CITY Gotham Gazette is an online publication covering New York policy and politics as well as news on public safety, transportation, education, finance and more. https://www.gothamgazette.com/city 2023-05-29T02:59:27+00:00 Webmaster [email protected] Joomla! - Open Source Content Management Digital Literacy Programming for Older New Yorkers to be Required Under Bill Passed by City Council 2023-05-25T04:00:00+00:00 2023-05-25T04:00:00+00:00 https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/12021-council-digital-literacy-older-new-yorkers Samar Khurshid [email protected] <p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/1-council-to-pass-digital-literacy.jpg" width="600" /></p> <p>Seniors ready to learn (photo: John McCarten/City Council)</p> <hr /> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">When the COVID-19 pandemic struck and forced a lockdown of physical access to many government agencies and services, it highlighted New York City’s stark digital divide. Some of the city’s most vulnerable people lacked access to high-speed internet connection or the knowledge and training to use them. Now, a City Council bill expected to pass on Thursday aims to address that gap for the city’s rapidly growing older adult population. </span></p> <p><a href="https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=5839374&amp;GUID=2A7DA356-7191-4F82-BC95-1C7166D12C7E&amp;Options=&amp;Search=" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Intro. 665</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, sponsored by Council Member Jennifer Gutiérrez, a Brooklyn Democrat who chairs the Council’s Committee on Technology, will require the Department for the Aging (DFTA) and the city’s Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI) to create an online digital literacy program for older adults aged 65 and above, who make up just over 15% of the city’s population. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The program would address issues such as accessing and navigating city telehealth services; navigating online platforms and websites, including social media, that provide lessons in technology; navigating the city’s websites and mobile applications that offer access to city benefits and older adult services; and training in spotting online scams, among other topics. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Under the bill, the program would be provided in person or through live interactive video instruction in at least one library or senior center in each of the city’s 59 community districts. It would be evaluated and updated every three years and offered in the city’s most prevalent languages</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“Access to technology played a pivotal role during the pandemic, whether it was ensuring people could receive vital social services, or enabling families to stay connected,” Gutiérrez said in a statement. “It is not enough to simply hook someone up to the internet and consider our work done - true access means providing people with the necessary devices and empowering them with digital literacy to safely harness the full potential of this connection to the world.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In 2020, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio launched an Internet Master Plan that aimed to tackle the digital divide by building out municipal broadband infrastructure across the city with a $157 million investment of capital funds. But Mayor Eric Adams quietly abandoned that plan, as </span><a href="https://gothamist.com/news/nyc-kills-internet-master-plan-for-universal-public-web-access" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Gothamist first reported</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, even as he evangelized about using technology to improve city government, consolidated the city’s various technology agencies into the new OTI, and launched a website that is meant to centralize access to city benefits and services. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Adams has, however, taken other steps on digital access including by launching Big Apple Connect in September 2022, a program where the city partners with private internet providers to give public housing residents free high-speed internet access and cable. In December, the administration also collaborated with DFTA to launch the Queens Gigabit Center at the Allen Senior Center, where older adults get access to digital literacy trainings. The Brooklyn Gigabit Center which launched in March at Digital Girl also provides similar programs.  </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">At a January 12 City Council hearing on the older-adult digital literacy bill, OTI officials also testified that they are also already overseeing the Connected Communities initiative that provides digital literacy programs and free internet access through other city agencies and public institutions at 100 sites across the city. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“With respect to the older adult population, OTI recognizes that older adults need particular support to engage with the benefits of digital life,” said Brett Sikoff, OTI’s executive director of Franchise Administration, at the hearing. “We believe that digital literacy programming, when paired with devices and access, combat social isolation and mobility barriers, provide basic skills for staying safe online, and helps maintain civic engagement.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">However, he said that Gutiérrez’s bill would require OTI “to more directly administer digital literacy training for seniors in a singular program with broadly defined parameters.” Instead, he said OTI’s “best function is to leverage digital literacy practitioners and expertise, rather than either staff these programs with in-house personnel, or set limitations on the curriculum practiced by the City’s partners. We worry this bill could inadvertently compromise the incredible work already underway.” </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The bill has since been revised and requires DFTA to administer the program in collaboration with OTI, rather than OTI taking the lead. “We wholeheartedly support digital literacy – particularly for older adults – and are committed to continuing to collaborate with our partners at NYC Aging to ensure older New Yorkers are able to fully participate in our modern society,” OTI spokesperson Ray Legendre said in a Wednesday statement.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">DFTA welcomed passage of the bill. “The pandemic underscored the importance of technology for older adults to stay socially connected and receive the services they needed to stay in touch with family and friends, and service providers,” said DFTA Commissioner Lorraine Cortés-Vázquez, in a statement to Gotham Gazette.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">She noted that the administration has taken measures to spread awareness of the federal Affordable Connectivity Program, which helps reduce broadband costs, and that DFTA’s older adult centers provide digital literacy classes and training to its members. “This bill will formalize and expand these efforts, and the Department for the Aging looks forward to working with our colleagues in government and community partners to ensure we are giving even more older New Yorkers the skills they need to age in place,” she said. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The bill is set to pass the Council's technology committee then the full Council on Thursday. It would then be up to the mayor to sign it into law or veto it.</span></p> <p>

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

Read more by this writer.

</p>
<p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/1-council-to-pass-digital-literacy.jpg" width="600" /></p> <p>Seniors ready to learn (photo: John McCarten/City Council)</p> <hr /> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">When the COVID-19 pandemic struck and forced a lockdown of physical access to many government agencies and services, it highlighted New York City’s stark digital divide. Some of the city’s most vulnerable people lacked access to high-speed internet connection or the knowledge and training to use them. Now, a City Council bill expected to pass on Thursday aims to address that gap for the city’s rapidly growing older adult population. </span></p> <p><a href="https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=5839374&amp;GUID=2A7DA356-7191-4F82-BC95-1C7166D12C7E&amp;Options=&amp;Search=" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Intro. 665</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, sponsored by Council Member Jennifer Gutiérrez, a Brooklyn Democrat who chairs the Council’s Committee on Technology, will require the Department for the Aging (DFTA) and the city’s Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI) to create an online digital literacy program for older adults aged 65 and above, who make up just over 15% of the city’s population. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The program would address issues such as accessing and navigating city telehealth services; navigating online platforms and websites, including social media, that provide lessons in technology; navigating the city’s websites and mobile applications that offer access to city benefits and older adult services; and training in spotting online scams, among other topics. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Under the bill, the program would be provided in person or through live interactive video instruction in at least one library or senior center in each of the city’s 59 community districts. It would be evaluated and updated every three years and offered in the city’s most prevalent languages</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“Access to technology played a pivotal role during the pandemic, whether it was ensuring people could receive vital social services, or enabling families to stay connected,” Gutiérrez said in a statement. “It is not enough to simply hook someone up to the internet and consider our work done - true access means providing people with the necessary devices and empowering them with digital literacy to safely harness the full potential of this connection to the world.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In 2020, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio launched an Internet Master Plan that aimed to tackle the digital divide by building out municipal broadband infrastructure across the city with a $157 million investment of capital funds. But Mayor Eric Adams quietly abandoned that plan, as </span><a href="https://gothamist.com/news/nyc-kills-internet-master-plan-for-universal-public-web-access" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Gothamist first reported</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, even as he evangelized about using technology to improve city government, consolidated the city’s various technology agencies into the new OTI, and launched a website that is meant to centralize access to city benefits and services. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Adams has, however, taken other steps on digital access including by launching Big Apple Connect in September 2022, a program where the city partners with private internet providers to give public housing residents free high-speed internet access and cable. In December, the administration also collaborated with DFTA to launch the Queens Gigabit Center at the Allen Senior Center, where older adults get access to digital literacy trainings. The Brooklyn Gigabit Center which launched in March at Digital Girl also provides similar programs.  </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">At a January 12 City Council hearing on the older-adult digital literacy bill, OTI officials also testified that they are also already overseeing the Connected Communities initiative that provides digital literacy programs and free internet access through other city agencies and public institutions at 100 sites across the city. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“With respect to the older adult population, OTI recognizes that older adults need particular support to engage with the benefits of digital life,” said Brett Sikoff, OTI’s executive director of Franchise Administration, at the hearing. “We believe that digital literacy programming, when paired with devices and access, combat social isolation and mobility barriers, provide basic skills for staying safe online, and helps maintain civic engagement.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">However, he said that Gutiérrez’s bill would require OTI “to more directly administer digital literacy training for seniors in a singular program with broadly defined parameters.” Instead, he said OTI’s “best function is to leverage digital literacy practitioners and expertise, rather than either staff these programs with in-house personnel, or set limitations on the curriculum practiced by the City’s partners. We worry this bill could inadvertently compromise the incredible work already underway.” </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The bill has since been revised and requires DFTA to administer the program in collaboration with OTI, rather than OTI taking the lead. “We wholeheartedly support digital literacy – particularly for older adults – and are committed to continuing to collaborate with our partners at NYC Aging to ensure older New Yorkers are able to fully participate in our modern society,” OTI spokesperson Ray Legendre said in a Wednesday statement.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">DFTA welcomed passage of the bill. “The pandemic underscored the importance of technology for older adults to stay socially connected and receive the services they needed to stay in touch with family and friends, and service providers,” said DFTA Commissioner Lorraine Cortés-Vázquez, in a statement to Gotham Gazette.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">She noted that the administration has taken measures to spread awareness of the federal Affordable Connectivity Program, which helps reduce broadband costs, and that DFTA’s older adult centers provide digital literacy classes and training to its members. “This bill will formalize and expand these efforts, and the Department for the Aging looks forward to working with our colleagues in government and community partners to ensure we are giving even more older New Yorkers the skills they need to age in place,” she said. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The bill is set to pass the Council's technology committee then the full Council on Thursday. It would then be up to the mayor to sign it into law or veto it.</span></p> <p>

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

Read more by this writer.

</p>
Council Passes Bill Pushing Summer Youth Employment Program Across City Agencies 2023-05-25T04:00:00+00:00 2023-05-25T04:00:00+00:00 https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/12022-city-council-summer-youth-employment-program-agencies Ethan Geringer-Sameth [email protected] <p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/2-pass-bill-mandating.jpg" width="600" /></p> <p>Summer Youth Employment Program celebration (photo: John McCarten/NYC Council Media Unit)</p> <hr /> <p>New York City’s Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP) could be seeing a boost despite proposed budget cuts, thanks to legislation in the City Council that could lead to greater participation from city agencies.</p> <p>The Council is expected to pass a bill Thursday that would set a goal for each city agency to offer youth job slots as part of the landmark program, which connects tens of thousands of students with paid job opportunities in and out of city government during the summer months when school is out.</p> <p>The legislation would require each agency to offer a number of slots equal to .5% of its full-time staff. It is unclear exactly what that would mean for the overall number of SYEP slots in city agencies as many agencies already reach that threshold each year.</p> <p>"This collective effort maximizes the available resources and enables a wider range of job opportunities for SYEP participants, ensuring that the program meets the diverse needs and interests of young people while fostering workforce development city-wide," said Council Member Althea Stevens, a Bronx Democrat, the Council's youth services chair, and the bill's prime sponsor, in a statement to Gotham Gazette.</p> <p>The bill would also require annual reporting on the number of youth served in the public and private sectors, and a breakdown of city agency participation. Agencies that fail to meet the .5% goal would have to report why they failed to the mayor and City Council. The legislation would take effect 120 days after it becomes law, meaning the new thresholds likely wouldn't be in place until next summer at the earliest.</p> <p>SYEP had a record high 100,000 slots last year, of which 8,600, or close to 9%, were at 82 city agencies and offices, and 29 City Council offices, according to the Department of Youth and Community Development (DYCD), which administers the program.</p> <p>When asked to respond to the bill and its likely passage this week, DYCD Commissioner Keith Howard touted SYEP's coordination with city agencies and the City Council but did not take a firm Adams administration position on the legislation.</p> <p>“A record 100,000 SYEP opportunities will return this summer, including thousands of young people placed in city agencies and mayoral offices," said Howard, an appointee of Mayor Eric Adams, in a statement. "One example of the great success we have had with cross-agency partnerships was NYPD opening their doors to more than 800 SYEP internships in law enforcement last year, and this summer that number will grow to more than a thousand."</p> <p>"We thank the City Council for supporting SYEP, and for once again encouraging its members to become worksites and exposing young people to the world of politics and civic engagement,” Howard added.</p> <p>Mayor Adams' proposed spending plan for the 2024 fiscal year, which begins July 1, budgets for 302,000 full-time positions across city government; .5% of that total is only about 1,500, far lower than the 8,600 SYEP participants placed in city agencies in 2022. If the bill becomes law, some agencies will likely have to increase their number of SYEP offerings but the overall number of positions is unlikely to change. It would still set a new benchmark, a suggested floor for each agency, along with the accountability mechanism of the reporting requirements.</p> <p>The mayor’s executive budget includes $209.6 million for SYEP, a proposed spending cut of $18.7 million from this fiscal year's adopted budget. The spending reduction is the result of $11 million less allocated to a DYCD program called "Work, Learn, Grow" and the end of one-time MetroCard funding for SYEP participants, according to a report from the New York City Council. The rest comes from savings from wages that were lower than anticipated, the report said.</p> <p>Asked what impact the bill would have on agency participation rates, a DYCD spokesperson pointed out that the .5% standard was a goal, not a requirement. But the department would make efforts to see that agencies meet the threshold if it becomes law, they said.</p> <p>According to Stevens, the bill would expand the types of city agency offerings and bolster "a critical pipeline" to the public and nonprofit sectors, which are facing significant workforce shortages.</p> <p>Eli Dvorkin, policy director at Center for an Urban Future, a nonpartisan think tank focused on economic opportunity, said the Council's emphasis on SYEP was "encouraging" but criticized the program for being too heavily concentrated in low-paying fields and not oriented toward economically mobile career pathways.</p> <p>"It's understandable that this legislation is primarily focused on encouraging placements in city agencies -- that's where the Council has the most leverage," Dvorkin wrote by email to Gotham Gazette. "But to really improve the program, the city will have to do much more to recruit private sector employers in growing industries -- from tech and healthcare to finance and the creative economy."</p> <p>A Center for an Urban Future analysis of DYCD data found "placements are concentrated in low-paying industries like daycare providers and day camps (15.3 percent of all work sites), social services (7.5 percent), and retail (8.4 percent)," according to Dvorkin. A majority of SYEP government slots are in worksites at public schools.</p> <p>"That's a challenge that DYCD and SBS can't tackle on their own, and it's where much more progress will be needed even if this legislation becomes law," he added, referring to the city’s Department of Small Business Services, which under the Council bill would be required to coordinate with DYCD to promote SYEP to small businesses.</p> <p>Part of the problem, Dvorkin wrote, was that the program wasn't well-integrated with the year-round education system. The previous version of Stevens' bill included a year-long mentorship program for SYEP participants, but that was dropped from the final legislation. A spokesperson for Stevens did not say why it was removed.</p> <p>The bill will go before the Council's Committee on Small Business on Thursday, where it is likely to advance to a full City Council vote in the afternoon. If it passes, it will go to Mayor Adams for signature or veto.</p> <p>

***
by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

Read more by this writer.

</p>
<p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/2-pass-bill-mandating.jpg" width="600" /></p> <p>Summer Youth Employment Program celebration (photo: John McCarten/NYC Council Media Unit)</p> <hr /> <p>New York City’s Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP) could be seeing a boost despite proposed budget cuts, thanks to legislation in the City Council that could lead to greater participation from city agencies.</p> <p>The Council is expected to pass a bill Thursday that would set a goal for each city agency to offer youth job slots as part of the landmark program, which connects tens of thousands of students with paid job opportunities in and out of city government during the summer months when school is out.</p> <p>The legislation would require each agency to offer a number of slots equal to .5% of its full-time staff. It is unclear exactly what that would mean for the overall number of SYEP slots in city agencies as many agencies already reach that threshold each year.</p> <p>"This collective effort maximizes the available resources and enables a wider range of job opportunities for SYEP participants, ensuring that the program meets the diverse needs and interests of young people while fostering workforce development city-wide," said Council Member Althea Stevens, a Bronx Democrat, the Council's youth services chair, and the bill's prime sponsor, in a statement to Gotham Gazette.</p> <p>The bill would also require annual reporting on the number of youth served in the public and private sectors, and a breakdown of city agency participation. Agencies that fail to meet the .5% goal would have to report why they failed to the mayor and City Council. The legislation would take effect 120 days after it becomes law, meaning the new thresholds likely wouldn't be in place until next summer at the earliest.</p> <p>SYEP had a record high 100,000 slots last year, of which 8,600, or close to 9%, were at 82 city agencies and offices, and 29 City Council offices, according to the Department of Youth and Community Development (DYCD), which administers the program.</p> <p>When asked to respond to the bill and its likely passage this week, DYCD Commissioner Keith Howard touted SYEP's coordination with city agencies and the City Council but did not take a firm Adams administration position on the legislation.</p> <p>“A record 100,000 SYEP opportunities will return this summer, including thousands of young people placed in city agencies and mayoral offices," said Howard, an appointee of Mayor Eric Adams, in a statement. "One example of the great success we have had with cross-agency partnerships was NYPD opening their doors to more than 800 SYEP internships in law enforcement last year, and this summer that number will grow to more than a thousand."</p> <p>"We thank the City Council for supporting SYEP, and for once again encouraging its members to become worksites and exposing young people to the world of politics and civic engagement,” Howard added.</p> <p>Mayor Adams' proposed spending plan for the 2024 fiscal year, which begins July 1, budgets for 302,000 full-time positions across city government; .5% of that total is only about 1,500, far lower than the 8,600 SYEP participants placed in city agencies in 2022. If the bill becomes law, some agencies will likely have to increase their number of SYEP offerings but the overall number of positions is unlikely to change. It would still set a new benchmark, a suggested floor for each agency, along with the accountability mechanism of the reporting requirements.</p> <p>The mayor’s executive budget includes $209.6 million for SYEP, a proposed spending cut of $18.7 million from this fiscal year's adopted budget. The spending reduction is the result of $11 million less allocated to a DYCD program called "Work, Learn, Grow" and the end of one-time MetroCard funding for SYEP participants, according to a report from the New York City Council. The rest comes from savings from wages that were lower than anticipated, the report said.</p> <p>Asked what impact the bill would have on agency participation rates, a DYCD spokesperson pointed out that the .5% standard was a goal, not a requirement. But the department would make efforts to see that agencies meet the threshold if it becomes law, they said.</p> <p>According to Stevens, the bill would expand the types of city agency offerings and bolster "a critical pipeline" to the public and nonprofit sectors, which are facing significant workforce shortages.</p> <p>Eli Dvorkin, policy director at Center for an Urban Future, a nonpartisan think tank focused on economic opportunity, said the Council's emphasis on SYEP was "encouraging" but criticized the program for being too heavily concentrated in low-paying fields and not oriented toward economically mobile career pathways.</p> <p>"It's understandable that this legislation is primarily focused on encouraging placements in city agencies -- that's where the Council has the most leverage," Dvorkin wrote by email to Gotham Gazette. "But to really improve the program, the city will have to do much more to recruit private sector employers in growing industries -- from tech and healthcare to finance and the creative economy."</p> <p>A Center for an Urban Future analysis of DYCD data found "placements are concentrated in low-paying industries like daycare providers and day camps (15.3 percent of all work sites), social services (7.5 percent), and retail (8.4 percent)," according to Dvorkin. A majority of SYEP government slots are in worksites at public schools.</p> <p>"That's a challenge that DYCD and SBS can't tackle on their own, and it's where much more progress will be needed even if this legislation becomes law," he added, referring to the city’s Department of Small Business Services, which under the Council bill would be required to coordinate with DYCD to promote SYEP to small businesses.</p> <p>Part of the problem, Dvorkin wrote, was that the program wasn't well-integrated with the year-round education system. The previous version of Stevens' bill included a year-long mentorship program for SYEP participants, but that was dropped from the final legislation. A spokesperson for Stevens did not say why it was removed.</p> <p>The bill will go before the Council's Committee on Small Business on Thursday, where it is likely to advance to a full City Council vote in the afternoon. If it passes, it will go to Mayor Adams for signature or veto.</p> <p>

***
by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

Read more by this writer.

</p>
'A Day Without Human Services': Nonprofits Protest Lack of City Funding 2023-05-25T04:00:00+00:00 2023-05-25T04:00:00+00:00 https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/12023-human-services-contracts-city-funding-nyc Ethan Geringer-Sameth [email protected] <p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/3-day-without-protest.jpg" width="600" /></p> <p>Serving meals (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)</p> <hr /> <p>The organizations that New York City contracts to deliver everything from essential health and homeless services to youth and senior programing are striking for better compensation in the next city budget.</p> <p>Over 100 human services providers will pause many non-life-saving activities on Thursday to demonstrate what they say are the consequences of underfunding the sector as inflation and compounding economic and social crises strain the system. Led by the Human Services Council of New York, the "day without human services” is aimed at securing a $200 million investment from the city, equivalent to a roughly 6.5% cost of living adjustment (COLA). It is part of the ongoing "Just Pay" campaign run by the Human Services Council and its members.</p> <p>Campaign representatives say thousands of nonprofit workers will rally at City Hall on Thursday morning with Comptroller Brad Lander and members of the City Council. Programs not legally or contractually mandated or considered essential – including a host of educational, legal, and clinical services – will be suspended for the day. Providers are encouraging their staff, boards, and clients to write to Mayor Eric Adams and the City Council in support of the COLA.</p> <p>"We're asking our members to consider closing up to 30% of their programs because that's how much our workforce is paid less than their government counterparts who do similar work," HSC executive director Michelle Jackson said in an interview with Gotham Gazette. "We are very concerned that if we don't get this COLA and more investment in future years, actual life-saving services will not be around next year."</p> <p>Human Service Council represents 175 providers, a vast majority with city or state contracts, serving 2.5 million New Yorkers each year.</p> <p>Adams and the City Council are negotiating over the mayor’s $106.7 billion executive budget proposal ahead of the July 1 start of the city fiscal year. Adams' proposed spending plan does not include a human services COLA. The Council, led by Speaker Adrienne Adams, pushed to double baseline funding for human services workers to $120 million in its response to the mayor's earlier preliminary budget. That money is still less than the $200 million providers are seeking to keep up with inflation.</p> <p>"Human services nonprofits play a vital role in our city by caring for our most vulnerable and the Council fully believes that they must receive an adequate COLA increase," wrote a Council spokesperson by email about the day of action.</p> <p>Speaker Adams has not taken a public stand on the higher funding ask from the coalition. "The Council is in negotiations with the Administration on the budget and remains committed to fighting for a healthy, functioning human services sector," the spokesperson wrote.</p> <p>Roughly 80% of New York City's human service workforce is people of color, with three out of five qualifying for some form of government assistance themselves, according to HSC.</p> <p>"Human services workers show up every day to make sure that residents are fed, housed, and have their most fundamental needs met—often while earning poverty-level wages themselves," Lander said in a statement to Gotham Gazette. "Fair compensation that matches the cost of living is what we owe the essential workers who provide these services.”</p> <p>Of the thousands of after-school programs, childcare centers, counseling services, supportive housing and shelter providers, domestic violence and eviction prevention programs, summer programs, and other social services across the five boroughs, the city government itself administers only a small number. The city runs some pre-kindergarten, shelters, and community health clinics, for example. But the vast majority are contracted to nonprofit providers around the city. Jackson estimated close to 9 out of 10 human services are provided by a contractor, including nearly all senior and youth, and most homeless services.</p> <p>Workforce shortages across the health and human services sector have significantly hampered a myriad of programs. The shortage has been at the center of city and state struggles to staff hospitals, <a href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/state/11973-psych-beds-hospitals-new-york-upstate">psychiatric beds</a>, and <a href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/12012-mayor-city-council-mental-health-care-workforce">street outreach programs</a>. Among other factors, pay is a key reason for the personnel challenges.</p> <p>In the state budget passed in early May, Governor Kathy Hochul and the State Legislature included a 4% COLA for human services workers paid through state contracts, higher than the 2.5% Hochul had originally proposed, but less than the 8.5% advocates sought. To balance differences in pay, both between city and state contracts and between public and private sector competitors, nonprofits try to subsidize their employees' pay with private fundraising.</p> <p>"Our members are reporting 30 to 40% vacancy rates," Jackson told Gotham Gazette. "Which means at some point services are not being delivered when you cannot hire and retain talent. So the sector is in true crisis and this investment is one step to solving that," she said, referring to a city COLA.</p> <p>It is unclear how many New Yorkers will be impacted by the day of action but Jackson said providers are taking steps to ensure clients aren't left out in the cold.</p> <p>"You're certainly not going to see residential service close, but you might see wraparound services like case management…delayed until Friday," Jackson told Gotham Gazette. Court-mandated and contractually-binding programs will continue but others relied upon by tens of thousands of residents will pause. That includes many older adult centers, afterschool and youth programs, adult literacy and professional development courses, and counseling services, among many others.</p> <p>In the case of home-delivered meals, providers delivered an extra portion earlier in the week, Jackson said. The provisions organizations are making for Thursday are similar to the way they operate during natural disasters.</p> <p>"The sector is at this point where they realize if we don't take bolder and bigger action now…we will see communities in real suffering in future years, when programs close," Jackson said. "We have made every plea possible to government before getting to this point."</p> <p>

***
by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

Read more by this writer.

</p>
<p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/3-day-without-protest.jpg" width="600" /></p> <p>Serving meals (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)</p> <hr /> <p>The organizations that New York City contracts to deliver everything from essential health and homeless services to youth and senior programing are striking for better compensation in the next city budget.</p> <p>Over 100 human services providers will pause many non-life-saving activities on Thursday to demonstrate what they say are the consequences of underfunding the sector as inflation and compounding economic and social crises strain the system. Led by the Human Services Council of New York, the "day without human services” is aimed at securing a $200 million investment from the city, equivalent to a roughly 6.5% cost of living adjustment (COLA). It is part of the ongoing "Just Pay" campaign run by the Human Services Council and its members.</p> <p>Campaign representatives say thousands of nonprofit workers will rally at City Hall on Thursday morning with Comptroller Brad Lander and members of the City Council. Programs not legally or contractually mandated or considered essential – including a host of educational, legal, and clinical services – will be suspended for the day. Providers are encouraging their staff, boards, and clients to write to Mayor Eric Adams and the City Council in support of the COLA.</p> <p>"We're asking our members to consider closing up to 30% of their programs because that's how much our workforce is paid less than their government counterparts who do similar work," HSC executive director Michelle Jackson said in an interview with Gotham Gazette. "We are very concerned that if we don't get this COLA and more investment in future years, actual life-saving services will not be around next year."</p> <p>Human Service Council represents 175 providers, a vast majority with city or state contracts, serving 2.5 million New Yorkers each year.</p> <p>Adams and the City Council are negotiating over the mayor’s $106.7 billion executive budget proposal ahead of the July 1 start of the city fiscal year. Adams' proposed spending plan does not include a human services COLA. The Council, led by Speaker Adrienne Adams, pushed to double baseline funding for human services workers to $120 million in its response to the mayor's earlier preliminary budget. That money is still less than the $200 million providers are seeking to keep up with inflation.</p> <p>"Human services nonprofits play a vital role in our city by caring for our most vulnerable and the Council fully believes that they must receive an adequate COLA increase," wrote a Council spokesperson by email about the day of action.</p> <p>Speaker Adams has not taken a public stand on the higher funding ask from the coalition. "The Council is in negotiations with the Administration on the budget and remains committed to fighting for a healthy, functioning human services sector," the spokesperson wrote.</p> <p>Roughly 80% of New York City's human service workforce is people of color, with three out of five qualifying for some form of government assistance themselves, according to HSC.</p> <p>"Human services workers show up every day to make sure that residents are fed, housed, and have their most fundamental needs met—often while earning poverty-level wages themselves," Lander said in a statement to Gotham Gazette. "Fair compensation that matches the cost of living is what we owe the essential workers who provide these services.”</p> <p>Of the thousands of after-school programs, childcare centers, counseling services, supportive housing and shelter providers, domestic violence and eviction prevention programs, summer programs, and other social services across the five boroughs, the city government itself administers only a small number. The city runs some pre-kindergarten, shelters, and community health clinics, for example. But the vast majority are contracted to nonprofit providers around the city. Jackson estimated close to 9 out of 10 human services are provided by a contractor, including nearly all senior and youth, and most homeless services.</p> <p>Workforce shortages across the health and human services sector have significantly hampered a myriad of programs. The shortage has been at the center of city and state struggles to staff hospitals, <a href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/state/11973-psych-beds-hospitals-new-york-upstate">psychiatric beds</a>, and <a href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/12012-mayor-city-council-mental-health-care-workforce">street outreach programs</a>. Among other factors, pay is a key reason for the personnel challenges.</p> <p>In the state budget passed in early May, Governor Kathy Hochul and the State Legislature included a 4% COLA for human services workers paid through state contracts, higher than the 2.5% Hochul had originally proposed, but less than the 8.5% advocates sought. To balance differences in pay, both between city and state contracts and between public and private sector competitors, nonprofits try to subsidize their employees' pay with private fundraising.</p> <p>"Our members are reporting 30 to 40% vacancy rates," Jackson told Gotham Gazette. "Which means at some point services are not being delivered when you cannot hire and retain talent. So the sector is in true crisis and this investment is one step to solving that," she said, referring to a city COLA.</p> <p>It is unclear how many New Yorkers will be impacted by the day of action but Jackson said providers are taking steps to ensure clients aren't left out in the cold.</p> <p>"You're certainly not going to see residential service close, but you might see wraparound services like case management…delayed until Friday," Jackson told Gotham Gazette. Court-mandated and contractually-binding programs will continue but others relied upon by tens of thousands of residents will pause. That includes many older adult centers, afterschool and youth programs, adult literacy and professional development courses, and counseling services, among many others.</p> <p>In the case of home-delivered meals, providers delivered an extra portion earlier in the week, Jackson said. The provisions organizations are making for Thursday are similar to the way they operate during natural disasters.</p> <p>"The sector is at this point where they realize if we don't take bolder and bigger action now…we will see communities in real suffering in future years, when programs close," Jackson said. "We have made every plea possible to government before getting to this point."</p> <p>

***
by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

Read more by this writer.

</p>
Max Politics Podcast: New York City's 'Green New Deal' Comes Into Focus, with Pete Sikora 2023-05-22T13:00:00+00:00 2023-05-22T13:00:00+00:00 https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/12013-max-politics-podcast-new-york-city-green-new-deal-local-law-97-sikora Gotham Gazette [email protected] <p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/mpp-green-nyc.jpg" /></p> <p>Pushing an NYC 'Green New Deal' (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography)</p> <hr /> <p><strong>May 22 2023 - Max Politics Podcast: New York City's 'Green New Deal' Comes Into Focus, with Pete Sikora<br /></strong></p> <p>Pete Sikora, climate campaigns director for New York Communities for Change, joined the show to discuss implementation of New York City's "Green New Deal" — particularly Local Law 97 that deals with building emissions — and more related to climate action, green jobs, gas bans, and other topics.</p> <p>Listen to the conversation and let us know what you think, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/TweetBenMax">@TweetBenMax</a>. You can listen to the show through the embedded audio below or download the episode wherever you get your podcasts at Max Politics.</p> <p class="feed-readmore"><a target="_blank" href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/12013-max-politics-podcast-new-york-city-green-new-deal-local-law-97-sikora">Read More ...</a></p> <p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/mpp-green-nyc.jpg" /></p> <p>Pushing an NYC 'Green New Deal' (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography)</p> <hr /> <p><strong>May 22 2023 - Max Politics Podcast: New York City's 'Green New Deal' Comes Into Focus, with Pete Sikora<br /></strong></p> <p>Pete Sikora, climate campaigns director for New York Communities for Change, joined the show to discuss implementation of New York City's "Green New Deal" — particularly Local Law 97 that deals with building emissions — and more related to climate action, green jobs, gas bans, and other topics.</p> <p>Listen to the conversation and let us know what you think, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/TweetBenMax">@TweetBenMax</a>. You can listen to the show through the embedded audio below or download the episode wherever you get your podcasts at Max Politics.</p> <p class="feed-readmore"><a target="_blank" href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/12013-max-politics-podcast-new-york-city-green-new-deal-local-law-97-sikora">Read More ...</a></p> Mayor, City Council Negotiate Priorities for Mental Health Care Workforce Funding 2023-05-23T04:00:00+00:00 2023-05-23T04:00:00+00:00 https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/12012-mayor-city-council-mental-health-care-workforce Ethan Geringer-Sameth [email protected] <p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/3-council-alt.jpg" width="600" /></p> <p>Mental health plans (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)</p> <hr /> <p>The New York City Council is seeking greater investment in the behavioral health workforce as leaders at all levels of government grapple with the longstanding crisis of untreated severe mental illness.</p> <p>The Council and Mayor Eric Adams are negotiating the mayor's $106.7 billion executive budget for the next fiscal year, which begins July 1. On the table is tens of millions of dollars to help boost staffing levels for a range of needed services – some new and some depleted by the pandemic — both in and out of city government.</p> <p>The Council, led by Speaker Adrienne Adams, is seeking to double the $60 million cost of living increase for human services workers included in the current city budget, along with greater funding for nonprofit providers, a social work fellowship at CUNY, and other priorities.</p> <p>Industry-wide staffing shortages caused by burnout and uncompetitive wages have stretched behavioral health services too thin, city health officials and providers say, threatening the city and state response to gaps in the social safety net. Mobile intervention, inpatient commitment, and outpatient services — the so-called continuum of care for those with serious mental illness — have become a defining focus for Mayor Eric Adams and <a href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/state/11982-state-budget-mental-health-care-psychiatric-beds-hochul">Governor Kathy Hochul</a>, both Democrats. They have sought to respond to the subway killing of Jordan Neely this month and other attacks in recent years on or by people experiencing acute psychiatric episodes and homelessness.</p> <p>The Council's response to the mayor's preliminary budget for next fiscal year and its <a href="https://council.nyc.gov/mental-health-road-map/">Mental Health Roadmap</a> released shortly thereafter called for $117.4 million more in mental health care funding along with pay parity for the publicly-funded behavioral health workforce.</p> <p>Two days after release of the Council’s wide-ranging Roadmap, Mayor Adams released his $106.7 billion executive budget proposal, which contained an additional $40 million for the crisis response program B-HEARD, youth telehealth services, peer-led clubhouses, and a digital services access hub, according to his office’s summary of the plan.</p> <p>The mayor's latest budget proposal includes none of the city-level workforce development elements in the Council's Mental Health Roadmap, one of the central pillars of the plan. The Roadmap includes various Council bills, city spending priorities, requests of mayoral administration action, and state and federal policy changes aimed at bolstering mental health services and limiting the intersection with the criminal legal system.</p> <p>Asked whether the mayor supports any of the Roadmap's workforce-related proposals, an Adams spokesperson pointed to the mayor's own mental health blueprint, issued earlier this year, but no specific funding lines in the executive budget.</p> <p>“The ongoing mental health crisis in our city demands a strong response from all levels of government," the spokesperson wrote in a statement to Gotham Gazette after the executive budget was released. “We applaud the speaker for unveiling this agenda and thank her and the Council for their partnership,” the spokesperson added.</p> <p>Workforce pipeline issues have led to <a href="https://www.crainsnewyork.com/health-care/more-1000-new-yorkers-await-spot-serious-mental-illness-programs">bottlenecks in mental health programs</a> throughout the state, frustrating proposals by the mayor and governor, including a marquee plan to <a href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/state/11973-psych-beds-hospitals-new-york-upstate">restore hundreds of shuttered psychiatric beds</a>.</p> <p>The Council's Roadmap calls for more funding for nonprofit organizations providing culturally competent behavioral health services. The plan, which Speaker Adrienne Adams emphasized was an "ongoing roadmap" and a "pivotal start" as budget talks unfold, lacks specific funding targets. Last year, the Council allocated roughly $25 million in discretionary spending to mental health services, including autism awareness, programs for court-involved and LGBTQ youth, seniors, and other vulnerable populations, opioid treatment, and trauma recovery centers.</p> <p>Coalition for Behavioral Health represents over 250 local mental health and substance use providers. In testimony before the City Council in March, CBH representatives called for a 8.5% cost of living increase for publicly-contracted mental health workers to match a parallel push in the state budget (that was passed early this month).</p> <p>The money would help retain and recruit the psychiatrists, counselors, and social workers needed for Adams' various emergency and preventative programs, professionals often leaving for higher pay in other settings. The state included a 4% cost of living adjustment this year, which was less than the 8.5% advocates pushed for but more than the 2.5% Hochul initially proposed.</p> <p>Cara Berkowitz, acting director of the CBH and Association for Substance Abuse Providers Association of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Providers' Policy Center, said the cost of living increase is a matter of equal access to health care as much as it is a fair pay issue. "When social service providers, especially those helping those most vulnerable, cannot find workers it is the clients who suffer the most with little or no access to care," she wrote by email. "Facilitating access starts with paying city-contracted workers on par with the state, federal and private sectors."</p> <p>Dr. Ashwin Vasan, the city health commissioner appointed by Mayor Adams, called a cost of living increase for human services agencies "long overdue" in testimony before the City Council finance and health committees at a May 15 budget hearing. "As a former operator of a human service and community health organization this hits home," he said.</p> <p>"It is not an agency by agency decision on whether to fill those funding gaps," Vasan added. "It is a citywide decision in part because we're all working with human services agencies and often multiple [city] agencies are working with the same human service agencies, so that's really handled centrally by [the Mayor's Office of Management and Budget] to ensure consistency and equity."</p> <p>Hiring for the city's outreach teams has been particularly difficult because of the nature of the work and major shortages in social workers and doctors.</p> <p>"There is a huge problem right now for all mental health professionals across the city, across the country. COVID has really disrupted the mental health market," said Dr. Mitchell Katz, president and CEO of New York City Health + Hospitals (H+H), the city's public hospital network and largest behavioral health provider, in his own budget testimony on May 16.</p> <p>One of the city’s signature programs, B-HEARD, a non-police mental health crisis response pilot using H+H clinicians and FDNY EMTs to answer non-violent 911 calls, can't expand in part because of a shortage of social workers, Katz told the Council. B-HEARD is getting an additional $27 million in the mayor's executive budget proposal to bring it to the remainder of the Bronx and other parts of the city. The program, which only operates from 9 a.m. to 1 a.m. in a limited number of police precincts, has been criticized for failing to respond to calls often leading to the deployment of police officers.</p> <p>"We are in favor of 24-hour coverage but we would need to be able to hire more people in order to do that," Katz told the Council. "The city has committed that if we are able to hire, they would provide the funding. The current funding we have is sufficient for the number of social workers that we are employing."</p> <p>"So it's a question of, can we recruit enough to go to nights?" he added.</p> <p>The Council Roadmap calls for subsidies for CUNY social work candidates, part of the speaker's State of the City agenda this year. Rendy Desamours, a spokesperson for Speaker Adams, said the body didn't have a specific dollar figure in mind but would be pushing for its inclusion in the final budget deal. Council Member Rita Joseph, a Brooklyn Democrat, introduced a resolution calling on the state to pay for the education and licensing fees of CUNY students who commit to working in the public sector in a mental health field. The resolution is sponsored by 13 City Council and Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso.</p> <p>In <a href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/11995-max-politics-podcast-city-council-mental-health-roadmap-linda-lee" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">a recent podcast interview with Gotham Gazette</a> on the City Council Mental Health Roadmap, the Council's mental health committee chair, Linda Lee, said pay parity and subsidized education were key to priming the pipeline of mental health workers. But to fill vacancies in the immediate term, Lee pointed to action the state could take to authorize out-of-state clinicians to practice in New York. Doing so would inevitably increase the reliance on remote service delivery by phone or teleconference, she said. Whether and how telehealth could be used for street outreach remains an open question.<br /><br />"What we're asking is, can we increase the workforce pool, by actually allowing these folks from out of state to come. And we see that being tremendously helpful when it comes to telehealth," she told Gotham Gazette.</p> <p>The mayor’s executive budget also includes $66 million for other outreach and crisis response teams run by the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, according to officials at the May 15 budget hearing. Recruiting for those positions has also been a challenge.</p> <p>"Building trust, engaging people over time, coming back and coming back and coming back, never leaving, is extraordinarily difficult work," Vasan told the committee. "It requires extraordinarily special people who want to do that every single day. We're lucky in this city to have hundreds of people who want to do this work, if not more."</p> <p>

***
by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

Read more by this writer.

</p>
<p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/3-council-alt.jpg" width="600" /></p> <p>Mental health plans (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)</p> <hr /> <p>The New York City Council is seeking greater investment in the behavioral health workforce as leaders at all levels of government grapple with the longstanding crisis of untreated severe mental illness.</p> <p>The Council and Mayor Eric Adams are negotiating the mayor's $106.7 billion executive budget for the next fiscal year, which begins July 1. On the table is tens of millions of dollars to help boost staffing levels for a range of needed services – some new and some depleted by the pandemic — both in and out of city government.</p> <p>The Council, led by Speaker Adrienne Adams, is seeking to double the $60 million cost of living increase for human services workers included in the current city budget, along with greater funding for nonprofit providers, a social work fellowship at CUNY, and other priorities.</p> <p>Industry-wide staffing shortages caused by burnout and uncompetitive wages have stretched behavioral health services too thin, city health officials and providers say, threatening the city and state response to gaps in the social safety net. Mobile intervention, inpatient commitment, and outpatient services — the so-called continuum of care for those with serious mental illness — have become a defining focus for Mayor Eric Adams and <a href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/state/11982-state-budget-mental-health-care-psychiatric-beds-hochul">Governor Kathy Hochul</a>, both Democrats. They have sought to respond to the subway killing of Jordan Neely this month and other attacks in recent years on or by people experiencing acute psychiatric episodes and homelessness.</p> <p>The Council's response to the mayor's preliminary budget for next fiscal year and its <a href="https://council.nyc.gov/mental-health-road-map/">Mental Health Roadmap</a> released shortly thereafter called for $117.4 million more in mental health care funding along with pay parity for the publicly-funded behavioral health workforce.</p> <p>Two days after release of the Council’s wide-ranging Roadmap, Mayor Adams released his $106.7 billion executive budget proposal, which contained an additional $40 million for the crisis response program B-HEARD, youth telehealth services, peer-led clubhouses, and a digital services access hub, according to his office’s summary of the plan.</p> <p>The mayor's latest budget proposal includes none of the city-level workforce development elements in the Council's Mental Health Roadmap, one of the central pillars of the plan. The Roadmap includes various Council bills, city spending priorities, requests of mayoral administration action, and state and federal policy changes aimed at bolstering mental health services and limiting the intersection with the criminal legal system.</p> <p>Asked whether the mayor supports any of the Roadmap's workforce-related proposals, an Adams spokesperson pointed to the mayor's own mental health blueprint, issued earlier this year, but no specific funding lines in the executive budget.</p> <p>“The ongoing mental health crisis in our city demands a strong response from all levels of government," the spokesperson wrote in a statement to Gotham Gazette after the executive budget was released. “We applaud the speaker for unveiling this agenda and thank her and the Council for their partnership,” the spokesperson added.</p> <p>Workforce pipeline issues have led to <a href="https://www.crainsnewyork.com/health-care/more-1000-new-yorkers-await-spot-serious-mental-illness-programs">bottlenecks in mental health programs</a> throughout the state, frustrating proposals by the mayor and governor, including a marquee plan to <a href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/state/11973-psych-beds-hospitals-new-york-upstate">restore hundreds of shuttered psychiatric beds</a>.</p> <p>The Council's Roadmap calls for more funding for nonprofit organizations providing culturally competent behavioral health services. The plan, which Speaker Adrienne Adams emphasized was an "ongoing roadmap" and a "pivotal start" as budget talks unfold, lacks specific funding targets. Last year, the Council allocated roughly $25 million in discretionary spending to mental health services, including autism awareness, programs for court-involved and LGBTQ youth, seniors, and other vulnerable populations, opioid treatment, and trauma recovery centers.</p> <p>Coalition for Behavioral Health represents over 250 local mental health and substance use providers. In testimony before the City Council in March, CBH representatives called for a 8.5% cost of living increase for publicly-contracted mental health workers to match a parallel push in the state budget (that was passed early this month).</p> <p>The money would help retain and recruit the psychiatrists, counselors, and social workers needed for Adams' various emergency and preventative programs, professionals often leaving for higher pay in other settings. The state included a 4% cost of living adjustment this year, which was less than the 8.5% advocates pushed for but more than the 2.5% Hochul initially proposed.</p> <p>Cara Berkowitz, acting director of the CBH and Association for Substance Abuse Providers Association of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Providers' Policy Center, said the cost of living increase is a matter of equal access to health care as much as it is a fair pay issue. "When social service providers, especially those helping those most vulnerable, cannot find workers it is the clients who suffer the most with little or no access to care," she wrote by email. "Facilitating access starts with paying city-contracted workers on par with the state, federal and private sectors."</p> <p>Dr. Ashwin Vasan, the city health commissioner appointed by Mayor Adams, called a cost of living increase for human services agencies "long overdue" in testimony before the City Council finance and health committees at a May 15 budget hearing. "As a former operator of a human service and community health organization this hits home," he said.</p> <p>"It is not an agency by agency decision on whether to fill those funding gaps," Vasan added. "It is a citywide decision in part because we're all working with human services agencies and often multiple [city] agencies are working with the same human service agencies, so that's really handled centrally by [the Mayor's Office of Management and Budget] to ensure consistency and equity."</p> <p>Hiring for the city's outreach teams has been particularly difficult because of the nature of the work and major shortages in social workers and doctors.</p> <p>"There is a huge problem right now for all mental health professionals across the city, across the country. COVID has really disrupted the mental health market," said Dr. Mitchell Katz, president and CEO of New York City Health + Hospitals (H+H), the city's public hospital network and largest behavioral health provider, in his own budget testimony on May 16.</p> <p>One of the city’s signature programs, B-HEARD, a non-police mental health crisis response pilot using H+H clinicians and FDNY EMTs to answer non-violent 911 calls, can't expand in part because of a shortage of social workers, Katz told the Council. B-HEARD is getting an additional $27 million in the mayor's executive budget proposal to bring it to the remainder of the Bronx and other parts of the city. The program, which only operates from 9 a.m. to 1 a.m. in a limited number of police precincts, has been criticized for failing to respond to calls often leading to the deployment of police officers.</p> <p>"We are in favor of 24-hour coverage but we would need to be able to hire more people in order to do that," Katz told the Council. "The city has committed that if we are able to hire, they would provide the funding. The current funding we have is sufficient for the number of social workers that we are employing."</p> <p>"So it's a question of, can we recruit enough to go to nights?" he added.</p> <p>The Council Roadmap calls for subsidies for CUNY social work candidates, part of the speaker's State of the City agenda this year. Rendy Desamours, a spokesperson for Speaker Adams, said the body didn't have a specific dollar figure in mind but would be pushing for its inclusion in the final budget deal. Council Member Rita Joseph, a Brooklyn Democrat, introduced a resolution calling on the state to pay for the education and licensing fees of CUNY students who commit to working in the public sector in a mental health field. The resolution is sponsored by 13 City Council and Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso.</p> <p>In <a href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/11995-max-politics-podcast-city-council-mental-health-roadmap-linda-lee" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">a recent podcast interview with Gotham Gazette</a> on the City Council Mental Health Roadmap, the Council's mental health committee chair, Linda Lee, said pay parity and subsidized education were key to priming the pipeline of mental health workers. But to fill vacancies in the immediate term, Lee pointed to action the state could take to authorize out-of-state clinicians to practice in New York. Doing so would inevitably increase the reliance on remote service delivery by phone or teleconference, she said. Whether and how telehealth could be used for street outreach remains an open question.<br /><br />"What we're asking is, can we increase the workforce pool, by actually allowing these folks from out of state to come. And we see that being tremendously helpful when it comes to telehealth," she told Gotham Gazette.</p> <p>The mayor’s executive budget also includes $66 million for other outreach and crisis response teams run by the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, according to officials at the May 15 budget hearing. Recruiting for those positions has also been a challenge.</p> <p>"Building trust, engaging people over time, coming back and coming back and coming back, never leaving, is extraordinarily difficult work," Vasan told the committee. "It requires extraordinarily special people who want to do that every single day. We're lucky in this city to have hundreds of people who want to do this work, if not more."</p> <p>

***
by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

Read more by this writer.

</p>
What Advocates and Electeds Say Mayor Adams Should Be Doing Differently About the Asylum-Seeker Crisis 2023-05-18T13:00:00+00:00 2023-05-18T13:00:00+00:00 https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/12014-mayor-adams-nyc-asylum-seeker-crisis Samar Khurshid [email protected] <p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/what-critics-say.jpg" width="600" /></p> <p>Mayor Adams and others tour a HERRC (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)</p> <hr /> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As the migrant asylum-seeker crisis continues to escalate, and another surge of arrivals has begun after a federal pandemic-era border policy expired last week, Mayor Eric Adams is taking increasingly desperate steps to ease the impact on New York City.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">While virtually everyone agrees that the federal and state governments should do more to help the city, critics say there are still several concrete measures the mayor has failed to enact that could have immediate beneficial results, including the humane treatment of people fleeing their home countries to create new lives in the United States.     </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Elected officials, advocates, and nonprofit groups have grown progressively more dismayed and outraged at the mayor’s response to the migrant crisis, which has seen more than 67,000 asylum-seekers arrive in the city over the last year, according to City Hall. About 41,500 are in the city’s care in shelters, which are now home to a record 80,278 individuals in sum.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“[W]e have been facing one of the single most significant humanitarian crises in recent memory, with more than 67,000 people seeking asylum coming through our system since last year,” said Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Anne Williams-Isom, at a press briefing on Wednesday. The number of migrants, she pointed out, is “larger than the entire population of the city of Utica, New York” and “would fill Madison Square Garden three times.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Williams-Isom made an urgent plea for financial and logistical support from the state and federal governments, and a long-term policy solution on immigration, while stressing that the administration would “keep open lines of communication” with all elected officials, stakeholders and everyday New Yorkers.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“We only ask that in return we get a good faith effort for help. We've seen too many criticisms couched in half truth,” she said. “We've got to do this together for the benefit of all New Yorkers…If you don't like what we're doing, I can understand. We can have a difference of opinions, but we're asking for constructive, real suggestions, not idle talking points.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Various critics have questioned Mayor Adams' operational approach, which has included several misguided moves, what they’ve called his anti-immigrant rhetoric about the crisis, and ways in which he has lashed out at fellow Democrats whose help he needs — while Republicans have said he's been too welcoming of migrants. Advocates and Democrats want to see the mayor not only lower the temperature of his remarks about how the city is “being destroyed by the migrant crisis” and his criticism of President Biden, City Council members, and others, but also communicate far better with local officials as he opens shelters and takes other steps.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">They have called on him to extend right-to-shelter protections, invest in immigrant legal services, cut red tape for housing rental vouchers, and other steps they say could help everyone involved and even the city’s bottom line, which has been the mayor’s main focus.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Democratic mayor has enacted cuts to city agencies and proposed more as his administration estimated a $4.3 billion cost of sheltering and providing services to migrants for the current and next fiscal years, though that number has been </span><a href="https://ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/snapshot-new-york-city-spending-for-asylum-seekers-may2023.pdf"><span style="font-weight: 400;">questioned</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> as an inflated projection by some. The city has only received about $30.5 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), though hundreds of millions more is projected.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">And the state has appropriated $1 billion in its recently-passed budget, which includes $767 million to reimburse 29% of the city’s shelter costs for migrants (in line with its share of other shelter costs), $162 million for operational and logistical support from the New York State National Guard, $137 million for health care for migrants, a $25 million resettlement fund, $10 million in legal assistance, and more.</span></p> <p><b>Desperate Moves, Pushback, and Help<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Last week, Adams signed an executive order suspending parts of the city’s right-to-shelter law, which mandates that the city provides a bed to any person who needs one. The order suspended portions of the law that require timely placement of families with children, require families to be placed in private rather than congregate settings, and certain eviction prevention protections.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The executive order comes shortly on the heels of the administration’s decision to bus hundreds of migrants to hotels in Orange and Rockland Counties, which was met with swift local opposition. Rockland County Executive Ed Day, a Republican, declared a state of emergency to prevent migrants from being brought to and sheltered in the county while Orange County officials filed two separate lawsuits in state Supreme Court over the plan, winning a temporary restraining order on Monday.  </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Adams administration has also </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/12/nyregion/ny-migrants-public-school-gym.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">housed</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> migrants in a school gym in Coney Island, and is preparing to use several others for that purpose, though after outcry the city reversed course at least temporarily. “The city should not be using schools for intake and shelter,” said Murad Awawdeh, executive director of New York Immigration Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group. “We don't want to disrupt students’ school environment. And the city owns at least a million square feet of space across the city and we need to be prioritizing those spaces.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">According to a </span><a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2023/05/11/adams-considers-housing-migrants-shuttered-prison-00096518" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Politico New York report</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, the mayor also considered potentially sheltering migrants in a shuttered correctional facility in Dutchess County and </span><a href="https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/ny-rikers-island-migrants-closed-jail-mayor-adams-20230517-m5yhriyoffdwtbzrlln63upxrq-story.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">the Daily News</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> reported that he may use a shuttered jail facility on Rikers Island, something Adams did not deny on Wednesday as he told reporters that everything is on the table, prompting another wave of outcry. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“Cutting migrants off from resources and support and handing them over to jail facilities is not safety,” said Eileen Maher, a leader with VOCAL-NY’s Civil Rights Union who was formerly detained on Rikers, in a statement. “This is just another attempt from Adams to use the carceral system to disappear people and it's unacceptable. Rikers must be ‘off the table.’”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In one bit of news welcomed by advocates, the mayor on Monday used his </span><a href="https://www.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/406-23/emergency-executive-order-406" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">executive authority</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to suspend the required Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) for siting and building homeless shelters, which he previously did for the Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Centers (HERRCs) set up in response to the migrant influx. Besides shelters, the city has opened 150 emergency sites for migrants, many of which are hotels, and 8 HERRCs.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">While the mayor did release a </span><a href="https://www.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/158-23/mayor-adams-releases-the-road-forward-new-blueprint-handle-asylum-seeker-crisis-moving-forward#/0" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">blueprint</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in March to deal with the ongoing crisis, including by creating a new Office of Asylum Seeker Operations, the plan was </span><a href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/11868-city-council-immigrant-affairs-asylum-seekers-budget" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">immediately questioned</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> as inadequate and misguided, including the question of why a new office was necessary beyond the existing Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The City Council has presented several solutions over the course of months. In September, 34 Council members </span><a href="https://twitter.com/galeabrewer/status/1570873235214077957" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">wrote</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to U.S. Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand asking them for help with expedited work authorization for migrants. In October, the Council identified 10 large hotels for use as HERRCs, a suggestion that the administration opposed at the time but eventually ended up using some of those proposed sites.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In December, the Council put out a </span><a href="https://council.nyc.gov/press/2022/12/21/2328/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">full report</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> outlining short-term measures to address migrants’ needs before and when they arrive and long-term policies for housing, education, health care, food security and more. The Council also launched a public-private partnership in March to provide funding to community-based groups that are assisting migrants. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“New York City will always be a welcoming and safe harbor for people seeking asylum, who deserve to be treated with care, dignity, and compassion. Unfortunately, our City continues to shoulder the significant bulk and cost of this humanitarian response, which is unfair and unsustainable without the necessary funding from all levels of government,” said Council Speaker Adrienne Adams and Council Finance Chair Justin Brannan, in a statement earlier this month after the city received FEMA’s initial round of funding. “Despite the City’s $350 million request, FEMA's initial grant provides a paltry $30.5 million, which is not anywhere close to enough to cover the cost of assistance for asylum seekers. New York City deserves much more support to continue providing services for more than 60,000 asylum seekers. The Council remains strongly committed to helping all those who seek refuge, and we look forward to working with our partners to secure this important additional funding.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The state and federal governments have appeared largely indifferent to the city’s challenges for most of the past year. There has been no coordinated strategy among the federal, state, and local governments. As </span><a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2023/05/12/critics-say-hochul-is-mia-during-migrant-crisis-00096647" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Politico New York reported</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, Democratic leaders believe that Governor Kathy Hochul, a fellow Democrat and staunch Adams ally, has been missing from the conversation – though she did write </span><a href="https://nypost.com/2023/05/12/hochul-begs-biden-for-more-aid-to-confront-migrant-crisis/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">a May 12 letter</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to President Joe Biden pleading for assistance, saw to the $1 billion for the city in the state budget deal reached early this month, and was in Washington D.C. on Wednesday to push for more federal help on the issue.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">And while President Joe Biden, a Democrat, has taken some measures to address the ongoing crisis as well as the surge from the lifting of pandemic-era Title 42, which allowed for more expulsion of asylum-seeking migrants on public health grounds, in the divided Congress there has been almost no movement on immigration reform or related legislation. Congress appropriated $800 million in December for the migrant crisis with a significant amount expected to be allocated to New York City, but very little of that has flowed to the city yet through FEMA for unclear reasons.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“We're at this point where we've been doing this for a year now, and really haven't had very much traction on a lot of the different areas that we need to,” said Awawdeh. “The simplest thing we can do and the first thing we need to do is actually invest in getting people out of emergency shelter and into permanent housing.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Even as the mayor continues to plead for aid from the federal government, expedited work permits for migrants, and a different operational approach at the border to help spread the influx of asylum-seekers around the country, critics have offered solutions, both short- and long-term, to address the overall crisis.</span></p> <p><b>Extend Right to Shelter Standards and Invest in Immigration Legal Services<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Last week, City Comptroller Brad Lander and Council Member Shahana Hanif, who chairs the Council’s immigration committee, wrote a </span><a href="https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/letter-to-mayor-adams-re-prioritizing-immigration-legal-services-to-assist-asylum-seekers-on-pathways-out-of-shelter/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">letter</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to the mayor, calling on him to invest an additional $70 million in the city budget for immigration legal services. That would include $10 million to scale up pro se legal clinics that help immigrants apply for asylum, work authorization, and Temporary Protected Status; and $60 million to provide legal representation to those in immigration courts, where there is a backlog of 127,000 cases. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The mayor’s office did not respond to an inquiry about the funding recommendation.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Those funds, Lander and Hanif said, could help expand the city’s existing programs for immigrants including ActionNYC, the Immigrant Opportunity Initiative (IOI), and the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project (NYIFUP). And they said the city should work with law schools and law firms to enroll volunteers who can provide legal assistance to migrants, and enlist the help of nonprofit and religious organizations for outreach and translation services.  </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">They urged the administration to take an “all hands” approach to the crisis by expanding direct outreach to asylum seekers in the HERRCs and DHS shelter system and to create systems for data collection, case prioritization, and follow-up contact. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“With a dedicated all-hands outreach effort and an investment of $70 million for legal services, the City can significantly reduce the shelter length of stay, redeploy existing shelter space for people newly in need or newly arrived, reduce the number of people otherwise in the shelter system, and save significantly on the costs of operating shelters,” Lander and Hanif wrote. “As immigrants have for generations, these new arrivals have the potential to contribute greatly to NYC’s economic and cultural vitality. Their success, and their contributions to NYC, depend on taking the next step now to help them establish new lives here.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The letter was sent just prior to a City Council budget hearing where Hanif questioned officials from the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs and was left dissatisfied with their testimony. Though she agreed that the federal government has left the city to fend for itself, “a lack of federal support does not excuse some of the ways in which the City is failing to meet the needs of asylum seekers,” she said, in a statement after the hearing. She noted that the city has disbursed no new funds for asylum seeker legal services this year and that there still seems to be no long-term plan. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Hanif also urged the passage of her bill, </span><a href="https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=6047891&amp;GUID=84A59237-CFA0-4415-B52B-6889C47927F3&amp;Options=&amp;Search=" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Intro. 942</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, which would require that emergency congregate housing, including the HERRCs, abide by the minimum standards required under the right-to-shelter law.</span></p> <p><b>Free Up Shelter Capacity by Eliminating 90-Day Rule for Housing Vouchers<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The migrant crisis has placed a particular strain on the city’s shelter system, with the daily shelter population </span><a href="https://www.nyc.gov/assets/dhs/downloads/pdf/dailyreport.pdf"><span style="font-weight: 400;">ballooning</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to nearly 80,000 adults and children. According to city estimates from early May, that included about 37,500 asylum-seekers. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The city requires that families with children spend 90-days in a shelter before they can apply for the CityFHEPS program, which provides a rental assistance voucher to help families find permanent housing. An analysis released Monday by Win, the city’s largest shelter and services provider for families with children, found that repealing that 90-day rule could save the city tens of thousands of dollars per homeless family with children. The organization is one of several that have argued for easing access to housing vouchers</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">"For decades, the 90-Day Rule has arbitrarily kept New Yorkers in shelter far longer than they should be — but right now, the City has a chance to end this illogical barrier,” said Christine Quinn, President &amp; CEO of Win, in a statement. “Repealing this rule could save the City up to $27,990 per family with children, while helping them leave shelter sooner. It’s the definition of a win-win.” </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The mayor’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the 90-day rule for this story, and has </span><a href="https://gothamist.com/news/citys-largest-shelter-provider-urges-mayor-to-scrap-90-day-shelter-stay-rule-for-housing" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">not taken a position</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in prior reporting by other outlets on the subject. “The administration is deeply grateful to the New Yorkers who have experienced homelessness and helped us develop our blueprint for housing and homelessness,” the mayor’s office told </span><a href="https://www.cityandstateny.com/policy/2023/02/advocates-decry-90-day-waiting-rule-affordable-housing-sheltered-new-yorkers-needless/383124/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">City &amp; State</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in a statement in February. “Just a few months ago, we announced a host of CityFHEPS reforms to cut red tape, reduce administrative burdens, and move more New Yorkers out of shelter and into affordable housing as quickly as possible, and we are doing that everyday.” </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Quinn, a former City Council Speaker, noted that eliminating the rule would free up shelter capacity while easing pressure on the city budget. “There is no good reason to keep this rule in place — but we think City Hall will agree there are plenty of reasons to repeal it,” she said. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Though the mayor could unilaterally get rid of the regulation, there is also an effort before the City Council to do so. Council Member Diana Ayala, a Bronx Democrat, has sponsored </span><a href="https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=5995863&amp;GUID=4F0FC024-E228-4E8D-809B-12A8007C4DA4&amp;Options=ID%7CText%7C&amp;Search=878" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">legislation</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> that would eliminate the need for a family to stay in a shelter at all before they can apply for a housing voucher.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“Repealing the 90-day rule is not only good for the city financially, it’s the right thing to do,” Ayala said in a statement. “Families entering shelter should not have to wait 90 days to begin applying for vouchers that take months to process. If we intend to solve the bottlenecks within our shelter system, then we must take a look at all the policies in place that are contributing to that bottleneck, including the 90-day rule.”</span></p> <p><b>Renovate Private and City-Owned Vacant Apartments <br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">As a means to address the homelessness and housing crisis, elected officials and housing advocates have been urging the administration to invest in renovating vacant apartments owned by the city and also to provide incentives to private landlords to carry out similar fixes in dilapidated units that they own. Those solutions could, by extension, also assist in tackling the migrant crisis as they provide an avenue for people living in shelters to transition to permanent homes. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Open New York, a pro-housing group, conducted a survey and found over 200 vacant rent-stabilized units in buildings that the city either owns or subsidizes, according to </span><a href="https://gothamist.com/news/empty-nyc-owned-apartments-could-help-solve-housing-crisis-policy-group-says" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">a Gothamist report</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. The group is pushing the administration to get those apartments back in rotation by funding repairs. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), the public housing agency, also has thousands of vacant apartments that elected officials and advocates say could be used to quickly provide housing to those in shelter if they are fixed and leased.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The mayor did take one step </span><a href="https://www.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/272-23/mayor-adams-invest-up-10-million-repair-rent-stabilized-homes-providing-roofs-heads#:~:text=NEW%20YORK%20%E2%80%93%20New%20York%20City,with%20access%20to%20those%20homes." target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">last month</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to coax private landlords into bringing rent-stabilized homes back on the market by launching a $10 million program that will provide $25,000 each to renovate 400 “chronically vacant” rent-stabilized units and then connect those apartments with families receiving CityFHEPS vouchers. However, housing advocates and landlords have both said the program is a drop in the bucket considering what they say are tens of thousands of rent-stabilized units that lie vacant across the city. </span></p> <p><b>Lease Apartments on the Market for Homeless Families<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, a Democrat, has criticized the real estate industry for failing to support the city’s efforts, called out suburban lawmakers for their refusal to permit more housing development, and blasted the Biden administration’s relative inaction on a crisis that cuts across multiple states and cities.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“While Mayor Adams is doing the wrong thing in rolling back Right-to-Shelter, we must be careful to call even more loudly on those who are doing nothing at all: the real estate community that sits on thousands of vacant apartments while families sleep in the streets; our neighbors in the suburbs who hide behind racist zoning policies that prevent new affordable housing from being built; and the Biden administration that refuses to step up with meaningful aid despite immigration being a federal issue,” Reynoso said in part in a statement on Friday. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">On Wednesday, Reynoso proposed three legal options for the governor, mayor, and City Council that would simultaneously confront the housing and homelessness crisis to reduce pressure on the city’s shelter system. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Under his proposal the Council would pass a law adding the migrant crisis to the list of emergencies in the city’s Administrative Code, the mayoral administration would lease apartments for homeless families while landlords would be required to make it a priority to rent to the city at market-rate, and landlords would be prohibited from refusing to rent to the city when an emergency has been declared. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Additionally, Reynoso proposed that the mayor declare an emergency over the homelessness crisis and seek more assistance for it from the state.</span></p> <p><b>State Action<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Advocates have praised the governor and Legislature for allocating about $73 million in the recently approved $229 billion state budget for legal assistance and services for immigrants. But they have also criticized the failure of various pieces of legislation that could aid immigrants more broadly and help the newly-arrived asylum-seekers. The top relevant priority for advocates is the passage of the Access to Representation Act (ARA), which would ensure the right to legal representation in immigration cases. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“It is imperative to use a portion of these additional funds to build the long-term infrastructure that the Access to Representation Act would provide,” said Shayna Kessler, state advocacy manager for the Vera Institute of Justice’s Advancing Universal Representation initiative, in a statement referencing the $73 million allocation. “The ARA guarantees in state law the right to legal representation in these complex immigration cases and ensures long-term stability for these life-saving services. It is the right thing to do, and we will redouble our efforts to ensure the bill is passed this year.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Borough President Reynoso urged the governor to offer the city the use of state personnel and facilities, while suspending local laws that municipalities such as Rockland County have used to block migrants from being housed in their jurisdiction, as well as those that counties have used to block new affordable housing creation. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In an </span><a href="https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/politics/2023/05/17/hochul--n-y--working-to-find--welcoming--sites-for-migrant-housing" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">interview with NY1</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in Washington D.C. on Wednesday, Hochul said the state is working with the city to identify sites to welcome migrants, including </span><a href="https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2023/05/17/local-officials-told-suny-campuses--closed-psych-centers-possible-migrant-housing-options" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">potentially</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> SUNY campuses and shuttered psychiatric facilities. “The city has done an incredible job trying to find places to house them, but they are at capacity.” Hochul said. “So we’re helping [Adams] find places that will be welcoming.”</span></p> <p><b>Federal Action</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> <br /></span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mayor Adams has pressed President Biden to not just provide funding but to take several executive actions on the migrant crisis. Last month, he called on the Department of Homeland Security to re-designate TPS for migrants from Venezuela, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Sudan, South Sudan, and Cameroon, to expand access to humanitarian parole, and to increase the number of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officers, or reassign existing ones, to reduce application processing times. Those measures would help migrants obtain expedited work authorization. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“The president of the United States can give us the ability to allow people to work. This is in the lap of the executive branch of the United States of America, and that's what we are calling for,” Adams said at the time.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Adams has often cast himself as standing alone on the migrant crisis, critiquing fellow Democrats, including Biden, and others for what he sees as lackluster support in lobbying the federal government for aid. While the mayor has been right that federal and state financial aid has been slow to materialize, he has falsely claimed that Biden has no </span><a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/01/05/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-announces-new-border-enforcement-actions/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">southern border policy</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and that City Council members and others have not helped lobby for federal and state support.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Besides the proposals the Council issued, Speaker Adams also advocated for more support from the state in her </span><a href="https://council.nyc.gov/press/2023/02/15/2353/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">budget testimony</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in Albany in February. On April 7, after the city submitted its application for FEMA funding on March 29, the speaker and Council Member Brannan </span><a href="http://council.nyc.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/4.7.23_NYC-Council-Letter-RE-FEMA-Asylum-Seeker-Funding-To-POTUS.pdf"><span style="font-weight: 400;">wrote a letter</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to President Biden in support of the request. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Last month, in an effort Adams did acknowledge, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and members of New York’s Congressional delegation stood outside the U.S. Capitol with immigration activists and proposed a series of solutions, echoing demands that the mayor has also made of the federal government. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“For almost a year, New York City has been a focal point of the ongoing challenge of aiding asylum seekers – but this issue did not originate when the first bus arrived at Port Authority,” they said in a joint statement. “It is rooted in decades of inaction toward reforming our immigration infrastructure and agencies’ inability to adapt to the needs of people arriving in our country.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“New York City, a city of immigrants, needs aid in meeting the current crisis, and at the same time, we must implement real, achievable, sustainable changes to our federal systems of immigration to help ensure that people coming to our country for its opportunities do not find themselves arriving in a new crisis of our own inertia.,” they added.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Williams and the congressional representatives called for:</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Issuing new Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designations, redesignations, and extensions to immigrants.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Passage of the Asylum Seeker Work Authorization Act to reduce the waiting period for work authorizations from 180 days to 30 days.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Passage of The New Way Forward Act to significantly reform the immigration system and its interactions with the criminal legal system that disproportionately hurt immigrants of color.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Ending all contracts with private immigration detention centers, repealing mandatory detention, ending family detention, and banning solitary confinement.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Passage of the New Deal for New Americans Act to ease the naturalization process and address obstacles to employment and language barriers.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Expanding eligibility for DACA recipients and undocumented immigrants to Medicaid, CHIP, and the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance exchanges, while ensuring that access does not affect their ability to apply for citizenship under the </span><a href="https://www.dhs.gov/news/2022/09/08/dhs-publishes-fair-and-humane-public-charge-rule" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">public charge rule</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Creating a pathway to permanent residency and citizenship for Dreamers (including DACA recipients), those with Temporary Protected Status and those covered by Deferred Enforced Departure.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Passage of the Renewing Immigration Provisions of the Immigration Act of 1929 to expand pathways to permanent residency for eligible immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for at least seven years.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Clearing family and employment-based backlogs, recapturing unused visas, eliminating lengthy wait times for reentry, and increasing per-country visa caps.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Broad immigration court reform, increased funding for legal assistance, reduced immigration court backlogs, expanded training for immigration judges, and more.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Expedited processing of Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) applications to allow those without Social Security numbers to file taxes.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Expanded funding for language accessibility.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Williams, a Democrat, has been critical of the mayor, particularly in the wake of his executive order partially suspending right-to-shelter. “The mayor attempting to weaken those rights now—in a moment of immense need for so many asylum seekers—is a misguided and harmful action in the face of the real, urgent challenge exacerbated by a lack of decisive and timely state and federal action,” the public advocate said in a statement. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">But he hasn’t reserved his criticism only for Adams. “Denying rights and resources to people arriving in desperate need and fervent hope will not replace action needed from the President, who has failed to provide sufficient federal funding or a national response, or the Governor, who has failed to support the city, and therefore the state, by coordinating with other municipalities,” Williams said. “Instead, this action will only harm our newest, aspiring and long-term New Yorkers and shift, not solve, the crisis. While it is clear that the current situation is unsafe and unsustainable, we need Democratic leaders on all levels of government to focus on getting the support needed to uphold the right to shelter, not undercut it.”</span></p> <p>

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

Read more by this writer.

</p>
<p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/what-critics-say.jpg" width="600" /></p> <p>Mayor Adams and others tour a HERRC (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)</p> <hr /> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As the migrant asylum-seeker crisis continues to escalate, and another surge of arrivals has begun after a federal pandemic-era border policy expired last week, Mayor Eric Adams is taking increasingly desperate steps to ease the impact on New York City.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">While virtually everyone agrees that the federal and state governments should do more to help the city, critics say there are still several concrete measures the mayor has failed to enact that could have immediate beneficial results, including the humane treatment of people fleeing their home countries to create new lives in the United States.     </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Elected officials, advocates, and nonprofit groups have grown progressively more dismayed and outraged at the mayor’s response to the migrant crisis, which has seen more than 67,000 asylum-seekers arrive in the city over the last year, according to City Hall. About 41,500 are in the city’s care in shelters, which are now home to a record 80,278 individuals in sum.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“[W]e have been facing one of the single most significant humanitarian crises in recent memory, with more than 67,000 people seeking asylum coming through our system since last year,” said Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Anne Williams-Isom, at a press briefing on Wednesday. The number of migrants, she pointed out, is “larger than the entire population of the city of Utica, New York” and “would fill Madison Square Garden three times.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Williams-Isom made an urgent plea for financial and logistical support from the state and federal governments, and a long-term policy solution on immigration, while stressing that the administration would “keep open lines of communication” with all elected officials, stakeholders and everyday New Yorkers.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“We only ask that in return we get a good faith effort for help. We've seen too many criticisms couched in half truth,” she said. “We've got to do this together for the benefit of all New Yorkers…If you don't like what we're doing, I can understand. We can have a difference of opinions, but we're asking for constructive, real suggestions, not idle talking points.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Various critics have questioned Mayor Adams' operational approach, which has included several misguided moves, what they’ve called his anti-immigrant rhetoric about the crisis, and ways in which he has lashed out at fellow Democrats whose help he needs — while Republicans have said he's been too welcoming of migrants. Advocates and Democrats want to see the mayor not only lower the temperature of his remarks about how the city is “being destroyed by the migrant crisis” and his criticism of President Biden, City Council members, and others, but also communicate far better with local officials as he opens shelters and takes other steps.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">They have called on him to extend right-to-shelter protections, invest in immigrant legal services, cut red tape for housing rental vouchers, and other steps they say could help everyone involved and even the city’s bottom line, which has been the mayor’s main focus.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Democratic mayor has enacted cuts to city agencies and proposed more as his administration estimated a $4.3 billion cost of sheltering and providing services to migrants for the current and next fiscal years, though that number has been </span><a href="https://ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/snapshot-new-york-city-spending-for-asylum-seekers-may2023.pdf"><span style="font-weight: 400;">questioned</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> as an inflated projection by some. The city has only received about $30.5 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), though hundreds of millions more is projected.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">And the state has appropriated $1 billion in its recently-passed budget, which includes $767 million to reimburse 29% of the city’s shelter costs for migrants (in line with its share of other shelter costs), $162 million for operational and logistical support from the New York State National Guard, $137 million for health care for migrants, a $25 million resettlement fund, $10 million in legal assistance, and more.</span></p> <p><b>Desperate Moves, Pushback, and Help<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Last week, Adams signed an executive order suspending parts of the city’s right-to-shelter law, which mandates that the city provides a bed to any person who needs one. The order suspended portions of the law that require timely placement of families with children, require families to be placed in private rather than congregate settings, and certain eviction prevention protections.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The executive order comes shortly on the heels of the administration’s decision to bus hundreds of migrants to hotels in Orange and Rockland Counties, which was met with swift local opposition. Rockland County Executive Ed Day, a Republican, declared a state of emergency to prevent migrants from being brought to and sheltered in the county while Orange County officials filed two separate lawsuits in state Supreme Court over the plan, winning a temporary restraining order on Monday.  </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Adams administration has also </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/12/nyregion/ny-migrants-public-school-gym.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">housed</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> migrants in a school gym in Coney Island, and is preparing to use several others for that purpose, though after outcry the city reversed course at least temporarily. “The city should not be using schools for intake and shelter,” said Murad Awawdeh, executive director of New York Immigration Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group. “We don't want to disrupt students’ school environment. And the city owns at least a million square feet of space across the city and we need to be prioritizing those spaces.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">According to a </span><a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2023/05/11/adams-considers-housing-migrants-shuttered-prison-00096518" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Politico New York report</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, the mayor also considered potentially sheltering migrants in a shuttered correctional facility in Dutchess County and </span><a href="https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/ny-rikers-island-migrants-closed-jail-mayor-adams-20230517-m5yhriyoffdwtbzrlln63upxrq-story.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">the Daily News</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> reported that he may use a shuttered jail facility on Rikers Island, something Adams did not deny on Wednesday as he told reporters that everything is on the table, prompting another wave of outcry. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“Cutting migrants off from resources and support and handing them over to jail facilities is not safety,” said Eileen Maher, a leader with VOCAL-NY’s Civil Rights Union who was formerly detained on Rikers, in a statement. “This is just another attempt from Adams to use the carceral system to disappear people and it's unacceptable. Rikers must be ‘off the table.’”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In one bit of news welcomed by advocates, the mayor on Monday used his </span><a href="https://www.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/406-23/emergency-executive-order-406" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">executive authority</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to suspend the required Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) for siting and building homeless shelters, which he previously did for the Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Centers (HERRCs) set up in response to the migrant influx. Besides shelters, the city has opened 150 emergency sites for migrants, many of which are hotels, and 8 HERRCs.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">While the mayor did release a </span><a href="https://www.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/158-23/mayor-adams-releases-the-road-forward-new-blueprint-handle-asylum-seeker-crisis-moving-forward#/0" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">blueprint</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in March to deal with the ongoing crisis, including by creating a new Office of Asylum Seeker Operations, the plan was </span><a href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/11868-city-council-immigrant-affairs-asylum-seekers-budget" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">immediately questioned</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> as inadequate and misguided, including the question of why a new office was necessary beyond the existing Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The City Council has presented several solutions over the course of months. In September, 34 Council members </span><a href="https://twitter.com/galeabrewer/status/1570873235214077957" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">wrote</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to U.S. Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand asking them for help with expedited work authorization for migrants. In October, the Council identified 10 large hotels for use as HERRCs, a suggestion that the administration opposed at the time but eventually ended up using some of those proposed sites.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In December, the Council put out a </span><a href="https://council.nyc.gov/press/2022/12/21/2328/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">full report</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> outlining short-term measures to address migrants’ needs before and when they arrive and long-term policies for housing, education, health care, food security and more. The Council also launched a public-private partnership in March to provide funding to community-based groups that are assisting migrants. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“New York City will always be a welcoming and safe harbor for people seeking asylum, who deserve to be treated with care, dignity, and compassion. Unfortunately, our City continues to shoulder the significant bulk and cost of this humanitarian response, which is unfair and unsustainable without the necessary funding from all levels of government,” said Council Speaker Adrienne Adams and Council Finance Chair Justin Brannan, in a statement earlier this month after the city received FEMA’s initial round of funding. “Despite the City’s $350 million request, FEMA's initial grant provides a paltry $30.5 million, which is not anywhere close to enough to cover the cost of assistance for asylum seekers. New York City deserves much more support to continue providing services for more than 60,000 asylum seekers. The Council remains strongly committed to helping all those who seek refuge, and we look forward to working with our partners to secure this important additional funding.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The state and federal governments have appeared largely indifferent to the city’s challenges for most of the past year. There has been no coordinated strategy among the federal, state, and local governments. As </span><a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2023/05/12/critics-say-hochul-is-mia-during-migrant-crisis-00096647" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Politico New York reported</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, Democratic leaders believe that Governor Kathy Hochul, a fellow Democrat and staunch Adams ally, has been missing from the conversation – though she did write </span><a href="https://nypost.com/2023/05/12/hochul-begs-biden-for-more-aid-to-confront-migrant-crisis/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">a May 12 letter</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to President Joe Biden pleading for assistance, saw to the $1 billion for the city in the state budget deal reached early this month, and was in Washington D.C. on Wednesday to push for more federal help on the issue.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">And while President Joe Biden, a Democrat, has taken some measures to address the ongoing crisis as well as the surge from the lifting of pandemic-era Title 42, which allowed for more expulsion of asylum-seeking migrants on public health grounds, in the divided Congress there has been almost no movement on immigration reform or related legislation. Congress appropriated $800 million in December for the migrant crisis with a significant amount expected to be allocated to New York City, but very little of that has flowed to the city yet through FEMA for unclear reasons.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“We're at this point where we've been doing this for a year now, and really haven't had very much traction on a lot of the different areas that we need to,” said Awawdeh. “The simplest thing we can do and the first thing we need to do is actually invest in getting people out of emergency shelter and into permanent housing.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Even as the mayor continues to plead for aid from the federal government, expedited work permits for migrants, and a different operational approach at the border to help spread the influx of asylum-seekers around the country, critics have offered solutions, both short- and long-term, to address the overall crisis.</span></p> <p><b>Extend Right to Shelter Standards and Invest in Immigration Legal Services<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Last week, City Comptroller Brad Lander and Council Member Shahana Hanif, who chairs the Council’s immigration committee, wrote a </span><a href="https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/letter-to-mayor-adams-re-prioritizing-immigration-legal-services-to-assist-asylum-seekers-on-pathways-out-of-shelter/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">letter</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to the mayor, calling on him to invest an additional $70 million in the city budget for immigration legal services. That would include $10 million to scale up pro se legal clinics that help immigrants apply for asylum, work authorization, and Temporary Protected Status; and $60 million to provide legal representation to those in immigration courts, where there is a backlog of 127,000 cases. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The mayor’s office did not respond to an inquiry about the funding recommendation.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Those funds, Lander and Hanif said, could help expand the city’s existing programs for immigrants including ActionNYC, the Immigrant Opportunity Initiative (IOI), and the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project (NYIFUP). And they said the city should work with law schools and law firms to enroll volunteers who can provide legal assistance to migrants, and enlist the help of nonprofit and religious organizations for outreach and translation services.  </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">They urged the administration to take an “all hands” approach to the crisis by expanding direct outreach to asylum seekers in the HERRCs and DHS shelter system and to create systems for data collection, case prioritization, and follow-up contact. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“With a dedicated all-hands outreach effort and an investment of $70 million for legal services, the City can significantly reduce the shelter length of stay, redeploy existing shelter space for people newly in need or newly arrived, reduce the number of people otherwise in the shelter system, and save significantly on the costs of operating shelters,” Lander and Hanif wrote. “As immigrants have for generations, these new arrivals have the potential to contribute greatly to NYC’s economic and cultural vitality. Their success, and their contributions to NYC, depend on taking the next step now to help them establish new lives here.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The letter was sent just prior to a City Council budget hearing where Hanif questioned officials from the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs and was left dissatisfied with their testimony. Though she agreed that the federal government has left the city to fend for itself, “a lack of federal support does not excuse some of the ways in which the City is failing to meet the needs of asylum seekers,” she said, in a statement after the hearing. She noted that the city has disbursed no new funds for asylum seeker legal services this year and that there still seems to be no long-term plan. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Hanif also urged the passage of her bill, </span><a href="https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=6047891&amp;GUID=84A59237-CFA0-4415-B52B-6889C47927F3&amp;Options=&amp;Search=" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Intro. 942</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, which would require that emergency congregate housing, including the HERRCs, abide by the minimum standards required under the right-to-shelter law.</span></p> <p><b>Free Up Shelter Capacity by Eliminating 90-Day Rule for Housing Vouchers<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The migrant crisis has placed a particular strain on the city’s shelter system, with the daily shelter population </span><a href="https://www.nyc.gov/assets/dhs/downloads/pdf/dailyreport.pdf"><span style="font-weight: 400;">ballooning</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to nearly 80,000 adults and children. According to city estimates from early May, that included about 37,500 asylum-seekers. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The city requires that families with children spend 90-days in a shelter before they can apply for the CityFHEPS program, which provides a rental assistance voucher to help families find permanent housing. An analysis released Monday by Win, the city’s largest shelter and services provider for families with children, found that repealing that 90-day rule could save the city tens of thousands of dollars per homeless family with children. The organization is one of several that have argued for easing access to housing vouchers</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">"For decades, the 90-Day Rule has arbitrarily kept New Yorkers in shelter far longer than they should be — but right now, the City has a chance to end this illogical barrier,” said Christine Quinn, President &amp; CEO of Win, in a statement. “Repealing this rule could save the City up to $27,990 per family with children, while helping them leave shelter sooner. It’s the definition of a win-win.” </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The mayor’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the 90-day rule for this story, and has </span><a href="https://gothamist.com/news/citys-largest-shelter-provider-urges-mayor-to-scrap-90-day-shelter-stay-rule-for-housing" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">not taken a position</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in prior reporting by other outlets on the subject. “The administration is deeply grateful to the New Yorkers who have experienced homelessness and helped us develop our blueprint for housing and homelessness,” the mayor’s office told </span><a href="https://www.cityandstateny.com/policy/2023/02/advocates-decry-90-day-waiting-rule-affordable-housing-sheltered-new-yorkers-needless/383124/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">City &amp; State</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in a statement in February. “Just a few months ago, we announced a host of CityFHEPS reforms to cut red tape, reduce administrative burdens, and move more New Yorkers out of shelter and into affordable housing as quickly as possible, and we are doing that everyday.” </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Quinn, a former City Council Speaker, noted that eliminating the rule would free up shelter capacity while easing pressure on the city budget. “There is no good reason to keep this rule in place — but we think City Hall will agree there are plenty of reasons to repeal it,” she said. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Though the mayor could unilaterally get rid of the regulation, there is also an effort before the City Council to do so. Council Member Diana Ayala, a Bronx Democrat, has sponsored </span><a href="https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=5995863&amp;GUID=4F0FC024-E228-4E8D-809B-12A8007C4DA4&amp;Options=ID%7CText%7C&amp;Search=878" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">legislation</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> that would eliminate the need for a family to stay in a shelter at all before they can apply for a housing voucher.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“Repealing the 90-day rule is not only good for the city financially, it’s the right thing to do,” Ayala said in a statement. “Families entering shelter should not have to wait 90 days to begin applying for vouchers that take months to process. If we intend to solve the bottlenecks within our shelter system, then we must take a look at all the policies in place that are contributing to that bottleneck, including the 90-day rule.”</span></p> <p><b>Renovate Private and City-Owned Vacant Apartments <br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">As a means to address the homelessness and housing crisis, elected officials and housing advocates have been urging the administration to invest in renovating vacant apartments owned by the city and also to provide incentives to private landlords to carry out similar fixes in dilapidated units that they own. Those solutions could, by extension, also assist in tackling the migrant crisis as they provide an avenue for people living in shelters to transition to permanent homes. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Open New York, a pro-housing group, conducted a survey and found over 200 vacant rent-stabilized units in buildings that the city either owns or subsidizes, according to </span><a href="https://gothamist.com/news/empty-nyc-owned-apartments-could-help-solve-housing-crisis-policy-group-says" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">a Gothamist report</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. The group is pushing the administration to get those apartments back in rotation by funding repairs. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), the public housing agency, also has thousands of vacant apartments that elected officials and advocates say could be used to quickly provide housing to those in shelter if they are fixed and leased.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The mayor did take one step </span><a href="https://www.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/272-23/mayor-adams-invest-up-10-million-repair-rent-stabilized-homes-providing-roofs-heads#:~:text=NEW%20YORK%20%E2%80%93%20New%20York%20City,with%20access%20to%20those%20homes." target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">last month</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to coax private landlords into bringing rent-stabilized homes back on the market by launching a $10 million program that will provide $25,000 each to renovate 400 “chronically vacant” rent-stabilized units and then connect those apartments with families receiving CityFHEPS vouchers. However, housing advocates and landlords have both said the program is a drop in the bucket considering what they say are tens of thousands of rent-stabilized units that lie vacant across the city. </span></p> <p><b>Lease Apartments on the Market for Homeless Families<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, a Democrat, has criticized the real estate industry for failing to support the city’s efforts, called out suburban lawmakers for their refusal to permit more housing development, and blasted the Biden administration’s relative inaction on a crisis that cuts across multiple states and cities.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“While Mayor Adams is doing the wrong thing in rolling back Right-to-Shelter, we must be careful to call even more loudly on those who are doing nothing at all: the real estate community that sits on thousands of vacant apartments while families sleep in the streets; our neighbors in the suburbs who hide behind racist zoning policies that prevent new affordable housing from being built; and the Biden administration that refuses to step up with meaningful aid despite immigration being a federal issue,” Reynoso said in part in a statement on Friday. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">On Wednesday, Reynoso proposed three legal options for the governor, mayor, and City Council that would simultaneously confront the housing and homelessness crisis to reduce pressure on the city’s shelter system. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Under his proposal the Council would pass a law adding the migrant crisis to the list of emergencies in the city’s Administrative Code, the mayoral administration would lease apartments for homeless families while landlords would be required to make it a priority to rent to the city at market-rate, and landlords would be prohibited from refusing to rent to the city when an emergency has been declared. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Additionally, Reynoso proposed that the mayor declare an emergency over the homelessness crisis and seek more assistance for it from the state.</span></p> <p><b>State Action<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Advocates have praised the governor and Legislature for allocating about $73 million in the recently approved $229 billion state budget for legal assistance and services for immigrants. But they have also criticized the failure of various pieces of legislation that could aid immigrants more broadly and help the newly-arrived asylum-seekers. The top relevant priority for advocates is the passage of the Access to Representation Act (ARA), which would ensure the right to legal representation in immigration cases. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“It is imperative to use a portion of these additional funds to build the long-term infrastructure that the Access to Representation Act would provide,” said Shayna Kessler, state advocacy manager for the Vera Institute of Justice’s Advancing Universal Representation initiative, in a statement referencing the $73 million allocation. “The ARA guarantees in state law the right to legal representation in these complex immigration cases and ensures long-term stability for these life-saving services. It is the right thing to do, and we will redouble our efforts to ensure the bill is passed this year.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Borough President Reynoso urged the governor to offer the city the use of state personnel and facilities, while suspending local laws that municipalities such as Rockland County have used to block migrants from being housed in their jurisdiction, as well as those that counties have used to block new affordable housing creation. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In an </span><a href="https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/politics/2023/05/17/hochul--n-y--working-to-find--welcoming--sites-for-migrant-housing" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">interview with NY1</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in Washington D.C. on Wednesday, Hochul said the state is working with the city to identify sites to welcome migrants, including </span><a href="https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2023/05/17/local-officials-told-suny-campuses--closed-psych-centers-possible-migrant-housing-options" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">potentially</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> SUNY campuses and shuttered psychiatric facilities. “The city has done an incredible job trying to find places to house them, but they are at capacity.” Hochul said. “So we’re helping [Adams] find places that will be welcoming.”</span></p> <p><b>Federal Action</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> <br /></span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mayor Adams has pressed President Biden to not just provide funding but to take several executive actions on the migrant crisis. Last month, he called on the Department of Homeland Security to re-designate TPS for migrants from Venezuela, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Sudan, South Sudan, and Cameroon, to expand access to humanitarian parole, and to increase the number of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officers, or reassign existing ones, to reduce application processing times. Those measures would help migrants obtain expedited work authorization. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“The president of the United States can give us the ability to allow people to work. This is in the lap of the executive branch of the United States of America, and that's what we are calling for,” Adams said at the time.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Adams has often cast himself as standing alone on the migrant crisis, critiquing fellow Democrats, including Biden, and others for what he sees as lackluster support in lobbying the federal government for aid. While the mayor has been right that federal and state financial aid has been slow to materialize, he has falsely claimed that Biden has no </span><a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/01/05/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-announces-new-border-enforcement-actions/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">southern border policy</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and that City Council members and others have not helped lobby for federal and state support.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Besides the proposals the Council issued, Speaker Adams also advocated for more support from the state in her </span><a href="https://council.nyc.gov/press/2023/02/15/2353/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">budget testimony</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in Albany in February. On April 7, after the city submitted its application for FEMA funding on March 29, the speaker and Council Member Brannan </span><a href="http://council.nyc.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/4.7.23_NYC-Council-Letter-RE-FEMA-Asylum-Seeker-Funding-To-POTUS.pdf"><span style="font-weight: 400;">wrote a letter</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to President Biden in support of the request. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Last month, in an effort Adams did acknowledge, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and members of New York’s Congressional delegation stood outside the U.S. Capitol with immigration activists and proposed a series of solutions, echoing demands that the mayor has also made of the federal government. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“For almost a year, New York City has been a focal point of the ongoing challenge of aiding asylum seekers – but this issue did not originate when the first bus arrived at Port Authority,” they said in a joint statement. “It is rooted in decades of inaction toward reforming our immigration infrastructure and agencies’ inability to adapt to the needs of people arriving in our country.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“New York City, a city of immigrants, needs aid in meeting the current crisis, and at the same time, we must implement real, achievable, sustainable changes to our federal systems of immigration to help ensure that people coming to our country for its opportunities do not find themselves arriving in a new crisis of our own inertia.,” they added.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Williams and the congressional representatives called for:</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Issuing new Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designations, redesignations, and extensions to immigrants.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Passage of the Asylum Seeker Work Authorization Act to reduce the waiting period for work authorizations from 180 days to 30 days.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Passage of The New Way Forward Act to significantly reform the immigration system and its interactions with the criminal legal system that disproportionately hurt immigrants of color.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Ending all contracts with private immigration detention centers, repealing mandatory detention, ending family detention, and banning solitary confinement.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Passage of the New Deal for New Americans Act to ease the naturalization process and address obstacles to employment and language barriers.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Expanding eligibility for DACA recipients and undocumented immigrants to Medicaid, CHIP, and the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance exchanges, while ensuring that access does not affect their ability to apply for citizenship under the </span><a href="https://www.dhs.gov/news/2022/09/08/dhs-publishes-fair-and-humane-public-charge-rule" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">public charge rule</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Creating a pathway to permanent residency and citizenship for Dreamers (including DACA recipients), those with Temporary Protected Status and those covered by Deferred Enforced Departure.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Passage of the Renewing Immigration Provisions of the Immigration Act of 1929 to expand pathways to permanent residency for eligible immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for at least seven years.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Clearing family and employment-based backlogs, recapturing unused visas, eliminating lengthy wait times for reentry, and increasing per-country visa caps.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Broad immigration court reform, increased funding for legal assistance, reduced immigration court backlogs, expanded training for immigration judges, and more.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Expedited processing of Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) applications to allow those without Social Security numbers to file taxes.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Expanded funding for language accessibility.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Williams, a Democrat, has been critical of the mayor, particularly in the wake of his executive order partially suspending right-to-shelter. “The mayor attempting to weaken those rights now—in a moment of immense need for so many asylum seekers—is a misguided and harmful action in the face of the real, urgent challenge exacerbated by a lack of decisive and timely state and federal action,” the public advocate said in a statement. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">But he hasn’t reserved his criticism only for Adams. “Denying rights and resources to people arriving in desperate need and fervent hope will not replace action needed from the President, who has failed to provide sufficient federal funding or a national response, or the Governor, who has failed to support the city, and therefore the state, by coordinating with other municipalities,” Williams said. “Instead, this action will only harm our newest, aspiring and long-term New Yorkers and shift, not solve, the crisis. While it is clear that the current situation is unsafe and unsustainable, we need Democratic leaders on all levels of government to focus on getting the support needed to uphold the right to shelter, not undercut it.”</span></p> <p>

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

Read more by this writer.

</p>
Three Downstate Casino Licenses are Up for Grabs: Everything You Need To Know 2023-05-18T04:00:00+00:00 2023-05-18T04:00:00+00:00 https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/12006-downstate-new-york-city-casino-licenses Kristian Burt [email protected] <p> <img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/downsate-cas-license.jpg" /></p> <p>A rendering for The Coney, a proposed casino in Coney Island</p> <hr /> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">After Governor Kathy Hochul and the State Legislature decided that Downstate New York—which includes New York City, Long Island, and Westchester County—could potentially get three full casino licenses on a faster timeline than originally planned, the application process has begun and concepts for proposals have been sporadically announced. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The availability of the three casino licenses and the process for awarding them were finalized in the state budget passed in April 2022, in part accelerating a plan from a prior casino law passed in 2013 that allowed for the more immediate opening of several Upstate casinos.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The formal application process for the three Downstate licenses began in January of this year, with the region’s two current “racinos” — the MGM Resorts International’s Empire City Casino in Yonkers and Genting Group’s Resorts World New York City in the Queens Aqueduct Racetrack complex — believed by some to be at the front of the line for licenses to become full casinos with table games. They are currently limited to a race track and slot machines, and since they are both already established their owners are hopeful that they can win full licenses, allowing them to expand significantly with games such as poker, blackjack, and more.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">But they have serious competition from a series of groups that have put forward proposals across the city and beyond.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As of May 1, there have been 11 casino proposals announced in some form, including five in Manhattan (Midtown, Hudson Yards, Penn Station, Times Square, and adjacent to the United Nations building), two in Queens (Willets Point and Ozone Park), one in the Bronx (Throgs Neck), one in Brooklyn (Coney Island), one in Nassau County (Uniondale), and one in Westchester County (Yonkers).</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In order to formally apply for a casino license, the minimum capital investment for the project must be $500 million, applicants must submit a research study detailing the economic impact their casino would have on the surrounding community, and they must pay the $1 million application fee. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The casinos are intended to promote economic growth for the state through jobs at the venues and increased activity in surrounding communities, while also providing tax revenue that will fund education and financial assistance programs — as well as the MTA, per the new state budget passed in early May of this year. Along with the $1 million per proposal in application fees, each of the potential three casino license awardees will be required to pay a $500 million license fee to the state. Taxes will produce ongoing revenue, including but not limited to at least 25% on gross slot gaming revenue and 10% on all other gross gaming revenue.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">State Senator Joseph Addabbo, a Queens Democrat and chair of the Senate’s Committee on Racing, Gaming, and Wagering, said the casino licenses are a hot commodity for all involved.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“The gaming industry gives about $3 billion on average every year to education,” Addabbo said in an interview with Gotham Gazette. “There is billions in revenue, there's thousands of construction and post-construction jobs. So the opportunity here doesn't come about every couple of years, this is a one-time shot. We're not talking about more licenses, this is three, and that's gonna be it for the foreseeable future.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Addabbo, and the state senate committee he chairs, will monitor the downstate licensing process and provide oversight, but does not have a role in the selection of the applicants.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">There are multiple governing parties overseeing New York’s gaming initiatives, including the gaming committee in each house of the Legislature and the ultimate decider, </span><a href="https://www.gaming.ny.gov/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">the New York State Gaming Commission</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Before final decisions by the Gaming Commission, the entity presiding over much of the downstate license application process is the New York Gaming Facility Location Board, which was created as part of the 2013 law allowing for new casino licenses upstate and, eventually, downstate. The commission elected new members in 2022 to oversee the downstate casino licensure process.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Board is now composed of three members: Vicki Been, an NYU professor and former New York City deputy mayor; Quenia Abreu, President and CEO of the New York Women’s Chamber of Commerce; and Stuart Rabinowitz, an attorney and former president of Hofstra University. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Its power ranges from setting the licensing fees to conducting investigative hearings at any stage of the application process. Ultimately, it will select up to three candidates to be reviewed for licenses by the Gaming Commission. It reports to Governor Kathy Hochul, though Hochul has indicated she is not involved in the process.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">On January 3, the Board released a Request For Applicants (RFA), which included guidance for potential bidders, evaluation criteria, and an outline of the entire process timeline. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">That kicked off a casino bidding process that is split into two stages, and many proposals have emerged.</span></p> <p><b>Stage 1</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br /></span><span style="font-weight: 400;">The first stage of the formal process began with the Board’s RFA in January and a period in which potential applicants could ask questions.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As of March 2, the Board received “several hundred questions” and is working on responses, which will then be published. After the publication of those responses, there will be another round of question-and-answer as the process unfolds. The official deadline for applications will be 30 days after the Board’s second set of question-responses is published — a deadline expected to be sometime this summer or fall.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In the meantime, a series of potential applicants have been announcing proposals for casinos across the five boroughs and in the suburbs. More are expected as the deadline approaches, while some that have been publicized may not officially enter the bidding process.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">After the official application period ends, applicants that choose to formally move forward in the process and pay the $1 million application fee will be reviewed based on their geography by a Community Advisory Committee (CAC). Each application will trigger the establishment of a CAC.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The CACs for each proposal in Westchester and Long Island are composed of five members—one each chosen by the governor, relevant mayor, and local state senator, State Assembly member, and City Council member. CACs in New York City will be composed of six members, with the addition of the relevant Borough President choosing one.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">For example, for a proposed casino(s) in Coney Island, Brooklyn, the CAC would be made up of representatives of Mayor Eric Adams, Governor Kathy Hochul, Borough President Antonio Reynoso, State Senator Jessica Scarcella-Spanton, Assemblymember Alec Brook-Krasny, and City Council Member Ari Kagan (or the official themself).</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">CACs will hold public hearings and review written responses to casino proposals under their purview, and must hold a vote to determine whether each proposal has local community support. CACs can also provide feedback for the proposals, asking questions or expressing concerns, which applicants can respond to prior to the vote.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In order for a casino proposal to move on in the process, the CAC vote must yield at least a two-thirds majority in the affirmative, meaning four votes. Proposals that are advanced move on to the Gaming Facility Location Board.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The first stage of the process will end after all applicants are approved or disapproved by the CACs, and those approved are submitted to the local zoning authorities to begin the relevant review process by which a potential casino could win the necessary zoning changes.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Senator Addabbo said the creation of the CACs is a new function for New York when reviewing casino proposals, and called them an integral part of the process.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“That is a critical first step, something we did not do back in 2013 when we did the initial four licenses upstate, there was no community input,” Addabbo said. “And even when they were doing a racino for Aqueduct, the community had very little input, not even advisory, but just whenever we had the opportunity, we gained input. But this is something new for this go around of the three licenses downstate, and it's a critical step, without that CAC approval, they can't go forward.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Aside from adding the CACs, the state is retaining most of the structure from the 2013 upstate casino licensing process, during which the Gaming Facility Location Board selected three casinos out of 16 applicants: Montreign Resort and Casino in Thompson, Rivers Casino and Resort in Schenectady, and Lago Resort Casino in Tyre. </span></p> <p><b>Stage 2<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Stage two will begin once the aforementioned application and zoning process is completed, after which the Gaming Facility Location Board will announce the remaining applicants, who will publicly present their proposals to the Board and hear comments from a public audience.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Board will then select “up to three applicants” to be reviewed by the State Gaming Commission, which will ultimately finalize casino license winners.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">According to the RFA, the Gaming Facility Location Board will select applicants based on a weighted system, with “economic activity and business development” being 70%; “local impact siting” 10%; “workforce enhancement” 10%; and “diversity framework” 10%.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Gaming Commission is composed of five people, including Chair Brian O’Dwyer. The other members are John Crotty, Peter Moschetti Jr., Marissa Shorenstein, and Jerry Skurnik.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Commission will review applicants' ability to fund their casino projects in full, meet all the state's requirements, fund any proposed community outreach programs proposed, and otherwise follow through.</span></p> <p><b>Making Progress<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Though the process remains in Stage 1 going into the summer, Senator Addabbo is hopeful that it will be finished by the end of the year.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“I know they have the wherewithal and the professionalism to do the downstate licenses even though it is a different process,” Addabbo said of the Gaming Facility Location Board. “But nevertheless, I am keeping an eye on the progress they are making in terms of ultimately accepting these submissions by the proposed sites, and then evaluating them. So we're not there yet, but hopefully soon.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Another major proponent behind the process has been New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a former state senator who was chair of the Senate Racing, Gaming, and Wagering Committee when the racino licenses were being awarded. At the time, Adams </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/22/nyregion/22casino.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">wound up as part</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of an ethics investigation into the process and though he was never charged with a crime, he was reprimanded by the New York State Inspector General for working with figures tied to one of the bidders, including revealing internal information and attending a victory celebration, and not adequately responding during the Inspector General’s investigation.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Adams </span><a href="https://www.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/169-22/transcript-mayor-eric-adams-makes-social-services-related-announcement" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">has said he would like</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> at least two licenses to go to proposals in the city, citing the economic benefits they could bring.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“We would love to have two in New York City,” Adams said in March 2022. “I think it would be a great boost for the economy, and we are evaluating what's the best location, so we can weigh in with some type of communication. We're looking forward to doing so.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">But Adams </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/10/nyregion/adams-timothy-pearson-casino-salaries.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">has also come under scrutiny</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> around his casino-related relationships, including hiring his long-time friend Timothy Pearson as a senior advisor. At the time, Pearson was also a vice president of Resorts World Casino handling security. More recently, Adams’ former chief of staff, Frank Carone, </span><a href="https://www.amny.com/news/former-adams-chief-of-staff-to-aid-sl-green-in-its-times-square-casino-bid/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">signed a consulting contract with Greenberg Traurig</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, the legal firm representing SL Green in its Times Square casino bid. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Referencing the mayor’s time as chair of the Senate Racing and Wagering Committee, Senator Addabbo said Adams surely “understands the economic growth involved, the jobs, the revenue, and everything else that comes along with these casinos. So he's saying, 'Yeah, I want two' because he sees the potential economic growth and again, the jobs.”</span></p> <p><b>Proposals<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">There have been proposals announced and hinted at in all five boroughs except Staten Island, one on Long Island, and to expand the existing MGM casino in Westchester.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Manhattan appears that it will have the most bids, with five current proposals in the works. Borough President Mark Levine, who will select one member of any CAC in Manhattan or serve himself, has remained neutral to the bidding war while in its early stages, but is focused on making sure any casino would benefit the surrounding community.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“On the one side, there are benefits for jobs and economic development, so we have to look at what any proposal would mean for a neighborhood, good and bad,” Levine said on </span><a href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/11813-max-politics-podcast-manhattan-borough-president-mark-levine-housing-plan" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Gotham Gazette’s Max Politics podcast</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in February. “We have to weigh concerns about gambling addiction and what it would mean to local residents, so there's a lot to consider.” </span></p> <p><em>Midtown East</em><b><br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Soloviev Group, in partnership with one of the largest casino companies in the country, Mohegan, </span><a href="https://www.costar.com/article/1465567390/soloviev-group-bets-manhattans-largest-undeveloped-lot-will-help-it-win-coveted-casino-license" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">is hoping to build</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> a casino on one of the biggest undeveloped lots in Manhattan.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Adjacent to the United Nations building in Midtown along the East River, according to the draft plan the 6.7 acre plot would host a massive ferris wheel along with four acres of green space, two residential towers, a hotel, and a museum devoted to democracy. The casino itself would be situated mostly underground with windows overlooking the water. The project is initially being dubbed Freedom Plaza.</span></p> <p><em>Times Square </em><b><br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Caesars Entertainment </span><a href="https://deadline.com/2022/12/jay-z-roc-nation-caesars-palace-times-square-new-york-1235192668/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">has partnered with</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> realty-company SL Green and Jay Z’s entertainment business Roc Nation to try to bring a Caesars Palace casino to Times Square.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The companies </span><a href="https://www.curbed.com/2023/02/times-square-casino-slgreen-caesars-jay-z-security-bratton.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">argue the casino</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> would be a central player in the revival of the Theater District, with $117 million in funds going to initiatives around education, theater tickets for children in underserved communities, and more. The casino would be smaller than some of the other proposals, which the companies say will lead customers to also see Broadway shows and other attractions in and beyond Times Square.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">But the proposal has come with some of the harshest pushback yet. The ‘No Times Square Casino’ coalition </span><a href="http://www.notimessquarecasino.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">is a group</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of community groups in the Times Square area banding together to prevent a casino. The coalition officially denounced any applicants in the area on April 14, citing congestion, economic disruption, and social harm as main concerns.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Manhattan Community Board 5, which includes the Times Square area, has also passed </span><a href="https://www.citybiz.co/article/404258/no-times-square-casino-community-coalition-forms-to-oppose-gambling-plan/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">a resolution</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> pushing for the local City Council Member, Erik Bottcher, to oppose a casino bid for Times Square.</span></p> <p><em>Hudson Yards</em><b><br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Related Companies, one of the real estate firms behind the Hudson Yards redevelopment project, </span><a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-07/nyc-hudson-yards-developer-pitches-1-500-room-resort-in-casino-bid#xj4y7vzkg?leadSource=uverify%20wall"><span style="font-weight: 400;">is partnering with</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Las Vegas-based Wynn Resorts to bring a casino next to the Javits Center. The casino would be part of a larger project located on the western half of Hudson Yards, platformed on top of the MTA rail yard, and potentially consist of public parks, a school, a hotel, many restaurants, and the casino. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The project is being pitched as an apt extension of Hudson Yards as it currently exists — </span><a href="https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/s/largest-real-estate-project-in-u-s--is-being-built-above-a-train-yard-162054332.html?guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&amp;guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAJWcFUdxGZz-wxcD1jjc8PtehU9tRAQQs8MDJuSAXnfRXPxVYNHf4imofOADF-o0lOYV0Nv2ZleX53VcEnoTSFsVQeGeHDhQUCUFmatF1dv8m3MBJolmgVKfwwCsUaIiF1HVBPnnYI-PjUPt9FzF7X_NN46ZLJERu-dFER2zddTP#:~:text=The%20Hudson%20Yards%20project%2C%20on,was%20constructed%20in%20the%201930s." target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">the largest</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> private real estate development in American history with multiple tourist attractions, a mall, public space, event venues, and more — and neighbor to The Javits Center, the massive convention center whose attendees would be natural potential patrons of a new casino.</span></p> <p><em>Fifth Avenue</em><b><br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Saks Fifth Avenue owner Hudson’s Bay Company </span><a href="https://www.6sqft.com/new-renderings-of-saks-fifth-avenue-casino-in-midtown/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">is hoping to bring</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> a high-end casino to its flagship store at 611 5th Ave. The company wants to use 200,000 feet of existing space from the ninth through the 11th floors of the store to bring a luxury casino, which would include a rooftop terrace overlooking Rockefeller Center. The upper floors are currently used as temporary swing spaces.</span></p> <p><em>Penn Station</em><b><br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">City real estate giant Vornado Realty </span><a href="https://www.usbets.com/report-nyc-casino-proposal-near-penn-station-emerges/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">is looking to build</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> a casino on the lot that currently houses Hotel Pennsylvania. The hotel, which sits across from Penn Station, </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/02/nyregion/hotel-pennsylvania-nyc.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">is currently being demolished</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, part of a major potential redevelopment plan for the entire Penn Station area that has hit significant roadbumps.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Vornado is proposing a casino to complement any future upgrades to the station and surrounding neighborhood, though the future of those plans, championed by Governor Hochul, has become uncertain given the company’s reevaluation of its proposal, which relied heavily on new office towers.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The company has not publicly announced any partners for the project, and no renderings or detailed plans have been published.</span></p> <p><em>Ferry Point</em><b><br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The only current bid in the Bronx is at Ferry Point Park in Throggs Neck, connected to the Trump Links Golf Course. Gaming company Bally’s </span><a href="https://www.bxtimes.com/ballys-makes-a-bid-for-a-casino-at-trump-golf-links-in-throggs-neck/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">is hoping to put</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> a casino where the golf course clubhouse now stands. The casino would use about ten acres of land, with seven more for public green space and potential housing for employees.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The casino proposal has come with mixed feelings. Bronx Borough President Vanessa Gibson is worried about how the Throgs Neck and larger Bronx community would be affected by the casino, but she’s intrigued by the economic development potential.</span> </p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“I want to be able to make sure that there's a real community benefit, but you understand when you’re building out casinos, you're going to have a hotel, restaurant, parking, small businesses, retail,” Gibson said recently on </span><a href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/11863-max-politics-podcast-bronx-borough-president-vanessa-gibson" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Gotham Gazette’s Max Politics podcast</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. “So you're building a whole new neighborhood within a neighborhood and you're bringing in clientele, I want to make this beneficial for the Bronx.”</span></p> <p><em>Coney Island</em><b><br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The only current proposal in Brooklyn </span><a href="https://www.timeout.com/newyork/news/here-is-what-a-casino-on-coney-island-might-actually-look-like-030723" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">is for a beachfront casino</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in Coney Island, near famous long-standing attractions. Real-estate investment firm Thor Equities Group is partnering with Saratoga Casino Holdings and The Chickasaw Nation, as well as Legends Hospitality.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The casino would include a hotel across from the boardwalk, a convention hall, and a large entertainment venue. Part of the pitch is to help make the area a place with year-round attractions.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso said he is open to the prospect of a casino in Coney Island, but he has questions about benefits for the surrounding community.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“We need a reinvigoration of some sort,” Reynoso said on </span><a href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/11774-max-politics-podcast-brooklyn-borough-president-antonio-reynoso-vision" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Gotham Gazette’s Max Politics podcast</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in January, speaking about Coney Island in general. “I don't know if a casino answers that, but I don't want to dismiss it outright, especially if this casino could provide, within five years, can every single [public] housing development in Coney Island be repaired and be dignified housing? Can they do that? Are they going to bring more people? We're talking about one of the highest rates of unemployment. Coney Island, unemployment, almost 12%, especially for Black and brown people. Are we talking about full-time jobs that they can get? Those are all things you can't just push aside.”</span></p> <p><em>Mets-Willets Point</em><b><br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Aside from the already-established Resorts World casino, there is one other proposal announced for Queens, with a big push underway. New York Mets owner Steve Cohen </span><a href="https://nypost.com/2022/11/19/mets-owner-steve-cohen-betting-big-on-nyc-casino/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">is looking to capitalize</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> on the already-announced $780 million development project in Willets Point, which will bring a stadium for New York City Football Club, housing, retail, and more, and put his own casino adjacent to the Mets’ Citi Field.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Cohen has named the proposal “New Green Willets” and <a href="https://www.thecity.nyc/2023/5/18/23727795/mets-steve-cohen-parking-soccer-stadium" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">hopes to put the casino</a> where some of the Mets parking lots are currently, though he will need the city to remove the current zoning designation in order to begin construction — it is technically city-owned park land.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Members of the community have already </span><a href="https://patch.com/new-york/flushing-murray-hill/new-yorkers-rally-against-casino-citi-field" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">begun protesting</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> the proposal, which will set the table for the CAC’s deliberations.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">For his part, Queens Borough President Donovan Richards is hoping to get both a Willets Point casino license and the expanded Resorts World license. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“I think it would be a homerun, perhaps to have two,” Richards said on </span><a href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/11721-max-politics-podcast-borough-president-donovan-richards-queens-updates" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Gotham Gazette’s Max Politics podcast</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in December. “But the jobs, what's happening at Willets, transportation improvements — I will take it all coming out of this pandemic. But let me end by saying this on the casino: one of the things we've been clear about is right across the train tracks is neighborhoods, like Corona, have been hit hard during this pandemic. And we want to make sure that even as Willets is developed, even with the possibility of a casino, that we're also focusing in on a lot of the community benefits that need to also be a part of this plan.”</span></p> <p><em>Nassau</em><b><br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Casino and resort company Las Vegas Sands </span><a href="https://www.bisnow.com/new-york/news/construction-development/las-vegas-sands-pitch-nassau-coliseum-for-new-casino-117190" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">has proposed to buy</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> the lease of the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum and use the 80 available acres of land to build a casino, hotel, community spaces, a performance venue, and celebrity chef restaurants. Las Vegas Sands is collaborating with RXR Realty, which has been working on the Coliseum site.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sands </span><a href="https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/casinos-gaming/las-vegas-sands-takes-another-step-toward-ny-resort-project-2768285/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">announced on April 26</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> that Nassau County signed a 99-year preliminary agreement with the company to use the Coliseum site for the casino, a major first step in the bid’s chances. Sands will also need approval from the Nassau County Legislature, which is scheduled to meet around the proposal on May 22.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">While the proposal is in its early stages and there is growing institutional support, community pushback has started. A petition ‘Say No To The Casino’ has </span><a href="https://www.change.org/p/say-no-to-the-casino" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">garnered</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> more than 2,000 signatures. Hofstra University </span><a href="https://www.liherald.com/stories/hofstra-university-sues-county-planning-commission-over-4-billion-nassau-hub-casino-proposal,174397" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">is suing</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> the Nassau County Planning Commission for not adequately notifying the public of a hearing to consider the Las Vegas Sands casino, which it says violates the state Open Meetings Law.</span></p> <p><em>Existing Casinos</em><b><br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">MGM Resorts’ Empire City Casino in Yonkers and Resorts World Casino in Queens, the two current downstate ‘racinos’ — meaning race tracks and some gambling via slot machines but not table games — have been seen as likely frontrunners to win licenses to expand to become full-fledged casinos and offer far more amenities.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Addabbo, the Queens state senator and gaming committee chair, has been a major figure in the development and oversight of Resorts World, which is not far from his district. He said that though Resorts World has acres it is looking to expand upon with a new license, MGM will be applying with more space and the ability for a larger expansion project.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“With Resorts World, they already built their hotel, they already built an expansion, and they still have acres to build upon, but they still have about a billion-dollar investment,” Addabbo said, indicating his view of a disparity between the two in terms of their status and growth potential. “MGM, basically waiting for that license, they have great potential with their acreage, they’ve got a lot of room to expand and build upon and certainly improve that area, which means a thousand construction jobs, as well as the thousand post-construction jobs.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">

***
by Kristian Burt, Gotham Gazette

Read more by this writer.

</span></p>
<p> <img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/downsate-cas-license.jpg" /></p> <p>A rendering for The Coney, a proposed casino in Coney Island</p> <hr /> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">After Governor Kathy Hochul and the State Legislature decided that Downstate New York—which includes New York City, Long Island, and Westchester County—could potentially get three full casino licenses on a faster timeline than originally planned, the application process has begun and concepts for proposals have been sporadically announced. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The availability of the three casino licenses and the process for awarding them were finalized in the state budget passed in April 2022, in part accelerating a plan from a prior casino law passed in 2013 that allowed for the more immediate opening of several Upstate casinos.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The formal application process for the three Downstate licenses began in January of this year, with the region’s two current “racinos” — the MGM Resorts International’s Empire City Casino in Yonkers and Genting Group’s Resorts World New York City in the Queens Aqueduct Racetrack complex — believed by some to be at the front of the line for licenses to become full casinos with table games. They are currently limited to a race track and slot machines, and since they are both already established their owners are hopeful that they can win full licenses, allowing them to expand significantly with games such as poker, blackjack, and more.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">But they have serious competition from a series of groups that have put forward proposals across the city and beyond.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As of May 1, there have been 11 casino proposals announced in some form, including five in Manhattan (Midtown, Hudson Yards, Penn Station, Times Square, and adjacent to the United Nations building), two in Queens (Willets Point and Ozone Park), one in the Bronx (Throgs Neck), one in Brooklyn (Coney Island), one in Nassau County (Uniondale), and one in Westchester County (Yonkers).</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In order to formally apply for a casino license, the minimum capital investment for the project must be $500 million, applicants must submit a research study detailing the economic impact their casino would have on the surrounding community, and they must pay the $1 million application fee. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The casinos are intended to promote economic growth for the state through jobs at the venues and increased activity in surrounding communities, while also providing tax revenue that will fund education and financial assistance programs — as well as the MTA, per the new state budget passed in early May of this year. Along with the $1 million per proposal in application fees, each of the potential three casino license awardees will be required to pay a $500 million license fee to the state. Taxes will produce ongoing revenue, including but not limited to at least 25% on gross slot gaming revenue and 10% on all other gross gaming revenue.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">State Senator Joseph Addabbo, a Queens Democrat and chair of the Senate’s Committee on Racing, Gaming, and Wagering, said the casino licenses are a hot commodity for all involved.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“The gaming industry gives about $3 billion on average every year to education,” Addabbo said in an interview with Gotham Gazette. “There is billions in revenue, there's thousands of construction and post-construction jobs. So the opportunity here doesn't come about every couple of years, this is a one-time shot. We're not talking about more licenses, this is three, and that's gonna be it for the foreseeable future.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Addabbo, and the state senate committee he chairs, will monitor the downstate licensing process and provide oversight, but does not have a role in the selection of the applicants.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">There are multiple governing parties overseeing New York’s gaming initiatives, including the gaming committee in each house of the Legislature and the ultimate decider, </span><a href="https://www.gaming.ny.gov/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">the New York State Gaming Commission</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Before final decisions by the Gaming Commission, the entity presiding over much of the downstate license application process is the New York Gaming Facility Location Board, which was created as part of the 2013 law allowing for new casino licenses upstate and, eventually, downstate. The commission elected new members in 2022 to oversee the downstate casino licensure process.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Board is now composed of three members: Vicki Been, an NYU professor and former New York City deputy mayor; Quenia Abreu, President and CEO of the New York Women’s Chamber of Commerce; and Stuart Rabinowitz, an attorney and former president of Hofstra University. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Its power ranges from setting the licensing fees to conducting investigative hearings at any stage of the application process. Ultimately, it will select up to three candidates to be reviewed for licenses by the Gaming Commission. It reports to Governor Kathy Hochul, though Hochul has indicated she is not involved in the process.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">On January 3, the Board released a Request For Applicants (RFA), which included guidance for potential bidders, evaluation criteria, and an outline of the entire process timeline. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">That kicked off a casino bidding process that is split into two stages, and many proposals have emerged.</span></p> <p><b>Stage 1</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br /></span><span style="font-weight: 400;">The first stage of the formal process began with the Board’s RFA in January and a period in which potential applicants could ask questions.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As of March 2, the Board received “several hundred questions” and is working on responses, which will then be published. After the publication of those responses, there will be another round of question-and-answer as the process unfolds. The official deadline for applications will be 30 days after the Board’s second set of question-responses is published — a deadline expected to be sometime this summer or fall.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In the meantime, a series of potential applicants have been announcing proposals for casinos across the five boroughs and in the suburbs. More are expected as the deadline approaches, while some that have been publicized may not officially enter the bidding process.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">After the official application period ends, applicants that choose to formally move forward in the process and pay the $1 million application fee will be reviewed based on their geography by a Community Advisory Committee (CAC). Each application will trigger the establishment of a CAC.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The CACs for each proposal in Westchester and Long Island are composed of five members—one each chosen by the governor, relevant mayor, and local state senator, State Assembly member, and City Council member. CACs in New York City will be composed of six members, with the addition of the relevant Borough President choosing one.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">For example, for a proposed casino(s) in Coney Island, Brooklyn, the CAC would be made up of representatives of Mayor Eric Adams, Governor Kathy Hochul, Borough President Antonio Reynoso, State Senator Jessica Scarcella-Spanton, Assemblymember Alec Brook-Krasny, and City Council Member Ari Kagan (or the official themself).</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">CACs will hold public hearings and review written responses to casino proposals under their purview, and must hold a vote to determine whether each proposal has local community support. CACs can also provide feedback for the proposals, asking questions or expressing concerns, which applicants can respond to prior to the vote.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In order for a casino proposal to move on in the process, the CAC vote must yield at least a two-thirds majority in the affirmative, meaning four votes. Proposals that are advanced move on to the Gaming Facility Location Board.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The first stage of the process will end after all applicants are approved or disapproved by the CACs, and those approved are submitted to the local zoning authorities to begin the relevant review process by which a potential casino could win the necessary zoning changes.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Senator Addabbo said the creation of the CACs is a new function for New York when reviewing casino proposals, and called them an integral part of the process.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“That is a critical first step, something we did not do back in 2013 when we did the initial four licenses upstate, there was no community input,” Addabbo said. “And even when they were doing a racino for Aqueduct, the community had very little input, not even advisory, but just whenever we had the opportunity, we gained input. But this is something new for this go around of the three licenses downstate, and it's a critical step, without that CAC approval, they can't go forward.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Aside from adding the CACs, the state is retaining most of the structure from the 2013 upstate casino licensing process, during which the Gaming Facility Location Board selected three casinos out of 16 applicants: Montreign Resort and Casino in Thompson, Rivers Casino and Resort in Schenectady, and Lago Resort Casino in Tyre. </span></p> <p><b>Stage 2<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Stage two will begin once the aforementioned application and zoning process is completed, after which the Gaming Facility Location Board will announce the remaining applicants, who will publicly present their proposals to the Board and hear comments from a public audience.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Board will then select “up to three applicants” to be reviewed by the State Gaming Commission, which will ultimately finalize casino license winners.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">According to the RFA, the Gaming Facility Location Board will select applicants based on a weighted system, with “economic activity and business development” being 70%; “local impact siting” 10%; “workforce enhancement” 10%; and “diversity framework” 10%.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Gaming Commission is composed of five people, including Chair Brian O’Dwyer. The other members are John Crotty, Peter Moschetti Jr., Marissa Shorenstein, and Jerry Skurnik.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Commission will review applicants' ability to fund their casino projects in full, meet all the state's requirements, fund any proposed community outreach programs proposed, and otherwise follow through.</span></p> <p><b>Making Progress<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Though the process remains in Stage 1 going into the summer, Senator Addabbo is hopeful that it will be finished by the end of the year.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“I know they have the wherewithal and the professionalism to do the downstate licenses even though it is a different process,” Addabbo said of the Gaming Facility Location Board. “But nevertheless, I am keeping an eye on the progress they are making in terms of ultimately accepting these submissions by the proposed sites, and then evaluating them. So we're not there yet, but hopefully soon.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Another major proponent behind the process has been New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a former state senator who was chair of the Senate Racing, Gaming, and Wagering Committee when the racino licenses were being awarded. At the time, Adams </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/22/nyregion/22casino.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">wound up as part</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of an ethics investigation into the process and though he was never charged with a crime, he was reprimanded by the New York State Inspector General for working with figures tied to one of the bidders, including revealing internal information and attending a victory celebration, and not adequately responding during the Inspector General’s investigation.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Adams </span><a href="https://www.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/169-22/transcript-mayor-eric-adams-makes-social-services-related-announcement" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">has said he would like</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> at least two licenses to go to proposals in the city, citing the economic benefits they could bring.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“We would love to have two in New York City,” Adams said in March 2022. “I think it would be a great boost for the economy, and we are evaluating what's the best location, so we can weigh in with some type of communication. We're looking forward to doing so.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">But Adams </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/10/nyregion/adams-timothy-pearson-casino-salaries.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">has also come under scrutiny</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> around his casino-related relationships, including hiring his long-time friend Timothy Pearson as a senior advisor. At the time, Pearson was also a vice president of Resorts World Casino handling security. More recently, Adams’ former chief of staff, Frank Carone, </span><a href="https://www.amny.com/news/former-adams-chief-of-staff-to-aid-sl-green-in-its-times-square-casino-bid/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">signed a consulting contract with Greenberg Traurig</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, the legal firm representing SL Green in its Times Square casino bid. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Referencing the mayor’s time as chair of the Senate Racing and Wagering Committee, Senator Addabbo said Adams surely “understands the economic growth involved, the jobs, the revenue, and everything else that comes along with these casinos. So he's saying, 'Yeah, I want two' because he sees the potential economic growth and again, the jobs.”</span></p> <p><b>Proposals<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">There have been proposals announced and hinted at in all five boroughs except Staten Island, one on Long Island, and to expand the existing MGM casino in Westchester.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Manhattan appears that it will have the most bids, with five current proposals in the works. Borough President Mark Levine, who will select one member of any CAC in Manhattan or serve himself, has remained neutral to the bidding war while in its early stages, but is focused on making sure any casino would benefit the surrounding community.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“On the one side, there are benefits for jobs and economic development, so we have to look at what any proposal would mean for a neighborhood, good and bad,” Levine said on </span><a href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/11813-max-politics-podcast-manhattan-borough-president-mark-levine-housing-plan" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Gotham Gazette’s Max Politics podcast</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in February. “We have to weigh concerns about gambling addiction and what it would mean to local residents, so there's a lot to consider.” </span></p> <p><em>Midtown East</em><b><br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Soloviev Group, in partnership with one of the largest casino companies in the country, Mohegan, </span><a href="https://www.costar.com/article/1465567390/soloviev-group-bets-manhattans-largest-undeveloped-lot-will-help-it-win-coveted-casino-license" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">is hoping to build</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> a casino on one of the biggest undeveloped lots in Manhattan.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Adjacent to the United Nations building in Midtown along the East River, according to the draft plan the 6.7 acre plot would host a massive ferris wheel along with four acres of green space, two residential towers, a hotel, and a museum devoted to democracy. The casino itself would be situated mostly underground with windows overlooking the water. The project is initially being dubbed Freedom Plaza.</span></p> <p><em>Times Square </em><b><br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Caesars Entertainment </span><a href="https://deadline.com/2022/12/jay-z-roc-nation-caesars-palace-times-square-new-york-1235192668/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">has partnered with</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> realty-company SL Green and Jay Z’s entertainment business Roc Nation to try to bring a Caesars Palace casino to Times Square.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The companies </span><a href="https://www.curbed.com/2023/02/times-square-casino-slgreen-caesars-jay-z-security-bratton.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">argue the casino</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> would be a central player in the revival of the Theater District, with $117 million in funds going to initiatives around education, theater tickets for children in underserved communities, and more. The casino would be smaller than some of the other proposals, which the companies say will lead customers to also see Broadway shows and other attractions in and beyond Times Square.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">But the proposal has come with some of the harshest pushback yet. The ‘No Times Square Casino’ coalition </span><a href="http://www.notimessquarecasino.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">is a group</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of community groups in the Times Square area banding together to prevent a casino. The coalition officially denounced any applicants in the area on April 14, citing congestion, economic disruption, and social harm as main concerns.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Manhattan Community Board 5, which includes the Times Square area, has also passed </span><a href="https://www.citybiz.co/article/404258/no-times-square-casino-community-coalition-forms-to-oppose-gambling-plan/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">a resolution</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> pushing for the local City Council Member, Erik Bottcher, to oppose a casino bid for Times Square.</span></p> <p><em>Hudson Yards</em><b><br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Related Companies, one of the real estate firms behind the Hudson Yards redevelopment project, </span><a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-07/nyc-hudson-yards-developer-pitches-1-500-room-resort-in-casino-bid#xj4y7vzkg?leadSource=uverify%20wall"><span style="font-weight: 400;">is partnering with</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Las Vegas-based Wynn Resorts to bring a casino next to the Javits Center. The casino would be part of a larger project located on the western half of Hudson Yards, platformed on top of the MTA rail yard, and potentially consist of public parks, a school, a hotel, many restaurants, and the casino. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The project is being pitched as an apt extension of Hudson Yards as it currently exists — </span><a href="https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/s/largest-real-estate-project-in-u-s--is-being-built-above-a-train-yard-162054332.html?guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&amp;guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAJWcFUdxGZz-wxcD1jjc8PtehU9tRAQQs8MDJuSAXnfRXPxVYNHf4imofOADF-o0lOYV0Nv2ZleX53VcEnoTSFsVQeGeHDhQUCUFmatF1dv8m3MBJolmgVKfwwCsUaIiF1HVBPnnYI-PjUPt9FzF7X_NN46ZLJERu-dFER2zddTP#:~:text=The%20Hudson%20Yards%20project%2C%20on,was%20constructed%20in%20the%201930s." target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">the largest</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> private real estate development in American history with multiple tourist attractions, a mall, public space, event venues, and more — and neighbor to The Javits Center, the massive convention center whose attendees would be natural potential patrons of a new casino.</span></p> <p><em>Fifth Avenue</em><b><br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Saks Fifth Avenue owner Hudson’s Bay Company </span><a href="https://www.6sqft.com/new-renderings-of-saks-fifth-avenue-casino-in-midtown/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">is hoping to bring</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> a high-end casino to its flagship store at 611 5th Ave. The company wants to use 200,000 feet of existing space from the ninth through the 11th floors of the store to bring a luxury casino, which would include a rooftop terrace overlooking Rockefeller Center. The upper floors are currently used as temporary swing spaces.</span></p> <p><em>Penn Station</em><b><br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">City real estate giant Vornado Realty </span><a href="https://www.usbets.com/report-nyc-casino-proposal-near-penn-station-emerges/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">is looking to build</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> a casino on the lot that currently houses Hotel Pennsylvania. The hotel, which sits across from Penn Station, </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/02/nyregion/hotel-pennsylvania-nyc.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">is currently being demolished</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, part of a major potential redevelopment plan for the entire Penn Station area that has hit significant roadbumps.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Vornado is proposing a casino to complement any future upgrades to the station and surrounding neighborhood, though the future of those plans, championed by Governor Hochul, has become uncertain given the company’s reevaluation of its proposal, which relied heavily on new office towers.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The company has not publicly announced any partners for the project, and no renderings or detailed plans have been published.</span></p> <p><em>Ferry Point</em><b><br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The only current bid in the Bronx is at Ferry Point Park in Throggs Neck, connected to the Trump Links Golf Course. Gaming company Bally’s </span><a href="https://www.bxtimes.com/ballys-makes-a-bid-for-a-casino-at-trump-golf-links-in-throggs-neck/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">is hoping to put</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> a casino where the golf course clubhouse now stands. The casino would use about ten acres of land, with seven more for public green space and potential housing for employees.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The casino proposal has come with mixed feelings. Bronx Borough President Vanessa Gibson is worried about how the Throgs Neck and larger Bronx community would be affected by the casino, but she’s intrigued by the economic development potential.</span> </p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“I want to be able to make sure that there's a real community benefit, but you understand when you’re building out casinos, you're going to have a hotel, restaurant, parking, small businesses, retail,” Gibson said recently on </span><a href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/11863-max-politics-podcast-bronx-borough-president-vanessa-gibson" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Gotham Gazette’s Max Politics podcast</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. “So you're building a whole new neighborhood within a neighborhood and you're bringing in clientele, I want to make this beneficial for the Bronx.”</span></p> <p><em>Coney Island</em><b><br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The only current proposal in Brooklyn </span><a href="https://www.timeout.com/newyork/news/here-is-what-a-casino-on-coney-island-might-actually-look-like-030723" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">is for a beachfront casino</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in Coney Island, near famous long-standing attractions. Real-estate investment firm Thor Equities Group is partnering with Saratoga Casino Holdings and The Chickasaw Nation, as well as Legends Hospitality.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The casino would include a hotel across from the boardwalk, a convention hall, and a large entertainment venue. Part of the pitch is to help make the area a place with year-round attractions.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso said he is open to the prospect of a casino in Coney Island, but he has questions about benefits for the surrounding community.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“We need a reinvigoration of some sort,” Reynoso said on </span><a href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/11774-max-politics-podcast-brooklyn-borough-president-antonio-reynoso-vision" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Gotham Gazette’s Max Politics podcast</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in January, speaking about Coney Island in general. “I don't know if a casino answers that, but I don't want to dismiss it outright, especially if this casino could provide, within five years, can every single [public] housing development in Coney Island be repaired and be dignified housing? Can they do that? Are they going to bring more people? We're talking about one of the highest rates of unemployment. Coney Island, unemployment, almost 12%, especially for Black and brown people. Are we talking about full-time jobs that they can get? Those are all things you can't just push aside.”</span></p> <p><em>Mets-Willets Point</em><b><br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Aside from the already-established Resorts World casino, there is one other proposal announced for Queens, with a big push underway. New York Mets owner Steve Cohen </span><a href="https://nypost.com/2022/11/19/mets-owner-steve-cohen-betting-big-on-nyc-casino/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">is looking to capitalize</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> on the already-announced $780 million development project in Willets Point, which will bring a stadium for New York City Football Club, housing, retail, and more, and put his own casino adjacent to the Mets’ Citi Field.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Cohen has named the proposal “New Green Willets” and <a href="https://www.thecity.nyc/2023/5/18/23727795/mets-steve-cohen-parking-soccer-stadium" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">hopes to put the casino</a> where some of the Mets parking lots are currently, though he will need the city to remove the current zoning designation in order to begin construction — it is technically city-owned park land.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Members of the community have already </span><a href="https://patch.com/new-york/flushing-murray-hill/new-yorkers-rally-against-casino-citi-field" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">begun protesting</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> the proposal, which will set the table for the CAC’s deliberations.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">For his part, Queens Borough President Donovan Richards is hoping to get both a Willets Point casino license and the expanded Resorts World license. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“I think it would be a homerun, perhaps to have two,” Richards said on </span><a href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/11721-max-politics-podcast-borough-president-donovan-richards-queens-updates" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Gotham Gazette’s Max Politics podcast</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in December. “But the jobs, what's happening at Willets, transportation improvements — I will take it all coming out of this pandemic. But let me end by saying this on the casino: one of the things we've been clear about is right across the train tracks is neighborhoods, like Corona, have been hit hard during this pandemic. And we want to make sure that even as Willets is developed, even with the possibility of a casino, that we're also focusing in on a lot of the community benefits that need to also be a part of this plan.”</span></p> <p><em>Nassau</em><b><br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Casino and resort company Las Vegas Sands </span><a href="https://www.bisnow.com/new-york/news/construction-development/las-vegas-sands-pitch-nassau-coliseum-for-new-casino-117190" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">has proposed to buy</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> the lease of the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum and use the 80 available acres of land to build a casino, hotel, community spaces, a performance venue, and celebrity chef restaurants. Las Vegas Sands is collaborating with RXR Realty, which has been working on the Coliseum site.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sands </span><a href="https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/casinos-gaming/las-vegas-sands-takes-another-step-toward-ny-resort-project-2768285/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">announced on April 26</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> that Nassau County signed a 99-year preliminary agreement with the company to use the Coliseum site for the casino, a major first step in the bid’s chances. Sands will also need approval from the Nassau County Legislature, which is scheduled to meet around the proposal on May 22.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">While the proposal is in its early stages and there is growing institutional support, community pushback has started. A petition ‘Say No To The Casino’ has </span><a href="https://www.change.org/p/say-no-to-the-casino" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">garnered</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> more than 2,000 signatures. Hofstra University </span><a href="https://www.liherald.com/stories/hofstra-university-sues-county-planning-commission-over-4-billion-nassau-hub-casino-proposal,174397" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">is suing</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> the Nassau County Planning Commission for not adequately notifying the public of a hearing to consider the Las Vegas Sands casino, which it says violates the state Open Meetings Law.</span></p> <p><em>Existing Casinos</em><b><br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">MGM Resorts’ Empire City Casino in Yonkers and Resorts World Casino in Queens, the two current downstate ‘racinos’ — meaning race tracks and some gambling via slot machines but not table games — have been seen as likely frontrunners to win licenses to expand to become full-fledged casinos and offer far more amenities.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Addabbo, the Queens state senator and gaming committee chair, has been a major figure in the development and oversight of Resorts World, which is not far from his district. He said that though Resorts World has acres it is looking to expand upon with a new license, MGM will be applying with more space and the ability for a larger expansion project.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“With Resorts World, they already built their hotel, they already built an expansion, and they still have acres to build upon, but they still have about a billion-dollar investment,” Addabbo said, indicating his view of a disparity between the two in terms of their status and growth potential. “MGM, basically waiting for that license, they have great potential with their acreage, they’ve got a lot of room to expand and build upon and certainly improve that area, which means a thousand construction jobs, as well as the thousand post-construction jobs.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">

***
by Kristian Burt, Gotham Gazette

Read more by this writer.

</span></p>
Max Politics Podcast: A Vision for a More Livable City, with Sara Lind of Open Plans 2023-05-16T13:00:00+00:00 2023-05-16T13:00:00+00:00 https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/12004-max-politics-podcast-livable-city-open-plans-streets-curb Gotham Gazette [email protected] <p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/mpp-vision-city-600.jpg" /></p> <p>People in the street (photo: NYC Department of Transportation)</p> <hr /> <p><strong>May 15, 2023 - Max Politics Podcast: A Vision for a More Livable City, with Sara Lind of Open Plans<br /></strong></p> <p>Sara Lind, co-executive director of Open Plans, joined the show to discuss the group's vision for a more livable New York City, including specific programs, like Open Streets and Open Restaurants, state and city policy priorities, and more.</p> <p>Listen to the conversation and let us know what you think, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/TweetBenMax">@TweetBenMax</a>. You can listen to the show through the embedded audio below or download the episode wherever you get your podcasts at Max Politics.</p> <p class="feed-readmore"><a target="_blank" href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/12004-max-politics-podcast-livable-city-open-plans-streets-curb">Read More ...</a></p> <p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/mpp-vision-city-600.jpg" /></p> <p>People in the street (photo: NYC Department of Transportation)</p> <hr /> <p><strong>May 15, 2023 - Max Politics Podcast: A Vision for a More Livable City, with Sara Lind of Open Plans<br /></strong></p> <p>Sara Lind, co-executive director of Open Plans, joined the show to discuss the group's vision for a more livable New York City, including specific programs, like Open Streets and Open Restaurants, state and city policy priorities, and more.</p> <p>Listen to the conversation and let us know what you think, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/TweetBenMax">@TweetBenMax</a>. You can listen to the show through the embedded audio below or download the episode wherever you get your podcasts at Max Politics.</p> <p class="feed-readmore"><a target="_blank" href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/12004-max-politics-podcast-livable-city-open-plans-streets-curb">Read More ...</a></p> Civic Tech Experts Question Mayor Adams' Decision to Contract Out Signature 'MyCity' Portal 2023-05-17T04:00:00+00:00 2023-05-17T04:00:00+00:00 https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/11961-mayor-adams-mycity-contracts-services Samar Khurshid [email protected] <p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/2-when-contract-portal.jpg" width="600" /></p> <p>Mayor Adams unveils the MyCity portal (photo: Caroline Willis/Mayoral Photo Office)</p> <hr /> <p>Mayor Eric Adams began to fulfill one of his major campaign promises in March as he launched the “MyCity” online portal that promises to help New Yorkers more easily apply for public benefits and access city services. The platform — which Adams calls "a legacy project" — is in its infancy, currently only providing access to childcare applications, but is meant to grow into a one-stop-shop for many if not all interactions with city government.</p> <p>But civic technologists say that the administration’s approach to building MyCity repeats the mistakes of the past by farming out the work to contractors, in what was a reversal of its initial intent to develop the portal in-house and do it cheaper and more efficiently.</p> <p>Adams has repeatedly sung the praises of technology as a tool to make government work better for the people, in part built on his experiences with the NYPD’s CompStat system during his two decades in the police department. In his first month in office as mayor, Adams consolidated the city’s various technology agencies under the banner of the new Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI), led by new Chief Technology Officer Matthew Fraser, and charged it with creating MyCity.</p> <p>“For the first time, families who need help paying for child care can apply in one place, with one application,” the mayor said in a statement as he launched the portal in March, pledging additional services would be added in the future. “We are using the power of technology to reduce the bureaucracy and red tape in our government, to help New Yorkers get the services their taxes pay for, and to ‘Get Stuff Done’ for the working people of this city.”</p> <p>But the rollout of MyCity didn’t happen on the timeline his administration had first predicted or through the process it initially envisioned. Initially, OTI had declared that it was building the portal in-house, <a href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/11448-mayor-adams-mycity-portal-city-services">earning praise</a> from civic technology experts. It was meant to launch by late 2022, but was delayed for months.</p> <p>Adams admitted in a year-end <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/01/nyregion/eric-adams-mayor.html">interview with the New York Times</a> that technology had been one of the areas where he faced a steep learning curve in his first year, delaying the launch of MyCity. “We could rush it out now, but I really want to kick the tires,” he said at the time. At the unveiling, Adams said the delay was worth it in order to get the most user-friendly product possible, calling it "a foundation of how this <span class="il">city</span> is going to function."</p> <p>Ultimately, while the administration said that about 100 city employees worked on MyCity, a substantial amount of its development has been contracted out to 14 different technology firms in 31 separate contracts so far worth more than $3.4 million.</p> <p>According to OTI, the city owns the intellectual property created under those contracts. Civic technologists, however, say that the open-source technology infrastructure for MyCity already existed in Access NYC, an online portal managed by the Mayor's Office of Economic Opportunity where people can already determine their eligibility for public benefits, which is meant to be a key feature built into MyCity.</p> <p>And they say the administration lost an opportunity to build out a Digital Service Organization (DSO) that could create internal tech solutions using open-source software rather than purchasing outside software, allowing for more efficient and cost-effective iterations of this tool and development of others.</p> <p>“While it's exciting to see the centralization of services and at least the incorporation of a modern technology stack, it is disappointing that the city's internal teams are not resourced to support this ongoing work,” said Noel Hidalgo, executive director of BetaNYC, a civic technology group, who advised Adams’ transition team on the MyCity portal. “I was expecting to be disappointed. I am disappointed, but I have hopes that something's going to change. I just don't know when that change is going to happen.”</p> <p>OTI has pushed back against the broad criticism of its reliance on outside vendors.</p> <p>“It's easy to play Monday morning quarterback from a distance when you're not accountable to more than 8 million New Yorkers. With MyCity, this administration is rebuilding city services from the ground up to help working families effortlessly apply online for child care subsidies and to provide the foundation for New Yorkers to access future city services and benefits,” said OTI spokesperson Ray Legendre, in a statement to Gotham Gazette. “To ultimately deliver a better product for New Yorkers, the City supplemented its internal talent and expertise with external experts, including more than 10 M/WBEs, who provided invaluable support on key components of the project such as translation services, user testing, and design.”</p> <p>Legendre noted that the work done by one of the main contractors, Innovative Business Concepts, Inc., included strategy, project road-mapping, and portal design, which will all continue to benefit the portal’s functions in the long-term.</p> <p>The portal’s infrastructure also includes a document retention hub for future applications, a dashboard to track application status, user-friendly authentication, a mechanism that allows virtual signatures from multiple legal guardians, translation into 11 of the most commonly spoken languages in New York City, the capability to upload documents from a mobile device, and cybersecurity measures to protect people's data.</p> <p>Legendre also said that MyCity could possibly be rolled out on other platforms in the future, such as a mobile application.</p> <p>Currently, MyCity does include other options besides the childcare application, with categories labeled “Business,” “Jobs,” and “Benefits.” But those merely link to other city agency websites – the last one connects to Access NYC.</p> <p>“It's not just a website. This is about the fundamentals of how government services are built in the 21st century,” Hidalgo said. But, he added, “there doesn’t seem to be anything revolutionary about it. Even the technology, there's nothing grand about it. It's the same software that the city has been using since the pandemic because it's a better webform software than what the city had been using prior to that.”</p> <p>Besides HRA’s online tool, civic tech experts also point to other digital tools developed by the city in the recent past, in particular <a href="https://labs.planning.nyc.gov/about/">Planning Labs</a> at the Department of City Planning, which could have been used as the model approach.</p> <p>“For the Adams administration to not be able to recognize where good things were happening and where the opportunity to continue good work is when it comes to information technology  reform is really disappointing,” said Devin Balkind, a civic technologist. Balkind and others have called for the city to create a DSO, similar to models adopted by other cities like Boston or the 18F division of the federal government. “If [the Adams administration] were observant, they would have seen the opportunity to do things much faster, better and cheaper than they're doing it now,” said Balkind.</p> <p>Even former Mayor Bill de Blasio “paid lip service” to the DSO model by announcing an NYC Digital Service just one month before his tenure ended, Balkind pointed out.</p> <p>“Adams campaigned on it and I hope he figures out what everyone else seems to have figured out, which is that there's a model for government IT reform that works and is valid and he should use it,” Balkind added.</p> <p>A spokesperson for City Council Member Jennifer Gutiérrez, who chairs the Council’s technology committee, declined to comment but said that the Council member is considering an oversight hearing on the administration’s approach to technology contracts, including the development of MyCity.</p> <p>Comptroller Brad Lander’s office did not respond to requests for comment. The comptroller is responsible for monitoring and reviewing city contracts.</p> <p>A former city technology manager who wished to remain unnamed said that the use of outside contractors isn’t inherently the wrong choice and not necessarily more expensive. But he questioned the reason behind the choice for MyCity. “Why wasn't the internal team meeting the goals? Why is the NYC Digital Service not a thing anymore? What happened to that?,” he asked.</p> <p>He did have some words of advice for the administration. “Full ownership [of the software] and capacity for maintaining the project has to stay in house. Otherwise, you're setting yourself up for failure because…you can't have forward continuity when there's nobody around that actually knows how the thing works.”</p> <p>According to Legendre, the website’s technical support and maintenance are carried out by both internal staff and external contractors. And he said that the administration is indeed expanding its technology team. “We’re aggressively building internal capacity and will also continue to tap a wide range of external expertise to deliver solutions as quickly as possible,” he said by email.</p> <p>A digital service model within city government is the right way to go, said the former city technology manager. “There's this perception that government employees can't build modern tools. They can,” he said. “You just need to hire modern tool builders.”</p> <p>

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

Read more by this writer.

</p> <p>Note - this article has been updated to note that the city's benefits eligibility screening tool is called Access NYC and is run by the Mayor's Office of Economic Opportunity. Access HRA is a separate tool managed by the Human Resources Administration. </p>
<p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/2-when-contract-portal.jpg" width="600" /></p> <p>Mayor Adams unveils the MyCity portal (photo: Caroline Willis/Mayoral Photo Office)</p> <hr /> <p>Mayor Eric Adams began to fulfill one of his major campaign promises in March as he launched the “MyCity” online portal that promises to help New Yorkers more easily apply for public benefits and access city services. The platform — which Adams calls "a legacy project" — is in its infancy, currently only providing access to childcare applications, but is meant to grow into a one-stop-shop for many if not all interactions with city government.</p> <p>But civic technologists say that the administration’s approach to building MyCity repeats the mistakes of the past by farming out the work to contractors, in what was a reversal of its initial intent to develop the portal in-house and do it cheaper and more efficiently.</p> <p>Adams has repeatedly sung the praises of technology as a tool to make government work better for the people, in part built on his experiences with the NYPD’s CompStat system during his two decades in the police department. In his first month in office as mayor, Adams consolidated the city’s various technology agencies under the banner of the new Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI), led by new Chief Technology Officer Matthew Fraser, and charged it with creating MyCity.</p> <p>“For the first time, families who need help paying for child care can apply in one place, with one application,” the mayor said in a statement as he launched the portal in March, pledging additional services would be added in the future. “We are using the power of technology to reduce the bureaucracy and red tape in our government, to help New Yorkers get the services their taxes pay for, and to ‘Get Stuff Done’ for the working people of this city.”</p> <p>But the rollout of MyCity didn’t happen on the timeline his administration had first predicted or through the process it initially envisioned. Initially, OTI had declared that it was building the portal in-house, <a href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/11448-mayor-adams-mycity-portal-city-services">earning praise</a> from civic technology experts. It was meant to launch by late 2022, but was delayed for months.</p> <p>Adams admitted in a year-end <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/01/nyregion/eric-adams-mayor.html">interview with the New York Times</a> that technology had been one of the areas where he faced a steep learning curve in his first year, delaying the launch of MyCity. “We could rush it out now, but I really want to kick the tires,” he said at the time. At the unveiling, Adams said the delay was worth it in order to get the most user-friendly product possible, calling it "a foundation of how this <span class="il">city</span> is going to function."</p> <p>Ultimately, while the administration said that about 100 city employees worked on MyCity, a substantial amount of its development has been contracted out to 14 different technology firms in 31 separate contracts so far worth more than $3.4 million.</p> <p>According to OTI, the city owns the intellectual property created under those contracts. Civic technologists, however, say that the open-source technology infrastructure for MyCity already existed in Access NYC, an online portal managed by the Mayor's Office of Economic Opportunity where people can already determine their eligibility for public benefits, which is meant to be a key feature built into MyCity.</p> <p>And they say the administration lost an opportunity to build out a Digital Service Organization (DSO) that could create internal tech solutions using open-source software rather than purchasing outside software, allowing for more efficient and cost-effective iterations of this tool and development of others.</p> <p>“While it's exciting to see the centralization of services and at least the incorporation of a modern technology stack, it is disappointing that the city's internal teams are not resourced to support this ongoing work,” said Noel Hidalgo, executive director of BetaNYC, a civic technology group, who advised Adams’ transition team on the MyCity portal. “I was expecting to be disappointed. I am disappointed, but I have hopes that something's going to change. I just don't know when that change is going to happen.”</p> <p>OTI has pushed back against the broad criticism of its reliance on outside vendors.</p> <p>“It's easy to play Monday morning quarterback from a distance when you're not accountable to more than 8 million New Yorkers. With MyCity, this administration is rebuilding city services from the ground up to help working families effortlessly apply online for child care subsidies and to provide the foundation for New Yorkers to access future city services and benefits,” said OTI spokesperson Ray Legendre, in a statement to Gotham Gazette. “To ultimately deliver a better product for New Yorkers, the City supplemented its internal talent and expertise with external experts, including more than 10 M/WBEs, who provided invaluable support on key components of the project such as translation services, user testing, and design.”</p> <p>Legendre noted that the work done by one of the main contractors, Innovative Business Concepts, Inc., included strategy, project road-mapping, and portal design, which will all continue to benefit the portal’s functions in the long-term.</p> <p>The portal’s infrastructure also includes a document retention hub for future applications, a dashboard to track application status, user-friendly authentication, a mechanism that allows virtual signatures from multiple legal guardians, translation into 11 of the most commonly spoken languages in New York City, the capability to upload documents from a mobile device, and cybersecurity measures to protect people's data.</p> <p>Legendre also said that MyCity could possibly be rolled out on other platforms in the future, such as a mobile application.</p> <p>Currently, MyCity does include other options besides the childcare application, with categories labeled “Business,” “Jobs,” and “Benefits.” But those merely link to other city agency websites – the last one connects to Access NYC.</p> <p>“It's not just a website. This is about the fundamentals of how government services are built in the 21st century,” Hidalgo said. But, he added, “there doesn’t seem to be anything revolutionary about it. Even the technology, there's nothing grand about it. It's the same software that the city has been using since the pandemic because it's a better webform software than what the city had been using prior to that.”</p> <p>Besides HRA’s online tool, civic tech experts also point to other digital tools developed by the city in the recent past, in particular <a href="https://labs.planning.nyc.gov/about/">Planning Labs</a> at the Department of City Planning, which could have been used as the model approach.</p> <p>“For the Adams administration to not be able to recognize where good things were happening and where the opportunity to continue good work is when it comes to information technology  reform is really disappointing,” said Devin Balkind, a civic technologist. Balkind and others have called for the city to create a DSO, similar to models adopted by other cities like Boston or the 18F division of the federal government. “If [the Adams administration] were observant, they would have seen the opportunity to do things much faster, better and cheaper than they're doing it now,” said Balkind.</p> <p>Even former Mayor Bill de Blasio “paid lip service” to the DSO model by announcing an NYC Digital Service just one month before his tenure ended, Balkind pointed out.</p> <p>“Adams campaigned on it and I hope he figures out what everyone else seems to have figured out, which is that there's a model for government IT reform that works and is valid and he should use it,” Balkind added.</p> <p>A spokesperson for City Council Member Jennifer Gutiérrez, who chairs the Council’s technology committee, declined to comment but said that the Council member is considering an oversight hearing on the administration’s approach to technology contracts, including the development of MyCity.</p> <p>Comptroller Brad Lander’s office did not respond to requests for comment. The comptroller is responsible for monitoring and reviewing city contracts.</p> <p>A former city technology manager who wished to remain unnamed said that the use of outside contractors isn’t inherently the wrong choice and not necessarily more expensive. But he questioned the reason behind the choice for MyCity. “Why wasn't the internal team meeting the goals? Why is the NYC Digital Service not a thing anymore? What happened to that?,” he asked.</p> <p>He did have some words of advice for the administration. “Full ownership [of the software] and capacity for maintaining the project has to stay in house. Otherwise, you're setting yourself up for failure because…you can't have forward continuity when there's nobody around that actually knows how the thing works.”</p> <p>According to Legendre, the website’s technical support and maintenance are carried out by both internal staff and external contractors. And he said that the administration is indeed expanding its technology team. “We’re aggressively building internal capacity and will also continue to tap a wide range of external expertise to deliver solutions as quickly as possible,” he said by email.</p> <p>A digital service model within city government is the right way to go, said the former city technology manager. “There's this perception that government employees can't build modern tools. They can,” he said. “You just need to hire modern tool builders.”</p> <p>

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

Read more by this writer.

</p> <p>Note - this article has been updated to note that the city's benefits eligibility screening tool is called Access NYC and is run by the Mayor's Office of Economic Opportunity. Access HRA is a separate tool managed by the Human Resources Administration. </p>
Max Politics Podcast: The City Council's Mental Health Roadmap, with Council Member Linda Lee 2023-05-10T13:00:00+00:00 2023-05-10T13:00:00+00:00 https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/11995-max-politics-podcast-city-council-mental-health-roadmap-linda-lee Gotham Gazette [email protected] <p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/mpp-city-mental-600px.jpg" /></p> <p>City Council Member Linda Lee, with Speaker Adrienne Adams &amp; others (photo: John McCarten/NYC Council)</p> <hr /> <p><strong>May 10, 2023 - Max Politics Podcast: The City Council's Mental Health Roadmap, with Council Member Linda Lee<br /></strong></p> <p>City Council Member Linda Lee, a Queens Democrat and chair of the Council's mental health committee, joined the show to discuss the CIty Council's mental health roadmap, specific legislation that's part of it, a recent Council hearing on the package, and more.</p> <p>Listen to the conversation and let us know what you think, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/TweetBenMax">@TweetBenMax</a>. You can listen to the show through the embedded audio below or download the episode wherever you get your podcasts at Max Politics.</p> <p class="feed-readmore"><a target="_blank" href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/11995-max-politics-podcast-city-council-mental-health-roadmap-linda-lee">Read More ...</a></p> <p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/mpp-city-mental-600px.jpg" /></p> <p>City Council Member Linda Lee, with Speaker Adrienne Adams &amp; others (photo: John McCarten/NYC Council)</p> <hr /> <p><strong>May 10, 2023 - Max Politics Podcast: The City Council's Mental Health Roadmap, with Council Member Linda Lee<br /></strong></p> <p>City Council Member Linda Lee, a Queens Democrat and chair of the Council's mental health committee, joined the show to discuss the CIty Council's mental health roadmap, specific legislation that's part of it, a recent Council hearing on the package, and more.</p> <p>Listen to the conversation and let us know what you think, on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/TweetBenMax">@TweetBenMax</a>. You can listen to the show through the embedded audio below or download the episode wherever you get your podcasts at Max Politics.</p> <p class="feed-readmore"><a target="_blank" href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/11995-max-politics-podcast-city-council-mental-health-roadmap-linda-lee">Read More ...</a></p> How Mayor Adams' Albany Agenda Fared in the New State Budget 2023-05-07T09:00:00+00:00 2023-05-07T09:00:00+00:00 https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/11984-mayor-adams-albany-agenda-state-budget-hochul Samar Khurshid [email protected] <p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/6-agenda-fared.jpg" width="600" /></p> <p>Mayor &amp; Governor (photo: Darren McGee/Governor's Office)</p> <hr /> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">New York State’s $229 billion budget deal for the new fiscal year has both good and bad news for New York City and Mayor Eric Adams’ Albany agenda.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">It directs additional funding for the ongoing migrant asylum-seeker crisis, provides a lifeline to the cash-strapped MTA, funds rent relief for public housing residents, extends a child tax credit, increases enforcement for illegal marijuana sales, and more. But it excluded regulatory changes and tax incentives that would have boosted the city’s housing production, allowed new charter schools, and increased a tax on city businesses while requiring more funds from city government to help pay for the MTA.  </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mayor Adams praised the budget deal, particularly measures on public safety that he prioritized, but has had little to say so far of the many items on his agenda that weren’t approved. He has also continued to emphasize his strong partnership with Governor Kathy Hochul, a fellow Democrat who has delivered several victories for the mayor in the two budgets she has overseen. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">On Wednesday, Adams heaped praise on Hochul at a news conference where she touted the various public safety measures in the state budget, most notably additional changes to the state’s bail law that Adams supported in their efforts to jail more defendants pre-trial.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“We started out this session in Albany focused on communication, and I just cannot say enough about the governor and what she has done from day one,” Adams said, pointing to their collaboration on successive subway safety plans and funding for services for asylum-seekers. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“Governor, job well done. I cannot thank you enough from the beginning of this process. And you are right, it was not about a deadline, it was about making sure that we do it right and you did it right. Thank you, governor,” he added, referring to the fact that the state budget was about a month late. In several cases, the Legislature helped Adams achieve alterations to Hochul’s proposed budget that would have hurt the city’s bottom line, in part responding to testimony the mayor delivered at a legislative budget hearing earlier this year.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In response to an inquiry about how the mayor’s state agenda fared in the budget, Fabien Levy, Adams’ chief spokesperson, highlighted the many areas where the city will benefit from the budget and pointed to items that remain on the mayor’s agenda for the post-budget session.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“The budget will put more money in the pockets of working families, provide rent relief for NYCHA tenants, and invest in our public transit without unfairly burdening New Yorkers. And it will allow for improved enforcement against unlicensed cannabis sales so we can grow a safe and equitable industry. These are all priorities we fought hard for, and we are grateful they were included,” Levy said in a statement. “We remain disappointed that more progress was not made on affordable housing and discovery reform. We will continue to make housing and public safety top priorities during the remaining weeks of the state legislative session.” </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The passage of the state budget will now also help define negotiations over the mayor’s $106.7 billion executive budget proposal for the city’s 2024 fiscal year, which begins July 1. Though the proposed budget is about $5.7 billion higher than the budget adopted last June, the mayor has come under fire from the City Council for successive rounds of agency savings plans that could affect certain city services. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The executive budget was released before the state budget was finally approved, so there are likely to be significant changes to the city’s spending plan. While the state budget delivered more funding on certain fronts, there are also cuts and cost shifts that the city will have to bear. The City Council will soon examine the mayor’s spending plan and other fiscal dynamics in a series of May hearings.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“The State budget was a mixed bag for New York City, although it is certainly better than the sum of proposals in the Executive Budget,” said Patrick Orecki, director of state studies at Citizens Budget Commission, a nonprofit fiscal watchdog. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“On the plus side, the State is going to deliver some fiscal support to accommodate asylum seekers, and put forth a plan to provide recurring resources to the MTA with fewer cost shifts onto New York City directly,” Orecki said in an email. “However, the MTA plan levies a payroll mobility tax increase solely on businesses in New York City. The approach should have been regional. New York City taxpayers already provide a vast majority of operating support to the MTA, directly and indirectly.”</span></p> <p><b>Migrant Funding<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The mayor’s main budget priority has been to secure more funding for the city to handle the ongoing arrival of thousands of migrant asylum-seekers. In the last year, according to his administration, more than 57,000 migrants have arrived in the city, with a majority of them living in city shelters and unallowed to work, leading to ballooning costs of providing city services to them. The administration has spent more than $800 million already and estimates that it will spend $4.3 billion in sum by the end of next fiscal year (though that estimate has been challenged as too high or at least not fully supported).</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The state budget delivered $1 billion to aid with migrant spending, which would cover roughly one-third of the city’s shelter costs, but Adams has said that will not be enough to avoid cuts in the city’s own budget. He continues to push for more aid from the federal government as well, which has been slow to materialize though money was appropriated for the overall situation late last year.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The situation is expected to become more challenging as the federal government is expected to soon lift Title 42, a covid-era policy that expelled more than 2 million migrants at the border over health concerns. </span></p> <p><b>Public Safety<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The budget was largely delayed because of the governor’s insistence on changes to bail laws, specifically removing the “least restrictive standard” that judges use while determining whether to set bail or remand a defendant into custody. It was necessary, she argued, to give judges more discretion and keep repeat offenders, particularly those with a history of violence, off the streets. The proposal was ultimately approved by the Legislature. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Adams has also repeatedly called for the bail laws to be tightened, and he hailed the governor for making those changes. “This budget is a budget that clearly will make our city and our communities safer,” he said Wednesday.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The budget did not include rollbacks of sweeping discovery reforms, which both Adams and Hochul had wanted, though it did add $170 million to support the implementation of discovery reforms, including $50 million in capital funding for discovery technology improvements in the city.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The mayor had also pushed for additional funding for prosecutors and public defenders, and the state budget delivers on both fronts. It provides $100 million in aid for prosecution and defense funding across the state, though it's unclear how much of that will be delivered to the city. The budget also allocates $92 million to offset the costs of increasing rates paid to lawyers assigned by courts to represent low-income New Yorkers.  </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The governor also signed legislation to curb the illegal sale of marijuana at retail stores across the state by increasing tax and civil penalties and criminalizing sales without a license. Illicit marijuana sales have skyrocketed, particularly in the city, as hundreds of unlicensed dispensaries have proliferated since marijuana was legalized in the state. While the city has been slow to use the enforcement mechanisms at its disposal to slow the proliferation of illegal retail sales, Adams has also pointed the finger at the state, looking for the types of changes that are now law.</span></p> <p><b>NYCHA Rent Relief<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">As NYCHA struggles with a major rent arrears crisis that has threatened its financial footing, the state budget delivered much needed relief. It allocates $391 million for the state’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program to provide aid to tenants at NYCHA as well as those receiving federal Section 8 vouchers. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">That funding still falls short of what the city requires – NYCHA tenants owe more than $466 million in arrears – and has not been specifically dedicated to NYCHA as advocates and some lawmakers wanted. </span></p> <p><b>The MTA<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The MTA has been facing a major structural deficit and has lost millions in fare revenue as ridership plummeted during the pandemic and has yet to fully recover. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The state budget created a plan to rescue the MTA and avoid service cuts, which includes $400 million in reduced costs through efficiencies, providing $300 million in one-time state aid, $35 million to improve subway service, $65 million to reduce a proposed fare increase from 5.5% to 4%, and $35 million for MTA safety improvements.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">It would also dedicate $1.5 billion to the MTA from licensing fees from three downstate casino licenses when they are awarded, and a share of annual tax revenues from those casinos, which are estimated at between $231 to $413 million.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">It also provides $15 million for a pilot program in New York City to provide one fare-free bus route in every borough, and significantly expands the city’s Automated Bus Lane Enforcement program.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">But the plan also marginally raises the Payroll Mobility Tax for New York City’s largest businesses, bringing in an additional $1.1 billion annually, while letting suburbanites off the hook, despite the fact that they are served by the commuter rails and subways.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“The approach should have been regional. New York City taxpayers already provide a vast majority of operating support to the MTA, directly and indirectly,” Orecki said. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">It also requires an additional $165 million annually from the city over the next two years to cover the costs of paratransit services. That was a partial victory for the mayor, as he had pushed back against the governor’s initial proposal that would have required $500 million from the city for the MTA every year.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“The budget is good for riders, and given that riders are a majority of people in the city, it’s good for the city,” said Danny Pearlstein, policy and communications director of Riders Alliance, an advocacy group.</span></p> <p><b>Charter Schools<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The governor had proposed lifting the charter school cap for New York City, which the city estimated could cost up to $1 billion annually over time. But the proposal did not make it into the final budget. Instead, the budget reauthorizes 14 so-called “zombie charters” in the city that were issued but whose schools have since closed.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Under state law, the city must either give school space to charters or pay their rent for other spaces, but the state budget will cover those rent costs for the zombie charters so the city may be spared any additional burden. Adams, a charter school supporter, had raised questions about the funding for that space and the budget agreement is a victory for the city.</span></p> <p><b>Housing Policy<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">One of the bigger disappointments for the Adams administration was the complete exclusion of the governor’s “New York Housing Compact” from the state budget. The governor had proposed a plan that would build an estimated 800,000 units of housing over the next decade through the use of mandated growth targets, overrides of local zoning where targets aren’t met, mandating rezonings to create more density around mass transit stops throughout the MTA region, and several other mechanisms. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mayor Adams had advocated for a few of the measures and given nominal support to the overall plan to accomplish his own housing program, which targets 500,000 new homes over the next ten years.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Among the items the Adams administration was focused on were eliminating the floor-area ratio (FAR) cap in the city to allow denser buildings, easing conversions of office space to housing, new regulations for basement and cellar apartments, and extending and replacing the expired 421-a affordable housing tax credit and the J-51 tax credit for renovations in exchange for converting to affordable housing.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">None of those policies were included in the budget, and the governor’s housing plan failed altogether. Hochul and Adams will continue to fight for some of the proposals to pass in the legislative session that runs into June, while Hochul has pledged to pursue other policies by executive action and said she will come back next year with another go at a sweeping housing plan.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rachel Fee, executive director of nonprofit New York Housing Conference, expressed broad disappointment with the failure on housing. She said a new regulatory structure for office and basement conversions would be a significant step in quickly creating new housing. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Fee also said the lack of a replacement for 421-a threatens the city’s own housing program. “Mandatory Inclusionary Housing is one of the city's only tools to produce affordable housing in high income neighborhoods. And if there's not a tax incentive to be paired with mandatory inclusionary housing, we're never going to see the full benefits of that program,” she said. “And we're only going to be building low-income housing in low-income neighborhoods where land costs are cheapest.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“Authorizing transit-oriented development, increasing the floor area ratio cap, and extending and replacing 421-a would've been a start to addressing the housing crises in New York City and surrounding areas,” said Orecki of Citizens Budget Commission. “Absent these and other policies to produce housing production, those crises will continue snowballing.”</span></p> <p><b>Capital Construction and Procurement Reforms<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Adams administration has launched a major effort to reform the city’s antiquated and cumbersome capital construction processes. But it required approval on several pieces of legislation at the state level to approve alternate project delivery methods, allow progressive design-build, change procurement rules, and more. The Adams administration had also wanted state approval to change the Department of Design and Construction into a public authority.  </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">None of those measures seem to have made it into the state budget. The mayor’s office did not respond to an inquiry about these proposals.  </span></p> <p><b>Medicaid Funding<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The budget will also push about $300 million in annual Medicaid costs onto the city, and a similar amount to the other 57 counties across the state. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“This is a significant disappointment in the State budget,” Orecki said. “The 2015 Medicaid local share freeze is one of the State’s most significant fiscal policy achievements in recent years, and now they are partially reversing that.”</span></p> <p><b>Community Hiring Legislation<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Adams advocated for the state to approve a community hiring bill, which would have allowed the city to require local community hiring by companies that get city contracts. The bill was not included in the budget.  </span></p> <p><b>Income Disregard<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The mayor was also pushing for an “income disregard” bill that would allow low-income New Yorkers to continue receiving state public benefits for six months after they obtain new employment if they have already completed a job training program recognized by the state or federal government. The bill aims to tackle the “benefits cliff” where individuals lose public assistance as their income increases past the qualifying threshold. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The state budget did not include the proposal. </span></p> <p><b>Expanding Tax Credits<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The mayor called on the state to enhance the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit again this year, after improvements to both were included in last year’s budget. Adams had pushed for expanding eligibility for the benefits to hundreds of thousands of immigrants, including the undocumented. Though undocumented immigrants weren’t added to eligibility for either credit, the child tax credit was expanded to children under the age of four, which is expected to benefit more than 1 million children and their families. </span></p> <p><b>Health Care for Undocumented Immigrants<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Immigrant advocates, many legislators, and Mayor Adams called on the governor to support the “Coverage for All” proposal, which would have expanded the state’s Essential Plan and provided health coverage to those making up to 250% of the Federal Poverty Level, including undocumented immigrants. Their advocacy was unsuccessful and the proposal did not make it into the budget. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“The state budget was deeply disappointing and a slap in the face for working families and immigrants across the state, including in New York City,” said Jose Lopez, Co-Executive Director of Make the Road New York, an immigrant community-focused nonprofit group. “The budget failed to ensure access to basic health coverage and unemployment insurance, and advance any tenant protections whatsoever. As Albany continues to fail our communities, it's alarming to see Mayor Adams double down on his attempts to further cut schools, health care, and housing services—and blaming families who’ve come seeking asylum for it. The Mayor should stop his dangerous rhetoric and refocus on delivering solutions that treat asylum seekers, and all New Yorkers, with the respect and dignity they deserve.”</span></p> <p>

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

Read more by this writer.

</p>
<p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/6-agenda-fared.jpg" width="600" /></p> <p>Mayor &amp; Governor (photo: Darren McGee/Governor's Office)</p> <hr /> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">New York State’s $229 billion budget deal for the new fiscal year has both good and bad news for New York City and Mayor Eric Adams’ Albany agenda.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">It directs additional funding for the ongoing migrant asylum-seeker crisis, provides a lifeline to the cash-strapped MTA, funds rent relief for public housing residents, extends a child tax credit, increases enforcement for illegal marijuana sales, and more. But it excluded regulatory changes and tax incentives that would have boosted the city’s housing production, allowed new charter schools, and increased a tax on city businesses while requiring more funds from city government to help pay for the MTA.  </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mayor Adams praised the budget deal, particularly measures on public safety that he prioritized, but has had little to say so far of the many items on his agenda that weren’t approved. He has also continued to emphasize his strong partnership with Governor Kathy Hochul, a fellow Democrat who has delivered several victories for the mayor in the two budgets she has overseen. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">On Wednesday, Adams heaped praise on Hochul at a news conference where she touted the various public safety measures in the state budget, most notably additional changes to the state’s bail law that Adams supported in their efforts to jail more defendants pre-trial.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“We started out this session in Albany focused on communication, and I just cannot say enough about the governor and what she has done from day one,” Adams said, pointing to their collaboration on successive subway safety plans and funding for services for asylum-seekers. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“Governor, job well done. I cannot thank you enough from the beginning of this process. And you are right, it was not about a deadline, it was about making sure that we do it right and you did it right. Thank you, governor,” he added, referring to the fact that the state budget was about a month late. In several cases, the Legislature helped Adams achieve alterations to Hochul’s proposed budget that would have hurt the city’s bottom line, in part responding to testimony the mayor delivered at a legislative budget hearing earlier this year.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In response to an inquiry about how the mayor’s state agenda fared in the budget, Fabien Levy, Adams’ chief spokesperson, highlighted the many areas where the city will benefit from the budget and pointed to items that remain on the mayor’s agenda for the post-budget session.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“The budget will put more money in the pockets of working families, provide rent relief for NYCHA tenants, and invest in our public transit without unfairly burdening New Yorkers. And it will allow for improved enforcement against unlicensed cannabis sales so we can grow a safe and equitable industry. These are all priorities we fought hard for, and we are grateful they were included,” Levy said in a statement. “We remain disappointed that more progress was not made on affordable housing and discovery reform. We will continue to make housing and public safety top priorities during the remaining weeks of the state legislative session.” </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The passage of the state budget will now also help define negotiations over the mayor’s $106.7 billion executive budget proposal for the city’s 2024 fiscal year, which begins July 1. Though the proposed budget is about $5.7 billion higher than the budget adopted last June, the mayor has come under fire from the City Council for successive rounds of agency savings plans that could affect certain city services. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The executive budget was released before the state budget was finally approved, so there are likely to be significant changes to the city’s spending plan. While the state budget delivered more funding on certain fronts, there are also cuts and cost shifts that the city will have to bear. The City Council will soon examine the mayor’s spending plan and other fiscal dynamics in a series of May hearings.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“The State budget was a mixed bag for New York City, although it is certainly better than the sum of proposals in the Executive Budget,” said Patrick Orecki, director of state studies at Citizens Budget Commission, a nonprofit fiscal watchdog. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“On the plus side, the State is going to deliver some fiscal support to accommodate asylum seekers, and put forth a plan to provide recurring resources to the MTA with fewer cost shifts onto New York City directly,” Orecki said in an email. “However, the MTA plan levies a payroll mobility tax increase solely on businesses in New York City. The approach should have been regional. New York City taxpayers already provide a vast majority of operating support to the MTA, directly and indirectly.”</span></p> <p><b>Migrant Funding<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The mayor’s main budget priority has been to secure more funding for the city to handle the ongoing arrival of thousands of migrant asylum-seekers. In the last year, according to his administration, more than 57,000 migrants have arrived in the city, with a majority of them living in city shelters and unallowed to work, leading to ballooning costs of providing city services to them. The administration has spent more than $800 million already and estimates that it will spend $4.3 billion in sum by the end of next fiscal year (though that estimate has been challenged as too high or at least not fully supported).</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The state budget delivered $1 billion to aid with migrant spending, which would cover roughly one-third of the city’s shelter costs, but Adams has said that will not be enough to avoid cuts in the city’s own budget. He continues to push for more aid from the federal government as well, which has been slow to materialize though money was appropriated for the overall situation late last year.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The situation is expected to become more challenging as the federal government is expected to soon lift Title 42, a covid-era policy that expelled more than 2 million migrants at the border over health concerns. </span></p> <p><b>Public Safety<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The budget was largely delayed because of the governor’s insistence on changes to bail laws, specifically removing the “least restrictive standard” that judges use while determining whether to set bail or remand a defendant into custody. It was necessary, she argued, to give judges more discretion and keep repeat offenders, particularly those with a history of violence, off the streets. The proposal was ultimately approved by the Legislature. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Adams has also repeatedly called for the bail laws to be tightened, and he hailed the governor for making those changes. “This budget is a budget that clearly will make our city and our communities safer,” he said Wednesday.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The budget did not include rollbacks of sweeping discovery reforms, which both Adams and Hochul had wanted, though it did add $170 million to support the implementation of discovery reforms, including $50 million in capital funding for discovery technology improvements in the city.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The mayor had also pushed for additional funding for prosecutors and public defenders, and the state budget delivers on both fronts. It provides $100 million in aid for prosecution and defense funding across the state, though it's unclear how much of that will be delivered to the city. The budget also allocates $92 million to offset the costs of increasing rates paid to lawyers assigned by courts to represent low-income New Yorkers.  </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The governor also signed legislation to curb the illegal sale of marijuana at retail stores across the state by increasing tax and civil penalties and criminalizing sales without a license. Illicit marijuana sales have skyrocketed, particularly in the city, as hundreds of unlicensed dispensaries have proliferated since marijuana was legalized in the state. While the city has been slow to use the enforcement mechanisms at its disposal to slow the proliferation of illegal retail sales, Adams has also pointed the finger at the state, looking for the types of changes that are now law.</span></p> <p><b>NYCHA Rent Relief<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">As NYCHA struggles with a major rent arrears crisis that has threatened its financial footing, the state budget delivered much needed relief. It allocates $391 million for the state’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program to provide aid to tenants at NYCHA as well as those receiving federal Section 8 vouchers. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">That funding still falls short of what the city requires – NYCHA tenants owe more than $466 million in arrears – and has not been specifically dedicated to NYCHA as advocates and some lawmakers wanted. </span></p> <p><b>The MTA<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The MTA has been facing a major structural deficit and has lost millions in fare revenue as ridership plummeted during the pandemic and has yet to fully recover. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The state budget created a plan to rescue the MTA and avoid service cuts, which includes $400 million in reduced costs through efficiencies, providing $300 million in one-time state aid, $35 million to improve subway service, $65 million to reduce a proposed fare increase from 5.5% to 4%, and $35 million for MTA safety improvements.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">It would also dedicate $1.5 billion to the MTA from licensing fees from three downstate casino licenses when they are awarded, and a share of annual tax revenues from those casinos, which are estimated at between $231 to $413 million.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">It also provides $15 million for a pilot program in New York City to provide one fare-free bus route in every borough, and significantly expands the city’s Automated Bus Lane Enforcement program.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">But the plan also marginally raises the Payroll Mobility Tax for New York City’s largest businesses, bringing in an additional $1.1 billion annually, while letting suburbanites off the hook, despite the fact that they are served by the commuter rails and subways.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“The approach should have been regional. New York City taxpayers already provide a vast majority of operating support to the MTA, directly and indirectly,” Orecki said. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">It also requires an additional $165 million annually from the city over the next two years to cover the costs of paratransit services. That was a partial victory for the mayor, as he had pushed back against the governor’s initial proposal that would have required $500 million from the city for the MTA every year.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“The budget is good for riders, and given that riders are a majority of people in the city, it’s good for the city,” said Danny Pearlstein, policy and communications director of Riders Alliance, an advocacy group.</span></p> <p><b>Charter Schools<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The governor had proposed lifting the charter school cap for New York City, which the city estimated could cost up to $1 billion annually over time. But the proposal did not make it into the final budget. Instead, the budget reauthorizes 14 so-called “zombie charters” in the city that were issued but whose schools have since closed.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Under state law, the city must either give school space to charters or pay their rent for other spaces, but the state budget will cover those rent costs for the zombie charters so the city may be spared any additional burden. Adams, a charter school supporter, had raised questions about the funding for that space and the budget agreement is a victory for the city.</span></p> <p><b>Housing Policy<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">One of the bigger disappointments for the Adams administration was the complete exclusion of the governor’s “New York Housing Compact” from the state budget. The governor had proposed a plan that would build an estimated 800,000 units of housing over the next decade through the use of mandated growth targets, overrides of local zoning where targets aren’t met, mandating rezonings to create more density around mass transit stops throughout the MTA region, and several other mechanisms. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mayor Adams had advocated for a few of the measures and given nominal support to the overall plan to accomplish his own housing program, which targets 500,000 new homes over the next ten years.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Among the items the Adams administration was focused on were eliminating the floor-area ratio (FAR) cap in the city to allow denser buildings, easing conversions of office space to housing, new regulations for basement and cellar apartments, and extending and replacing the expired 421-a affordable housing tax credit and the J-51 tax credit for renovations in exchange for converting to affordable housing.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">None of those policies were included in the budget, and the governor’s housing plan failed altogether. Hochul and Adams will continue to fight for some of the proposals to pass in the legislative session that runs into June, while Hochul has pledged to pursue other policies by executive action and said she will come back next year with another go at a sweeping housing plan.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rachel Fee, executive director of nonprofit New York Housing Conference, expressed broad disappointment with the failure on housing. She said a new regulatory structure for office and basement conversions would be a significant step in quickly creating new housing. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Fee also said the lack of a replacement for 421-a threatens the city’s own housing program. “Mandatory Inclusionary Housing is one of the city's only tools to produce affordable housing in high income neighborhoods. And if there's not a tax incentive to be paired with mandatory inclusionary housing, we're never going to see the full benefits of that program,” she said. “And we're only going to be building low-income housing in low-income neighborhoods where land costs are cheapest.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“Authorizing transit-oriented development, increasing the floor area ratio cap, and extending and replacing 421-a would've been a start to addressing the housing crises in New York City and surrounding areas,” said Orecki of Citizens Budget Commission. “Absent these and other policies to produce housing production, those crises will continue snowballing.”</span></p> <p><b>Capital Construction and Procurement Reforms<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Adams administration has launched a major effort to reform the city’s antiquated and cumbersome capital construction processes. But it required approval on several pieces of legislation at the state level to approve alternate project delivery methods, allow progressive design-build, change procurement rules, and more. The Adams administration had also wanted state approval to change the Department of Design and Construction into a public authority.  </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">None of those measures seem to have made it into the state budget. The mayor’s office did not respond to an inquiry about these proposals.  </span></p> <p><b>Medicaid Funding<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The budget will also push about $300 million in annual Medicaid costs onto the city, and a similar amount to the other 57 counties across the state. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“This is a significant disappointment in the State budget,” Orecki said. “The 2015 Medicaid local share freeze is one of the State’s most significant fiscal policy achievements in recent years, and now they are partially reversing that.”</span></p> <p><b>Community Hiring Legislation<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Adams advocated for the state to approve a community hiring bill, which would have allowed the city to require local community hiring by companies that get city contracts. The bill was not included in the budget.  </span></p> <p><b>Income Disregard<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The mayor was also pushing for an “income disregard” bill that would allow low-income New Yorkers to continue receiving state public benefits for six months after they obtain new employment if they have already completed a job training program recognized by the state or federal government. The bill aims to tackle the “benefits cliff” where individuals lose public assistance as their income increases past the qualifying threshold. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The state budget did not include the proposal. </span></p> <p><b>Expanding Tax Credits<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The mayor called on the state to enhance the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit again this year, after improvements to both were included in last year’s budget. Adams had pushed for expanding eligibility for the benefits to hundreds of thousands of immigrants, including the undocumented. Though undocumented immigrants weren’t added to eligibility for either credit, the child tax credit was expanded to children under the age of four, which is expected to benefit more than 1 million children and their families. </span></p> <p><b>Health Care for Undocumented Immigrants<br /></b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Immigrant advocates, many legislators, and Mayor Adams called on the governor to support the “Coverage for All” proposal, which would have expanded the state’s Essential Plan and provided health coverage to those making up to 250% of the Federal Poverty Level, including undocumented immigrants. Their advocacy was unsuccessful and the proposal did not make it into the budget. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“The state budget was deeply disappointing and a slap in the face for working families and immigrants across the state, including in New York City,” said Jose Lopez, Co-Executive Director of Make the Road New York, an immigrant community-focused nonprofit group. “The budget failed to ensure access to basic health coverage and unemployment insurance, and advance any tenant protections whatsoever. As Albany continues to fail our communities, it's alarming to see Mayor Adams double down on his attempts to further cut schools, health care, and housing services—and blaming families who’ve come seeking asylum for it. The Mayor should stop his dangerous rhetoric and refocus on delivering solutions that treat asylum seekers, and all New Yorkers, with the respect and dignity they deserve.”</span></p> <p>

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

Read more by this writer.

</p>
Staffing Shortages Undermine Anti-Corruption Efforts at City Agencies, New Report Finds 2023-05-01T13:00:00+00:00 2023-05-01T13:00:00+00:00 https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/11979-staffing-nyc-agencies-corruption-waste Samar Khurshid [email protected] <p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/1-anti-corruption.jpg" width="600" /></p> <p>Inside City Hall (photo: William Alatriste/New York City Council)</p> <hr /> <p>Two-thirds of New York City government agencies say that difficulties in recruiting and retaining employees have negatively affected their anti-corruption efforts, raising the risk of fraud and waste, according to a new report from a city corruption watchdog.</p> <p>The New York City Department of Investigation (DOI), the oversight agency that monitors and investigates corruption and other dysfunction at city agencies, released its <a href="https://www.nyc.gov/assets/doi/press-releases/2023/May/19AntiCorrRpt.Release.05.01.2023.docx.pdf">2022 Annual Anti-Corruption Report</a> on Monday, pointing to serious risks arising from the city’s ongoing municipal staffing crisis. There are more than 23,000 budgeted vacancies across city agencies.</p> <p>Unlike past reports that focused on corruption issues and agency responses to them, DOI surveyed city agencies on how persisting staffing challenges have affected their efforts to monitor and tackle fraud and waste. The report was based on detailed questionnaires sent to 64 mayoral and non-mayoral city agencies, and covers the period from October 1, 2021 through September 30, 2022 — meaning the final three months of the de Blasio administration and first nine months of the Adams administration.</p> <p>Of those 64 agencies, 66% reported to DOI that a decrease in their staff was adversely affecting or posing risks to their anti-corruption efforts. “These challenges, should they continue, could have a long-term negative impact on the City’s anti-corruption efforts and therefore could increase the risks of corruption, fraud, waste, and abuse,” said DOI Commissioner Jocelyn Strauber, in a statement accompanying the report.</p> <p>Those agencies reported “reductions in oversight, auditing, and internal control functions,” according to the report, as well as risks to anti-corruption activities because of “delays, lowered capacity, inexperienced staff, and burnout.” In response, agencies said they have had to rearrange staff roles, take longer to complete certain tasks, and even forego new programs to monitor or prevent corruption.</p> <p>Only one agency pointed to a specific instance of suspected theft (valued at $5,000 or less) that agency management said could have been avoided if there was sufficient staffing.</p> <p>DOI itself has been struggling with staffing and budget cuts as its workload has increased. Strauber <a href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/11869-city-council-mayor-adams-cuts-department-investigation">testified at a Council budget hearing</a> in March that those factors have led to a slower pace of work and attention diverted more to administrative tasks than investigations.</p> <p>Council Member Gale Brewer, a Manhattan Democrat who chairs the Council’s oversight and investigations committee, has spent months advocating for funding boosts for oversight agencies like DOI and urging the administration to quickly fill vacancies. “It’s not just the oversight agencies but its all the anti-corruption work that goes on in the agencies that is impacted by vacancies,” she said in a phone interview, responding to DOI’s report.</p> <p>Brewer said she had no idea of the extent of the adverse effects until she saw the report. “You don't have oversight. You don't have the audit teams. You don't have the internal control functions. All of that is needed to do anti-corruption work,” she said.</p> <p>The report does note that the municipal staffing shortage is not limited to New York City. Since the pandemic, changes in employment trends have created a tight labor market nationally. And there are various reasons behind the vacancy crisis affecting city agencies including previous hiring freezes instituted at the height of the pandemic, the city’s vaccination mandate and the administration’s insistence that employees return to the office.</p> <p>Higher pay scales in the private sector have also drawn away workers from city agencies, leading to unprecedented attrition. The report even noted that inadequate pay raises the risk of corruption, “with one agency expressing concerns that inspectors who are not compensated properly would be at a higher risk of accepting bribes.”</p> <p>While slow to act, Mayor Eric Adams’ administration has started to take steps to address the vacancy crisis. Those steps have come after the period covered in the report and DOI does credit the administration for them, though it has not been clear why Adams did not take more aggressive steps earlier in his tenure given the vacancy crisis he inherited. In December, the mayor also created the Mayor’s Office of Risk Management and Compliance and Mayor’s Office of Municipal Services Assessment to tackle corruption and waste.</p> <p>“While we continue to recruit aggressively and remain laser-focused on hiring new employees to serve New Yorkers, as the report states, there is a nationwide labor shortage and hiring challenges are not unique to New York City,” said Fabien Levy, a spokesperson for the mayor, in a statement. “Even with our vacancies, the report — which addresses conditions this administration inherited — makes clear that there has not been any demonstrable increase in corruption among city employees. Our city employees remain committed to doing the difficult work New Yorkers rely on with honesty and integrity. We continue to improve our hiring process and welcome input to overcome the challenges that the city — like employers across the country — faces in recruiting and retaining employees.”</p> <p>Among the steps the administration has taken include ending in December its 2-for-1 hiring policy that mandated that agencies could hire one employee for every two vacancies, allowing agencies to increase salaries by 15% in high-attrition positions, appointing Agency Recruitment Czars at every agency, expedited responses to agency hiring requests, and several “Hiring Halls” to fill vacancies.</p> <p>The administration also slightly softened its stance on hybrid work schedules, reaching a contract agreement with DC37, the largest municipal workers union, which included a flexible work pilot program and increased wages. The city’s recent contract with the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the largest police union representing rank-and-file officers, also included more flexibility for officers besides increased salaries. But the mayor has not taken assertive executive action outside of union labor contracts to shift personnel policies for the city's many non-union employees, such as allowing some work-from-home for positions where those tasks can be done remotely.</p> <p>Critics, including Comptroller Brad Lander and City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, have said that the vacancy crisis was exacerbated by the mayor’s administration and that he did not move fast enough to address it. They have raised concerns that the vacancies, compounded by cuts imposed in the proposed city budget for next year, could be detrimental to city agencies and affect their ability to provide services to New Yorkers.</p> <p>In her <a href="https://council.nyc.gov/press/2023/03/08/2365/">State of the City speech</a> in March, Speaker Adams stressed the urgency of tackling the agency staffing crisis. “It has created a domino effect, and now New Yorkers who rely on essential services are feeling those impacts in real time,” she said.<br /><br />“As our <a href="https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/title-vacant/">Title Vacant</a> and <a href="https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/understaffed-underserved/">Understaffed, Underserved</a> reports lay out, the high number of vacancies at city agencies pose risks to the quality of city services, including basic oversight of agency operations,” Lander said in a statement to Gotham Gazette. “DOI’s anti-corruption report echoes our recommendations like higher salaries, accelerated hiring processes, and hybrid/remote work policies to strengthen the retention and recruitment of staff who perform mission critical oversight roles.”</p> <p>

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

Read more by this writer.

</p>
<p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/1-anti-corruption.jpg" width="600" /></p> <p>Inside City Hall (photo: William Alatriste/New York City Council)</p> <hr /> <p>Two-thirds of New York City government agencies say that difficulties in recruiting and retaining employees have negatively affected their anti-corruption efforts, raising the risk of fraud and waste, according to a new report from a city corruption watchdog.</p> <p>The New York City Department of Investigation (DOI), the oversight agency that monitors and investigates corruption and other dysfunction at city agencies, released its <a href="https://www.nyc.gov/assets/doi/press-releases/2023/May/19AntiCorrRpt.Release.05.01.2023.docx.pdf">2022 Annual Anti-Corruption Report</a> on Monday, pointing to serious risks arising from the city’s ongoing municipal staffing crisis. There are more than 23,000 budgeted vacancies across city agencies.</p> <p>Unlike past reports that focused on corruption issues and agency responses to them, DOI surveyed city agencies on how persisting staffing challenges have affected their efforts to monitor and tackle fraud and waste. The report was based on detailed questionnaires sent to 64 mayoral and non-mayoral city agencies, and covers the period from October 1, 2021 through September 30, 2022 — meaning the final three months of the de Blasio administration and first nine months of the Adams administration.</p> <p>Of those 64 agencies, 66% reported to DOI that a decrease in their staff was adversely affecting or posing risks to their anti-corruption efforts. “These challenges, should they continue, could have a long-term negative impact on the City’s anti-corruption efforts and therefore could increase the risks of corruption, fraud, waste, and abuse,” said DOI Commissioner Jocelyn Strauber, in a statement accompanying the report.</p> <p>Those agencies reported “reductions in oversight, auditing, and internal control functions,” according to the report, as well as risks to anti-corruption activities because of “delays, lowered capacity, inexperienced staff, and burnout.” In response, agencies said they have had to rearrange staff roles, take longer to complete certain tasks, and even forego new programs to monitor or prevent corruption.</p> <p>Only one agency pointed to a specific instance of suspected theft (valued at $5,000 or less) that agency management said could have been avoided if there was sufficient staffing.</p> <p>DOI itself has been struggling with staffing and budget cuts as its workload has increased. Strauber <a href="https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/11869-city-council-mayor-adams-cuts-department-investigation">testified at a Council budget hearing</a> in March that those factors have led to a slower pace of work and attention diverted more to administrative tasks than investigations.</p> <p>Council Member Gale Brewer, a Manhattan Democrat who chairs the Council’s oversight and investigations committee, has spent months advocating for funding boosts for oversight agencies like DOI and urging the administration to quickly fill vacancies. “It’s not just the oversight agencies but its all the anti-corruption work that goes on in the agencies that is impacted by vacancies,” she said in a phone interview, responding to DOI’s report.</p> <p>Brewer said she had no idea of the extent of the adverse effects until she saw the report. “You don't have oversight. You don't have the audit teams. You don't have the internal control functions. All of that is needed to do anti-corruption work,” she said.</p> <p>The report does note that the municipal staffing shortage is not limited to New York City. Since the pandemic, changes in employment trends have created a tight labor market nationally. And there are various reasons behind the vacancy crisis affecting city agencies including previous hiring freezes instituted at the height of the pandemic, the city’s vaccination mandate and the administration’s insistence that employees return to the office.</p> <p>Higher pay scales in the private sector have also drawn away workers from city agencies, leading to unprecedented attrition. The report even noted that inadequate pay raises the risk of corruption, “with one agency expressing concerns that inspectors who are not compensated properly would be at a higher risk of accepting bribes.”</p> <p>While slow to act, Mayor Eric Adams’ administration has started to take steps to address the vacancy crisis. Those steps have come after the period covered in the report and DOI does credit the administration for them, though it has not been clear why Adams did not take more aggressive steps earlier in his tenure given the vacancy crisis he inherited. In December, the mayor also created the Mayor’s Office of Risk Management and Compliance and Mayor’s Office of Municipal Services Assessment to tackle corruption and waste.</p> <p>“While we continue to recruit aggressively and remain laser-focused on hiring new employees to serve New Yorkers, as the report states, there is a nationwide labor shortage and hiring challenges are not unique to New York City,” said Fabien Levy, a spokesperson for the mayor, in a statement. “Even with our vacancies, the report — which addresses conditions this administration inherited — makes clear that there has not been any demonstrable increase in corruption among city employees. Our city employees remain committed to doing the difficult work New Yorkers rely on with honesty and integrity. We continue to improve our hiring process and welcome input to overcome the challenges that the city — like employers across the country — faces in recruiting and retaining employees.”</p> <p>Among the steps the administration has taken include ending in December its 2-for-1 hiring policy that mandated that agencies could hire one employee for every two vacancies, allowing agencies to increase salaries by 15% in high-attrition positions, appointing Agency Recruitment Czars at every agency, expedited responses to agency hiring requests, and several “Hiring Halls” to fill vacancies.</p> <p>The administration also slightly softened its stance on hybrid work schedules, reaching a contract agreement with DC37, the largest municipal workers union, which included a flexible work pilot program and increased wages. The city’s recent contract with the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the largest police union representing rank-and-file officers, also included more flexibility for officers besides increased salaries. But the mayor has not taken assertive executive action outside of union labor contracts to shift personnel policies for the city's many non-union employees, such as allowing some work-from-home for positions where those tasks can be done remotely.</p> <p>Critics, including Comptroller Brad Lander and City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, have said that the vacancy crisis was exacerbated by the mayor’s administration and that he did not move fast enough to address it. They have raised concerns that the vacancies, compounded by cuts imposed in the proposed city budget for next year, could be detrimental to city agencies and affect their ability to provide services to New Yorkers.</p> <p>In her <a href="https://council.nyc.gov/press/2023/03/08/2365/">State of the City speech</a> in March, Speaker Adams stressed the urgency of tackling the agency staffing crisis. “It has created a domino effect, and now New Yorkers who rely on essential services are feeling those impacts in real time,” she said.<br /><br />“As our <a href="https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/title-vacant/">Title Vacant</a> and <a href="https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/understaffed-underserved/">Understaffed, Underserved</a> reports lay out, the high number of vacancies at city agencies pose risks to the quality of city services, including basic oversight of agency operations,” Lander said in a statement to Gotham Gazette. “DOI’s anti-corruption report echoes our recommendations like higher salaries, accelerated hiring processes, and hybrid/remote work policies to strengthen the retention and recruitment of staff who perform mission critical oversight roles.”</p> <p>

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

Read more by this writer.

</p>
Leading Immigrant Advocacy Group Releases NYC Agenda, Countering Mayor's Budget 2023-04-26T04:00:00+00:00 2023-04-26T04:00:00+00:00 https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/11971-immigrant-advocates-nyc-budget-policy Samar Khurshid [email protected] <p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/2-immigrant-adv.jpg" width="600" /></p> <p>Make the Road New York (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)</p> <hr /> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">With Mayor Eric Adams soon to release his executive budget plan, Make the Road New York, a leading immigrant advocacy organization, is releasing a policy and budget agenda to push the mayor and City Council to adopt a more immigrant- and worker-friendly budget. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">With 25,000 members across the state, Make the Road is the largest member-based group of immigrant advocates in the state and a prominent voice for progressive legislation. The group will release its “Dignity, Community and Power” agenda at its community center in Jackson Heights, Queens on Wednesday afternoon, advocating for immigrant protections, a right to shelter and housing, education equity, stronger worker protections, expanded health care, fairness for nonprofit human-services providers, and a reduction in the “bloated” annual NYPD budget.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The agenda includes both policy proposals and funding measures that Make the Road believes should be included in the city’s budget for the next fiscal year, which starts July 1. Some of the measures echo efforts from the City Council, especially its Progressive Caucus, where Make the Road has many allies.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The mayor’s $102.7 billion preliminary budget, released earlier this year, has been a source of broad controversy as he has mandated spending cuts across city agencies that critics say will further hurt basic city services. Adams has repeatedly said that he has been forced to make tough financial decisions as the city faces several major challenges, chiefly an influx of tens of thousands of migrant asylum-seekers, a crisis that his administration projects will cost the city about $4.3 billion by July 2024. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Elected officials, including City Council leadership, and immigrant advocates have spent months pushing back against the mayor’s suggestions that funding services and shelter for migrants will come at the cost of taking care of New Yorkers that have already been here. And they have called on him to use billions in expected surplus revenue to invest in the city’s most vulnerable populations. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Make the Road’s agenda directly outlines measures to achieve that goal. “It is a community-based and -guided platform which we hope that, this next fiscal year, the city  can fund, and looks at issues where brown, and Black and immigrant New Yorkers, the working class, are going to see relief in their everyday lives,” said Natalia Aristizabal Betancur, Make the Road’s deputy director, in a phone interview. The mayor and City Council must agree on a new city budget by the July 1 start to the next fiscal year.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">A chief criticism of Adams has been that he is proposing significant cuts to agencies that serve the neediest New Yorkers and has failed to more aggressively get thousands of budgeted but vacant personnel positions filled, while making little attempt to rein in ballooning costs at the NYPD and Department of Correction. The police department, which costs the city about $11 billion annually in operating expenses and fringe benefits, has already exceeded its overtime budget for the current fiscal year by $100 million and growing, despite promises by the mayor to bring those costs under control. Make the Road’s agenda takes direct aim at those costs, calling for substantial cuts to police funding, though without a specific dollar figure in mind, and greater transparency and accountability from the department.  </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“The way that Mayor Adams has been handling the budget has not been centering the people who need the most help in New York City,” Betancur said, specifically highlighting cuts to schools while the police budget remains largely unchanged. “We hope that this year, he understands that he needs to be delivering more for the people who voted for him and not for [wealthy] New York City interests.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The organization is also calling for an end to the NYPD’s School Safety division, and to redirect its $450 million budget to school resources, staff, mental health services, and restorative justice practices. The agenda urges the city to immediately place a hiring freeze on school safety agents, eliminate 600 vacant school safety positions, eliminate $47.5 million allocated for “enhanced security measures” including surveillance, and disband the Youth Coordination Officers program that costs $106.2 million.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Make the Road is also calling for eliminating the police department’s VICE unit and using its $25 million in funding to provide health, legal, and educational services to workers in the sex trades; eliminating the NYPD’s Mental Health Co-Response Teams (which cost $5.7 million) and police officers within the Department of Homeless Services (which cost $30.1 million); as well as the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group and its public relations budget, which altogether cost the city about $138.7 million annually. All that funding, the advocacy group argues, should instead be reinvested in community-based public safety solutions such as ending homelessness, building housing, expanding mental health services, harm reduction programs, education, and youth services.  </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The agenda calls for an additional $50 million in immigration legal services; $1 million in baselined funding for the Rapid Response Legal Collaborative, a city-state operation first created in 2019 and providing legal counsel to those in detention or facing deportation; and maintaining $16.6 million for the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The organization is also pushing for the passage of three bills before the City Council – </span><a href="https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=5555450&amp;GUID=EB5A0266-15BD-42BE-8A76-7E8ED9827D9C" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Intro. 158</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, which would amend the city’s civil immigration detainer laws to allow individuals to sue if they are wrongfully detained by the NYPD, the Department of Correction (DOC), or the</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Department of Probation; </span><a href="https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=5555481&amp;GUID=9C8994A7-3A5A-4FD1-A625-12BE7FEC273C" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Intro. 184</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, which would prevent the NYPD from detaining an individual on a civil immigration detainer past their release date without a signed warrant; and </span><a href="https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=5555471&amp;GUID=7EB53635-B66A-4F3E-A62F-FDB70D020B5F"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Intro 185</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, which would prevent the DOC from disclosing information about people in their custody to federal immigration authorities.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As the housing and homelessness crisis worsens in the city in the wake of the pandemic and given the arrival of so many asylum-seekers, Make the Road is pushing for the administration to ensure that all New Yorkers have a “</span><a href="https://righttoaroof.org"><span style="font-weight: 400;">right to a roof</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">” by expanding eligibility to undocumented immigrants for the CityFHEPS vouchers – a rental subsidy which helps people who are either living in homeless shelters or facing homelessness find permanent housing. The organization is also calling for a comprehensive housing plan that ensures New Yorkers can live in safe and healthy homes, including through greater penalties on landlords who fail to make repairs to homes. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Among the more prominent criticisms leveled against the mayor’s budget is that it will reduce funding to Department of Education schools, CUNY, and public libraries, with low-income communities of color experiencing the worst effects of those funding cuts. Make the Road’s agenda calls for restoring up to $500 million in education funding, while preventing any further cuts. It also urges the city to baseline $20.4 million for adult literacy programs run by the Department of Youth and Community Development (which the City Council has also pushed for); pushes the City Council to renew a $4 million discretionary adult literacy initiative, and renew and expand a separate $5 million discretionary adult literacy pilot project. It also calls for restoring $9.2 million in funding for 52</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">community schools, which provide more holistic services to students and families.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The agenda includes several worker protections including support for the passage of </span><a href="https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=5958217&amp;GUID=44D72CEC-FE82-4A43-BA31-4BB15FBC15EB" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Intro. 837</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, also called the Secure Jobs Act, which would prohibit terminating an employee without just cause. It calls for renewing and expanding the Low-Wage Worker Support Initiative to $3 million; restoring $2.4 million in funding for the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection to avoid vacancy reductions; restoring $3 million in funding to ensure adequate staffing at the Law Enforcement Bureau of the city’s Commission on Human Rights; and $5.3 million for the Consortium for Worker Education “Jobs to Build On” program and $2.4 million for Worker Service Centers.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Expanding access to health care for immigrants and workers has been a major priority for advocates. Make the Road’s agenda includes several proposals to achieve that goal including $4 million to expand funding for the Access Health Initiative; $2.3 million for the Managed Care Consumer Assistance Program (MCCAP); maintaining $7.7 million for the Ending the Epidemic initiative focused on ending HIV; and $2 million for the Immigrant Health Initiative. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The agenda also calls for $100 million annually to expand the NYC Care program, which is overseen by NYC Health + Hospitals and provides low- to no-cost health services to individuals who do not qualify for or cannot afford health insurance, including undocumented New Yorkers. Additionally, Make the Road is calling for a new Community Health Worker Project to help community-based organizations hire Community Health Workers that will aid navigation of the system at health-care facilities.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Even prior to Adams’ tenure, city government has long been criticized for failing to fairly pay nonprofit human-services providers. That, along with lengthy delays in payments, have led much of the industry to the brink of insolvency. In its agenda, Make the Road urges the city pay providers “what we are worth,” in-full and on-time by first providing a 6.5% cost-of-living</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">adjustment to all providers through $200 million in the next budget and then providing them a multi-year pay agreement on par with DC37, the city’s largest municipal union that recently ratified a new contract with the city. The group also calls for changing the Indirect Cost Rate manual to make indirect funding a fixed budget cost that is fully funded and to ensure on-time registration and payment of contracts with legal enforcement for delays and late payment.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Many of the items on Make the Road’s agenda align with the New York City Council’s recently-released </span><a href="https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&amp;rls=en&amp;q=city+council+prelimiuanry+budget+response&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;oe=UTF-8" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">preliminary budget response</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and the Council Progressive Caucus’ </span><a href="https://nycprogressives.com/2023/04/20/progressive-caucus-fy24-budget-agenda-a-budget-for-working-people/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">budget priorities</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, both of which call for rolling back education cuts, investing in affordable housing and expanding mental health services, while broadly investing in working New Yorkers, particularly low-income communities of color.</span></p> <p>

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

Read more by this writer.

</p>
<p><img src="https://www.gothamgazette.com/images/graphics/2-immigrant-adv.jpg" width="600" /></p> <p>Make the Road New York (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)</p> <hr /> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">With Mayor Eric Adams soon to release his executive budget plan, Make the Road New York, a leading immigrant advocacy organization, is releasing a policy and budget agenda to push the mayor and City Council to adopt a more immigrant- and worker-friendly budget. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">With 25,000 members across the state, Make the Road is the largest member-based group of immigrant advocates in the state and a prominent voice for progressive legislation. The group will release its “Dignity, Community and Power” agenda at its community center in Jackson Heights, Queens on Wednesday afternoon, advocating for immigrant protections, a right to shelter and housing, education equity, stronger worker protections, expanded health care, fairness for nonprofit human-services providers, and a reduction in the “bloated” annual NYPD budget.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The agenda includes both policy proposals and funding measures that Make the Road believes should be included in the city’s budget for the next fiscal year, which starts July 1. Some of the measures echo efforts from the City Council, especially its Progressive Caucus, where Make the Road has many allies.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The mayor’s $102.7 billion preliminary budget, released earlier this year, has been a source of broad controversy as he has mandated spending cuts across city agencies that critics say will further hurt basic city services. Adams has repeatedly said that he has been forced to make tough financial decisions as the city faces several major challenges, chiefly an influx of tens of thousands of migrant asylum-seekers, a crisis that his administration projects will cost the city about $4.3 billion by July 2024. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Elected officials, including City Council leadership, and immigrant advocates have spent months pushing back against the mayor’s suggestions that funding services and shelter for migrants will come at the cost of taking care of New Yorkers that have already been here. And they have called on him to use billions in expected surplus revenue to invest in the city’s most vulnerable populations. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Make the Road’s agenda directly outlines measures to achieve that goal. “It is a community-based and -guided platform which we hope that, this next fiscal year, the city  can fund, and looks at issues where brown, and Black and immigrant New Yorkers, the working class, are going to see relief in their everyday lives,” said Natalia Aristizabal Betancur, Make the Road’s deputy director, in a phone interview. The mayor and City Council must agree on a new city budget by the July 1 start to the next fiscal year.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">A chief criticism of Adams has been that he is proposing significant cuts to agencies that serve the neediest New Yorkers and has failed to more aggressively get thousands of budgeted but vacant personnel positions filled, while making little attempt to rein in ballooning costs at the NYPD and Department of Correction. The police department, which costs the city about $11 billion annually in operating expenses and fringe benefits, has already exceeded its overtime budget for the current fiscal year by $100 million and growing, despite promises by the mayor to bring those costs under control. Make the Road’s agenda takes direct aim at those costs, calling for substantial cuts to police funding, though without a specific dollar figure in mind, and greater transparency and accountability from the department.  </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“The way that Mayor Adams has been handling the budget has not been centering the people who need the most help in New York City,” Betancur said, specifically highlighting cuts to schools while the police budget remains largely unchanged. “We hope that this year, he understands that he needs to be delivering more for the people who voted for him and not for [wealthy] New York City interests.”</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The organization is also calling for an end to the NYPD’s School Safety division, and to redirect its $450 million budget to school resources, staff, mental health services, and restorative justice practices. The agenda urges the city to immediately place a hiring freeze on school safety agents, eliminate 600 vacant school safety positions, eliminate $47.5 million allocated for “enhanced security measures” including surveillance, and disband the Youth Coordination Officers program that costs $106.2 million.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Make the Road is also calling for eliminating the police department’s VICE unit and using its $25 million in funding to provide health, legal, and educational services to workers in the sex trades; eliminating the NYPD’s Mental Health Co-Response Teams (which cost $5.7 million) and police officers within the Department of Homeless Services (which cost $30.1 million); as well as the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group and its public relations budget, which altogether cost the city about $138.7 million annually. All that funding, the advocacy group argues, should instead be reinvested in community-based public safety solutions such as ending homelessness, building housing, expanding mental health services, harm reduction programs, education, and youth services.  </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The agenda calls for an additional $50 million in immigration legal services; $1 million in baselined funding for the Rapid Response Legal Collaborative, a city-state operation first created in 2019 and providing legal counsel to those in detention or facing deportation; and maintaining $16.6 million for the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The organization is also pushing for the passage of three bills before the City Council – </span><a href="https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=5555450&amp;GUID=EB5A0266-15BD-42BE-8A76-7E8ED9827D9C" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Intro. 158</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, which would amend the city’s civil immigration detainer laws to allow individuals to sue if they are wrongfully detained by the NYPD, the Department of Correction (DOC), or the</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Department of Probation; </span><a href="https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=5555481&amp;GUID=9C8994A7-3A5A-4FD1-A625-12BE7FEC273C" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Intro. 184</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, which would prevent the NYPD from detaining an individual on a civil immigration detainer past their release date without a signed warrant; and </span><a href="https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=5555471&amp;GUID=7EB53635-B66A-4F3E-A62F-FDB70D020B5F"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Intro 185</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, which would prevent the DOC from disclosing information about people in their custody to federal immigration authorities.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As the housing and homelessness crisis worsens in the city in the wake of the pandemic and given the arrival of so many asylum-seekers, Make the Road is pushing for the administration to ensure that all New Yorkers have a “</span><a href="https://righttoaroof.org"><span style="font-weight: 400;">right to a roof</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">” by expanding eligibility to undocumented immigrants for the CityFHEPS vouchers – a rental subsidy which helps people who are either living in homeless shelters or facing homelessness find permanent housing. The organization is also calling for a comprehensive housing plan that ensures New Yorkers can live in safe and healthy homes, including through greater penalties on landlords who fail to make repairs to homes. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Among the more prominent criticisms leveled against the mayor’s budget is that it will reduce funding to Department of Education schools, CUNY, and public libraries, with low-income communities of color experiencing the worst effects of those funding cuts. Make the Road’s agenda calls for restoring up to $500 million in education funding, while preventing any further cuts. It also urges the city to baseline $20.4 million for adult literacy programs run by the Department of Youth and Community Development (which the City Council has also pushed for); pushes the City Council to renew a $4 million discretionary adult literacy initiative, and renew and expand a separate $5 million discretionary adult literacy pilot project. It also calls for restoring $9.2 million in funding for 52</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">community schools, which provide more holistic services to students and families.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The agenda includes several worker protections including support for the passage of </span><a href="https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=5958217&amp;GUID=44D72CEC-FE82-4A43-BA31-4BB15FBC15EB" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Intro. 837</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, also called the Secure Jobs Act, which would prohibit terminating an employee without just cause. It calls for renewing and expanding the Low-Wage Worker Support Initiative to $3 million; restoring $2.4 million in funding for the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection to avoid vacancy reductions; restoring $3 million in funding to ensure adequate staffing at the Law Enforcement Bureau of the city’s Commission on Human Rights; and $5.3 million for the Consortium for Worker Education “Jobs to Build On” program and $2.4 million for Worker Service Centers.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Expanding access to health care for immigrants and workers has been a major priority for advocates. Make the Road’s agenda includes several proposals to achieve that goal including $4 million to expand funding for the Access Health Initiative; $2.3 million for the Managed Care Consumer Assistance Program (MCCAP); maintaining $7.7 million for the Ending the Epidemic initiative focused on ending HIV; and $2 million for the Immigrant Health Initiative. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The agenda also calls for $100 million annually to expand the NYC Care program, which is overseen by NYC Health + Hospitals and provides low- to no-cost health services to individuals who do not qualify for or cannot afford health insurance, including undocumented New Yorkers. Additionally, Make the Road is calling for a new Community Health Worker Project to help community-based organizations hire Community Health Workers that will aid navigation of the system at health-care facilities.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Even prior to Adams’ tenure, city government has long been criticized for failing to fairly pay nonprofit human-services providers. That, along with lengthy delays in payments, have led much of the industry to the brink of insolvency. In its agenda, Make the Road urges the city pay providers “what we are worth,” in-full and on-time by first providing a 6.5% cost-of-living</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">adjustment to all providers through $200 million in the next budget and then providing them a multi-year pay agreement on par with DC37, the city’s largest municipal union that recently ratified a new contract with the city. The group also calls for changing the Indirect Cost Rate manual to make indirect funding a fixed budget cost that is fully funded and to ensure on-time registration and payment of contracts with legal enforcement for delays and late payment.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Many of the items on Make the Road’s agenda align with the New York City Council’s recently-released </span><a href="https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&amp;rls=en&amp;q=city+council+prelimiuanry+budget+response&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;oe=UTF-8" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">preliminary budget response</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and the Council Progressive Caucus’ </span><a href="https://nycprogressives.com/2023/04/20/progressive-caucus-fy24-budget-agenda-a-budget-for-working-people/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">budget priorities</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, both of which call for rolling back education cuts, investing in affordable housing and expanding mental health services, while broadly investing in working New Yorkers, particularly low-income communities of color.</span></p> <p>

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

Read more by this writer.

</p>