Gotham Gazette

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Opinion

The New City Budget Fails Human Services Workers


3 failed human services

Mayor de Blasio handing out food (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)


Human services workers are the unsung heroes of the COVID-19 response, and the new city budget has failed them.

Many New Yorkers may not know that most social services are delivered by nonprofit
organizations under city and state government contracts that consistently set poverty level wages for workers.

Throughout the pandemic, when we heard about lines wrapping around the block outside of
food pantries, childcare being provided for hospital workers, and home-delivered meals
programs being created, we didn’t often hear about the nonprofit human services providers
who stepped up to meet these needs.

At Urban Pathways, our frontline staff showed up to ensure our residential facilities were clean and sanitized, and to ensure our residents’ well-being. We continued to conduct street outreach and opened 60 additional stabilization beds to bring New Yorkers experiencing street homelessness inside to safety. Human services workers risked their own health and that of their families to show up for New Yorkers in need.

To recognize their immeasurable contributions during the pandemic, we and our partners across the human services sector asked the City Council and Mayor de Blasio to include $48 million for a 3% Cost of Living Adjustment for the workforce (a drop in the bucket of a $98.7 billion
budget), and to begin the rightsizing of wages for those doing this work far below a living wage. A COLA is the least that could be done for our essential workforce, and we hoped it would act as a first step in moving towards a broader plan for raising low wages and achieving wage equity.

Disappointingly, Mayor de Blasio and the City Council failed to meet this call. The final fiscal year 2022 New York City Budget passed on June 30 does not include a human services COLA nor does it address wage equity. Instead, the city provided $24 million for a one-time bonus. While better than nothing, it is not the sustained investment in the workforce that is truly needed and will not help workers meet increased costs for food, rent, and other basic necessities. The continuous failure to invest in human services workers puts nonprofits at risk of no longer being able to serve communities, as we see employees exiting our workforce for higher paying opportunities and due to high levels of burnout.

This administration and City Council had an opportunity to leave a legacy by setting the stage
for addressing the long-held and long-overlooked inequities in the human services sector. They
had an opportunity to promote racial and gender equity by raising wages for a workforce primarily composed of people of color and women, and of which 85% of the frontline workers
most exposed to COVID-19 identified as Black, African-American, Hispanic, or Latino. Instead, they gave our workforce a pat on the back and invited them to a parade.

We thank those City Council members who supported our COLA ask and are seeking to address wage equity in the human services workforce through legislative means. And we look forward to working with the next administration and City Council to finally address these issues head on. It’s frankly hurtful that the city failed to address wage equity. If not following this past
tumultuous year, where both the critical nature of human services and the extreme racial
inequities present in our city were burst open, then when?

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Nicole McVinua, Director of Policy at Urban Pathways. On Twitter @UrbanPathwaysNY.

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Creating Green, Healthy New York City Schools as They Fully Reopen


4 reopen quality

The mayor and schools chancellor at a school (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)


The next Mayor of New York City will need to ensure that communities hit hardest by COVID-19 can not only recover, but achieve greater economic security and prosperity in the future.

Recovery after covid and the creation of green, healthy schools for all go together.

As part of the full re-opening of the public school system, city government should prioritize installing HVAC systems and solar energy in every school. Doing so will enhance air quality, education, and health while creating career-orientated union jobs for New Yorkers.

Improving air quality control through HVAC systems will be crucial, especially as questions remain about the durability of vaccines against new variants of COVID-19. Poor air quality not only impacts student and staff health, but it can also undermine learning by negatively affecting student attendance, comfort, and performance.

This work must begin in Mayor de Blasio’s final months, but it will fall to the next mayoral administration to sustain investments in HVAC systems and solar energy at public schools, especially in low-income communities of color most impacted by COVID-19 and the climate crisis.

Across the five boroughs, K-12 public schools account for one-quarter of all city-owned buildings, and they are also among the biggest climate polluters.

Investing in HVAC systems and solar energy will create good-paying jobs and careers in clean energy while enabling all public schools to become net-zero schools in the coming years and help the city dramatically reduce its climate pollution.

One key place to look for a model of Green, Healthy Schools is Staten Island. Indeed, PS 62 on Staten Island is a proven, successful model of a net-zero public school that can and should be replicated in communities across New York City. Created in partnership with IBEW Local 3, the PS 62 building has solar panels on the roof and its south facing walls to take advantage of sunlight throughout the day, allowing the building to maximize the solar energy it can collect.

The Climate Works for All coalition recently developed a Green, Healthy Schools action plan that estimates installing HVAC systems and solar energy in every public school would cost $1.5 billion.

Mayor de Blasio should begin the process of investing this $1.5 billion before he leaves office and connect this investment specifically to the reopening of schools. Such action would put the next mayoral administration in a strong position to finish the job. 

The public funds to create net-zero schools are available right now. The Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS) – the city agency in charge of energy management – has already allocated $3.8 billion for energy efficiency and renewable energy measures for public buildings over ten years in the capital budget. But allocation is not the same as active investment. This $3.8 billion needs to be invested. The recommended investment of $1.5 billion in solar panels and HVAC systems should be accompanied by an additional $2.3 billion investment in energy efficiency projects on other public city-owned buildings.

These investments totaling $3.8 billion will help ensure the city aggressively reduces climate pollution under the next mayoral administration while getting New Yorkers back to work.

By investing in Green, Healthy Schools, the city would establish a real pipeline of well-paid, career-orientated jobs for both new-entry workers and other New Yorkers transitioning into the clean energy industry. The creation of net-zero schools for all will enable the city to tackle the climate crisis, covid recovery, and safe reopening of schools simultaneously.

In New York City, the clean energy economy of the future should not be driven by short-term, low-skill, dead-end jobs. Instead, it should be full of good-paying, union jobs with family supporting wages and benefits. Now is the time for the city to begin to make this vision a reality through an investment in HVAC systems and solar panels for every public school in the city.

***
Maritza Silva-Farrell is Executive Director of ALIGN. Christopher Erikson is Business Manager of IBEW Local 3. On Twitter @MaritzaSf, @alignny, & @IBEWLocalUnion3.

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New York State and City Must Come Together to Fix the Board of Elections Mess


voting village the

Voters voting (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)


The latest local election debacle -- another botched effort by the New York City Board of Elections (BOE) -- is simply inexcusable. A structural overhaul to the BOE is necessary to create an accountable and transparent 21st century agency and restore voters’ faith in the city’s election system.

Nearly every election for decades has been plagued with problems: untrained poll workers, delays in poll site openings, coordinators who don’t know how to close down the poll at night, poll workers who are abusive to voters, botched absentee ballots, registered voters being wiped from the rolls, and most recently inexcusable delays and inaccurate balloting results.

To understand how we got into this mess, let’s examine the origins of this structure. Our state Constitution requires that county Boards of Elections are governed by a two-party structure. Each county and each New York City borough selects a Democrat and a Republican to serve as BOE commissioners. This bipartisan structure was created to prevent corruption, theoretically motivating the parties to act as a check and a balance to one another. This form of bipartisanship probably looked good on paper once upon a time, but it has become a recipe for dysfunction. 

Over the past decades, county leaders from both parties have used the BOE as a dumping ground of sorts for their family, friends, or political allies. Here’s the challenge: some such “patronage” employees are terrific workers – smart, skillset aligned, with rock-solid work ethic. Yet there are also too many employees who are merely party loyalists, or friends and family of those with political influence, whose skills and work ethic do not align well with the Board’s formidable responsibilities. The well-documented culture of nepotism and favoritism has created a largely untrained workforce without the necessary skills, education, or initiative. A system can absorb only so many unskilled and unmotivated workers before it malfunctions. 

Neither New York City nor its voters are well-served when patronage and ineptitude are the pervasive norm. It would be easy to blame one person or one party or one practice. It’s much bigger than that. The system needs a complete overhaul.

During the decade I served as Democratic District Leader, I repeatedly witnessed election problems up close, and called for reform along with many others, testifying numerous times at city and state hearings. In fact, back in 2013, a New York City Department of Investigation report recommended professionalizing the Board into an independent, nonpartisan structure. Instead, with each election, ineptitude manages to further erode the public’s confidence. 

Last year, I called for a professionally-managed, nonpartisan structure for the New York City Board of Elections. To date, there has been no comprehensive review of our election laws, our constitutional mandates, nor the policies, practices, and procedures followed by county Boards of Elections. The New York City BOE is not alone in its dysfunction, but its level of dysfunction seems to be on steroids. For that reason, I’m calling for the New York State Legislature to establish a Joint Legislative Task Force charged with conducting a comprehensive analysis with recommendations for action. The City of New York must become a vocal and active partner in these reform efforts, and the City Council should require that proposed BOE commissioners, which the Council approves, have qualifications beyond mere party support before authorizing their appointment.

We need a Joint Legislative Task Force that investigates both the structure of our Boards of Elections as well as the policies and procedures that have led to the current state of affairs; studies the various models for conducting fair, reliable, modern elections in a digital age; and makes actionable recommendations to the Legislature to fundamentally restructure the way we conduct elections in New York. Our democracy requires nothing less.

*** 
Jo Anne Simon is a state Assemblymember for District 52, a former Democratic District Leader (2004-2014), and a current candidate for Brooklyn Borough President. On Twitter @JoAnneSimonBK52.

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