power. For a Governor who is eager to criticize city government, it is unclear why Andrew Cuomo supports a potentially productive expansion of design-build elsewhere in the state, but not New York City.

These are just two ways New York could employ new ideas from elsewhere; but, if we do begin comparing our city to others, we may not be entirely happy with the blunt results. Skim the budget documents of Chicago, Cook County, Los Angeles, and Los Angeles County, and you’ll notice that all of their combined capital dollars are a fraction of what New York City plans to use, especially as our new ten-year capital plan now tops $95 billion.

The fact that New York spends a lot of money is nothing new. Our city budget is roughly the size of Poland’s budget, and the NYPD alone spends more than Mongolia. But when it comes to servicing our capital debt, New Yorkers have a right to raise new questions.

Debt service obligations are predicted to rise by 33% to $8.4 billion by 2021, and the percentage of tax revenue budgeted for it will trickle up to almost 15% in the same period.

Much of this growth is due to expanding interest payments on our ambitious capital program, which with a typical municipal general obligation bond we may be paying interest on for 20 years. It’s easy to accept this cost for a bridge when it’s constructed and the commuters are using it. It’s much harder for the public to digest the fact that we are paying interest on the bonds used to finance a playground or building while it’s delayed by our own morass.

The new statistic the administration should focus on and include in future capital plan slideshows is the amount of debt we are paying on projects that only exist as piles of paper aging on bureaucrats’ desks. Hopefully, by tracking that we can put even more pressure on City Hall to reform the way capital projects are worked through the system.

***
Joseph Borelli is a New York City Council member for the 51st District on Staten Island, a former state legislator, an adjunct professor at CUNY College of Staten Island, and a Lindsay Fellow at the CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance. On Twitter @JoeBorelliNYC. (The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of CUNY ISLG or any other affiliated entity.)

***
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.

Calling Trump’s Big Lie What It Is


nypd via nypdrecruit

(photo: @NYPDRecruit)


Upping the immigration deportation ante, a San Francisco federal judge found “irreparable harm” and ordered a national preliminary injunction blocking President Donald Trump’s threat of cutting off law enforcement funds to “sanctuary cities” that defiantly refused to comply with his deportation policy.

Under the proposed Trump policy, cities would lose funding if undocumented and even legal immigrants are not reported to federal authorities for deportation after being charged with low-level criminal offenses, such as disorderly conduct, possessing small amounts of marijuana, or a variety of non-violent, “broken windows” offenses.

Although federal law mandates deportation of noncitizens convicted of serious crimes, Trump’s executive order promulgates a simplistic view of “let’s kick them out” because all undocumented immigrants, non-citizen Muslims, or anyone overstaying a visa, “present a significant threat to national security and public safety and the presence of such individuals in the United States...are contrary to the national interest...[causing] immeasurable harm to the American people and to the very fabric of our Republic.”

This Trumpian misinterpretation of constitutional law is a giant step backward reshaping the country’s immigration policy by diminishing civil liberties, due process, and constitutional protections, which for more than 100 years were guaranteed by our federal courts even to those who are illegally in the U.S.

But threats have been elevated to the big lie.

Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, in an over-the-top and uninformed response to the court’s decision to block defunding, shouted that it was an “egregious overreach by a single, unelected district judge.”

Spicer should read the Constitution -- federal judges are appointed pursuant to Article 3, by the President -- as should Trump.

He accused “sanctuary cities” such as New York of "putting the well-being of criminal aliens before the safety of our citizens" and says city officials who authored policies protecting people living in the country illegally "have the blood of dead Americans on their hands...a gift to the criminal gang and cartel element in our country" that puts "thousands of innocent lives at risk."

This is the big lie, but Spicer is not the only Trump perpetrator.

On April 21, Attorney General Jeff Sessions declared in an official DOJ memo that New York City “soft on crime” and it “continues to see gang murder after gang murder,” blaming the city for failing to turn over to federal immigration authorities for deportation a gang member who was released from Rikers Island after a conviction of a non-serious misdemeanor.

The truth is New York City is a national success story of driving crime down over the past 20-plus years – especially violent crime. The president, a New Yorker, knows this. However, accepting this fact means superseding political grandstanding, and acknowledging that New York’s fight against violent and especially gang crimes have occurred with great success and has continued during Trump’s first 100 days.

Since Trump’s inauguration, the NYPD and the city’s District Attorneys have prosecuted gangs and others violent criminals, refuting Session’s big “soft on crime” lie. (Sessions did walk back some of his criticisms after major blowback from NYPD Commissioner Jimmy O’Neill and others.)

March 9, the Queens D.A. and NYPD arrested six members of the ABK street gang for plotting to kill two rival gang members and 11 individuals affiliated with the ABK for selling drugs in Queens neighborhoods.

March 15, the Bronx D.A., NYPD, and federal law enforcement officials charged 49 members of two Bronx drug distribution organizations with narcotics, robbery, firearms offenses and murder.

March 22, the Manhattan D.A. and NYPD charged six men, ages 19-22, as part of a firearm ring for trafficking 105 guns from South Carolina into New York City.

March 28, the Staten Island D.A. and NYPD announced the “takedown” of a heroin distribution ring that operated on the South Shore of Staten Island.

April 18, the Brooklyn D.A. announced four gang members were sentenced to 25 years to life for robbery and murder.

Although the federal courts sent a clear message to Trump that airport detentions, religious profiling, and now defunding threats are unconstitutional, this president does not accept that our nation’s history of protecting individual freedoms no matter one’s race or religion – or how one entered the United States – that our country was not founded on threats, unlawful, odious executive orders, or the big lie.

***
Arnold N. Kriss is a Manhattan attorney who formerly served as a Brooklyn Assistant District Attorney and Deputy Commissioner of Trials in the New York Police Department.

***
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.

A New Approach to Police Body Cameras


tucker body cam

NYPD's Ben Tucker with a body camera (photo: @NYPDnews)


After many months of waiting, the New York City Police Department recently announced its proposed rules for the use of body worn cameras. The NYPD developed the policy in response to a mandate by the federal court in the  Floyd v. City of New York “stop and frisk” case. To their credit, the NYPD, with the help of the Policing Project at NYU Law School, undertook an extensive public comment process to solicit input from experts, interest groups, members of the public, and police officers. Twenty thousand members of the public and 5,000 police officers sent in survey responses.

Unfortunately, many of the suggestions that emerged during that process were not included in the final NYPD policy, leading the lawyers in the Floyd case to pledge that they would move to block approval of the new rules by the court.

The main objections are that officers would have access to footage before making statements about what happened in an incident, the lack of privacy protections for those captured on video, and too much officer discretion as to when the cameras should be turned on. In addition, unions representing police sergeants, detectives, and lieutenants have threatened to fight the new rules in court because they were not consulted about their new roles in overseeing the process. Only patrol officers will wear the cameras.

Perhaps it’s time then to hit the reset button on our approach to this new technology. Body cameras produce a profound tension between our desire to enhance officer accountability and our concerns about the growing surveillance powers of the police.

The killings by police of Michael Brown and Eric Garner ushered in a wave of popular support for body worn cameras as a singular tool for improving police accountability. The hope is that the existence of video evidence will act as a deterrent to police misconduct and allow for easier prosecution of officers who abuse their authority. Expanded use of such cameras was a central recommendation of President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing and has been embraced by police accountability activists and civil rights organizations across the U.S.

Despite this strong support, there remain significant privacy concerns. In New York City alone there will soon be over 20,000 officers on patrol with cameras. These cameras will likely record millions of mundane interactions with the public as well as capture the activities of people merely going about their daily lives. Some of these people may be engaged in lawful activities that they would prefer their neighbors, employers, or the government were not aware of, such as visiting an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, attending a political event, or entering an adult book store.

In addition, extensive use of the cameras could contribute to an expansion of police surveillance capacity. By geocoding camera data, new databases could be established that allow police to review all footage from a designated area before or after a crime, potentially subjecting thousands of people to unwarranted intrusions into their lives merely because of where they live or work. Law professor Elizabeth Joh refers to this as an increase in “surveillance discretion” in which police have dramatically more potential reasons for looking into someone’s personal life based on suspicion rather than concrete evidence of wrongdoing.

Such “big data” endeavors turn innocent behavior into suspicious behavior because of correlations on a grand scale that may have absolutely no relevance to a specific individual now brought under investigation. For example, if there is a belief or evidence that drug dealers are more likely to frequent a particular park or corner and I happen to also regularly walk that way while going to work, then I can easily end up under suspicion.

Police would also be in a position to populate gang databases and political dossiers using camera footage in high crime areas or at political demonstrations. This effort could be aided by emerging facial recognition software. There is a long history of police misusing such databases. Gang databases are notoriously easy to end up in and near impossible to get out of. They have been used to target people for gang injunctions resulting in enhanced penalties. There have even been cases where they have been shared with current or prospective employers. There is a long history of local police maintaining political intelligence files with the names and images of individuals engaged in totally lawful political activity. These databases have also been shared with employers and resulted in politically motivated harassment.  

Camera footage of people walking down a particular street or lawfully interacting with friends or neighbors could also be used to populate databases of people considered at high risk for committing violence. Several major cities including Chicago and New York use these databases to produce “heat lists,” based on complex algorithms of potential risk factors such as prior arrests or involvement with child welfare systems. Being on such a list can trigger intensive surveillance or enhanced prosecutions.

Raw footage and databases that rely on the footage could also be shared with other law enforcement agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Drug Enforcement Agency, or the FBI. These agencies then might feed this data into their own algorithms triggering yet more surveillance, suspicion, and investigations based entirely on probabilities rather than individualized probable cause or reasonable suspicion.  

So what is to be done?

One way to reduce concerns about this enhanced police surveillance would be to take control of the footage away from police and hand it over to an independent civilian agency. From the moment officers download the data it would be under the control of such an agency and could not be reviewed, released, or altered by the police without probable cause.

If police feel there is something relevant to a legitimate investigation they can request a warrant to access it. Since the officer was present at filming, meeting the standard of probable cause should be easy in cases where criminal behavior is alleged. Similarly, police misconduct oversight bodies would need to have a sworn complaint in hand before they could review footage.

Following the guidance of the ACLU and the Constitution Project, there should also be tight restrictions on public access to the video. Footage should only be made available to the public with the consent of those seen in the video (or family members of someone deceased) or if there are no privacy issues at stake, which might be accomplished with extensive redaction. Individuals who are the subject of police action captured by body cameras should have the right to review it.

These tight privacy controls would help reassure the public that their non-criminal interactions with police will not be reviewed by police or the public. This is especially important for people who are victims of or witnesses to a crime or who may want to informally or anonymously provide police with information (these groups are not supposed to be recorded by the NYPD under the new rules).

Such a policy would also help overcome the legitimate concern of police officers that cameras should not be used to monitor them for administrative violations or be used for vendettas by supervisors. By taking control of the footage away from police, the chances of such personally or politically motivated reviews would be greatly diminished.

Placing the footage under the control of an independent agency would also ensure that defense attorneys and prosecutors have equal access to it. Currently, district attorneys are at an advantage as they receive evidence directly from the police and make their own determinations about whether something is relevant to the case and if so, when to give it to defense counsel. According to representatives of the public defender services here in New York, such evidence often only materializes the day before or the day of a trial, forcing many to take plea deals or be unprepared for trial.  

We must keep in mind that the primary basis for public support of body cameras is the need for increased police accountability. In the words of Michael Sisitzky of the New York Civil Liberties Union, “Public support for body cameras will not last if the technology becomes just another gadget to help police and prosecutors, instead of a tool for meaningful reform of police practices.”

***
Alex S. Vitale is Associate Professor of Sociology and Coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College. He is the author of City of Disorder: How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics and the forthcoming The End of Policing.

***
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.



Print Friendly and PDF

Editor's Choice


Gotham Gazette: New York Voters Approve $4.2 Billion Environmental Bond Act
New York Voters Approve $4.2 Billion Environmental Bond Act
Gotham Gazette: 
New York City Voters Approve Racial Justice Ballot Measures
New York City Voters Approve Racial Justice Ballot Measures
Gotham Gazette: 
Housing Development in New York City Slows to a Crawl as Officials Debate Tax Incentives
Housing Development in New York City Slows to a Crawl as Officials Debate Tax Incentives
Gotham Gazette: 
City Council Examines Low Voter Turnout, Moving Local Elections to Even Years City Council Examines Low Voter Turnout, Moving Local Elections to Even Years