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Calling for More Savings, Stringer Releases Analysis of De Blasio Budget Plan


stringer fy2020 prelim

Comptroller Stringer


New York Comptroller Scott Stringer released on Friday his analysis of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s preliminary budget for fiscal year 2020, which begins July 1 of this year. De Blasio had presented a $92.2 billion budget plan on Feb. 7, 2019, the first step of many that will lead to a budget deal between de Blasio and the City Council. As comptroller, Stringer is tasked with budget oversight and monitoring the city’s fiscal health.

During his presentation at his Manhattan office, Stringer expressed concern over de Blasio’s use of “one-time actions” to craft the budget and said the city ought to increase its savings “cushion” to 15% of total spending to prepare for an impending economic downturn. Savings are at roughly 11%, he said. Stringer said that de Blasio’s preliminary budget, which is far from the final product, would make for spending growth of 2.1%. The city budget has grown significantly and rapidly under de Blasio.

Stringer warned the city should be ready to take a budget hit from the state and while he commended the mayor for announcing a new savings plan -- de Blasio’s version of a Program to Eliminate the Gap, or PEG -- Stringer said it is not as ambitious as it should be and city agencies need a real “scrub” of their budgets and operations to identify more opportunities for efficiency.

Stringer also announced that he has removed the Department of Education from his “agency watch list” — a tool the office introduced last year to most closely track efficiency of spending in select city agencies of concern — and the Department of Buildings has been added. DOB, he said, has hired 132 new construction inspectors — a 62% increase in spending — while construction accidents rose 252%. The other two entrants on the watch list, the Department of Correction and the agencies that perform homeless services, remain.

Stringer pointed out, as de Blasio had, that city and state tax revenues have fallen recently, raising significant red flags as budget season unfolds. The state budget appears to be on shakier ground than the city’s, and a state spending plan is due by April 1, which will influence the city budget that is decided thereafter. The comptroller said the city should prepare for the state to shift the burden.

“The first place Albany goes to save money is New York City,” said Stringer. “We are not doing enough to prepare for this scenario or this reality.”

De Blasio and Stringer both recently testified in the state capital at a joint legislative budget hearing. During his testimony, de Blasio asked legislators to help him fight back against proposed cost shifts and cuts that Governor Andrew Cuomo had outlined in his January executive budget.

Stringer said on Friday that the city’s projected accumulated surplus is $1.4 billion less than at the start of this fiscal year despite the $400 million added to it, and most of the addition to the surplus this year was due to “one-time shots,” which are resources the city only collects once and can’t count on in recurring fashion.

After nine years of surplus and economic expansion, Stringer said the city should prepare for an economic downturn as the federal tax stimulus wears off. As the unprecedented growth streak has continued, de Blasio, Stringer and others have expected tougher times year after year, but they have not yet arrived. This year could be different, depending in part on how New York taxpayers have and continue to react to the new federal tax code.

As he called for the larger budget cushion -- something Stringer has pushed for years and de Blasio has mostly dismissed, citing large reserves -- the comptroller said preparation is key in order to protect low-income families, city workers, and social services that could be the biggest victims of city cuts.

On his agency watchlist, launched last year in an effort to reform spending at certain city agencies, Stringer congratulated the Department of Education for making its way off after reducing travel costs and consolidating redundant programs. He said DOE showed conclusive evidence of more efficient spending.

But the Department of Buildings made its way onto the list after hiring the 132 new construction inspectors, a 78.6% increase that yielded only a 32% increase in inspections. Meanwhile, there was a 252% increase in construction accidents, Stringer said, and a 166.7% increase in construction fatalities from fiscal year 2014 to 2018.

“We needed to hire inspectors, but they must be deployed in a way that gets results, and that's not what we are seeing here, so they have joined the watchlist,” he said.

The Department of Correction and five different city agencies that spend on homelessness remain on the watchlist. City spending on homelessness has increased from $1.3 billion in fiscal year 2014 to a projected $2.9 billion in fiscal year 2020, with the majority of spending going to shelters and other funding to prevention and services, with little impact in reducing the city’s homeless population — with 60,620 adults and children living in shelters as of Thursday, according to the city, and 580,000 New Yorkers living rent-burdened and on the edge of homelessness.

“This is really a crisis that is not being managed,” said Stringer. “There’s a lot of contributing factors.”

De Blasio has repeatedly said that he has not made the progress he’d hoped on homelessness but has also made the case that his administration’s efforts have stopped the problem from getting much worse, and that the city has finally stabilized the decades-long growth in homelessness, including through a significant increase in anti-eviction programs as well as rent vouchers for those leaving shelter.

Correction remains on the watch list after spending has nearly doubled since fiscal year 2014, partly in an effort to decrease violence on Rikers Island, though that violence has increased while the overall jail population has decreased significantly. According to the comptroller, the city currently spends $300,000 per detainee every year, up from $117,000 in 2008, and in the same period the number of violent incidents has more than tripled to 1,354 per 1,000 population. Meanwhile the number of detainees has decreased by 36%.

The comptroller also announced Friday that he has sent a letter to de Blasio’s office asking for a full financial accounting for ThriveNYC, the mental health program run by First Lady Chirlane McCray that has recently come under media and City Council scrutiny. Stringer expressed concerns about the transparency and effectiveness of the funding, and said he wants to determine where exactly the $250 million in annual spending is going.

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by Brianna Zimmerman, Gotham Gazette

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Ben Max contributed to this article.

Charter Revision Commission Hears Expert Testimony on Voting, Redistricting and Campaign Finance Reform


de blasio voting election day

(photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)


On Monday, the 2019 Charter Revision Commission heard from election experts from across the country as commissioners consider three potential election-related alterations to the city charter: ranked-choice voting, redistricting, and democracy vouchers.

The commission is in the middle of a year-long process of public hearings and private discussions, which will yield proposals to change the city’s foundational laws that will go before voters this November. The scope of those proposals is to be determined. After a series of hearings and meetings, the commission recently announced its four focus areas, and Monday’s hearing was the first dedicated to experts on one of the broad areas, which in addition to elections include governance, finance and land use.

The 2019 commission follows a 2018 commission called by Mayor Bill de Blasio, which was populated only by his appointees and put forth three proposals that voters approved this past November, including to lower individual campaign contribution limits and increase public matching funds, creation of a civic engagement commission, and term limits for community board members.

The 2019 commission was created through City Council legislation spearheaded by Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer and then-Public Advocate Letitia James. Its commissioners are appointed by a variety of elected officials, though the mayor was allotted a plurality. The chair was chosen by the City Council Speaker, Corey Johnson.

At Monday’s hearing, experts who testified offered a variety of ideas on the topics at hand.

Ranked-Choice Voting
A panel of six voting experts argued overwhelmingly for the merits of a ranked-choice voting system.

Ranked choice voting asks voters to order their preferred candidates rather than select just one. Under one design, if one candidate does not meet the given threshold (say, 40 or 50 percent of the vote) when the first round of selections are tallied, the candidate with the fewest first-place votes would be eliminated, and the voters who selected that candidate would have their second choices receive their votes. This process then proceeds until one candidate hits the magic number.

Ranked-choice voting could eliminate costly, low-turnout runoffs, mollify voters’ concerns over splitting party votes in a race with many ideologically-similar candidates, and allow for a winner to emerge with a clear majority rather than a plurality.

New York City is particularly well-suited to a ranked-choice voting system, argued Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, since voters tend to favor Democrats over Republicans by a wide margin, and where many Democrats and few Republicans run.

Panelists further argued that ranked-choice voting promotes more civil politicking, pointing to the sometimes contentious nature of the public advocate special election that was decided on Tuesday. That election also had 17 candidates on the ballot and was held up by some as a good example of where ranked-choice voting would be beneficial.

However, one panelist, Craig Burnett, an assistant professor of political science at Hofstra University, cautioned the commission against diving into ranked-choice voting. “A lot of voters can figure things out when they’re talking about the presidency, where there’s a lot of information,” said Burnett. But as races and candidates become more obscure and information less ubiquitous, “ranking becomes an even more difficult task.”

The commission expressed similar concerns over educating a city of more than eight million citizens about a new voting system. “I’m lucky if I know one or two Council candidates in an open seat,” said commissioner James Caras, who asked if ranked voting can produce “bizarre results,” as a product of voters arbitrarily assigning numbers to unfamiliar candidates.

Bella Wang, chair of voting reform at New York’s chapter of the League of Women Voters, pointed to the 2018 Maine gubernatorial race, which was the state’s first experience with ranked voting. Eight percent of voters ranked each of the candidates, and 80 percent ranked more than one candidate, indicating a widespread comprehension of how the system operates, she said.

Commissioner Merryl Tisch inquired about the possibility of disenfranchising voters while commissioner Sal Albanese expressed similar concern over minority participation, but the panelists disputed the idea that ranked-choice would have any effect at all on turnout. John Arntz, director of the San Francisco Department of Elections, insisted that the city will have to invest in educating voters about the new system, particularly immigrant communities and non-English speakers.

Other concerns raised involved a timetable for implementation (Karen Brinson Bell of the Ranked Choice Voting Research Center explained that she implemented ranked voting in North Carolina in just 86 days, though that is not the ideal timeline), the manner in which a winner is announced to the public, clarification over how many times voters would have to head to the polls to select a winner (typically just once), and skepticism about ranked voting producing a winner with a clear majority. The experts showed some disagreement over whether ranked voting will lead to a clear majority, with some arguing that a win with 48 percent still leads to voter confidence in the process.

Redistricting
A different panel of experts testified before the commission to discuss how New York City should draw its City Council districts, including TJ Costello, the former vice-chair of the Independent Citizens Redistricting Committee (ICRC) in Austin, Texas, which other panelists deemed the gold standard of redistricting. Redistricting occurs after each U.S. Census, the latest of which is about to occur in 2020.

Austin’s redistricting system is complex, involving more than 50 public meetings and a long timeline to decide members of the ICRC. But it also results in a robustly independent and representative redistricting commission, according to Costello. The charter revision commissioners questioned if such an involved process can be instituted in New York, which is more than eight times more populous than Austin. Michael Li of the Brennan Center for Justice said that it’s achievable with enough time.

Li also commended New York City’s current redistricting system. The process, he said, “has a lot of the right pieces in place: there is a commission that draws the district maps” that Li said is well-staffed, holds open meetings and engages the public. But he offered an important caveat, saying the process is susceptible to politicization, with “relatively few checks on who gets appointed to the commission.”

Jeffrey Wice of the SUNY Rockefeller Institute of Government said an independent board is a “judgement call,” and that legislators can objectively redistrict according to the guidelines set up by Section 5 of the federal Voting Rights Act, though the Supreme Court rendered Section 5 null in 2013. Contrarily, Esmeralda Simmons, founder of the Center for Law and Social Justice at Medgar Evers College, argued for the need for an independent board. The rules as they stand, she said, are “skewed against black and Latinx voters” and overrepresent Republicans.

Commissioner James Caras asked the panel to point to specific incidents of poor local redistricting that an independent commission could’ve solved. The panelists could not offer any examples, but Li pointed to a new district that formed in California after citizens banded together in an area particularly vulnerable to wildfires to gain stronger governmental representation for their concerns.

Albanese asked about the negatives of implementing the so-called gold standard that Austin has modeled. Li offered the difficulty of finding enough citizens interesting in serving, but Costello argued New Yorkers simply need sufficient outreach and education. Panelists further eased commissioners’ fears about a costly process and the potential for corruption from bad actors.

Campaign Finance
The last item on the agenda was the question of implementing a new campaign finance system: democracy vouchers. The program formed in 2017 in Seattle, the only city in the country that uses it, wherein the government mails four $25 vouchers to registered voters and asks voters to assign their vouchers to their preferred candidates and mail those in, leading to money disbursed to candidates. Seattle is currently working to offer a digitized process to supplement the mail-in version. Candidates must opt in to the program.

Democracy vouchers were a staple of charter revision Commissioner Sal Albanese’s unsuccessful 2017 mayoral campaign. Albanese was appointed to the commission by Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams in order to focus on campaign finance reform.

The panel included two of the leading forces behind Seattle’s democracy voucher program, Wayne Barnett and Alan Durning, alongside representatives from New York City’s Campaign Finance Board and other election experts who expressed varying levels of enthusiasm for the program.

Similar to the redistricting portion, many of the commission’s inquiries surrounded logistical challenges that New York City poses, which smaller cities face to lesser degrees. The panel generally conceded that the program is too new to definitively answer many of the commission’s questions. Barnett and Durning, however, were able to demonstrate the relatively low cost of the program of just over $2 million total, though that number will inevitably rise in New York City.

While all the panelists attested to the effectiveness of New York City’s current public matching funds program, especially with a newly-increased matching ratio and lowered contribution limits, Albanese made his support for democracy vouchers––and disdain for New York City’s current method––clear. Under New York City’s campaign finance system, Albanese said, pay-to-play corruption is rampant. He also said it renders donors of color invisible and asked, “Why should we continue a program that does nothing to mitigate corruption?”

The panelists had mixed reactions to Albanese’s criticism, but some argued that since the city’s system was changed only last year, they should give it time to play out before radically altering it. While Durning characterized the current system in New York City as one of the country’s best, “democracy vouchers are the most democratizing and egalitarian method of public funding for a campaign that has been invented yet. It makes every eligible participant in the city worth the same amount to a candidate, whether they’re a bartender or a bank president,” he said. “100 bucks.”

After Reform Commitments, City Council Democrats Appoint Three New Commissioners to Board of Elections


city council sp co jo

Speaker Johnson (photo: Jeff Reed/City Council)


The New York City Council’s Democratic conference held on Thursday what officials said was its first ever public vote to appoint three new commissioners to the New York City Board of Elections.

The BOE is a quasi-city agency, funded in the city budget but governed by state law. It has ten commissioners -- two from every borough, with one each recommended by the Democratic and Republican parties and appointed by the City Council for four-year terms. The board’s executive director is chosen by the commissioners.

The three commissioners appointed on Thursday are all women of color -- Patricia Anne Taylor, former president of the Staten Island Women’s Bar Association was appointed as Richmond County Democratic commissioner; Miguelina Camilo, who sits on the board of directors of the Dominican Bar Association, was appointed from the Bronx; and Tiffany Townsend, a Democratic district leader and former senior advisor to Council Speaker Corey Johnson, was appointed from Manhattan.

Both Taylor and Townsend will replace commissioners whose terms have already expired and who have been serving as holdovers for more than two years. Townsend will replace Commissioner Alan Schulkin, who was once caught on a hidden camera suggesting that New York City’s municipal identification program would exacerbate what he claimed was a problem of rampant voter fraud, of which there is no documented or even anecdotal evidence. When former Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito attempted to confirm her preferred candidate for Schulkin’s seat in 2017, the Council was sued by the Manhattan County Democratic Party, which had nominated a different candidate. The Party dropped the lawsuit after Johnson became speaker and both the candidates previously sought were sidelined for Townsend.

The three appointments on Thursday were the first made by Johnson under his speakership and the Democratic conference used the opportunity to push the appointees on several reforms in elections processes and the BOE’s internal culture. The BOE has had a checkered history of administrative failures, most visible during several mismanaged elections in the last few years. Critics have often blamed the board’s patronage hiring process for some of those mistakes while others blame the state’s arcane and immensely complex elections and voting laws.

The central point of tension with the City Council has been the Board’s refusal to abide by local legislation, claiming that the Council does not have the jurisdiction to mandate any changes to election administration and that only the state Legislature can force its hand. That tension has played out in various ways in recent years. The Council passed bills allowing online voter registration, mandating the creation of a voter information portal, and a more simple bill that would require the BOE to post signs when a poll site has been moved. The BOE has declined to implement all of them.

To push those reforms ahead, the Council Democrats asked the three commissioner candidates to fill out questionnaires pledging support for those changes and also asking them to make merit hires rather than patronage ones. They also asked the commissioners to agree to allow the BOE executive director to unilaterally hire and fire employees rather than having to obtain permission from the commissioners. All three candidates agreed to the pledge, according to Speaker Johnson and other Council members.  

There was some pushback from Camilo, the Bronx candidate, over the language of the questionnaire, Bronx Council Member Andy Cohen conceded when asked by Gotham Gazette. (Camilo’s appointment was not included on the agenda on the Council’s legislative calendar on Thursday morning that mentioned the other two appointments. It was added before the vote took place sometime before noon.)

But Cohen emphasized that Camilo agreed with the concept of the reforms but could not answer in a way that would contravene her duties as mandated by state law. “There are many, many frustrations as a City Council member of where the state has local control that I think is unnecessary, intrusive,” Cohen said in the Council chambers after the vote. “I think that if the city had control of its own Board of Elections, there’s no doubt in my mind we could do a better job.”

Manhattan Council Member Ben Kallos, who has long advocated for reforms at the BOE, said the Council’s public vote was “a good step in the right direction.” Kallos was the author of some of the reform bills that formed the basis for the questionnaire to the appointees. “For a long time I’ve been asking the Board of Elections to voluntarily do the right thing and it doesn’t matter if the law says they can get away with patronage, we need to live in a post-patronage world where people are hired based on what they know, not who they know.”

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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