City Council Member Stephen Levin, the author
We have now reached the longest government shutdown in history with no plans for reaching a deal anytime soon. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers’ jobs have been impacted and the shutdown has delayed mortgage applications, caused significant Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) staffing callouts, impacted basic healthcare access for Native Americans, and created waste pile-ups at national parks. Federal employees have even started looking for new jobs after being denied their paychecks last week with no sign of progress.
Worse still to come, the shutdown could put the nation’s safety net in peril. Forty-two million Americans rely on food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or food stamps); if the shutdown continues into February, we will see an increase in hunger nationwide as people lose benefits and are forced to turn to emergency assistance at food pantries. Following pressure, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) committed to funding February SNAP benefits, however, if the shutdown continues, the Center of Budget and Policy Priorities estimates families could see their benefits cut by 40%. In New York City alone, almost 1.7 million residents depend on food stamps, and would be forced to worry if they’ll be able to provide enough food for their loved ones simply because of President Trump’s political game of chicken.
This government shutdown is callous and irresponsible; and we’ve already begun to see the impacts on nutrition benefits. According to Rewire News, over 2,500 grocery stores have stopped accepting SNAP because of paperwork filing issues caused by the federal government. States are also required to apply to issue February benefits by January 20, disrupting recipients’ normal monthly food aid schedule. One SNAP recipient in Brooklyn, Brenda Riley, with the Safety Net Activists said it best: "The president and other politicians who have created this shutdown should sacrifice their own salaries instead of hurting families who are already on soup lines."
Unfortunately, the president’s disregard for SNAP recipients is just the latest attack in a long line of attempts to dissolve the country’s safety net and harm low-income communities. Perhaps most concerning is the proposed executive order published late last month calling for new work restrictions on the SNAP program to cut off basic food assistance for hundreds of thousands of Americans. Under the current policy, single adults 18-through-49 are only granted SNAP benefits for three months out of every three years if they are not working more than 20 hours per week. However, longstanding bipartisan rules have allowed waivers to this restrictive policy, recognizing high rates of unemployment in communities and lack of job training access that make work requirements extremely burdensome. Trump’s proposed rule would significantly reduce allowances for job waivers, effectively cutting off the lowest income recipients who are unable to work more than 20 hours a week or who have a difficult time finding a job. This proposal undermines the very notion of a safety net, and unrealistically expects recipients to suddenly afford groceries, maintain stable housing and cover high health costs.
SNAP has been an incredibly successful program and made the difference for millions of families who don’t have to sacrifice groceries to be able to afford their monthly rent. In 2015, food assistance lifted 4.6 million Americans out of poverty, including 2 million children and 366,000 seniors. Adding burdensome work requirements would only make it harder for already struggling New Yorkers to cover basic expenses, and would further contribute to the city’s income divide.
It’s also bad economic policy. In 2017 alone, SNAP helped generate over $5 billion in economic impact in New York City, as every dollar spent through SNAP adds $1.79 to its local economy. The fact is, the vast majority of Americans who receive SNAP already work, and for those who don’t, it is largely due to a disability or circumstance that prevents them from working. These new restrictions reinforce harmful stereotypes in order to discourage participation and public investment in the program more broadly.
The onslaught of attacks on the SNAP program require that we fight back. New York City has long committed to investing in food assistance programs -- such as through passing legislation to increase awareness and enrollment among eligible residents and by making healthy, local food accessible to all SNAP recipients through the City’s GrowNYC’s Healthy Exchange Project. As a result of the Greenmarket partnership, over $1 million in SNAP benefits were redeemed at city farmers markets in 2016 alone. But federal restrictions are rolling back public assistance at a time when the need is increasing. Rent continues to rise and New Yorkers are facing stagnant wages and supermarket closures, making it difficult to afford nutritious food.
The government shutdown and recent cuts to SNAP are also impacting our city’s emergency food assistance program — providers have shared they are seeing increased traffic as people are supplementing their SNAP benefits with food pantries and soup kitchens. With recipients’ monthly SNAP benefits running out sooner, many are turning to food pantries to make ends meet, where monthly resources are depleted quicker and providers are struggling to keep up with the demand. If the shutdown continues much longer, New York City will need an emergency assistance contingency plan.
The president’s ongoing attack on food assistance is nothing short of draconian. I encourage New Yorkers to call on the administration and Republican leadership to join House Democrats’ efforts to reopen the government and protect New Yorkers’ access to food aid. And when the Food and Drug Administration’s public comment period on work requirements opens, I will be submitting comments in opposition to the proposed rule. Congress has long maintained bipartisan support of the food stamps program and should not let up now — the 42 million Americans who receive SNAP benefits are counting on us.
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Stephen Levin is a City Council Member from Brooklyn and chair of the Council’s General Welfare Committee. On Twitter @StephenLevin33.
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Cuomo tours the L tunnel (photo: The Governor's Office)
There’s far more to what Governor Andrew Cuomo is saying than what he says at a major announcement. And when an announcement concerns New York’s public transportation, you can bet it’s a calculated communications decision with serious long-term implications.
On Thursday, January 3, Governor Cuomo announced he was slamming the brakes on the L train shutdown. After consulting for three weeks with an independent panel of experts, his team insists repairing the Canarsie Tunnel connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan can be done with only night and weekend disruptions for 15 to 20 months, tossing aside the 15-month full closure three years in the making by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) and scheduled to begin in April. It was a bold bet by New York’s most powerful politician, who has inconsistently taken responsibility for and interest in the transit authority that he has de facto control over.
Many commuters and real estate interests rejoiced, some transit advocates rang the alarm, and several transit officials masked frustration with bewilderment. For the public, there’s a fair bit of confusion to clear up -- it’s hard to make sense of conflicting messages and a lack of comprehensive information. How are riders supposed to think about this new plan? Does the MTA have any idea what it is doing? Where was the governor all this time?
Ultimately, what can the public consider to be truthful?
While the governor insisted that he had now involved himself with the L train plan -- which would disrupt the lives of hundreds of thousands of commuters, business owners, and others -- because of the magnitude of the issue and the pleas of multiple constituents, many questions linger. Along with the aforementioned, one especially important one: What’s Cuomo really doing here? Cuomo has manipulated public opinion to execute transit repairs before, and it’s happening again during this L train saga. He’s again taking a calculated political risk.
Consider the governor’s role in 2017’s “Summer of Hell.” Originally, the “Summer of Hell” had nothing to do with a subway system in decline. The catchy name’s source was none other than Governor Cuomo. He created this crisis narrative at a May 23, 2017 announcement to brace LIRR commuters for six weeks of Amtrak’s necessary repair work at Penn Station. Yes, that was it. But it became much more.
Amtrak’s plans were already two years in motion and announced one month earlier. Yet, Cuomo parachuted in to blame Amtrak for Penn’s state of disrepair, tell Long Islanders to adjust their established commuting routines, and present new contingency plans (ferry, bus and ticket supplements). The weeks leading up to the “Summer of Hell” were terrifying for many Long Islanders who commute into Manhattan.
In the end, Cuomo’s exaggeration made the “Summer of Hell” anything but. The crisis narrative drove Long Islanders off the LIRR, the underused ferry and bus services were curbed in the first week of repairs, and trains ran better during a supposed “hell” than at any time in the past two years. Cuomo manufactured a crisis worth his addressing by lowering expectations, then being able to take credit for exceeding the low bar he set. However, the “Summer of Hell” phrase he applied to Penn quickly became used to capture the state of transit more broadly, and liberally wielded against the governor by electoral opponents and other critics.
Cuomo’s “Summer of Hell” announcement and L train un-shutdown announcement were strikingly similar in format, with the governor intervening at the eleventh hour to shake things up when a great deal of planning, both on the infrastructure and commuting sides, had already been done. On the L train, Cuomo went after the MTA and city Department of Transportation, reassured Brooklynites their neighborhoods can survive the partial closure, unveiled his new plan, and touted the state’s (read: his) willingness to innovate -- all the while trying to sweep under the rug the fact that he stayed away from shutdown plans for the previous three years.
Again, what’s the Governor really doing here? I spent more than a year researching the “Summer of Hell” and New York’s transit management, uncovering why Cuomo would popularize impending doom and what his transit priorities are. He seizes opportunities to be, or appear to be, a savior who is helping commuters, while minimizing his political risk.
As he’s swooped in on the L train shutdown, Cuomo’s entire frame of discussion relates to commuters and commuting disruptions, with his plan presented as one that will drastically reduce challenges for L riders.
Cuomo’s team and various Cuomo political appointees, like Port Authority Executive Director Rick Cotton, relentlessly use the phrase “customer experience” to describe their project selection choices. They’re looking to improve transit’s touchpoints with the commuting public, they say. Yet, the terrible MTA customer experience was a major flashpoint in the gubernatorial primary and general elections that Cuomo nevertheless won by wide margins last year.
Cuomo’s particular project focus is controllable (ideally media-intense) situations: ones he can use to demonstrate tangible success to the public, because he’s fairly certain the outcome will raise a pathetically low bar for service. Though plowing through bureaucracy makes projects like the new Tappan Zee Bridge tough to execute, Cuomo uses it as an opportunity to brandish his image as a “doer,” even if he oversees the entrenched bureaucracy he maligns, and has positioned himself as a champion for infrastructure by taking some service bar layups, per se. He replaced the truly hellish Goethals Bridge, is renovating JFK and LaGuardia Airports (the country’s worst), installed WiFi and LED lighting in ugly subway stations, and built an app to more conveniently buy train tickets. And he made sure the new Tappan Zee is named after his father: the Mario M. Cuomo Bridge.
For the L train shutdown, Cuomo’s making his willingness to innovate visible relative to that of the MTA, which he does control despite his protestations. Presenting his advice from engineering experts, Cuomo touted big names like Tesla, Cornell, and Columbia so lay people understand how “outside the box” and the traditional bureaucracy he is going to address the tunnel and its users. He talked about never-tried-here methods that will make New York a national model, using European infrastructure methods considered superior, giving him another public relations advantage.
It’s difficult to know just how productively innovative Cuomo’s proposal is, though evaluations are ongoing, with the MTA Board briefed on Tuesday during an “emergency” meeting held at Cuomo’s behest. His language is reminiscent of when he solicited outside proposals to modernize the subway in 2017, as part of a “Genius Challenge” that ultimately bore little fruit. Ideally, the new L train plan will make a much bigger impact than the Genius Challenge did, but at this stage, there are plenty of questions to be answered.
Here’s one: Just how obvious is the new shutdown fix? Cuomo’s team feels it’s tremendous, Andy Byford, the still new and heralded president of MTA New York City Transit, admitted it’s enticing, some MTA board members are shocked but intrigued, and advocates like Riders Alliance Executive Director John Raskin remain skeptical. It’s astonishingly unclear in whom the public should place faith in making the correct project decision. Making matters more complex, the MTA Board's independence can’t be completely trusted in deciding which project is better. Interim Chair Freddy Ferrer has put his finger on the scale from the January 3 press conference onward.
In the past, Cuomo’s used project delivery as conduit to more power, and he’s clearly using the L train in a similar fashion. Situations where he’s able to beat the poor transit status quo are opportunities to show the state should be directly in charge, when it suits his narrative.
Cuomo’s projects at and around Amtrak-controlled Penn Station cultivate a potential takeover there, too. For starters, the governor is spearheading Moynihan Train Hall at Penn’s western edge without including New Jersey Transit on the project. Cuomo’s involvement in 2017 track repairs also saw him propose that New York State, not the federal government, operate Penn Station. Since then, Cuomo’s attempted to take control of the whole neighborhood around Penn.
For the subway, Cuomo has repeatedly questioned the MTA’s convoluted governing structure and wants to “blow it up.” He’s forcing the MTA Board’s hand in deciding which L train project is best, and some members (largely Mayor Bill de Blasio appointees) are publicly frustrated. However, the public’s discontent with the MTA and warranted aversion to a full shutdown gives the governor leverage in changing shutdown plans today, and blowing up the MTA tomorrow.
Cuomo needs public support in order for his takeover to work -- that’s why analyzing his communication is critical. Cuomo knows tearing things down with “outside the box” solutions appeals to desperate commuters, especially those seeking relief from the L-pocalypse. Under the guise of repeated complaints from people in Brooklyn, Cuomo is saving New Yorkers from the pain they’ve already been told is coming.
It’s a stunning reversal in government communication. For three years, officials at the MTA and city DOT were upfront about disruptions with locals and assumed the risk that comes with accountability; in exchange, riders would accommodate changes to daily life. This tacit agreement amounts to a commuting social contract.
Ironically, Cuomo helped write this script during the “Summer of Hell,” except this time (by virtue of association with running the MTA), Cuomo was stuck with accountability for a project he wasn’t running directly. Cuomo prioritizes controllable situations, and fallout from the possibly the greatest planned transit disaster in history does not qualify as such. So, Cuomo is hastily withdrawing himself from the original shutdown agreement -- let’s call it a breach of contract.
If the Board sticks with the original plan, Cuomo’s more off the hook than he would have been otherwise, but transit agencies’ jobs become harder. Floating an alternative is a tease to communities that, in all likelihood, face serious hardship. It hinders the MTA and DOT’s ability to get everyone on board (again) in surviving the “L-pocalypse.”
But, if Cuomo’s plan gets approved, which appears to be the more likely scenario, it spreads pain into more distant, seemingly manageable chunks. Yet, in the quest to absolve himself of responsibility for the old plan, the governor is creating an alternate, riskier scenario: he’s directly accountable for making the L-pocalypse a bearable experience.
Cuomo may have just thrown a low-pressure system into a brewing superstorm, like when the “Summer of Hell” crisis narrative Cuomo created blew up in his face. By intervening on behalf of 230,000 Long Islanders, Cuomo unintentionally gave millions of subway and bus riders city-wide a succinct term to express their long-festering frustrations, plus point the finger his way. Backed into a corner, Cuomo and former MTA Chair Joe Lhota enacted a Subway Action Plan for short-term fixes, though Andy Byford’s long-term Fast Forward plan remains unfunded.
If the L train shutdown plans are scrapped, and the governor does “blow up” the MTA, can Cuomo really pick up the pieces? Only one person ever, former MTA Chairman Dick Ravitch, has proven capable of successfully overhauling the MTA; it took him a decade of nonstop, focused effort. With that in mind, will Cuomo be around long enough and truly committed to implement meaningful structural reform?
Over the coming weeks, it will be critical to translate what Cuomo tells the public into his future transit action items. In the meantime, it’s essential all the questions about the new proposal are answered, and to remember 2017 as we examine Cuomo’s words and actions with a critical eye.
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Tim Lazaroff is a freelance journalist specializing in transit.
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Senator Young, the author (photo: @SenatorCathyYoung)
It’s a new day in New York. On January 1, the Senate Republican Conference, our state’s last line of defense against tax-and-spend, downstate-centric policies, assumed its new role as the minority party in the New York State Senate.
While many in New York are cheering this change, many others are wary. They should be.
A host of progressive, and in some cases, extremist, agenda items are being pushed by Governor Cuomo and the Democratic majorities in each house of the Legislature.
One of the first items on their list is passage of legislation enacting a statewide system of public campaign financing, modeled after New York City’s matching-funds program. Democrats claim there is broad support for such a change and that it would increase political competitiveness and reduce corruption.
Facts show that they are wrong.
No one would argue that corruption is not a problem in New York’s political system. Senate Republicans took the lead in passing a sweeping package of reforms in 2018 - widely lauded by good government groups - that would have targeted Albany’s “pay-to-play” culture and other corruption culprits. It died in the Democrat-led Assembly.
Democrats claim that public financing of campaigns is a cure for the corruption problem. The city’s small donor matching funds program, enacted in 1989, provides participating candidates with $6 for every $1 a New York City resident donates, up to $175 (and those numbers are set to increase in future elections). The system was intended to bring integrity to the campaign process by empowering small donors and diminishing the influence of special interests.
However, an honest examination of the system shows it has fallen far short of its laudable goals. In fact, the system has proven to be an additional channel for campaign corruption.
Establishment of the public financing system has allowed ethically challenged candidates and their operatives to cheat the taxpayer-funded program by creating fake donors, called “straw donors,” to receive matching funds. Former comptroller and mayoral candidate John Liu, a newly-elected State Senator, was fined more than $26,000 for a straw-donor scandal that resulted in jail time for an aide and a fund-raiser. He has a lot of company: Bill de Blasio, Malcolm Smith, Anthony Weiner, Dan Halloran, Jesse Hamilton, Albert Alvarez, Al Baldeo, Ron Reale are just a few of many city politicians associated with public campaign finance scandals.
It is not a track record that inspires confidence.
Supporters of publicly financed campaigns also promote the feel-good idea that the system encourages political competition by making it easier for political newcomers and less well-funded outsiders to run for office. A December 2017 Georgetown Public Policy Review found this theory to simply be wishful thinking.
Its examination of incumbent re-election rates for state legislators in states offering taxpayer-funded campaign programs and those without such programs found no statistically significant difference. Incumbency rates for the groups were 89 and 91 percent, respectively.
Similarly, the hoped-for impact on civic engagement also has not been realized. In the first two mayoral elections under public financing in New York City, 1989 and 1993, voter turnout was 60 percent and 57 percent. In 2013 turnout was 26 percent and in 2017, it was 23.9 percent. These decreases have occurred even as the size of the taxpayer-funded match has risen significantly, starting as 1:1 in 1989 rising to 6:1 in the most recent election. It is now moving to 8:1.
Given these poor results, it is impossible to justify using taxpayer dollars for such a system. In New York City, the fiscal year 2018 budget for the Campaign Finance Board was $56.7 million, including $10.6 million for staff and $40.2 million for campaign matching funds. The cost to implement a system similar to the city’s on a statewide scale has been estimated at between $200 million and $300 million. With New York State projected to have a $3 billion budget deficit in the forthcoming fiscal year, and a slowing stock market that will only make the deficit worse, the notion of creating a vast, new state bureaucracy to dole out taxpayer funds to political candidates is irrational.
Even absent any deficit, diverting taxpayer funds to pay for political campaigns and negative television ads is indefensible.
As Stephen Eide, a scholar with the Manhattan Institute, argues “what governments spend taxpayer dollars on is as significant as how much they spend. Unlike public financing for, say, cleaner streets or better schools, public financing of elections provides a private benefit – serving the needs of officeholders, staffers and consultants engaged in politics as a career.”
All this begs the question: where does the public stand on taxpayer-financed campaigns? Studies indicate that the majority of the public is opposed. Recent surveys (Quinnipiac, 2017) found that 54 percent of survey respondents were opposed to public campaign financing; 12 percent had no opinion; and only 34 percent were in favor.
While one-party rule is now a reality in New York state government, those in power need to remember their overriding duty is to act in the best interests of all New Yorkers.
Public campaign financing is a device to benefit politicians, not the public. New York can’t afford it fiscally or ethically -- not now, not ever.
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State Senator Catharine M. Young represents the 57th District, including Allegany, Cattaraugus, Chautauqua, and portions of Livingston County. She is the Ranking Republican member on the Senate committees of Elections and Ethics and Internal Governance. On Twitter @SenatorYoung.
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Note: this column has been updated with the latest budget deficit forecast provided by Governor Cuomo on January 15.