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Max Politics Podcast: Rep.-Elect Dan Goldman on Priorities for Entering Congress


Congressman-elect Dan Goldman (photo: Goldman campaign)


December 21, 2022 - Max Politics Podcast: Rep.-Elect Dan Goldman on Priorities for Entering Congress

Congressman-elect Dan Goldman (D, NY-10) joined the show to discuss his transition period and priorities for his first term in Congress as he prepares to join the House of Representatives in January, becoming part of the narrow Democratic House minority under Leader Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn. Goldman will represent the new 10th congressional district of New York, including Lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn.

Listen to the conversation and let us know what you think, on Twitter @TweetBenMax. You can listen to the show through the embedded audio below or download the episode wherever you get your podcasts at Max Politics.

Read more: Max Politics Podcast: Rep.-Elect Dan Goldman on Priorities for Entering Congress

Amid Debate Over Agency Vacancies, NYC Government Workforce Report More Than Two Years Late


On the job (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)


The New York City Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS) is preparing to publish its latest annual workforce report, which details the demographics of the city government’s massive workforce and trends in employee turnover. But the report is already obsolete, given it is to cover the 2020 fiscal year, which ended June 30, 2020, at the height of the pandemic, and will fail to shine a light on how the municipal workforce has changed in the last two years.

DCAS’ report, which was most recently published last year and covered the 2019 fiscal year, examines employee-level data from 72 city agencies and offices under the Mayor, various city boards, and even the offices of elected officials including in the City Council, the Public Advocate, the Comptroller, Borough Presidents, and District Attorneys. The report, which is usually published before the end of the next fiscal year, presents detailed demographic data – age, gender, race, ethnicity – as well as information on salaries, length of employment, and retirement eligibility. It looks at hiring, attrition, resignations, and transfers.

According to a DCAS spokesperson, the long-delayed report will be released in the coming months and is tardy in part because of the COVID-19 pandemic, which affected the lengthy process of collecting and reviewing data from city agencies and the pension system. The DCAS spokesperson made no mention of when the next two reports might be published to get the annual report up to date. The mayor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

At a glance, the report provides a valuable look at the city’s workforce. It shows patterns of diversity, in race, age, and gender. It shows where the city’s workforce lives, across the five boroughs and its surrounding counties. And it provides comparisons with other major cities.

Since the report was last published, however, the municipal workforce has experienced a massive upheaval because of the pandemic and decisions by city leaders. The intervening period also covers the end of the eight-year Bill de Blasio administration and start of Eric Adams’ mayoral tenure. The city lost more than 19,000 full-time workers, and vacancies have soared amid unusually high attrition rates, controversial retention and hiring policies, and a tight labor market. An acute staffing crisis has threatened critical functions and services at several city agencies.

With the massive number of vacancies that the city will not be able to quickly fill and amid belt-tightening efforts, Mayor Eric Adams has ordered a 50% cut in budgeted vacancies across the board for all non-uniformed positions in advance of his preliminary budget for next fiscal year, which is due in February. But none of that, though the subject of intense ongoing debate and negotiation, is expected to be covered in the DCAS report on the city workforce of the 2020 fiscal year.

“I would say this report is more important now than ever because it gives us the ability to compare,” said City Council Member Gale Brewer, a Manhattan Democrat. Brewer chairs the Committee on Oversight and Investigations and chaired a joint hearing in September with the Committee on Civil Service and Labor on maintaining the city’s workforce. At the hearing, Brewer and her colleagues pressed the administration on the municipal worker shortage, concerns that they have since reiterated repeatedly, including at a more recent hearing on the mayor’s November budget update.

[Read: At Hearing, City Council Criticizes Mayor Adams on Budget Decisions, Depleted Agencies]

While the report will contain important information, as Brewer pointed out, it will present an outdated picture since it covers the fiscal year from July 1, 2019 to June 30, 2020. “That’s a strange time, for lack of a better word,” Brewer said. “We don't know who's in the office, who's not.”

Brewer is also concerned about retirement trends. “New York City has an older workforce,” she said. “That's another whole challenge right now because…so many people are retiring. In addition to nobody wanting to work for the city, it's really creating a challenge to provide service.”

She also doesn’t buy the excuse that DCAS’ report was so delayed because of covid. “I think everybody blames everything on the pandemic. I assume some delay would be called for…but this is too long a delay,” she said.

Other electeds have also been sounding the alarm about the city’s staffing trends and have called for more transparency from the administration. New York City Comptroller Brad Lander released a report earlier this month warning that the high rate of vacancies at city agencies is affecting critical services, as he urged the mayor to accelerate hiring and improve retention. And while Mayor Adams has promised new recruitment and retention policies, he has yet to announce any so far.

A separate report released last month by State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli’s office examined how the pandemic has affected the city’s workforce. “The City experienced significant growth in its full- time workforce in the years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, much of which was driven by new or expanded services. The pandemic, and the City’s efforts to manage the budgetary implications of its impact, have led to a decline in staffing which has undone much of this growth,” the report states. “The decline did not occur evenly across the City’s agencies. Certain occupations also experienced a disproportionate decline, including those engaged in educational support as well as protective and enforcement services.”

But that report excluded full-time equivalent employees and certain public authorities like the massive New York City Housing Authority and Health+Hospitals, both of which are in the DCAS workforce profile report. It also did not analyze workforce demographics, which the DCAS report does.

In his report, DiNapoli encouraged DCAS to release its latest data. “The City would benefit from having an updated assessment of the changes to its workforce since the pandemic began,” it states.

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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Nearly A Year In, No Sign of Adams' Promised NYPD Watchlist


Mayor Adams with NYPD officials (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)


In his first nearly twelve months in office, Mayor Eric Adams has shown no signs of moving on a major campaign promise to publish a list of police officers the NYPD is watching for violent or otherwise unseemly behavior.

The promise was one of the more striking commitments the would-be mayor made to boost accountability within the ranks of the police force, a department of 34,000 uniformed officers. It was also one of the more tangible pledges Adams made to demonstrate his commitment to balancing police reform with his heavy focus on more aggressive law enforcement, part of Adams’ decades-long mix of pushing for fairer policing while remaining “conservative on crime,” as he has put it.

"As a former police officer who stood up against racism and corruption in the NYPD while simultaneously protecting our streets, I know how entrenched systemic bias is in the department," reads the police reform platform from Adams' 2021 campaign website, which has since been taken down (but preserved by Gotham Gazette). "The fastest way to true reform is to add as much diversity to the NYPD as fast as we can, while building trust through transparency."

"The NYPD keeps its own 'monitoring list' of cops with records of complaints and violent incidents. We will make those records more available to the public to be transparent and build trust," the platform reads.

But as of this month, the promise is still a work in progress, according to the mayor's office. As was a pledge the first-year Democratic mayor made in May to expedite the NYPD's often glacial disciplinary process.

"We're looking at the flowchart of how long it takes to remove someone who has violated their oath of office," Adams told CBS-2 TV’s Marcia Kramer in a May 25 interview. "We're making sure if an officer is doing something incorrect we right away rectify that behavior and at the same time, if it's something that is done that breaks the law or is not suitable to be [a] police officer, we are bringing them up on internal departmental charges," he said.

Fabien Levy, Adams' press secretary, said the administration was not ready to share more details on either the monitoring list or the expedited disciplinary system.

"Since day one, our public safety team has been focused on the NYPD disciplinary process with a particular focus on efficiency and transparency," Levy said in a statement when Gotham Gazette first inquired in October. "We have met, and continue to meet, with relevant stakeholders internally and externally, and our work, including with respect to the monitoring list and streamlining the disciplinary process, continues. We will share announcements when they are ready to be made."

At the time, Levy would not say which stakeholders the mayor has met with or what hurdles remain in place. On Thursday, December 15, he said by email that he had no progress updates to share.

But an hour later, Adams was asked about speeding up police discipline during an open question-and-answer session with reporters at City Hall.

The mayor said the disciplinary process was one of three focuses of an interagency working group, along with civilianizing parts of the NYPD and addressing failures of the department’s sex crimes unit. The group has presented its first set of recommendations and will come back with a second set, following feedback from the mayor, Adams said. The monitoring list was not mentioned in the question or answer.

"We're going to get it right and we're going to streamline the disciplinary process," he said. "It should not take this long, it's unfair to the person who's being charged and it's unfair to the city to keep an officer on the books who is not suitable to wear a uniform and understand the nobility of public safety."

Elected last year amid two years of pandemic-era crime increases, Adams has spent much of his first year in office focused on adding police patrols to the subways, enforcing low-level quality-of-life offenses, and cracking down on illegal guns. The mayor’s public remarks, in part spurred by the murder of two NYPD officers in his first month in office, have almost entirely consisted almost entirely of support for police and push-back against those who criticize them.

Adams' watchlist promise came amid an ongoing struggle over what police disciplinary records are accessible under the state's Freedom of Information Law. State lawmakers repealed Civil Rights Law 50-a, the statute used to shield those and other police personnel records from the public, in 2020. But police departments around the state, including the NYPD, have refused to publish many of them or sued to keep them under wraps.

The parameters of the mayor's promised watchlist are unclear. The NYPD's Early Intervention Program, which reviews officers for behavior that may lead to misconduct or negative public interactions, reports each quarter the number but not the names of officers under examination.

From April through June of this year (the second quarter), the department examined 208 uniformed officers for potential intervention, according to the last publicly available data. Of those, 156 were placed under review because prosecutors had declined to pursue their arrests, and 45 were due to allegations of biased policing. Only 14 officers, or about 7%, were recommended for non-punitive intervention after the review.

According to the department's Administrative Guide, intervention could entail training, mentoring, enhanced supervision, body-worn camera review, a conversation with leadership, or a change in assignment.

By comparison, the first quarter of 2022, from January to March, saw only 53 officers placed under review, and 26 of them – roughly half – were recommended for intervention.

But Dr. Keith Taylor, an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who served in the NYPD's Internal Affairs Bureau from 1998 to 2001, said the department has been keeping watchlists long before the Early Intervention Program launched. Those lists could consist of substantiated and unsubstantiated complaints that go beyond the Early Intervention Program.

"I think it's appropriate to use a level of discretion and sensitivity in order to make certain that [officers'] ability to do their job is not negatively affected by allegations," Taylor told Gotham Gazette of Adams' proposal to publish a list of officers under internal watch. On the other hand, he said, "once an allegation has become an actual finding then it's important the agency has transparency to maintain the public's trust."

Civil rights advocates believe publishing a "monitoring list" would be the tip of the iceberg of true police accountability.

"What the public needs to know is not just the officers that the NYPD has flagged for monitoring but to know how many complaints are being filed against officers on the whole [and] what is happening with those complaints," said Michael Sisitzky, an assistant policy director at the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), in an interview. "From the outset, it was always an inadequate proposal but it did speak to the need to have more transparency.”

A lack of publicly available data also makes it hard to tell if there has been progress expediting the disciplinary process. One component of that is cases under the jurisdiction of the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB), an agency responsible for investigating certain allegations of police misconduct, a fraction of all misconduct cases.

According to the Mayor's Management Report, the average time it took the CCRB to close cases grew in fiscal year 2022, which included the last six months of the de Blasio administration and first six months of Adams’ term. The time to complete a full investigation rose from an average of 378 days to 591 days, or 56%, "largely as an after-effect of the City’s COVID-19 precautions," the report states. For complaints against police officers that the CCRB substantiated, the average case length increased 42%, from 433 to 614 days. Substantiated CCRB cases then go to the NYPD with recommendations for discipline, in some cases to an administrative trial, in others directly to the police commissioner for a decision.

“Mayor Adams has consistently said that public safety and justice are the prerequisites to prosperity," Levy wrote in October. "As the FY22 MMR — which spans a period covering two mayoral administrations — notes, the increase in average times of investigation and substantiation largely stem from the city’s COVID-19 precautions. As we continue the reopening process, we remain committed to ensuring CCRB has the resources it needs to fulfill its mission under the Charter efficiently and effectively.”

In November, the administration released a plan to cut the CCRB's budget by 3%, part of a citywide plan to reduce budget gaps and after a previous 3% reduction earlier this year. The CCRB headcount is already below New York City Charter-mandated levels tied to the NYPD's uniformed headcount.

A CCRB spokesperson said the agency has improved the time it takes to complete investigations but could not say whether the NYPD has increased the speed with which it handles cases and metes out punishment – one of the biggest issues raised by families of people killed by police. 

"The pandemic created significant roadblocks for the CCRB and other oversight entities to complete investigations on time, prompting a statewide executive order extending statute of limitations for CCRB cases, and other disciplinary investigations, through May 4, 2022," the CCRB spokesperson wrote in an email to Gotham Gazette. "Since closing those cases, the CCRB has already managed to reduce the time it takes to complete an investigation by 20% from Q1 to Q2 of this year."

According to the spokesperson, that is in part the result of new record-keeping methods and work between the CCRB and NYPD to improve the department's sharing of body-worn camera footage with CCRB investigators. The average time it takes the NYPD to fulfill a request for footage is now seven days, the spokesperson told Gotham Gazette, down from 42 business days in 2019. The agency's board members are also more frequently involved in case reviews, which further reduces completion time.

"Under Mayor Adams, disciplinary proceedings for NYPD officers remain inadequate in number and outcome and too far delayed, which harms the safety of our city and communities," said Loyda Colon, executive director of the Justice Committee, a group that advocates against police violence, and a member of the Communities United for Police Reform coalition.

"The mayor’s 'monitoring list' is a diversion attempt that promotes a false 'bad apples' narrative, when the whole policing system is rotten," Colon said in the statement.

The group has been pushing Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell and her predecessors to fire officers who killed Kawaski Trawick, a Black man with a history of mental health issues, in his home in 2019. In November, the department scheduled a disciplinary trial for Officers Brendan Thompson and Herbert Davis for April 24, 2023 – more than four years after Trawick was killed. Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark previously declined to charge the two with a crime.

This past week, Sewell issued an internal memo to the department saying she reduced or dismissed the penalty recommendations of departmental trial judges in dozens of cases and planned to soon change the NYPD's disciplinary matrix, The New York Post reported.

The New York City Council passed a law in 2020 requiring the matrix under her predecessor, NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea, after years of pressure from advocates. It was aimed at introducing the type of transparency and fairness into the disciplinary process that Adams' championed in his campaign promises and May interview. According to Sewell's memo, she believed many of the disciplinary recommendations were "manifestly unfair.”

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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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A Step Into the 2023 City Council Elections as Campaign Finance Board Approves First Public Funds Payment of Cycle


Tony Avella at City Hall (photo: NY City Council)


The 2023 City Council election is kicking off, as the New York City Campaign Finance Board approved its first public funds payment to a single campaign on Thursday and announced a series of completed campaign audits from the previous election cycle.

The upcoming elections are taking place just two years after all 51 City Council seats were on the ballot in 2021 because of the decennial redistricting process. Based on the 2020 Census, City Council districts were redrawn to accommodate an increase of 630,000 residents in the city since 2010. The New York City Districting Commission on Wednesday published the final new district map, which was approved by the City Council in October.

After the turn of the year, things are going to heat up ahead of June party primaries and the fall general election.

The first public funds payment by the Campaign Finance Board was based on the last campaign finance disclosure made by candidates on July 15 of this year. The next disclosure is due January 17, which will cover the fundraising period from July 12, 2022 till January 13, 2023. The next potential payment will occur on January 17 (based on the July disclosure report), followed by a payment on February 15, which will be based on the January disclosure report.

Thursday’s payment was the first of five that will be made before the primary ballot is set in May – the CFB has procedures for clawing back funds from candidates who either fail to petition or to qualify for the ballot – and will be followed by eight more payments through the 2023 cycle. 

The CFB’s voluntary public matching funds program matches small dollar donations at a 8-to-1 ratio, to encourage campaigns to broaden their outreach to constituents and disincentivize reliance on wealthy donors. For City Council candidates, the first $175 of a contribution from a resident within the relevant district is matched with public funds. 

The only candidate that qualified for the CFB’s first public funds payment was Tony Avella, a Democrat from Northeast Queens, who is running again for Council District 19, currently represented by Republican Council Member Vickie Paladino. Avella previously served as a state Senator from 2011 to 2019 and was a City Council member from 2002 till 2010. He ran for the District 19 seat last year and lost to Paladino.

Avella’s campaign has already raised $14,480 for the June primary and, on Thursday, was awarded $83,106 in public funds. To receive the funds, the campaign had to meet a dual threshold of raising at least $5,000 and had to have at least 75 contributors from within the district. Paladino has only raised about $615 so far for reelection. Besides Avella, two other candidates are running in the Democratic primary –  Paul Graziano and Richard Lee.

There were only minor changes made to City Council District 19 in Queens, while other districts saw drastically new lines and significant controversy during the process that was full of debate and drama. 

Under recent changes made to campaign finance law, through a voter-approved charter amendment in 2018 and legislation in 2019, the public funds program was significantly expanded while contribution limits were reduced for participants. Council candidates who opt in to the program can raise a maximum of $1,050 from an individual donor, while nonparticipants can raise $1,600. Candidates are also limited to spending $207,000 on each of the primary and general legs of the election, for a total limit of $414,000. (The spending limit in the non-election years of the cycle is $55,000 and counts towards the spending limit.)

Besides the public funds payment, the CFB also announced a list of 39 campaigns from the 2021 cycle that have been audited and were in compliance with CFB rules and regulations. The board still has more than 260 audits left to complete from the cycle and faced criticism at a City Council hearing earlier this week about its slow audit processes. 

Most of the current class of 51 Council members are serving their first terms and many are set to face competitive reelection races, with challengers already declaring their campaigns. There are already 78 candidates registered with the Campaign Finance Board. 

A particularly crowded contest seems to be shaping up in District 9 in Manhattan, where Council Member Kristin Richardson Jordan, a first-term Democrat, is facing a slew of primary opponents. There are already five other candidates registered with the CFB in the race including sitting Assemblymembers Inez Dickens and Al Taylor, and criminal justice advocate Yusef Salaam of the Central Park Five.

Some candidates have begun fundraising in earnest for the 2023 cycle. The top fundraiser so far is City Council Member Rafael Salamanca Jr., a Bronx Democrat, who had raised more than $393,000 as of July (most of which was left over from his previous campaign) and had about $378,000 in cash on hand. In second place was City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, who had raised nearly $128,000 and had about $105,000 on hand.

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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Max Politics Podcast: Dan Doctoroff on the Plan for a 'New' New York


Dan Doctoroff, far right, with the Mayor, Governor, and others (photo: Governor's Office)


December 15, 2022 - Max Politics Podcast: Dan Doctoroff on the Plan for a 'New' New York

Dan Doctoroff, former deputy mayor and now co-chair of the 'New' New York panel assembled by Governor Hochul and Mayor Adams, joined the show to discuss the extensive action plan put forward by the task force, governor, and mayor.

Listen to the conversation and let us know what you think, on Twitter @TweetBenMax. You can listen to the show through the embedded audio below or download the episode wherever you get your podcasts at Max Politics.

Read more: Max Politics Podcast: Dan Doctoroff on the Plan for a 'New' New York

Campaign Finance Board Promises Faster Audits at City Council Hearing Examining 2021 Election Cycle


CFB executive director Beth Rotman (photo: John McCarten/NYC Council Media Unit)


Though it's been more than 13 months since the last city election cycle ended, the New York City Campaign Finance Board has yet to conclude any audits examining the fundraising and expenditure of more than 300 campaigns. At an oversight hearing of the City Council’s Committee on Governmental Operations on Tuesday, the CFB, under new leadership, promised Council members that it is taking steps to expedite those audits as it continuously works to improve the city’s campaign finance program. 

The CFB administers the city’s public matching funds program, which matches qualifying small dollar donations at an 8-to-1 ratio, in order to encourage candidate participation and limit the influence of wealthy donors in elections. The program was amended for the city’s massive 2021 election cycle by a City Charter Revision proposed by a commission and approved by voters in 2018, followed by additional changes made by the City Council and mayor in 2019. Those changes increased the matching rate for small dollar contributions, raised the amount of matching funds paid out to candidates and drastically reduced contribution limits, among other tweaks to the program.

In the 2021 election, 308 candidates took part in the program and were paid out a record-breaking $127 million in public funds, more than triple what the CFB paid out in the last citywide election featuring so many open seats, in 2013. New York State recently launched its own public campaign financing program partially modeled after the city’s. 

“While the current campaign finance program is by most measures extremely successful, we can always do better,” said Council Member Sandra Ung, a Queens Democrat and chair of the governmental operations committee, in her opening remarks. As is always the case, the City Council is full of elected officials with experience in the matching funds program and in dealing with the Campaign Finance Board, which runs campaign education programming, distributes marching funds, conducts campaign finance audits, tracks spending, and more.

CFB’s executive director Beth Rotman, who was appointed to the role two months ago, detailed the success of the public funds program but had few recommendations for changes. “That is largely because virtually every piece of the program changed,” she said, referring to the sweeping amendments made in this last election cycle. 

Rotman did, however, urge two changes that would have to occur at the state level, which were included in the CFB’s 2021 Post Election report, released in September. She recommended that the state prohibit cryptocurrency donations to campaigns, citing their “erratic valuations” and the fact that they are “designed for anonymity” rather than transparency. The city, she said, should not follow in the footsteps of the Federal Election Commission which has allowed Bitcoin donations since 2014. She also urged the state to take steps to prevent foreign actors from influencing ballot proposals – under current federal law, foreign donors cannot contribute to campaigns but the FEC ruled that the prohibition does not extend to ballot questions. 

Council members peppered Rotman with questions about the functioning of the campaign finance program – whether the qualifying thresholds should be changed, how credit card donations are verified, how audits are triggered, and the effects of inflation on spending limits. But the main concern seemed to be that campaign audits move far too slowly. Candidates have long complained about the CFB’s auditing process, that it can be lengthy, onerous, punitive, and often penalizes them years after their campaigns have concluded. 

“We are always looking for ways to make the process less stressful and I'm very happy to work with this committee and with you on that,” Rotman told Council Member Lynn Schulman, a Queens Democrat who questioned whether the CFB could do “spot audits” during campaigns to ensure compliance.  

Rotman did note later that the CFB was unable to do compliance visits during the election because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which delayed the auditing process. “We are always looking for ways to make the process quicker, more candidate friendly, and focusing on what we really care about, which is the risk to the public fisc,” Rotman said, adding that the CFB is in the process of implementing a “big strategic plan” using new technology to expedite audits.

“We're not trying to replace people with machines but we are trying to use machines to help us accelerate and innovate so that the process is more candidate friendly and involves less stress and certainly less stress sort of after the process,” she said. 

The harshest rebuke came from Council Member Kalman Yeger, a Brooklyn Democrat and former campaign compliance lawyer who has often criticized the CFB’s processes and practices. “An audit of a campaign takes a day. If somebody tells you that it takes more than a day they're lying to you,” he said. 

Council Members Ung and Lincoln Restler, a Brooklyn Democrat, both raised the question of whether the thresholds for qualifying for public funds should be changed. Currently, a City Council candidate is only required to raise a minimum of $5,000 from a minimum of 75 small contributions from within the district. “As long as somebody has shown that threshold level of support, which is part of the law, then I actually think it's great that so many people qualified” for the 2021 election, Rotman said. “So from the board's perspective, we don't recommend a change to the threshold.”  

But, considering the changes to the program, including increases in the matching rate as well as the maximum amount that is paid out, Allie Swatek, CFB’s director of policy and research said, “We are definitely planning to look at how the threshold has been, we think, impacted by the fact that the program expanded so greatly.”

“It's something that we've also asked ourselves, whether the threshold amount should be higher. So that's something that we're continuing to look at,” she added. 

Brooklyn Democratic Council Member Shahana Hanif, however, said she would be in favor of lowering the threshold, which she said was “daunting” for her as a first-time Council candidate last year “because I did not come from any political connections and although I was organizing in my neighborhood, the electoral process was not a familiar one.”

Ung also asked whether the CFB has considered raising spending caps in the wake of high inflation rates. “The board hasn't taken a position to eliminate it, but it's definitely something that we always have to look at because, you're right, things get more expensive,” Rotman said. 

Council Member Gale Brewer, a Manhattan Democrat, asked the CFB to consider newer forms of payments for campaign contributions such as ApplePay, Venmo, and PayPal, instead of continuing to rely on paper checks and credit cards. “It's something that might be able to be figured in because it will be easier to raise money…They're quicker and they're faster and I don't even know anybody who doesn't use them sometimes these days,” Brewer said.  

But the CFB officials said those transactions come with challenges, since they don’t collect information that is required under the law. “If the vendor is able to work with the board about the appropriate backup documentation, then yes,” Rotman said. 

The hearing also briefly touched on a pre-considered bill, introduced by Council Members Selvena Brooks-Powers, Amanda Farias, and Tiffany Caban, which would require independent spenders that attempt to influence the results of a ballot proposal to disclose their donors. Rotman said the CFB supports the bill.

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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Police Have Removed Over 1,300 'Emotionally Disturbed People’ from Transit in 2022; Where Did They Go?


Mayor Adams on the subway (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography office)


In the first 11 months of the year, the NYPD removed 1,300 people suffering symptoms of mental illness from the city's transit system, often against their will. The city is unable or unwilling to say what happened to them next.

"Dealing with people who have mental health illnesses must be a focus of any plan moving forward," Mayor Eric Adams said at an October 22 announcement of a new subway safety campaign with Governor Kathy Hochul, dubbed Cops, Cameras, and Care – a plan to flood the subways with officers, surveillance cameras, and outreach workers.

"The New York City Police Department has had to remove 1,500 emotionally disturbed persons from the system this year — 1,500 — to prevent some form of incident from taking place," the mayor said.

A month later, in a directive to law enforcement, now clocking 1,200 additional hours in the transit system, Adams instructed officers to remove any individual who appears to have a mental illness that prevents them from meeting their own basic needs.

"Let me be clear," he said at the November 29 press conference announcing the directive, "we will continue to do all we can to persuade those in need of help to accept services voluntarily, but we will not abandon them if those efforts cannot overcome the person's unawareness of their own illness."

Even before that announcement, the NYPD Transit Bureau had already made contact with 1,600 "emotionally disturbed persons" between January 1 and November 22, and removed four out of five of them from subways and buses, according to Alfred Baker, a police department spokesperson.

None of them were charged with a crime, Baker said. Instead, they were handed over to EMS teams who delivered them to the nearest available hospital. It is unclear how many went voluntarily and how many met the clinical and legal criteria for a psychiatric admission. 

Spokespeople for the Mayor's Office, NYPD, and city’s Department of Homeless Services either referred Gotham Gazette to another city agency or stopped responding to inquiries about the outcomes of these cases. A spokesperson for the FDNY, which includes EMS, told Gotham Gazette to file a request for the hospital destinations of the 1,300 individuals under the Freedom of Information Law, which the department estimates will receive a response around April 2023.

The removal of individuals with untreated mental illness has been a central component of the controversial subway safety agendas of Adams and Hochul. As he outlined plans to step up the removals, Adams called it a "moral obligation" to help those suffering symptoms and to make the city safer.

"We can tell New Yorkers all the time that we have decreased crimes in certain areas, but if New Yorkers don't feel safe, we are failing," the first-year Democratic mayor said at the October 22 announcement, flanked by Hochul and top law enforcement, transit, and mental health officials. "And that's why the omnipresence of police officers and the removal of those who are dealing with mental health issues is crucial to our second phase of this important plan."

The focus on crime and disorder in the transit system has become a top political issue amid a period of increased crime rates and several instances of random violence committed by people with untreated mental illness.

Adams is now facing some backlash for that "second phase" from civil rights lawyers and advocates for homeless and disabled individuals. The new guidance, which was sent to NYPD, EMS, and Department of Health and Mental Hygiene mobile crisis teams, is based on an interpretation of existing state law from New York State Mental Health Commissioner Ann Marie Sullivan of what constitutes a danger to oneself and others – the failure to meet "basic living needs."

"It explicitly states that it is appropriate to use this process when a person refuses voluntary assistance and it appears that they are suffering from mental illness and are a danger to themselves due to an inability to meet their basic needs," Adams said on November 29 when he announced the push to increase involuntary hospitalization.

"We believe this is the first time that a mayoral administration has given this direction on the basic needs standard and official guidance," he said, referring to Sullivan's directive, which she issued to localities in February.

The people who fit that profile are predominantly unhoused people of color who have fallen through the cracks of the social safety net and live in the public spaces of the transit system.

It is unclear how effective the strategy is in getting people the help they need or improving safety underground. The Adams administration has been unable to provide information about the outcomes for the 1,300 detainments, including whether any of the individuals were admitted to a hospital, and how many ended up back on the street or in a shelter.

"The mayor didn’t 'tout' stats about those suffering from severe mental illness in the subways, but gave the simple stat where there is an overlap between mental illness and crime — not that the two are always tied because they are not," wrote Adams' press secretary, Fabien Levy, in an email responding to an inquiry about the efficacy of involuntary removals.

He did not provide any information about the 1,300 individuals removed from public transit by the NYPD or what City Hall is doing to track outcomes for those removed from the subways for mental health reasons. The city agencies Gotham Gazette was referred to by Levy or another agency were also unable or unwilling to provide any information about what happened to those individuals.

The NYPD initially referred Gotham Gazette inquiries to the Department of Homeless Services before referring inquiries to FDNY. DHS did not respond to inquiries about how many of the individuals were referred to its shelters, or how many people enter the shelter system after being released from a psychiatric commitment. FDNY said only that all patients are brought to the "closest appropriate hospital" when EMS is called.

While the city has seen multiple high-profile subway killings committed by people with reported psychosis, the mayor has drawn a tenuous connection between the majority of homeless individuals with mental health issues and violent crime in the subways. He has also made a point to say that not all people with mental illness are violent and the presence of apparently homeless and mentally ill individuals is as much a problem of disorder and unease among the broader riding public.

At the October “Cops, Cameras, and Care” announcement, Adams said the focus on mental health is in part a response to those few violent incidents. "Of the nine homicides that we've had on the subway system, this is why we're zeroing in today on mental health, 40% of those homicides came from people with a mental health history," he said, referring to four homicides, according to his office (a spokesperson for the mayor would not elaborate on what those alleged mental health histories consisted of, or whether the individuals were untreated at the time of the incident, but some have been reported by news outlets).

Adams went on to discuss the thousand-plus individuals removed from the system "to prevent some form of incident from taking place."

“Governor Hochul's top priority is the safety and well-being of New Yorkers, and we have been working collaboratively with the city on solutions to provide unhoused New Yorkers living with severe mental illness the help they need," wrote Justin Mason, a spokesperson for the governor, when asked to respond to the lack of clarity around outcomes for the 1,300 individuals removed from the transit system by the NYPD.

The governor controls the MTA and thus the subways, but, as she often notes, the city and the mayor are largely responsible for policing the transit system.

"This plan builds on our ongoing efforts together, including outreach teams in the subway system, training first responders, increasing capacity at psychiatric hospitals and residential programs, strengthening state laws, and issuing mental health guidance to ensure vulnerable populations get the care they need, and the Governor will continue working with elected colleagues, law enforcement, and medical professionals to enhance safety, support and resources," Mason wrote.

Disability and housing advocates criticized the removal regime, which they say violates individuals' civil rights and dangerously gives untrained police an invasive pseudo-clinical role in dealing with people with mental illness. Critics, including Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and members of the City Council, have raised questions about officers' ability to assess removal criteria among the vast and subtle web of experiences that fall into the category of mental illness.

"The NYPD has been illegally removing people from New York’s transit system for decades in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the United States Constitution," wrote Marinda van Dalen, a senior staff attorney in the Disability Justice Program at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, in an email. NYLPI and lawyers on behalf of a coalition of organizations filed a motion in federal court Thursday to block the new policy.

"The new involuntary removal policy is a dangerous departure from the already illegal 'EDP' policy," van Dalen said, using the acronym for emotionally disturbed person. "As set forth in our request for emergency relief, it now allows police officers to detain someone who they perceive as merely acting unusual."

Police and crisis intervention teams will receive enhanced training and the city will set up a hotline of clinicians that officers can call for guidance, according to the mayor.

City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams said the policy lacked enough detail to be evaluated by the Council.

“We are still waiting for a full, comprehensive plan when it comes to the rollout,” she said Wednesday at an unrelated press conference. “What we see in the Council is an idea. What we’d like to see is a plan. We have not seen that yet.” The speaker mentioned unanswered questions about how the NYPD will make removal assessments and how the directive will interplay with the larger continuum of care that the mayor has acknowledged is a deficient work in progress.

"New Yorkers deserve transparency on the effectiveness of the approaches the Administration is taking, particularly when it has announced an intent to expand its use," wrote a Council spokesperson in response to a Gotham Gazette inquiry about the lack of information from the administration about the outcomes of 1,300 removals.

The detainments may coincide with an increase of court-ordered outpatient treatment under a statute known as Kendra's Law, which the mayor and governor have repeatedly cited as a central plank to their mental health and public safety plans. The orders are sought by city health department officials under similar dangerousness criteria as the involuntary transit removals, though it is unclear what drove the uptick in those outpatient orders.

A separate state outreach program, known as Safe Option Support, made contact with 2,700 homeless individuals in the transit system and connected 410 individuals with services, Hochul said on October 22. The state has not provided data to show whether the program has been successful in achieving its goal of getting people into permanent housing. (It is unclear how many of these individuals, if any, are counted among the 1,300 people removed by the NYPD this year.)

Another piece of the puzzle is whether hospitals have the capacity to meet demand. The low availability of psychiatric beds has been a long-time issue for psychiatrists, social workers, and more recently, Adams and Hochul, who have centered it in their public safety plans. People often wait for days to be admitted to a hospital and the lack of continuity between inpatient and outpatient services – another element Adams said he wants to address – can leave people not far from where they started when they get out of a hospital stay.

Hochul has made it a point to restore over 1,000 psychiatric beds taken offline during the pandemic, which would increase the state's capacity by roughly 17%. But the state so far has restored only about 200, a pace that has slowed to a halt in the last five months. In New York City, 415 beds remain offline, though a spokesperson for the state Office of Mental Health told Gotham Gazette last month that 200 more would come online "in the coming months.”

New York City Health + Hospitals, the city's public hospital system and its largest behavioral health provider, would not provide details about its psychiatric bed capacity, including how many beds came offline during the pandemic and how many are currently available.

"The state should be able to provide granular detail for all the health systems in NYC. We're one piece of the puzzle," wrote Christopher Miller, a Health + Hospitals spokesperson, in response to repeated Gotham Gazette inquiries.

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

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Max Politics Podcast: City Council Member Shekar Krishnan on Priorities for NYC Parks


Council Member Krishnan outlines his parks agenda (photo: Emil Cohen/NYC Council Media Unit)


December 9, 2022 - Max Politics Podcast: City Council Member Shekar Krishnan on Priorities for NYC Parks

City Council Member Shekar Krishnan, a Queens Democrat, joined the show to discuss his work as chair of the Council's parks committee, his vision for the future of NYC parks and public open spaces, and more.

Listen to the conversation and let us know what you think, on Twitter @TweetBenMax. You can listen to the show through the embedded audio below or download the episode wherever you get your podcasts at Max Politics.

Read more: Max Politics Podcast: City Council Member Shekar Krishnan on Priorities for NYC Parks

At Hearing, City Council Criticizes Mayor Adams on Budget Decisions, Depleted Agencies


Mayor Adams and City Council Members Announce Budget Deal (photo: Emil Cohen/NYC Council Media Unit)


Mayor Eric Adams recently ordered most city agencies to halve their budgeted vacant positions as a means of cutting costs amid fiscal portents. The plan was not accounted for in the mayor’s latest modification to the city budget, released a week prior to the personnel order, and members of the City Council are incensed about the move. Already frustrated by the large number of city agency vacancies, blamed in part on Adams’ workforce policies, many Council members are raising red flags about further effects a lack of hiring could have on critical city services.

At a hearing on Thursday, Council members made those concerns known as they delved deeper into the city’s updated financial plan, known as the November budget modification, and the unintended consequences of reducing the size of the budgeted workforce amid a severe staffing shortage that appears to be impacting a number of critical functions, from affordable housing funding deals to social services for children and cybersecurity for city agencies.

The first-year Democratic mayor’s latest budget modification released November 15 increased projected spending for the current fiscal year, which runs through June 30 2023, to $104 billion, up $3 billion from when the budget was adopted in June of this year. Adams also told every agency to present a plan cutting 3% of spending under a Program to Eliminate the Gap (PEG) – though barely a third of city agencies fully complied – which saved the city $2.5 billion between the current and next fiscal years. Most of those savings came from spending re-estimates (including some personnel vacancy reductions) rather than actual recurring efficiencies.

Soon after, the city’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) told agencies to save more by cutting 50% of vacancies, with exemptions for uniformed agencies (police, fire, correction, sanitation), revenue-generating, and legally mandated positions. Those cuts come at a time when city agencies have an especially high overall vacancy rate of 8% (up from 2% before the pandemic) and are struggling to hire and retain workers, calling into question whether the city can fulfill its basic functions in everything from building inspections to child services.

“We need a municipal government that works for the people of this city, achieved by ensuring agencies are adequately staffed and supported so they can successfully provide essential services for New Yorkers,” said City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams and Council Member Justin Brannan, the Council finance chair, in a statement ahead of Thursday’s hearing. “A city often more focused on wasteful contracts than fixing its core workforce shortage will not get us there. Understaffing and underspending on the most critical services for New Yorkers at key agencies that can confront the crises facing our city is not efficiency.”

“This Administration cannot decimate the municipal workforce, and then pretend it has no effect on the people of this city simply because they say so,” they added. “A set of ideas focused on increasing the pace of development to confront the affordable housing shortage while simultaneously understaffing and eliminating positions at DOB, HPD, and the agencies required to do the work will not move us forward. New York City cannot successfully address our mental health crisis while cutting mental health programs and understaffing the Department of Health. The Council will continue to confront the inconsistencies between this Administration’s actual budget commitments and its public announcements on how to address New Yorkers’ greatest challenges.”

They concluded: “We need consistent and effective management that prioritizes investments in our city’s functionality and its people. The Council is deeply concerned about the Mayor’s budget plan falling woefully short in meeting the needs of our city and communities, and this Council will always prioritize New Yorkers.”

At the hearing, OMB officials sat on the defensive as they attempted to explain the reasons for the already high rate of vacancies and why the city needs to reduce vacant positions. Even with the PEG, the city expects to see a budget gap of $2.9 billion in the next fiscal year, growing to $4.6 billion in fiscal year 2025 and $5.9 billion in fiscal year 2026. The vacancy reductions are meant to cut spending by as much as $350 million annually. 

Kenneth Godiner, first deputy budget director, said that new funding needs and an uncertain fiscal future created pressing demands for the city to cut spending.

Losses on Wall Street means the city is projected to spend an additional $5.8 billion from fiscal years 2024 through 2026 to meet its obligations to the city pension fund. The city is also in the midst of spending about $1 billion to provide services for tens of thousands of migrant asylum seekers that have arrived here. Almost all municipal labor contracts have expired and are being renegotiated, likely to result in additional unbudgeted costs. Federal stimulus aid is running out.

“Health care costs are rising, energy prices remain high, and inflation has not eased,” Godiner added. (City budget director Jacques Jiha did not appear at the hearing, apparently due to a scheduling conflict and the fact that the hearing was scheduled with limited notice.)

City Council members pointed to several deficiencies they see in the administration budget plan. Brannan noted it did not recognize an additional $1 billion in revenue that the Council identified, which could have precluded the need to make cuts (OMB typically issues more conservative revenue estimates than the Council every year). He also said it includes $1 billion in projected federal aid for the migrant crisis, money that has not yet been secured from the federal government. (An analysis by the Independent Budget Office estimated those costs at just under $600 million annually, though it conceded that the calculation is fraught with uncertainty.)

Many of the Council members took exception to the PEG and the vacancy reduction plan, which they see as detrimental to agency functions. They echoed concerns from a report by Comptroller Brad Lander, which noted that City Hall’s actions to cut costs have exacerbated the vacancy crisis, which has led to a “severe lack of capacity to get things done in mission-critical areas, from creating new housing to providing services to low-income children to collecting the revenue the City needs to function.”

Echoing recent comments from Mayor Adams, Godiner argued that staffing shortages were out of the city’s control, pointing to a tight labor market nationally and locally and higher than usual attrition. He outlined measures the city has taken to ameliorate it including expedited hiring and eliminating a two-for-one hiring restriction that Adams instituted whereby agencies can only hire one new employee for every two that depart. And, he noted that even with half of the vacancies eliminated, agencies have enough budgeted empty positions to fill to meet their duties. “Even if you take a 50% reduction, that means half the vacancies are still there,” he pointed out.

The loudest criticism came from Council Member Gale Brewer, whose committee released a report for a hearing earlier this year on the city's depleted workforce. She pointed out that the city did not baseline increased personnel funding for the Department of Investigation, even though it generates revenue through fines and recouping city funds, and critiqued vacancy cuts at the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), where understaffing has already hampered the city’s affordable housing efforts. She also raised, in passing, questions about the administration lowballing salaries to potential hires and the mayor’s refusal to allow work-from-home or hybrid working schedules.

“I am livid about this issue that we have nobody inspecting anything, no HPD, no DOB [Department of Buildings], no fire department, no health department,” she said. “And we learned today there's nobody at the Commission on Human Rights. Nobody is doing inspections in this city…[T]his city is not going to function if you don't have these vacancies filled and people doing the inspections. We’ll have no supportive housing, no opening of restaurants, no opening of new business. Nothing.”

Godiner did say that inspector titles at HPD were exempt from the vacancy reduction and that a shortage of inspectors is a long-standing problem, particularly made worse when the construction industry is booming and attracting the same talent for better paying jobs. 

In testimony submitted to the Council on Thursday, Comptroller Lander’s Bureau of Budget presented a new analysis of the PEG in the November plan, identifying several areas where there could be a potential impact on programs including cuts to the city’s 3-K prekindergarten program, libraries, the Behavioral Health Emergency Assistance Response Division (B-HEARD) initiative, HPD’s supportive housing program, NYCHA, the Department of Youth and Community Development, and the Young Men’s Initiative.

The testimony noted that many PEGs from specific agencies were presented with murky information, making them hard to analyze. The office did back the elimination of vacancies that have been unfilled for at least a year, but raised concerns about a sweeping 50% cut. “We urge caution in applying such a blunt instrument to the positions that keep the City functioning,” the testimony reads.

At a news conference on Thursday to announce his new affordable housing plan, Mayor Adams addressed some of those criticisms, particularly since his plan calls for quickly staffing up the city’s housing agencies.

“It's no excuse to me that we don't have enough manpower. That is not an excuse. The new norm is that there are going to be challenges on staffing up,” he said. He even pointed out that the comptroller’s office, which continues to allow remote work, has a 14% vacancy rate of its own.

“We have a national workers shortage problem. Every company I speak with, no matter where I go across the country that's saying the same thing. So now it's up to us to adapt to this norm and come up with innovative ways of getting these projects through,” he added. Still, Adams has not announced any new city worker retention or recruitment policies, though OMB Director Jiha said some were in the works in his letter to agencies on November 21 that instructed them to slash budgeted vacancies.

IBO, in its own analysis, presented a rosier fiscal picture than OMB, but nonetheless acknowledged the challenges that lie ahead including the cost of services for asylum seekers and the likely unbudgeted costs of labor contract settlements. George Sweeting, IBO’s acting director, testified that it expects the city to have a budget surplus of $2.2 billion for the current fiscal year, a gap of only $207 million in FY24, followed by gaps of $3.5 billion in FY25 and $4.5 billion in FY26.

He pointed out that the PEG fell significantly short, with only 18 city agencies out of about 55 meeting their targets and with overall spending increasing regardless. “Along with not fully achieving the original PEG target,” he said, “the administration's PEG plan is offset in several cases by dollar for dollar increases to the very same budget lines targeted by the PEGs.”

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

Read more by this writer.

Max Politics Podcast: Borough President Donovan Richards on What's Next in Queens


Queens BP Donovan Richards (photo: Queens Borough President's Office)


December 8, 2022 - Max Politics Podcast: Borough President Donovan Richards on the Latest in Queens and Looking Ahead to 2023

Queens Borough President Donovan Richards joined the show to discuss recent developments in Queens, his top priorities, and what's ahead in 2023.

Listen to the conversation and let us know what you think, on Twitter @TweetBenMax. You can listen to the show through the embedded audio below or download the episode wherever you get your podcasts at Max Politics.

Read more: Max Politics Podcast: Borough President Donovan Richards on What's Next in Queens



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