A NYCHA tower looms over a city in crisis (photo: Kevin P. Coughlin/Governor's Office)
In late April, Mayor de Blasio announced a plan to deepen the city’s response to COVID-19 at NYCHA public housing. The plan includes distributing face coverings and gloves to all residents, enrolling all NYCHA senior buildings in the city’s food delivery program, and providing free tablets and internet service for 10,000 senior residents.
It’s long been clear that issues at NYCHA are pervasive, including disgraceful mismanagement of public money and the authority’s crippled system of communication with tenants, which is now more fully showing its limitations. Several weeks after de Blasio’s announcement, NYCHA residents throughout the city were still waiting for components of the plan aimed to support them in this new reality.
NYCHA resident leaders in the South Bronx, for example, have verified that since the hiring of outside contractors they have seen an overall increase in sterilization of their development, however touchpoints like elevators, mailboxes, and door-knobs are not sterilized on a regular basis.
NYCHA’s 2,200 buildings, like the public transit system, senior centers, and other often crowded areas, are potential virus hotspots. It is unacceptable that we do not have widespread testing at NYCHA developments -- an intentional effort by the city is past due.
COVID-19 has hit poor communities, black and brown folks, the hardest across our city. In a post-shutdown city, NYCHA residents must have comprehensive protections against both the virus and the ever-present epidemic of decades-long disregard and disinvestment. NYCHA residents must be afforded ample opportunity for testing and isolation when needed.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, some of the risk factors associated with COVID-19 are age (65 years or older) and conditions including chronic lung disease or moderate to severe asthma. NYCHA tenants regularly report asthma issues and cockroaches, which are an allergen source and an asthma trigger. NYCHA, which has not released a strategy for tracking COVID-19 infection rates, has left residents, building staff, and advocates to highlight the extent of the crisis.
The Housing Authority has bragged about posting updates to their website and social media accounts; sending out emails and alerts through its MyNYCHAapp; posting multilingual fliers in common areas; and scheduling robocalls and in-person outreach. In mid-March, NYCHA said it would start disinfecting its senior buildings five times a week, and all other buildings three times a week. NYCHA residents in East New York, Brownsville, and the South Bronx tell us they haven’t seen this happening with the care (and in some cases the frequency) the Authority has promised.
NYCHA has hired outside contractors to disinfect high-touch areas like elevators, but is still relying on its on-site caretakers to clean the rest of its buildings. The people responsible for keeping housing complexes clean, have themselves been sidelined by unsafe working conditions.
When it comes to the plan released by Mayor de Blasio, which promised PPE to all residents, among other precautions and protections, there has been a disjointed narrative and implementation, necessitating that NYCHA Tenant Association leaders across the city step up when the city has fallen short -- from handing out PPE to meals, NYCHA residents have exemplified a collective will.
Danny Barber, Chair of the Citywide Council of Presidents of NYCHA residents, in partnership with World Kitchen has delivered over 200,000 meals to NYCHA residents and has set a goal to deliver 1 million meals to NYCHA residents throughout the city.
NYCHA tenants in the South Bronx, East New York, Brownsville, and all across our entire city deserve housing that is safe, healthy, and secure. As the current lockdown ends, we will need to ensure that our NYCHA communities have all the resources that they need. A comprehensive post-shutdown NYCHA plan must include:
Our vulnerabilities have been further exposed by COVID-19. We need to move away from a reactive society to a proactive society. Our leaders must have the political courage to plan for a future where the government both anticipates better and responds more aggressively and efficiently to emergencies, ensuring that our most vulnerable communities are not disproportionately impacted.
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Wilfredo Florentino is a life-long Brooklynite, community advocate, community board member, and candidate for New York City Council in the 42nd District. Althea Stevens is a native New Yorker and community advocate in the Bronx and candidate for New York City Council 16th District. On Twitter @WilfredoBrooklyn & @Althea_s21.
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Mayor de Blasio and the NYPD (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)
Earlier this week, after nearly six-and-a-half years in office and repeatedly failing to meaningfully and systematically hold his own police department accountable for brutalizing and killing black New Yorkers, Mayor de Blasio took to Twitter to express outrage about Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd.
De Blasio forcefully demanded swift action by authorities in a city half-way across the country. He then proceeded to fail completely to stop police brutality in his own city on Friday and Saturday nights, when black New Yorkers and allies took to the streets to demand justice for Floyd and an end to institutional racism. The NYPD deployed thousands of officers who immediately created a war-like environment and escalated matters, repeatedly initiating violence against community members.
It takes a particular kind of political and moral cowardice to call for justice a thousand miles away while failing to protect black and Latino communities from racist policing in his own city. Martin Luther King Jr. forewarned us about politicians like de Blasio, ”those more concerned with ‘order’ than justice.”
The killing of George Floyd was horrifyingly similar to the NYPD’s killing of Eric Garner. In broad daylight, a police officer choked the life out of a black man on a sidewalk. Cries for help went unheeded by the other officers on the scene.
For more than five years, de Blasio sat on his hands, avoiding any and all responsibility for pursuing discipline or accountability for all officers involved in Eric Garner’s killing. Now former officer Daniel Pantaleo, caught on video choking Garner to death, remained employed by the NYPD for more than five years, even collecting overtime. When the department’s trial revealed egregious misconduct by other officers present, the mayor did all he could to turn the page following the firing of only Pantaleo. Eric Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr, continues to organize and call for all of the officers responsible to be fired. The mayor continues to ignore her calls for accountability and justice.
The murder of Eric Garner is the most high-profile case, but by no means the only time de Blasio spectacularly failed to hold the NYPD accountable for brutalizing and killing black and Latino New Yorkers. Delrawn Small, Jazmine Headley, Saheed Vassell, Sergio Reyes, Kawasaki Trawick -- they may not be as well know as Eric Garner, but their stories are other glaring failures on the part of the mayor to ensure the NYPD is held accountable for brutality and murder. These are only the cases the public hears about. But officers escaping without any discipline for misconduct or brutality, even in cases where people are killed, is the norm not an anomaly.
More recently, during the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous videos of NYPD officers violently enforcing social distancing in black and Latino communities showed the type of violent and biased policing that leads to the deaths of community members like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Eric Garner, Delrawn Small, Saheed Vassell, and many, many others. Police brutality doesn’t take a break for pandemics.
Black and Latino communities have not only suffered because our state and city governments failed to prepare for the disproportionate impact of COVID-19. Mayor de Blasio’s failed approach, where he proactively decided to criminalize a public health crisis before claiming to reverse course, has meant policing enforcement that continued to target our communities.
The mayor has spent much of the pandemic defending and downplaying the NYPD’s discriminatory and dangerous actions, even going as far as victim-blaming black New Yorkers for not following orders and cooperating. A recent video of police brutality during the pandemic shows what easily could have resulted in a similar tragic outcome to George Floyd’s or Eric Garner’s murder. Three weeks ago, following a violent take-down, NYPD officer Francisco Garcia sat on the head and neck of a prone Donni Wright. Wright luckily escaped with his life. De Blasio was much more tempered in his condemnation of the NYPD following that incident and refrained from any calls for swift consequences for the officers involved.
Friday’s night’s numerous incidents of police brutality made the problem even clearer, with officers running amok, beating, pushing, and pepper-spraying New Yorkers. Mayor de Blasio responded with a sad sort of “both sides-ism,” and nothing resembling a true commitment to firing abusive officers and holding the department accountable throughout the chain of command. On Saturday night, after new incidents of blatant policy brutality, the mayor even came to the defense of officers who had driven into protestors with an SUV.
As de Blasio’s second and final term comes to an end, he has cemented his legacy on policing. He was unwilling to hold the NYPD accountable for misconduct and brutality, failed to end “broken windows” policing, and chose to regurgitate talking points about training and neighborhood policing, rather than heeding the calls for justice and meaningful reform. If the mayor is serious about addressing police brutality and valuing all black lives, he should use the remainder of his time in office to pass and support strong legislative reforms to increase police accountability and transparency, while also taking sweeping executive action to change the department that he purportedly controls.
The Mayor should forcefully advocate for full repeal and not a watered down replacement of state Civil Rights Law 50-a in order to make public all police disciplinary records. He should ensure the NYPD swiftly terminates Officer Garcia, all of the officers involved in Eric Garner’s murder, and any officer who abuses their power, including in this week’s protests. And as the city gets closer to finalizing the fiscal year 2021 budget, the mayor should significantly reduce the NYPD budget and headcount and direct cost-savings towards the Department of Youth and Community Development, education, housing, housing the homeless, and social services that keep our communities safe and healthy.
The frustration and outrage manifested in this week’s protests are not merely in solidarity with communities in Minneapolis demanding justice for George Floyd. They are a response to the failure of Mayor de Blasio and decades of previous elected officials who have sanctioned daily state violence against black people in New York. They are the manifestation of generations of black people who have struggled to breathe with the weight of America’s anti-black racism on our necks. Almost six years after Eric Garner’s tragic murder at the hands of the NYPD, we still can’t breathe.
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Kesi Foster is the Co-Director of the Youth Power Project at Make the Road New York. On Twitter: @BemKesi @MaketheRoadNY.
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(photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)
The COVID-19 pandemic has taken so much from us all – over 100,000 lives taken too soon; months spent alone; businesses shuttered forever; and birthdays, proms, goodbyes, graduations, ball games, firsts and lasts missed. It must mean something, but only we can give it meaning through our actions, preparation, kind gestures, and deep love of all that we took for granted, including our shared connection. We have an opportunity to ensure all that we lost was not in vain. As a nation, as a people, we have a solemn obligation to not simply recreate what we had, but to build something better, stronger, more resilient, and more enduring.
We have this immense and meaningful opportunity because of those who took swift action, sacrificed their well-being to serve others, and risked ridicule and failure to save lives and curtail the spread of COVID-19. Their actions to beat back this twisted bunch of RNA undoubtedly mitigated the potential for an even more complete disaster. We owe them a debt of gratitude, but also a new and better normal.
A return to the way things used to be is impossible. We are, as a people, forever changed. Yes, state and federal guidelines for an economic reopening are being implemented in some regions, and we should proceed with these plans based on data, rationale, and the advice of experts, lest we risk going through this experience again. However, reopening is only one piece of the puzzle.
The future is uncertain, but we must be better prepared for the next crisis. For many who confronted COVID-19, it was not an absence of will that kept them from acting as quickly and effectively as possible, but a lack of the necessary tools. Insufficient testing (especially early on), inadequate supply of personal protective and emergency medical equipment, and low levels of health-care capacity are just the most obvious gaps. There were and are more. Data systems and sharing had to be developed and evolved on the fly and many localities had to creatively re-assign staff and rely on volunteers to perform basic levels of contact tracing.
This will not be the last time an infectious disease upturns our lives. To prepare for future challenges, we must increase emergency stockpiles; create supply lines that are more accessible and reliable during periods of global crisis; and streamline regulatory regimes that slowed the approval of needed screening tools and limited innovative solutions. Further, we should generally seek to improve disease surveillance, modernize disease tracking by creating a National Infectious Disease Forecasting Center (as recommended by many, including former F.D.A. Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb), and increase contact tracing capacity by expanding the workforce dedicated to this task and by utilizing app-based technologies.
As a society, we must do more to elevate medical and public health professions and encourage more people to enter these important fields. State governments should look to increase the authority and autonomy of nurse practitioners and physicians’ assistants and permanently reduce restrictions on out-of-state practitioners. Public health professionals should help develop high school curriculums that incorporate specific units on infectious diseases and develop basic public health skills and competencies that could potentially be used on a volunteer basis during a pandemic. All levels of government should work to bolster the ranks of public health service corps and medical reserve corps through tax benefits, recruitment efforts, and increasing paid service roles. As recommended by the “Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience” from Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, National Guard units in each state should add Health Reserves Corps.
Much has been lost and foregone over these months. It would have been easy during this time to lose our connection to one another, but in so many ways that connection deepened. Health-care professionals and first responders, including those who came out of retirement, consistently put the well-being of their patients before their own. People from all walks of life went to work making masks, gathering supplies, delivering meals, and caring for others. Tens of millions of dollars were donated to support COVID-19 response and relief efforts. Neighbors sang in the streets; teachers adapted on the fly to a new paradigm; friends and families celebrated milestones with impromptu parades and honking horns; and millions of individuals stayed at home and stopped the spread.
Sadly, there was no permanent cessation of political jabbing, name-calling, and anger. However, there were plenty of positive lessons to be learned. Experts and expertise seemed to regain the public’s and some political leaders’ reverence. The critical role of federalism in our republic was highlighted by the swift and well-thought-out actions of many governors, while the benefits of localism were clear, given the creativity and proactiveness of counties throughout New York and the nation. My experience during this emergency has been one of practical and congenial bipartisanship, not the mudslinging you see on the national news.
And yet the most important lesson is not about politics but people. It is about how important our shared connection is to our overall well-being. It is also about this opportunity to glimpse, if only briefly, the lives of those less fortunate – those who face food insecurity every day, those who live paycheck to paycheck, and those who face crippling anxiety and fear of the world outside their doors.
When we create our new normal, let us not forget those lessons. Let our recovery herald in a return to a better humanity in which we cherish those connections we have and work to form stronger bonds with our wider community. Let us return to a better humanity that takes care of those less fortunate by providing a strong safety net to catch those who have fallen through the cracks and that offers a sturdy ladder to aid in the climb to prosperity.
The world has changed, and we must change with it, if for no other reason than that we owe all those lost and all who lost, sacrificed, and worked so hard a better world, a new normal. We owe them a return to a stronger, healthier, and more connected humanity.
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Marc Molinaro is the Dutchess County Executive. On Twitter @MarcMolinaro.
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Facial recognition could be useful in the post-coronavirus world (photo: Security Industry Association)
As a native New Yorker, I am saddened that New York has been hardest hit by the COVID-19 virus. The very way of life for New Yorkers – close living and working conditions, reliance on a round-the-clock crowded mass transit system, a vibrant restaurant and bar scene, movie and live performance theaters, national and international transportation hubs, sporting facilities with tens of thousands of seats and over a million children in the public school system – has made the region particularly vulnerable to the novel virus.
We must be real about how long this disease will be with us, its lethal nature and how it has changed our lives. We must also be real about what steps we take to mitigate the impact of COVID-19, both through informed policies and through deployment of the right technologies that can help prevent the spread of this and other infectious diseases in the future.
Support is growing for touchless interactions, to protect the most vulnerable in our communities and our essential workers. Touchless solutions for access or screening required for entry to an area could be game-changers in reducing the spread of the virus and improving public safety.
These solutions can range from relatively low-tech ones like wave-to-open switches, motion sensors, and wireless transmitters to technologies developed to address more complex needs. Many hospitals already use facial matching technology to eliminate the need for frontline health care workers to swipe badges or type in codes to verify their credentials. By simply showing their faces, they are allowed access to clean rooms and other secure facilities. Reducing contact with potentially contaminated surfaces is critical to prevent our health care heroes – who are putting their lives on the line to help others – from becoming infected.
Programming an automatic building or elevator door to open for users would eliminate thousands of touches per day by human fingers and hands. In addition, facial matching technology can ensure that only authorized individuals are permitted to enter a building or workspace. For commercial buildings, thermal technologies can help initially screen entrants at a distance for elevated body temperature, identifying those who may need further testing before potentially exposing coworkers and others to the virus.
As people begin to travel by planes, trains, or buses at any of New York’s major transportation hubs, they will need to pass through security checkpoints, exchange documents with officials, and sit in closed, cramped spaces with scores of strangers. Touchless technologies can decrease the risk of spreading the virus and increase overall passenger safety. For example, New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport uses facial matching technology to provide touchless security and allow some international travelers to board flights without exchanging boarding passes.
Despite these benefits, some cities have attempted to limit facial matching and other biometric-based or electronic security technologies, even banning their use altogether. In New York, members of the City Council have proposed making it much more difficult for biometric technologies to be deployed for building access and security, and even mandate the use of physical keys in places where they were phased out in favor of electronic systems decades ago. Such restrictions would prevent proven and tested technologies from being used to protect the health and safety of New Yorkers.
Concerns about facial matching technology have garnered much media attention over the last year. Contrary to popular misconceptions, the accuracy of this technology is in fact reaching that of automated fingerprint comparison, which is generally viewed as the gold standard for identification. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the world’s leading authority on facial matching technology, has concluded that the software it tests is 20 times better at searching a database to find a matching picture than it was in 2014, and a NIST report last year recorded “close to perfect” results with miss rates averaging just 0.1 percent for the most accurate systems.
Advanced technologies like facial matching offer ready, touchless solutions to many of the challenges we will face in a post-COVID-19 world, which must be implemented in ways that respect privacy while also allowing our society to use science and innovation to be healthier and safer as we seek a return to a more normalized life. The Security Industry Association believes that all technology products must only be used for purposes that are lawful, ethical, and nondiscriminatory. If we work together and embrace it, touchless interface technologies can be one of our formidable frontline defenses to help reduce the spread of COVID-19 and other deadly diseases.
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Don Erickson is CEO of Security Industry Association. On Twitter @SIAonline.
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529 accounts allow college savings for children (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)
In the face of profound economic hardship and uncertainty, families and school communities across one of the most diverse and hardest-hit areas of our city are coming together today in recognition of their collective work to build a financial foundation for their children’s futures.
Today, May 29th, is 529 Day.
529 Day, named after 529 college savings plans, which are investment accounts specifically designed for college and career savings, is an annual opportunity to build community around preparing for college and career training. This year’s 529 Day comes as New York City’s communities — particularly its low-income communities, communities of color, and immigrant communities — are bearing the brunt of a public health and economic crisis like nothing we have seen in our lifetimes.
School District 30 in Western Queens, which spans an area from Long Island City and Astoria across to East Elmhurst, Jackson Heights, and part of Corona, is at the epicenter of the epicenter of these compounding crises. Tragically, these are the same families and communities that are among the least likely to benefit from the federal stimulus programs passed to date.
And yet this community is joining together, virtually, to mark the fact that more than 10,000 of their kindergarten, first-grade, and second-grade students already have a financial asset set aside for their educational future through the NYC Kids RISE Save for College Program, a public-private-community partnership initiative run by the nonprofit NYC Kids RISE.
Research has shown that a child in a low-income household with a college savings account of just $1 to $500 is three times more likely to go to college and more than four times more likely to graduate than a child without an account. 529 plans are the country’s main college and career savings tool, providing access to investment earnings alongside federal and state tax breaks. In practice, however, the benefits of 529 plans have overwhelmingly accrued to families toward the top of the income ladder. In 2014, just one out of every 91 children in the lowest-income New York City neighborhoods had a NY 529 account, compared to one out of four children in the highest-income neighborhoods.
Today, about 95% of K-2 students across this diverse school district have a 529 account with money set aside for their future. Over the past three years, 39 district and charter elementary schools, thousands of families, community leaders and partners, city government agencies, and state government offices have worked together through the Save for College Program to build financial assets and promote college- and career-going expectations for every participating student, regardless of immigration status or income. To date, this community has collectively deposited more than $3.3 million toward these young students’ educational futures through contributions from local organizations and businesses, philanthropy, and families’ own savings.
To mark 529 Day 2020, we have joined the schools and families of District 30 for virtual financial education lessons, a virtual town hall on balancing immediate financial needs with long-term financial goals, and a social media conversation using the hashtags #Together529 and #Juntos529. It is a reminder that, despite the immediate crisis, District 30’s students will continue to have options for their future because of the work their families and communities are doing today to prepare. In a moment of darkness, our children’s dreams and possibilities continue to shine bright.
Still, there is so much more to be done. The COVID-19 crisis threatens to widen existing income and wealth gaps in our city, further fray families’ already dwindling safety nets, and harm the long-term educational and economic trajectories of New York City’s children.
To ensure a full and equitable recovery, we need to invest more deeply in the financial security of every family, particularly those who are already most economically vulnerable. We need to continue to find ways to progressively drive assets toward communities of color and immigrant communities — regardless of immigration status — to both help provide a cushion in times of crisis and equip these families to succeed in the long-term. Indeed, initiatives that bring neighborhoods together to build financial resources and resiliency for every family must be a core component of the response to this crisis.
If we know anything, it’s that none of us got here, or go anywhere, on our own. More than ever, we owe it to one another to make sure all of our kids have a real financial asset waiting for them for their future. We hope you will join us in celebration of that vision on 529 Day.
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Debra-Ellen Glickstein is the executive director of NYC Kids RISE. Lorelei Salas is the commissioner of the NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP), which houses the City’s Office of Financial Empowerment, and an ex-officio director of NYC Kids RISE. On Twitter @GlicksteinDebra, @LoreleiNYCDCA, & @NYCKidsRISE. Join the conversation by posting on social media using #Together529 & #Juntos529.
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Existing infrastructure needs major investment (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)
Governor Cuomo traveled to Washington on Wednesday to meet with President Trump, where he pitched the president on infrastructure investments like an expanded Second Avenue Subway and a new Penn Station. The governor is right to push for a national public works program, which would get thousands of newly unemployed Americans working again while tackling urgent infrastructure needs.
The last time the nation embarked on a major public works program, it produced dozens of large-scale projects in New York that helped dig the city and the country out of the Great Depression—from the RFK Bridge, the Lincoln Tunnel, and LaGuardia Airport to post offices, hospitals, high schools, and swimming pools across every borough.
A bold public works program would give New York a similar boost during these devastating economic times. But New York’s infrastructure needs are different than they were during the 1930s. Today, what the city needs most is a massive campaign to upgrade and maintain the infrastructure it already has.
For decades, New York City has fallen behind the mounting state-of-good-repair needs of its crumbling public infrastructure, with serious consequences for the city’s livability and long-term health.
For instance, while building new miles of subway is a worthy goal, the urgent need is to stabilize the current system. Fixing the city’s crumbling subways and modernizing the bus system will require at least $40 billion over the next five years, including $7 billion just to upgrade decades-old signals and cut down on delays. These investments can restore confidence in public transit in a moment of crisis—and with the system shut at night and the city on lockdown, now is the time to get to work.
New York City’s aging infrastructure needs extend far beyond public transit. The city’s beleaguered public housing—home to a disproportionate share of residents impacted by the current crisis—is waiting on more than $31 billion in urgent infrastructure repairs, including crucial fixes to moldering apartments and crumbling facades.
The city’s average public hospital—essential to the pandemic response—is over 57 years old, and the system is staring down nearly $400 million in critical repair and maintenance costs.
The city’s public parks—especially vital now that New Yorkers have few other options for recreation and exercise—are more than 73 years old, on average, and face more than $634 million in needs, including decaying drainage systems, crumbling retaining walls, and disintegrating bulkheads.
Parks are far from the city’s only green infrastructure challenges. Thousands of acres of concrete and asphalt need to be greened to reduce stormwater runoff. And meeting the city’s ambitious targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions will require fast-tracked upgrades to retrofit far more public buildings.
Many of these assets receive little notice until they fail. Over the past decade, the city has averaged 459 water main breaks annually, more than one per day. The number of fracture-critical bridges jumped from 47 in 2012 to at least 67 in 2018.
Add to the list the stunning repair needs affecting the city’s public schools, colleges, and libraries—institutions that provide a sense of community in neighborhoods citywide, while preparing New Yorkers to participate in the economic recovery.
The Department of Education has nearly $2.5 billion in urgent, short-term capital needs, with over $100 million more at CUNY’s community colleges. And the city’s three public library systems—where the average branch library is more than 65 years old—are facing nearly $900 million in capital expenses to overhaul aging branches, replace leaky roofs, fix broken boilers, and upgrade HVAC systems. In addition, these institutions and many others need major upgrades to expand broadband access and help close the city’s persistent digital divide.
As the city at the epicenter of a national catastrophe, New York will need a historic level of federal investment to restore livelihoods and restart the country’s largest local economy, with lasting benefits for the nation and the world. Investing in infrastructure is a vital place to start.
But in a city as old as New York, the first priority should be repairing, restoring, and modernizing the aging infrastructure that we’ve already got. There’s no shortage of shovel-ready work to do.
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Jonathan Bowles is executive director of the Center for an Urban Future, a New York–based think tank focused on expanding economic opportunity. Eli Dvorkin is CUF’s editorial and policy director. On Twitter @jbowlesnyc, @wetwax, & @nycfuture.
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Questions about recycling abound (photo: Michael Anton/Sanitation)
The May 13 op-ed by Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer and City Council Member Antonio Reynoso, New York City Must Keep and Expand Organics Collection, It’s an Essential Service, suffers from two major fallacies.
The authors begin their piece:
“While is it is no secret that the city’s curbside organics collection program doesn’t pay for itself, that’s only half the story. It is true that the program currently generates a small amount of revenue, about $50,000. However, if properly executed, the program has the potential to generate millions of dollars in revenue for the city.”
The first fallacy once again raises the belief that a recycling-related program can one day generate sufficient revenues to significantly offset or eliminate the cost of its operation. Second, and perhaps more significant, is the belief that the organics collection program as currently conceived and executed should be further expanded.
To justify the above speculations the authors quote from an “analysis” performed by the Independent Budget Office estimating $22.5 million in possible future revenues from composting. This analysis is based upon an If, Then series of hypotheses untethered from current programmatic realities. The authors go on to further speculate that “realizing the increased revenue from organics recycling is dependent upon expansion.”
In the midst of a pandemic and the resulting financial crisis, it is irresponsible for elected officials to call for the expansion of a program that is clearly not working. Successful recycling collection programs are evaluated on a number of factors. In the case of an organics collection program, these most critical factors are: 1) A program design that overcomes participants’ inherent revulsion to decaying organic waste; 2) Maintaining sustained and consistent levels of participation by the generator (container set-out). Without robust participation by all parties targeted by the program, neither collection nor processing can be efficient and sustainable; 3) The three basic means by which to drive participation: regular public education, tangible enforcement, and differential charging for refuse versus recycling services. The latter two options for increasing participation have typically been strongly opposed by most local elected officials and to date there has been very limited investment in the first option.
In recycling programs, participation drives all of the other operational factors like collection efficiency and the successful processing of what is ultimately collected. There are many other challenges that can contribute to the success or failure of collection and processing but without sustained and adequate participation, organics programs fail. Based solely on the participation levels of the current organics program it is unsustainable and expansion is unjustified.
The authors next invoke the historical decision in 2002, following the recession brought about by the events of 9/11, to temporarily suspend the collection of plastics and glass as justification for why organics should not now be suspended. They argue that once restored in stages over the next two years following 2002, the recycling program never regained the same participation rates it experienced prior to this suspension. While it is true that the gross diversion rates of recyclables did not go back to the exact same levels as prior to 2002, there are a number of reasons for this change in diversion that are related to the suspension but unrelated to the speculations of the authors.
Chief among those was that post-suspension sanitation workers were better trained to no longer pick up what was essentially garbage in a recycling can or bag, but instead leave it for garbage collections. The recycling diversion rate (simply the weight of what was formerly trash, diverted to collection by recycling trucks) was in fact higher prior to suspension but so was the post-collection residue rate -- the rate of what the processors had to throw out as non-recyclables (garbage) received along with recyclables.
What the recession following 9/11 allowed was for a suspension of business-as-usual thinking, both political and operational, which then provided an opportunity to redesign the metal, glass, and plastics collection and processing program.
A little more history
Going back to the 1990s and the recession during the Dinkins administration, the city had decided to abandon investment in recycling processing infrastructure and to instead rely solely upon the private sector for the processing of recyclables. City contracts were based upon the lowest bid or lowest net cost to the Department of Sanitation for the processing of those recyclables; contracts that ultimately placed the entire risk of post-consumer commodity market price fluctuation upon the contractors.
While this arrangement worked for well over a decade, following 9/11 and the experience all New York City-contracted recyclers had shipping recyclables out of the Port of Newark for many months, those same recyclers decided it was time to assume far less of the risk associated with processing and marketing the city’s recyclables. In addition, when Sanitation released its rebid of the same processing in contracts in mid-2002 it decided in an unstable marketplace to reduce the risks to its contractors by assuming the market risk instead of the contractor, rather than sharing revenues the sanitation department would be the recipient of most of the revenues, both good and bad, and the contractor would bid a straight processing fee per ton, which would include the contractor’s overhead and profit.
The market instability plus the new contract structure resulted in what appeared to many as far higher prices, when in fact the prices after revenue offsets would have likely been similar. However, in the rush for cost-cutting following 9/11, one of the proposed cuts by the then-commissioner was to eliminate the entire metal, glass, and plastics collection program.
After much back-and-forth between the administration and the City Council leading up to the 2002 fiscal year budget, a compromise was made to temporarily suspend the collection of plastics and glass while continuing to collect just metal under a straightforward revenue-only contract the recycling bureau had in place. The former metal, glass, and plastics collection program was then scheduled through political compromise, and memorialized into law, for full restoration approximately two years later.
The previous history is invoked solely to illustrate the fact that the recession combined with the decision to temporarily suspend the metal, glass, and plastics collection program brought about an opportunity to rethink how to design the future processing and marketing of the metal, glass, and plastics recycling stream in New York City.
At the time the city already had long-term, 20-plus-year revenue contracts with private firms for the acceptance and processing of paper but lacked anything similar with metal, glass, and plastics. Because of the limited revenue-generating potential of the metal, glass, and plastics recycling stream, combined with the added cost of processing the same complex heterogeneous stream, unlike with paper, it was incumbent upon the city to make the needed investment to ensure the proper infrastructure to accept, process, and market the materials collected.
The political and operational rethinking provided by this opportunity resulted in the release by the recycling office of a request-for-proposals for a public-private partnership to process the city’s metal, glass, and plastics for the next 20-40 years on a piece of land provided by the city.
Without this opportunity, it is likely that the metal, glass, and plastics collection program, if it still existed, would have experienced many more ups and downs between 2004 and now, as it had since its inception. Instead of looking to expand an organics program that is currently purely voluntary and with a participation rate that dooms it to failure, it would be far better to use this opportunity to suspend the program and rethink all aspects of it to ensure that if and when it is restored, it is designed to succeed rather than fail.
Presently the organics program relies almost entirely upon a private-sector jury-rigged infrastructure for receiving, processing, and marketing the organics it collects. An infrastructure like that used for originally processing the metal, glass, and plastics stream, designed for another purpose and a wholly different quality stream but modified to a limited degree to answer the current call and secure a contract.
Times of crisis provide opportunities, if seized, to abandon conventional thinking and instead be creative. Rather than elected officials attempting to satisfy politically powerful constituencies such as the Natural Resources Defense Council by calling for restitution of a failing program, they should use the present crisis as an opportunity to call for the redesign of the program for operational success rather than political success.
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Robert Lange was the prime architect of New York City’s recycling program and the director of the Department of Sanitation’s recycling program for 20 years. He was a 2010 Alfred P. Sloan Public Service Award recipient, and retired from Sanitation in 2016.
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Gov. Cuomo delivers a budget address (photo: Darren McGee/Governor's Office)
Despite pleas from New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and state and local government leaders across the nation for major new federal help for budgets devastated by the COVID-19 recession, there is still no clear path to Washington acting quickly to provide financial relief.
Although on May 15 the House of Representatives, with its Democratic majority, passed a $3 trillion aid bill for the country that included $1 trillion for state and local governments, President Trump announced he would veto the bill if passed in both houses of Congress and many Republican senators, who hold the majority in that chamber, were quick to announce the House bill dead on arrival. When serious negotiations on a new relief package will occur, or when an aid package might ultimately get passed, is not clear.
State Cutbacks are Coming, No Doubt
It’s been seven weeks since New York leaders adopted the state budget on April 2. That budget anticipated implementing $10 billion in spending cutbacks from what had been the original $105 billion budget submitted by the governor in January for the 2020-21 fiscal year.
The state has yet to act on those massive cuts despite reaching a benchmark set in the budget that would trigger them, holding out hope for federal action.
Where New York is Now: Tax Receipts Plunge by 70%, 2 Million File for Unemployment
The state’s first benchmark was made public on May 15 by State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli and it is ugly.
STATE COMPTROLLER APRIL CASH REPORT
STATE FUNDS | Executive Budget April Estimate |
April Actual |
Drop from Estimate |
% Drop from Estimate |
TOTAL TAX RECEIPTS TOTAL |
$11,746.0 | $3,583.9 | -8,162.10 | 30.5% |
DISBURSEMENTS | $7,479.0 | $4,373.0 | -3,106.00 | 58.5% |
This benchmark, presented in the table above, involved comparing New York’s actual tax receipts in April 2020 to an estimate constructed in the governor's Executive Budget for that month. The table shows the Comptroller’s cash report for April 2020 compared to the Executive Budget estimates. The Division of the Budget was authorized to begin implementing spending reductions if receipts were less than 99% of estimates. The receipts were 30% of estimates, according to the Comptroller’s May 15 report.
Tax receipts plunged about 70%, more than $8 billion, compared to the adopted budget projection, which used April 2019 as a normal baseline.
The problem is two-fold. The economic downturn in New York is massive; more than 2 million New Yorkers have filed for unemployment in the last 8-eight weeks, about 20% of the state’s workforce. And the ordinary April 15 deadline for filing returns for both federal and state income taxes was extended to July 15, leaving New York bereft of normal tax revenues for months. The state is borrowing money for the short-term, but that won’t offset the overall plunge in revenue associated with the economic downturn.
New York State Faces Unprecedented Financial Challenges
New York state government now faces unprecedented challenges in attempting to manage a risky, uncertain set of dynamics that include:
1. Not knowing how much federal aid may come to the rescue, or when, or how deep New York’s own problems may be.
2.Not knowing how to use much of the federal aid already provided by Congress in the initial rescue packages because the U.S. Treasury’s guidelines for use of the funds has been unclear.
An analysis by the State Comptroller indicated that although New York State can utilize some funds provided by Congress for education and Medicaid, $5 billion allocated to New York in the first plan sits in limbo while New York awaits use guidelines. But with so many new expenses associated with the virus in health care and emergency response, much of that money could be unavailable for general budget relief.
3. The possibility that the job losses will drive up enrollment in the Medicaid program, increasing health care costs far more than currently anticipated and increasing the size of the state budget deficit.
The governor and Division of the Budget are undoubtedly still holding off because they know immediate implementation of cuts would be devastating. The governor’s daily press briefings display warnings of cuts to schools, hospitals, and local governments in the 20% range, meaning very large job losses for teachers, health care workers, transit workers, cops, firefighters, and other front-line government personnel. They are holding off despite realizing that too long a delay in making the cuts could make the situation worse for the providers of services that might be affected if little federal aid is forthcoming. Anyone getting a cut in their budget is better off knowing sooner rather than later so they can make plans to cope.
New York’s Current Plan to Mitigate Budget Cuts (short-term)
The state’s Financial Plan, issued April 25, showed that the state had backloaded about 40% of its $10 billion in spending cuts to next year, the final quarter of the state’s fiscal year, from January 2021 to the end of March 2021.
Congress also permitted the state to defer payment of Social Security and other payroll taxes for its own workforce to save $1 billion or more, providing additional cash flow relief.
The state’s Financial Plan indicates an effort to borrow $4.5 billion in May and June to cover initial revenue losses due to the tax filing extension and the recession. However, the adopted budget permits the state to borrow up to $11 billion short-term during the fiscal year (ending March 2021), and even permits the state to convert the short-term borrowing to long-term bonding. That means the state is permitted to borrow to cover operating deficits.
The State Comptroller’s analysis of the adopted state budget indicated the state could also re-evaluate its capital budget to defer nonessential projects to save cash and re-allocate financial settlement funds not yet spent for economic development projects. This could hurt recovery efforts in the future, however.
New York Can’t Count on Federal Help
A May 19 hearing in the United States Senate featured competing views on rescuing the economy. Federal Reserve Board Chair Jerome Powell said failing to help state and local governments could result in hundreds of thousands of layoffs and further damage to the economy. Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary, claimed the best way to help the economy was for the states to ‘reopen’ by easing social distancing restrictions and let people go back to work. It was also reported that President Trump met with Senate Republicans to strategize about new federal legislation, but remained circumspect about what he would support. The House returns to work after Memorial Day, from May 27-29, but many Senate Republicans want to wait longer than that.
Many states dominated by the Republican Party are already reeling from state and local government financial problems. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities is tracking state fiscal problems and has produced an analysis showing major problems in Louisiana, Kansas, Arizona, Missouri, Kentucky, Wisconsin, and Oklahoma. An update to the Center’s report says Georgia has just announced across-the-board state budget cuts of 14%, and Texas announced state agency budget cuts of 5%.
One hopes additional federal aid will arrive soon, but it seems unlikely to be anywhere near as generous as the House bill provides.
Should New York State Borrow Money to Cover Operating Expenses? Yes
The state budget permits New York to convert up to $11 billion in short-term borrowing, envisioned to deal with the extension of filing tax returns to July 15, or possibly longer if the Federal government grants another extension, to long-term bonding. In other words, the state could sell bonds for 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, or 30 years, to pay for its operating deficits this year. This, of course, would avoid some or even a large part of the spending cuts.
Bond raters, budget watchdogs, fiscal experts, ordinary people, and even I agree that borrowing long-term to cover your operating expenses is ordinarily a mistake. However, the alternative — eliminating tens of thousands of jobs including hospital workers, teachers, cops, transit workers, and emergency responders as the pandemic continues, has severe consequences for both those workers and the tens of millions of New Yorkers who depend on them.
New York should make a firm decision it will borrow some of the money it needs to sustain public services in a pandemic-induced near-depression if it can’t get covered by the federal government.
Governor Cuomo, at one of his press conferences, said if the state had to make cuts and later received federal aid, he would restore the cuts. New York could still make modest cutbacks and hope ultimately the Democrats in Washington will be successful with a new round of assistance for the American people, in part through state and local governments. But if needed New York should borrow a large portion of the money to cover its operating expenses this year while addressing the long-term problems created by COVID-19.
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Jim Brennan was a member of the New York State Assembly for 32 years, where he chaired four committees. On Twitter @JimBrennanNY.
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A New. York wind farm (photo: @nyserda)
Prologue
At the stroke of midnight, as April gave way to May, one hundred drones with diamond-brazed hacksaws descended on a remote section of the New York-New Jersey Bight. Methodically, diabolically, they set to their task: lopping off a thousand or more turbine blades whose spinning motion enabled the world’s biggest offshore wind farm. When the sun rose on May 1 it revealed a stark sight: 400 supertall towers stripped bare. Twelve hundred blades, three per tower, that for decades had funneled to the New York grid the equivalent of nearly a thousand megawatts of non-stop carbon-free power, lay at the bottom of the Atlantic.
No one noticed, at least not right away. Downstate New York homes, offices, and subways continued humming — at least, those not shuttered by the virus. The power grid summoned generators fired by natural gas piped in from Pennsylvania fracking sites that customarily ran at partial capacity. As they ramped up to full power their carbon emissions ramped up with them, magnifying New York’s climate impact even as officials were vowing to diminish it. While the worsened smog was concentrated in and around New York, the climate cost, in terms of worsened warming, would spread across the world.
OK, cut the fantasy. New York state’s hundreds of wind turbines are all upstate. None are offshore. In fact, there are just five in all east coast waters, all off Rhode Island. Moreover, hacksaws strong enough and drones sturdy enough to manage the dismemberment don’t yet exist; the turbine blades, toughened fiberglass dozens of feet across, would be hell to carve.
In real life, however, an equivalent operation — equivalent in its immediate climate consequences, that is — did commence at midnight on April 30, in a facility on the east shore of the Hudson River, 35 miles north of Columbus Circle. Technicians gingerly inserted boron rods into the core of the Indian Point #2 reactor, quenching the fissioning process that, since the mid-1970s, produced heat that boiled water that made steam that turned turbines and generated a large stream of carbon-free electricity.
That stream could be fickle. Over much of its first two decades IP2 was felled by leaks, cracks, and violations that limited its output averaged over a year to barely 50 percent of its nominal thousand megawatt capacity. Eventually, however, Indian Point 2, like most of the other 97 commercial reactors in the U.S., found a steady stride. At the end, the reactor was registering annual capacity factors of 80 percent or more and finally fulfilling the dream of trouble-free power.
Now it’s gone — its electricity, that is — switched off pursuant to a deal struck several years ago by plant owner Entergy, Hudson River watchdog Riverkeeper, and New York State, and endorsed by the state’s environmental and climate vanguard. The reactor’s twin sibling, Indian Point #3, will likewise go dark next April, doubling the loss of carbon-free output. From a climate standpoint the dual shutdown will be the same as erecting 800 giant wind turbines and then chopping off the blades.
Why Wind or Other Benign Energy Won’t Replace Indian Point’s Climate Contribution for Some Time
Wind turbines and reactors are dissimilar beasts. Wind turbines threaten no one, whereas the Indian Point nukes are thought by some to menace millions. Yet they have in common something vital to climate: neither entails a combustion process that emits carbon (or requires methane). This ensures that even counting their respective construction processes (and also, for the nukes, refueling), neither is responsible for more than a minuscule amount of greenhouse gases (see sidebar). Both are antidotes to fossil fuels.
Does it not follow, then, that shutting Indian Point need not worsen climate change? Can’t its nearly zero-carbon kilowatt-hours be replaced painlessly by building more wind or solar electricity, or with “negawatts” of electricity saved through energy-efficient L.E.D. lights and smarter appliances?
Riverkeeper and its anti-nuke allies take that stance in the case of Indian Point. I have advanced similar arguments repeatedly throughout my career.
Most recently, I have championed Mark Jacobson’s paradigm and analysis for replacing all energy— not just electricity — with “100 percent wind, water and sunlight.” Jacobson and his team concluded in 2013 that 40 percent of the energy required for New York State could be provided by 12,700 five-megawatt offshore wind turbines, with the remaining 60 percent coming from a mix of onshore wind, solar farms, rooftop solar on residential and commercial buildings, and retention of the state’s large hydro facilities built in the mid-20th century. I strongly endorse this vision and approach. And in a report published this week I documented that “clean electricity” — energy savings plus increased wind and solar power — is doing more than fracked gas to push out coal and decarbonize the U.S. electricity sector.
But even under the most optimistically aggressive timetables, it will be at least one decade and possibly several before it can be said that Jacobson’s turbines are doing Indian Point’s climate good deeds. That is because every bit of renewable energy and efficiency we can muster needs to go to replace fossil fuels, not to replace a different zero-carbon source. Not until the New York electric grid has been reconstituted to the point that the “replacement” (or “marginal” in the parlance of grid engineers and economists) block of power almost always comes from renewables rather than gas or coal can it be said that Indian Point’s climate benefit is now being supplied by solar or wind.
The logic of electric grids dictates that if a block of carbon-free energy from, say, a giant wind farm, is having to replace similarly carbon-free Indian Point 2, it cannot also replace fossil fuels. Let's augment this point with two separate pieces of evidence pertaining to Indian Point.
First, the latest figures (2018) show that fossil-fuel plants supply downstate New York (New York City, Long Island, and the Hudson Valley) with 70 percent of its electricity, as per the donut chart below from the NY Independent System Operator, the state-chartered body that manages New York’s power grid. Moreover, because their fuel costs make them costlier to run, these plants, which are almost entirely fueled by natural gas, are always called on after the state’s renewable and nuclear sources. This guarantees that the “marginal” (last) units topping off the grid — the ones that will be fired up in place of Indian Point — are almost always gas-fired plants rather than zero-carbon generators.
In other words, shut Indian Point, and the flood of kilowatt-hours to replace it won’t come from existing wind or solar farms; these are already running as flat out as the available wind and sun permit. Until wind and solar (plus hydro and the state’s other operating reactors) so dominate the grid that one of them is always “next in line,” the energy replacing Indian Point will come from under-utilized fossil-fuel generators that will be made to run more than they would if Indian Point were still operating.
More proof, if any were needed, may be found in the bar chart below, which I derived from NYISO data. The bars contrast statewide electricity production during IP2’s final week at full power, before its “coastdown” en route to shutdown, with production in the first week without it.
The share of electricity produced by fossil-fuel plants shot up from 29% to 33%. Lest that rise seem small, those four percentage points actually denote a nearly 14 percent increase (the additional 4% share divided by the original 29%). A contributory factor was the small drop in renewables (largely hydro and wind), but most of the increase was a direct consequence of the fall in the nuclear share as Indian Point 2 was turned off.
It’s axiomatic: withdraw the nukes and fossil generation rushes in. (The same would happen if some state edict forced hydro plants or wind farms off line.) Reminder: Indian Point 3 is slated for shutdown next year.
Counter-arguments?
My argument, then, is that shutting Indian Point will result in a more or less one-for-one substitution of its output by climate-damaging fossil fuels, for a long period of time.
Counterarguments range from somewhat wonky points about grid operation and management, to belief that with nuclear power diminished or off the table altogether, changes in culture and policy will enable energy efficiency and renewables to scale up faster. Some arguments and rejoinders follow:
Argument: Renewables won’t be throttled — deliberately cut back — as often if Indian Point isn’t supplying the grid; the regained output means that some of IP’s lost output is made up by wind and solar generation rather than fossil fuels.
Answer: Large-scale throttling of renewables in New York is a strawman, only occasionally befalling wind generators late at night when their output is high and demand is low, but accounting for less than 2 percent of statewide wind production. Moreover, nighttime loads appear poised to rise due to peak-pricing of daytime power, overnight charging of electric vehicles, and widespread development of energy storage systems, making throttling even more rare.
Argument: By pushing up prices paid for power supplied to New York, closing Indian Point will attract more renewables and efficiency.
Answer: That is true, but the likely effect will be far too small to offset the loss of Indian Point and bring much closer the time when the grid won’t have to run fossil fuel generators more than it would otherwise. (Note also that streamlining siting of wind and solar farms would probably spur renewables more than a modest jump in power prices; hopefully, the recently enacted Renewable Energy Growth and Community Benefit Act, REGACBA, will help accomplish that.)
Argument: Keeping Indian Point 2 alive was expensive.
Answer: That is true as well. Engineering, repairs, maintenance, security, regulatory compliance — the list is extensive. Still, these costs were largely known, and I strongly suspect that they were a relative bargain in terms of averted carbon emissions — at least compared to many other ways to cut carbon. (Building new reactors to cut CO2 is an entirely different proposition, of course.) Had IP2 been kept operating, any prospective major overhaul could have been an occasion for removing it from service.
Argument: Quebec’s vast hydro-electricity resources can readily substitute for Indian Point.
Answer: Bringing that power downstate presents a Rubik’s Cube of interlocking issues including cost, ownership, regulatory authority, and opposition not just from some First Nations and their environmentalist allies but also from competing electricity producers. And for all its vastness, Canadian hydropower too must be accountable to the reasoning that until the New York grid has been made largely carbon-free, every potential additional renewable kilowatt will be counted on to replace fossil fuels, and using it to replace another zero-carbon energy source effectively squanders its climate value.
Argument: Without Indian Point — indeed, without the distraction and false allure of nuclear power — society will be more inclined to throw its full weight behind renewables and efficiency.
Argument restated by a colleague: The question of Indian Point and carbon emissions is not some simple energy addition and subtraction but the social decision-making context. Everything is about politics — political and social will, messaging, energy, enthusiasm, public support. In the real world, enthusiasm for renewables is related to unease with nuclear power.
Answer: I agree that for far too long, nuclear power has absorbed far more public and policy attention than its current contribution and future potential warrant. (This report is an example!) It is also true that energy policy and investment are shaped by social context. But nuclear power’s heyday as a flashpoint of public concern was 40 years ago. Nowadays nuclear power isn't that much of a hot-button issue.
In short, the era is long gone when enthusiasm for renewables and the ability to harness it for a full-scale mobilization to rapidly push out fossil fuels was greatly influenced by unease about nukes. Rather, the two pillars on which a renewables-based Green New Deal will stand are, first, the immediacy of green jobs, and, second, the understanding — veneration, for some, myself included — that wind and solar, even at the necessary colossal scale, can be made harmonious with nature.
The argument also requires, as a kind of flip side, that leaving the 97 existing United States nuclear units running must enervate or undercut the push for renewables and energy efficiency. But how, exactly? I’ve no idea if this notion is widely held or just a niche affectation. But if it is to rise beyond hand-waving, its adherents should at least identify the flashpoints and levers by which clinging to existing reactors is getting in the way of massively expanding solar and wind.
What about radiation dangers from Indian Point?
The main purpose in closing the Indian Point reactors — and, arguably, the reason New York’s governor took an interest — is of course to extinguish the possibility of exposing the tens of thousands of people in its immediate vicinity and the millions in the New York metropolitan area, many of whom cannot quickly evacuate, to radioactive contamination from an accident on the scale of Chernobyl in 1986 or Fukushima in 2011.
Since the dawn of U.S. commercial nuclear power in the late 1950s, the nuclear industry’s bête noire has been the specter of horrific accidents, not least because it motivated increasingly stringent safety requirements that in turn drove up costs. I know very well the safety-regulation-cost nexus. In the early 1980s I published a scholarly article on the subject in the peer-reviewed journal Nuclear Safety, followed by a book-length exploration, Power Plant Cost Escalation: Nuclear and Coal Capital Costs, Regulation and Economics, arguing that costs arising from ever-increasing regulatory stringency would doom nuclear power’s expansion in the United States.
No one can divine the likelihood of a serious accident at Indian Point, particularly as it hinges in part on human fallibility and malfeasance. Nevertheless, I believe that if I lived nearby I would draw some comfort from the absence of a severe U.S. reactor accident in the four decades since the 1979 meltdown of the Three Mile Island reactor near Harrisburg, PA. Since that traumatic event, U.S. nuclear plants have racked up roughly 15 times as much experience as they had accumulated to that time.
This points to some success in climbing out of the morass of design blunders and operational mishaps that so unsettled Americans about nuclear power in its first few decades. So does the sharp reduction in reactors’ average downtime rates from 40 percent to 15 or even 10 percent today — an achievement that can’t entirely be chalked up to lax regulation.
This brief argument will not resonate with those who regard every reactor on earth including Indian Point as a bad accident waiting to happen. Nor do I intend it to. Here I am seeking to lay to rest the notion that the decarbonization lost by shutting Indian Point can be made up elsewhere anytime soon. It cannot, for the reason that those “elsewhere” decarbonization candidates — huge wind farms, wholesale installation of solar arrays, and energy efficiency for which I and others have campaigned for half a century — are all needed to push out fossil fuels. If any of these measures are replacing Indian Point, they’re not decarbonizing.
Riverkeeper and Indian Point
The campaign to shut Indian Point has been spearheaded by the venerable Hudson River environmental watchdog group Riverkeeper. Founded in 1966 as the Hudson River Fishermen’s Association, Riverkeeper earned its environmental stripes exposing and litigating corporate polluters and tenaciously defending the lower Hudson Valley and New York region’s drinking water and overall ecology. Its push to shut Indian Point was borne from the harm to the Hudson’s renascent striped bass fishery from the plant’s thermal plumes, impingement, and entrainment. Riverkeeper also has been the template for numerous “waterkeeper” protectors around the country. I’m a former member of the group and also consulted for it on several earlier efforts to shut Indian Point.
At the time of this writing, the group’s web site is marking the shutdown of Indian Point 2 with a statement referring to “this historic moment” and noting:
As Indian Point shuts down, environmental groups…are emphasizing the fact that renewable energy and energy efficiency that has been built up over the last several years are replacing the energy from Indian Point. An independent research brief by Physicians, Scientists, and Engineers for Healthy Energy found that recent deployment, current development, and projected growth of renewable generation and energy efficiency will contribute nearly 45,000 GWh annually by 2025, almost three times the 16,000 GWh currently supplied by Indian Point. (emphases added)
The brief cited by Riverkeeper is actually more guarded on these points. Its conclusion begins:
Our estimates suggest that renewables, storage and energy efficiency growth in line with New York’s targets could provide sufficient generation and local capacity following Indian Point’s closure, avoiding the need for a sustained increase in gas generation. (emphases added)
Note “could” rather than “will” and “sustained” rather than “any,” suggesting not just hedging by the consultant but some concordance with my central point that for years to come, climate-damaging carbon emissions will be higher without Indian Point operating than they would be with it. Indeed, the consultant’s brief did not venture such a comparison — suggesting that the scope of work from Riverkeeper may have excluded evaluating the possible rise in greenhouse gas emissions from shutting the reactors.
The consultant’s brief is creditable. It doesn’t invoke speculative imports of hydropower from Quebec. It explicitly and repeatedly credits “Indian Point’s carbon-free generation,” thus steering clear of outdated anti-nuclear tropes of reactor operation as somehow carbon-intensive. Most importantly, the brief does not claim that retiring Indian Point will leave the climate unscathed.
Coda
It is likely too late to reverse the shutdown of Indian Point 2. Too much went into crafting the deal, and too many plans have built on the expectation that the plant is being closed. The same, it must be said, goes for Unit 3.
In addition, with closure now the status quo, its reversal likely would be seen as, and thus would become, the kind of shot in the arm for nuclear power that could, in fact, get in the way of energy efficiency and renewable energy, just as the antinukers fear.
So the closures of Indian Point 2 and 3 will almost certainly stand. Why write this report, then? I could say I was forced to. First, by an anti-closure supporter of my not-for-profit, the Carbon Tax Center, who bared his distress to me and said that my silence made me complicit in setting back the climate cause. I came to agree that I was complicit — though not as director of CTC but as someone with the capacity to look clear-eyed at the issue, based on my long study of nuclear power and energy policy. I soon concluded that my long-standing excuse for being silent — Well, if New York state and the federal government had enacted the kind of carbon taxing I’ve fought for, Indian Point’s carbon benefits would be monetized —as they deserve to be — and that would have thwarted and defeated the long-standing campaign that did finally shut it down. — was insufficient.
I have little axe to grind here. I believe I see all sides. Unfortunately, the climate side, which moves me most, was not at the table when the deal was hammered out in 2016. The argument that renewable energy and energy efficiency can replace Indian Point, which originally was simply meant to cover — which it in fact does — keeping on the lights without laying too big of an economic egg, was too casually and carelessly extended to say that renewable energy and energy efficiency will replace Indian Point’s climate benefits, which they cannot do for quite some time.
Why climate was not at the table when Indian Point’s fate was being sealed is a worthy subject, perhaps for another occasion. I hope readers find this paper illuminating and helpful.
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Charles Komanoff, a mainstay of New York City's livable streets movement, had an earlier career as author, researcher, and expert witness on electricity policy and nuclear power. On Twitter @Komanoff.
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Mayor de Blasio visits with EMS (photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)
The coronavirus pandemic has compelled us to take stock of the racial and socioeconomic inequities that have burdened our city’s more than 5 million New Yorkers of color for generations. These obstacles to their upward mobility exist not only in health care, education, and housing but within our own municipal workforce.
The most glaring among them happens to also be one of particularly cruel irony given COVID-19’s onslaught on the city’s 9-1-1 system and related services: the unequal pay received by emergency medical technicians and paramedics at FDNY EMS.
These more than 4,000 EMTs and paramedics are predominantly people of color, often hailing from the same communities being ravaged by the coronavirus, and their ranks boast a higher percentage of women than any of the city’s uniformed services. They too are employees of the Fire Department, but, compared to their overwhelmingly white, male firefighting counterparts, FDNY EMS members are paid about $12,000 less on average, annually, and more than double that amount after five years; despite routinely facing threats to their safety as they provide life-saving medical care to well over 8 million New Yorkers, as well as commuters, tourists, and other visitors who need it.
FDNY EMS responded to over 1.5 million medical emergencies in each of the last two years. Over that same time, assaults against its members increased by 27% in 2018, and 36% through last fall.
Demoralized and undervalued, some 900 skilled and well-trained EMTs and paramedics left their jobs during that period to earn tens of thousands of dollars more as firefighters through an exclusive testing and hiring process within FDNY.
This pipeline, created on the heels of legal rulings affirming that FDNY engaged in hiring discrimination against minority and women applicants, has served to help the Department compensate for the abysmal racial and gender diversity outside of its EMS workforce.
Less known is the number of FDNY EMS members that walked away to join other city agencies, or left the city altogether, thus jeopardizing the health and well-being of our fellow New Yorkers. This is crucial work, and yet the compensation and parity issues have made it a difficult path to pursue for so many talented New Yorkers – and this was before COVID-19.
At the peak of the outbreak, as many as 7,000 emergency calls were placed in a single day, a level not seen since September 11, 2001; including the highest three-day call volume in FDNY history.
Despite the indignity of having only 12 sick days available to them, one out of every four FDNY EMS members called out during those agonizing weeks due to exposure to the coronavirus.
Four EMTs ultimately lost their lives to the virus, and a rookie EMT, John Mondello, tragically killed himself after just three months on the job serving in one of the busiest EMS stations in the city, having succumbed to the mental anguish of watching patient after patient die from the disease.
To this day, the most progressive city in America is denying these first responders their due. Mayor de Blasio himself previously described the work of EMTs and paramedics as “different” from firefighters, but has since given them numerous platitudes.
If the dedication, bravery, and sacrifice of FDNY EMS wasn’t apparent to him before COVID-19, it surely is now.
There can be no further argument against fairly compensating these beleaguered but endlessly brave first responders.
The time is now to show our gratitude for their service, commitment to excellence, and the value they add daily to our city by giving them the equal pay and benefits they rightly deserve.
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Corey Johnson represents parts of Manhattan and is the Speaker of the New York City Council. I. Daneek Miller represents parts of Queens and is the Chair of the City Council Committee on Civil Service and Labor. On Twitter @NYCSpeakerCoJo & @IDaneekMiller.
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