While Eric Schneiderman busily campaigns for state attorney general, four Democrats are vying for the State Senate seat he is vacating.
Assemblymember Adriano Espaillat, Democratic District Leader Mark Levine, State Heath Department attorney Anna Lewis, and community activist Miosotis Munoz all have thrown their hats in the ring. Each of these candidates hopes not only to continue the work of the man widely considered to be one of the most progressive voices in Albany but also to answer the ubiquitous calls for ethics reform.
"This is a new breed of elected officials," said Munoz, a former aide to U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel.
At a time when constituents are fed up with the state's political dysfunction, Espaillat's opponents hope his 14-plus years of Albany experience will hurt him.
"There's a desperate need for new voices with new perspective," said Levine. "I actually consider it an advantage to be running as a non-incumbent."
In an effort to capitalize on that supposed advantage, Levine has raised concerns about what he sees as several ethical lapses on Espailat's part.
Democrats Francesca Castellanos and Rafael Figuereo also filed signatures, but both have since dropped out. The winner of the Democratic primary will face Republican Stylo Sapaski and Conservative Raphael Klapper in November.
Espaillat -- with more than $260,000 in total contributions and over $100,000 in campaign cash as the campaign entered its final week -- also boasts a slew of endorsements from influential New York leaders, including Council Speaker Christine Quinn as well as Schneiderman himself. He also has backing from a number of unions, including the teachers and Local 1199 of the Service Employees Union.
All this, along with his years in the Assembly, makes Espaillat the frontrunner. Levine, though, is a close second. The former public school bilingual science teacher filed 12,000 signatures to Espaillat's 18,000 and has amassed more than about $240,000 in contributions. As the campaign went into the last month, he had the largest war chest with more than $146,000. He has also racked up some endorsements from unions, local Democratic clubs and public figures like City Councilmember Diana Reyna. And he has some star power on his side. His major contributors include actors Matt Damon and Ed Norton.
Lewis has reported about $6,000 in contributions, but filed 11,000 signatures. She has sought to stress her support for same sex marriage, although Espaillat and Levine also support it. Munoz has raised slightly more than $20,000.
District 31 comprises many of Manhattan's northernmost neighborhoods, including Washington Heights, West Harlem, the Upper West Side and Morningside Heights and extends into the Bronx. Although ethnically diverse, Hispanics, notably Dominicans, account for the largest share of voters. Amid a myriad of concerns and campaign promises, two issues loom particularly large: housing and economic development.
All four candidates complain about living conditions in the area. Each has vowed he or she will made it a priority to protect tenants from skyrocketing rent costs, greedy landlords and overdevelopment.
"There are desperate needs in the district," said Levine, who said that, if elected, he would advocate for stronger tenant protection laws and affordable housing development. He would want to end Vacancy Decontrol, which removes an apartment from the rent-control program once a tenant leaves.
Munoz also pledged to repeal Vacancy Decontrol. She said she plans to ensure that a steady stream of funding exists for programs and organizations to help tenants negotiate with their landlords.
"We already have programs to help people who need representation in court," she said. "Those programs are understaffed and overwhelmed."
Anna Lewis is a board member at the Mitchell-Lama Residents Coalition, a tenant advocacy group affiliated with the state affordable housing program. She hopes to improve current public living facilities and strengthen city housing standards. For example, while developer now can get public funding if they set aside 20 percent of apartments in a project for affordable housing, Lewis would seek to raise that to 40 percent.
One way to protect Upper Manhattan's most vulnerable tenants, said Espaillat, is to provide free translation services for important documents like eviction notices. He helped create the Community Legal Resource Network, a group that offers free legal counsel to vulnerable tenants.
Espaillat, who chairs the Assembly's small business committee, pledged to continue the work he has done in Albany economic development in his district. Last year, he worked with Con Edison and the Hispanic Federation to provide free energy efficient equipment to small business owners in his district. He also pointed out his role in creating the $25 million small business fund in this year's state budget from allows merchants to get low-interest loans of up to $125,000.
Munoz plans to combat soaring unemployment rates through job training programs. She also said she would work with Wall Street, providing firms with tax incentives to invest in and offer loans to small businesses.
"We need to go where the money is," she said.
Economic issues are "really tough", said Lewis. While campaigning, she overheard a recently unemployed construction worker bemoaning his situation to a friend.
"He said, 'What am I supposed to do now?' and I didn’t really have a good answer for him," she said. She suggested real estate development could bring jobs to the community -- if the hiring process is closely monitored.
"I'm not against development, but it needs to be smart development," she said. Levine, who founded Neighborhood Trust, a community credit union that frequently provides low-income residents with small business loans, said economic development is a top-priority.
"The state could do much more," to help struggling business owners cope with obstacles like rising rent and insufficient access to capital, he said.
Despite his pride in Neighborhood Trust -- and the non-profit that helps fund it -- Levine currently is taking a leave of absence from its board.
"I don't think state lawmakers should ever be directing funds toward groups that benefit them, their friends or their family members," he said. "I think the rules should be tightened to prevent lawmakers from steering resources to businesses to which they have any connection at all."
Levine may be trying to draw a contrast between himself and Espaillat. The New York Post recently reported reported that the Assembly member helped steer state funds to the Northern Manhattan Coalition for Economic Development, a non-profit that employs several of his associates, including sister-in-law and his former chief-of-staff. Though Espaillat has denied having a role in the hiring process, he shares an address with the organization.
Levine has requested that state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo investigate the arrangement between Espaillat and the coalition.
Critics have also charged that Espaillat hired a journalists to work for the Assembly who, at the same time, wrote opinion pieces in Dominican papers praising Espaillat.
While Levine has sought to make ethics a cornerstone of his campaign, the good government group Citizens Union gave its backing to Espaillat, a move that Levin reportedly called "a real stunner … perplexing." (Citizens Union's sister organization published Gotham Gazette.)
Espaillat has made campaign finance reform and independent redistricting top priorities in his campaign. He and Schneiderman spearheaded the successful effort to repeal the system that counts inmates in the district where they are incarcerated rather than their home districts.
"It is obvious that the Senate needs to change dramatically," Espaillat said.
Anna Lewis, who enjoyed a three-year stint on the Assembly's Committee on Oversight, Analysis and Investigation, said one vital way to achieve reform is to create an independent commission to oversee and decide on ethical matters concerning the state.
"It would be more credible if it were independent," she said.
With Rangel in the spotlight for multiple ethics violations, Munoz asserts her independence from her former boss and maintains her commitment to reform.
"That's what it means to be progressive, to be transparent," she said.
Perhaps the biggest challenge facing all of four potential state senators is engaging voters. Many residents of the district don't know who their local representative is, let alone that there is an election coming up. Ivy Parker, an Upper Manhattan resident, complained that candidates devote plenty of time to their district during campaign season, and once elected, vanish.
"Once they get into office, they have their own rules," she said. "They don't connect."
Two recent reports on Bloomberg administration management issues -- one from the administration itself -- offer an intriguing alternative to the widely held view of a business-like machine. Instead, the reports describe surprisingly scattershot styles of management over the past eight and a half years.
One of the reports Maximizing Efficiency in NYC Government: A Plan to Consolidate and Modernize Back-Office Operations, by the mayor's own Office of Operations, reveals an administration with a blind eye to inefficiencies in many agencies. The other by the Center for New York City Affairs -- Managing by the Numbers: Empowerment and Accountability in New York City’s Schools -- finds that the city's largest bureaucracy, the Department of Education, is apparently unable to establish a stable management structure for the city schools.
The city report is an astonishing self-critique of city management eight and a half years into the Bloomberg administration. Rather than a centralized, top-down structure that maximizes efficiencies and accountability, the report finds inefficient, decentralized structures in several agencies. The report has attracted criticism for proposing that some city services be privatized, but it also proposes an array of other "efficiencies" that it says will save $500 million over the next four years and $500 million a year thereafter.
The report on schools is a comprehensive study of Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein's reform efforts in the $18.6 billion Department of Education. Here a centralized, business model does seem to have been in full flower, but the department has been unable to settle on a bureaucratic structure: There have been three major shifts in less than eight years. Throughout them all, though, the department has focused so narrowly on one policy goal -- higher test scores -- that it proved blind to skepticism from teachers, parents and academic experts.
The Office of Operations' report is the first from the new, deputy mayor for operations, Stephen Goldsmith, who was mayor of Indianapolis from 1992 to 2000, where he gained a national reputation for management reforms, particularly in saving money from agency efficiencies and privatizing city services. He also has been a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, chief domestic adviser to President George W. Bush in the 2000 campaign and a former chair of the conservative Manhattan Institute's Center for Civic Innovation.
The report is remarkable for its blunt assessments. Such candor is a refreshing sign from the office that produces Mayor’s Management Reports twice a year, reports that have been short on assessments, goals and performance measures.
Goldsmith says his "concrete plan" will "turn ideas into efficiencies and save money in creative and previously unexamined ways."
For example, in information technology, the report found that "the city currently operates in a large and fragmented ... environment, consisting of more than 80 data centers that support approximately 3,000 applications in more than 50 different locations." Consolidating and modernizing this infrastructure would save nearly $60 million over the next four years, according to the Office of Operations.
The city collected over $40 billion last year in taxes, fines, rents and other revenue. Yet the report says the city could save $25 million to $35 million by consolidating collection operations and could increase collections by $100 million with stronger enforcement.
Human resources management in the city is "highly decentralized, which has precluded a coordinated, citywide [human resources] strategy." In fiscal year 2010, for instance, the city spent $410 million and had one human resources employee for every 38 workers, compared, the report said, to an average 95:1 ratio in organizations "similar to the city" Centralizing several hundred agency-specific human resources offices, Goldsmith's office believes, would save more than $100 million over the next four years.
The city's management of its office space and real estate is filled with inefficiencies, the Office of Operation concluded. No single agency is responsible for citywide real estate planning as project management is split between agencies and the Department of Citywide Administrative Services. Some 11 percent of city workstations are vacant.
The city currently owns and leases currently 19 million square feet of office space, costing $435 million a year. The report proposes the government reduce this by 1.2 million square feet in order to save $36 million a year by 2014.
The municipal government manages over 26,000 vehicles and other mobile equipment, at a cost of $667 million a year. Major costs include $283 million a year for maintenance, $250 million for procurement and $120 million for fuel. Nine agencies oversee 125 in-house vehicle maintenance shops, with more than 1,700 staff and over 300 vendor contracts for parts and maintenance services. Eight city agencies manage over 400 fueling locations.
Selling 700 non-emergency vehicles over the last year and a half has saved the city $20 million in one-time spending. Overall, downsizing, consolidating and privatizing services could save up to $71 million over four years, the report says.
If the key management question raised by the Goldsmith report is how the Bloomberg administration missed chances to save $500 million a year in the operations of several relatively small back-office agencies, one big question raised by the Center for New York City Affairs report is how so many management resources in an $18.6 billion agency could be devoted to, as its title aptly puts it, "managing the numbers."
The numbers here mean the scores on standardized tests and the scores for schools themselves, the School Progress scores, which form the basis for the so-called school report cards. In terms of management style, the most interesting finding is that through the three re-organizations of school management, the aim has increasingly been to centralize the system around those numbers.
The first re-organization, from 2003 to 2007, the report notes, dismantled the 32 community school districts that had been in place since the decentralization movement of the 1970s and in its place created 10 administrative regions. That centralized the administration of schools but reduced community and parent access.
The second re-organization, from 2007 to 2010, did away with the regions and placed much more responsibility and accountability on the 1,588 school principals. They were given more authority over budgets, hiring and curriculum, but, as the report says, "In exchange, principals must demonstrate steady and marked improvement in student performance as measured by statistical data, such as standardized tests and graduation rates."
The second re-organization also offered principals management help: They could choose among 11 School-Support Organizations -- specialized Department of Education offices, universities and non-profit organizations, which offered expert advice on teacher development, budget options, curriculum, etc. Operations, such as food, transportation and supplies, were to be handled by borough-wide Integrated Service Centers.
The third shift in management structure, introduced earlier this year, collapses the School-Support Organizations and Integrated Service Centers into new Children’s First Networks. These networks, each with roughly 25 schools, are chosen by the schools to provide similar support services, in many cases across borough as well as neighborhood lines. Every school pays about $40,000 a year to the network for whatever services it offers. Six "cluster leaders" manage these networks.
Apparently in response to criticisms that the chancellor has too tight a grip on schools, his office argues that the current system is "decentralized." But the study's authors point out, "While principals have been given more management discretion, this has been accompanied by new powers and accountability demands coming centrally from Klein's headquarters. ... Neither the [community school] superintendents nor the school network teams have direct control of the principals."
According to the Center for New York City Affairs, it is the chancellor’s Division of Performance and Accountability -- where the school progress reports are developed -- and his Division of School Support and Instruction that "largely oversee schools today." The chancellor’s "restructuring has all but eliminated middle management and abolished day-to-day supervision of principals," the report finds. Extensive interviews with principals suggest that some thrive in this structure and that others simply become lost.
The two reports -- one internal and the other external -- together suggest that any notion of a single Bloomberg administration "management style" is going to be hard to find. The idea, for instance, that this mayor has a business-like, centralized style is belied by the Goldsmith report, at least with regard to several back-office agencies that attract little public (and mayoral?) attention.
The bluntness of Goldsmith's assessment is encouraging. Maybe he can go on to answer some of the overarching questions about the administration's approach -- and its attitude toward centralization and decentralization, perhaps in a revamping of his Office of Operation's tired and largely irrelevant Mayor's Management Report this September. He and the mayor have made a good first step in setting out a management agenda that actually saves money. Tracing its progress in the management report would be a good second step.
Glenn Pasanen, who teaches political science at Lehman College, has been in charge of Gotham Gazette's finance topic page since 2001.
In the spring of 1975, the nation’s large commercial banks, fearing a default on New York City notes they had bought and sold for decades, severed their business ties with the city. Mayor Abe Beame’s City Hall was caught short – no longer could it turn to the powerful gatekeepers of the municipal bond market for the financing necessary to keep up with its bills, including a vast and growing pile of short-term debt. The recently elected Democratic governor of the state, Hugh L. Carey, stepped into the fray, fearing that a city bankruptcy would wreck the state’s entire financial system and generate national and even global repercussions.
Remarkably, Carey set the stage for approval by Congress and President Gerald R. Ford of billions of dollars in federal loans to the city, reform of the city’s scrambled finances, and the eventual return of the big banks. This dramatic story is drawn from an era, 35 years ago, when New York confronted a fiscal meltdown more imminent than the deeply entrenched but equally serious fiscal problems now facing the state. It is colorfully told in the new book "The Man Who Saved New York: Hugh Carey and the Great Fiscal Crisis of 1975," by Seymour P. Lachman and Robert Polner.
The following excerpt touches on the Washington phase of Carey's campaign to save the city from default and bankruptcy.
Time magazine’s Oct. 20, 1975, issue illustrated how far the city had sunk. Its cover depicted New York’s Mayor Abe Beame as a genteel hobo wearing a tattered top-hat, shaking a tin cup and pleading, “Brother, Can You Spare $4 Billion?” But Washington was unmoved. Tip O’Neill Jr., the majority leader of the House and a proponent of federal assistance for the debt-beleaguered New York City, said shortly after Governor Hugh Carey gave an impassioned plea before the Senate Banking Committee that an aid package was well short of the votes needed for approval. “If there were a vote today, I would have to say that New York would not prevail,” O’Neill said.
President Gerald Ford, as he would write in his autobiography, remained torn between his concern about the impact that a city default would have on residents and the desire not to let local leaders -- and lenders -- off the hook for decades of fiscal irresponsibility.
In the end, the president reconciled the competing forces with a bill that would add “Chapter 16” to the federal Bankruptcy Act to facilitate a gentle and “orderly” bankruptcy. It would keep some of the city’s remaining operating funds from getting tied up in the bankruptcy litigation, while allowing the court to authorize the sale of debt certificates secured by future city revenue, providing a short-term source of funds to carry on “essential services.”
“The bankruptcy option,” wrote Charles J. Orlebeke in a definitive study of the Ford White House during the city fiscal crisis, “appeared to offer him [the president] both a morally satisfying and administratively feasible path.”
But in a speech to the National Press Club on October 29, in which Ford laid out his new bankruptcy provision – delivering first formal statement on the New York crisis since May – his tone and message were noticeably un-gentle.
Ford, in the fateful speech, ignored the Herculean efforts made by Carey and Beame over the past six months, such as the sale of MAC bonds to stretch out of the city’s massive short-term debt, and the imposition of a financial control board to enforce deep cuts in city spending (including a planned 60,000 layoffs over the next three years). The president labeled the city, and its inability to meet its obligations, “unique among municipalities through the United States,” and alluded back to “a steady stream of unbalanced budgets, massive growth in the city’s debt, extraordinary increases in public employee contracts, and total disregard of independent experts who warned again and again that the city was courting disaster.”
He denounced “scare talk” used by New York politicians and bankers—“the blatant attempt in some quarters to frighten the American people and their representatives in Congress into panicky support of patently bad policy”—and added: “The people of this country will not be stampeded. They will not panic when a few desperate New York City officials and bankers try to scare New York’s mortgage payments out of them.”
The city’s “high wages and pensions . . . its tuition-free university system, its city-run hospital system, and welfare administration,” as Ford depicted them, meant, too, that the city must be taken to task. But he said the city’s political leaders had shown that they could not be trusted to exert spending discipline. An unearned and undeserved bailout by Congress, he said, would only set a “dangerous precedent,” signaling the willingness of the federal government to provide “immediate rewards and eventual rescue for every other city that follows the tragic example of our largest city.”
New York, Ford said, must face its “day of reckoning.”
“I can tell you, and tell you now,” he pronounced, “that I am prepared to veto any bill that has at its purpose a bailout of New York City to prevent a default.”
Ford’s speech stymied some inroads Gov. Carey had been making with key congressional committeees. More broadly, the address was a line in the sand, marking the beginning of a profound change arising in American political life, one that would be expressed in the angry citizen property-tax revolts a few years away. California voters in 1978 would approve Proposition 13, which deprived that state of increased taxes to pay for its systems of transportation, education, sewerage and potable water in an anti-tax movement that helped set the stage for the election of former California governor Ronald Reagan as president in 1980, not to mention his inaugural address in January, 1981, in which he declared, “Government is not the solution to our problems—government is the problem.”
The debate in 1975 over New York’s fiscal fate offered an early clue to the anti-tax fervency that was soon to gather to a gale force, although few imagined how successful that ideology would become, the vast social inequalities it would foster, or how ferocious and long-lasting would be the public and political backlash against unions, government, and public regulation of private industry and Wall Street. These first gusts emphasizing the finite nature of the public purse—which liberalism, in its view of government as the principal vehicle of opportunity and advancement, had never really defined—eventually turned into cyclonic winds in the 1980s, as corporate interests and influence rose, dominated and flourished.
Ford’s immediate need to court the right-wing of his party in the face of a Reagan challenge was a crucial factor in his giving New York the cold shoulder. He also made up his mind that fall to exclude from his reelection ticket Vice President Rockefeller, known as a liberal Republican and inextricably identified with his home state of New York, selecting instead the conservative Kansas Senator Bob Dole as his vice-presidential running mate.
Carey adviser Felix Rohatyn recalled that he and Carey watched Ford deliver his National Press Club speech on a television set in the governor’s Manhattan office and were “thoroughly depressed” as they sat down afterward for a late dinner at Elaine’s on Manhattan’s East Side. A newsboy walked into the casual bistro favored by Manhattan notables at about ten o’clock, hawking the early edition of the New York Daily News, and no one could believe their eyes. The front page headline in 144-point type, soon to be seen by millions of readers, screamed: “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD,” followed by the explanatory words: “Vows He’ll Veto Any Bail-Out.”
Powerful and unsettling—and immediately famous—the headline was an “unfortunate overstatement,” as James Cannon put it years later at a Hofstra University forum on the fiscal crisis, for Ford had never actually uttered the words “drop dead.” And he did not harbor malice toward its citizenry.
Ford himself was deeply stung by the headline. As late as 2001, five years before his death, he approached David Burke, who served as secretary to the governor under Carey, at a gala dinner honoring the ex-president with the John F. Kennedy Library’s “Profile in Courage” award for having delivered his controversial pardon of Richard Nixon “I want to get one thing straight,” Ford told the former Carey aide. “I never said â€New York City drop dead.’ I never said that.”
The headline, however, reflected the fact that the president was, as he put it, “prepared to veto any bill that has at its purpose a bailout of New York City to prevent a default.” It arguably cost him New York State’s 41 electoral votes in the close presidential election that followed in November, 1976, against Democrat Jimmy Carter of Georgia, after Ford’s defeat of Reagan in the primary. Former Wisconsin senator and Ford friend Melvin Laird said years later that the headline was exceeded only by Ford’s pardon of Nixon in the degree of damage it caused his popularity and chances in the 1976 election. “That headline caused him a lot of harm, almost as much harm as the pardon did.”
According to Rohatyn, Carey glared at the News headline before him at Elaine’s and pronounced: “Now we’re going to win.” It seemed to everyone sitting at the table that night that he was right and that Ford would not be able to withstand the ensuing heat. Yet Carey worried privately. Despite what he told his dinner companions, he felt the headline might cause Ford to harden in opposing a New York aid package so he wouldn’t appear to waffle or flip-fl op at a critical moment, with the eyes of the country and the world upon him. Still, he felt that Ford would remain true to his word of September 2 and support federal assistance if Carey could bring Republicans (as well as many reluctant Democrats) around in Congress.
Carey all the same moved quickly to exploit the headline’s national impact and point a finger of accusation at Ford and the Republicans in Congress for promoting the city’s demise at the risk not just of the city itself but of almost everyone. Speaking to a gathering of the AFL-CIO in upstate New York, the governor was indignant, saying it “isn’t fair when the President of the United States hauls off and kicks the people of the city of New York in the groin.”
On the first of November, he delivered a blistering statewide radio and television address, emphasizing that the threat of a default had already raised the cost of borrowing in many cities and states. Knowledgeable and well-organized, he further declared that the “Ford formula deliberately unravels every step we’ve taken to solve our own problems,” as the easier bankruptcy option he proposed would scare off prospective investors in municipal bonds.
“Who would risk his funds knowing that the government could avoid repayment simply by slipping into bankruptcy?” the governor asked. Carey accused Ford of effectively running for reelection at the expense of the city’s millions of residents, with his “simplistic, self-defeating plan . . . designed more to appease the Republican Party’s Reagan wing than to help New Yorkers.”
If the city defaulted on its obligations, Carey stated, the holders of the city’s $14 billion in outstanding bonds and notes would conservatively lose $6 billion in the value of those securities. “That money will be written off on tax returns, and that means $2 billion less in federal tax payments.”
Carey added that it would be left to the U.S. Treasury to pay the cost of unemployment insurance and welfare assistance when businesses owed money by the city, including those “in communities such as Grand Rapids, Michigan”—Ford’s hometown—went under, while there would be “tremors and collapses in local governments around America, including agencies of New York State.”
Even so, Carey acknowledged that Ford was correct in describing the city’s history of fiscal irresponsibility. But he said the blame belonged to many, mentioning “city officials and interest groups; banks that did not ask the hard questions; a state legislature and hand-picked vice president”— former Gov. Nelson Rockefeller—“that specifically authorized every fringe and pension benefit and every unwise borrowing Mr. Ford now attacks so righteously; and presidents who diverted tens of billions of dollars to foreign dictatorships and senseless war, and who plunged our economy into its worst crisis in 40 years.”
Carey acknowledged the existence of a “skeptical, hostile” Congress, and the antipathy that New York City aroused in many quarters.
“Our city,” he conceded, “is often abrasive and arrogant, sometimes cold and unfeeling, always challenging. For a lot of reasons it has incurred the scorn of some of our countrymen; because of our pace and tone of voice, because of the colors of our skins and the accents in which we speak, and our tradition as a magnet for the disaffected, the dispossessed. What we’re hoping to buy” from the White House and Congress “is time to finish the job we’ve started. We don’t want to be bailed out. We don’t want to be a ward of the federal government. I ask Mr. Ford not to work against us to make New York bankrupt. I cannot believe that the specter of temporary political gain will lead him into driving a city into bankruptcy and risking the loss of taxpayers’ dollars . . . If the financial structure of government is shaken, Mr. Ford will be accountable to all the people.”
But he had faith in the president, Carey concluded.
“I spent more than a decade with Gerald Ford in Congress. We disagreed about many things. But I always found him a man ready to negotiate and compromise for a practical result.”
(The Man Who Saved New York is published by SUNY Press. For further information about the book or to purchase a copy, go here)