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New York City Gets Back in Bed with a Bad Bank — But There’s a Better Way


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The Mayor on Wall Street (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)


This past week, an obscure public body, the New York City Banking Commission, decided that the city can resume banking with Wells Fargo — meaning the scandal-scarred bank could hold billions of public dollars for at least the next two years. 

The Commission, composed of the Mayor, Comptroller, and Commissioner of Finance, voted to redesignate Wells Fargo during an 11-minute remote meeting with no opportunity for the public to weigh in.

You’ve heard of three men in a room. Meet three men on a Zoom.

Stakes were high, transparency was low, and New Yorkers deserve better. That the Commission even considered placing city deposits in Wells Fargo again underscores how entangled New York City’s finances are with Wall Street — and the extent to which big banks call the shots in our city. 

Prior to the meeting, members of the Public Bank NYC coalition and the New York City Council strongly urged the Banking Commission to reject Wells Fargo’s request to hold city deposits. Ignoring widespread opposition, the Commission voted 2-to-1 in favor of the notorious predatory lender and climate destroyer. A representative of Comptroller Stringer voted “no,” but his vote was overridden by two “yes” votes by representatives of Mayor de Blasio and Commissioner of Finance Sherif Soliman, a mayoral appointee.

The City cut ties with Wells Fargo in 2017 ostensibly in response to the bank receiving a long overdue downgrade of its Community Reinvestment Act rating. In fact, environmental and indigenous rights activists, racial and economic justice groups, and many others had raised multiple justifications for dumping the bank.

Wells Fargo’s misdeeds and scandals are too numerous to list, but here are some lowlights: 

Wells Fargo’s shameful record raises a question we’re tired of asking: How bad does a bank have to be before it faces real consequences? We need a public option for the city’s financial holdings—a public bank for the public good. 

Public banks are owned by and accountable to the people. Rather than being driven solely by profit, a public bank would be mission-driven and chartered to meet the needs of the city, particularly historically-redlined Black and brown neighborhoods.

A public bank would give the city a powerful new tool to help ensure a just recovery and strengthen our ability to withstand future crises. It would partner with community-based lenders to deliver responsible financing and emergency funding to small and worker-owned businesses hardest-hit by COVID-19.

Public banks around the world responded quickly and effectively to economic devastation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, shoring up small businesses and other critical infrastructure. That’s because public banks specifically invest in sectors that provide direct economic, social and environmental benefits.

We can bring that success here, with a New York twist. 

Through public banking, New York City can support permanently-affordable housing, small and worker-owned businesses, green infrastructure, and other equitable development in Black and brown neighborhoods—and divest from Wall Street banks that actively harm New Yorkers, our economy, and the planet.

The broad-based Public Bank NYC coalition has charted a path for the city to follow to establish the country’s first municipal public bank.

For starters, the City Council must advance “The People’s Bank Act,” a transformative legislative package that lays groundwork for the creation of a public bank. The Mayor should work with the Council to establish a public bank capitalization fund.

In Albany, legislative leaders must pass the “NY Public Banking Act” this session, paving the way for cities and counties across the state to pursue public bank charters.

Reopening the door to Wells Fargo suggests that city officials have not learned the lessons of the past year, or decades. In the face of New York’s severe affordable housing shortage, climate devastation, and extreme racial wealth inequality—all exacerbated by COVID-19—we need bold action.

A public bank would build wealth and power in communities hardest hit by the pandemic. It’s needed now more than ever.

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Andy Morrison is Associate Director of New Economy Project. On Twitter @NewEconomyNYC.

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Don’t Let Kathryn Garcia Get Hillary’d


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Kathryn Garcia with Andrew Yang (photo: @aqreno)


“A competent woman losing a job to an incompetent man is not an anomalous Election Day surprise; it is Tuesday in America,” writes New York magazine’s Rebecca Traister in one 2016 presidential election debrief. Unfortunately, five long years of hindsight later, this dynamic persists. On Tuesday, June 22, Kathryn Garcia stands to get Hillary’d in the Democratic primary election for New York City Mayor.

Garcia is a career public servant who most recently served as commissioner of New York City’s Sanitation Department. She has led the city through multiple crises, overseen tens of thousands of employees, managed multi-billion-dollar budgets, and served across departments and at different levels of city government. She has won the endorsement of The New York Times Editorial Board, which noted, “Her ideas and experience stand out in a crowded field of Democratic hopefuls.” At the first official primary debate earlier this month when NY1 anchor Errol Louis asked the eight leading candidates who other than themselves they would vote for – the plurality chose her.

Still, Garcia has at times struggled to break through the noise created by her male competitors.

Despite her bona fides, Garcia had, until recently, been flailing in this highly consequential primary, polling well behind Andrew Yang, a man of dubious accomplishment, and Eric Adams, a man with a penchant for controversy. Much like the 2016 election, Garcia’s quiet, consistent, and effective work to keep the city functioning has not earned the same attention as her viral and mercurial male opponents.

Yang’s first real engagement with politics was when he ran for president in 2020, winning 0 delegates to the Democratic National Convention. Prior to his run for mayor, Yang joined the ranks of Rick Santorum as a commentator at CNN. His other endeavors were rife with complaints about his management style, including charges of racial and gender bias. Still, Yang has long-been a frontrunner in this primary despite never voting in a New York City mayoral election. At this moment, a man who fled New York City during the pandemic still appears more likely to be the city’s next mayor than Garcia, who oversaw the cross-agency effort to ensure all city residents had access to food during this crisis. If Yang’s lack of experience suggests he is unqualified to be mayor, his comments on a host of New York City issues this past week remove all doubt.

In assessing Garcia’s candidacy, Gotham Gazette writes, “she’s had her head down helping to run city government, not developing a donor network.” Prioritizing public service over campaign funding is not an affliction Eric Adams, who has also polled ahead of Garcia for most of the primary, appears to suffer from. The Times recently reported on Adams’ long history of using his “government power to benefit donors and advance his political ambitions.” While it cannot be said Adams, Brooklyn borough president, lacks the experience Yang does – he has maintained relevance in the primary through more of a cult of personality than thoughtful policy or accomplishments.

This dynamic was laid bare at the May 13 primary debate. Analysts described Garcia’s performance as “plenty substantive” but feared she “failed to introduce herself to voters…because she laid too far back from the fray.” In contrast, Adams repeatedly attempted to create reality TV moments, while offering dodges and clarifications in lieu of specific answers. He said civil rights lawyer Maya Wiley was acting “desperate” and being “nasty” due to her lagging behind in the polls. His exchanges with competitors were laced with terse retorts like “let me give you some facts.” He told Wiley “we both know how much [the Civilian Complaint Review Board] was a failure under you” and lambasted Yang as “disrespectful and appalling” for taking credit away from Stacey Abrams and other Black women organizers regarding the recent Georgia Senate run-offs that helped deliver Democrats a razor thin Senate majority.  

Beyond their media and social media antics, Yang and Adams have demonstrated almost no principle with regard to their policies. Both candidates have flip-flopped on issues both large and small. This ideological inconsistency underscores their form-over-substance campaigns. Meanwhile Garcia consistently offers some of the most detailed and comprehensive plans to solve big city problems. Just as Hillary Clinton’s campaign policy book “Stronger Together” apparently wasn’t interesting enough to earn media coverage commensurate with Trump’s racist, ill-conceived, proposals, Garcia’s plans don’t earn the headlines won by Yang’s thoughtless street-vendor crackdown proposal or Adams’ dangerous gun-baiting.

Electing attention-grabbing men over competent women comes at a very real cost. From pandemic management to policing – the lives of New York City residents are literally on the line. The winner of this Democratic primary will all but inevitably become the city’s next Mayor. We’ve seen this movie before. New Yorkers have less than 30 days to rewrite the ending. Latest polling shows this is an incredibly close race among Adams, Garcia, and Yang. It’s time to start paying attention and getting engaged. On that Tuesday in June, let’s make sure the qualified woman wins.

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Kaivan Shroff is a political commentator and alumnus of the Hillary for America Digital Team. On Twitter @KaivanShroff.

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Stop the Ranked-Choice Fear-Mongering — If Maine Can Do It, So Can We


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Voting (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)


I moved from Manhattan to Maine in early 2020 to run the Democratic Party’s inaugural voter protection team in the Pine Tree State, trading lox for lobster rolls and the deep blue West Village for a purple battleground. But while Maine still had a Republican senator and had only recently dumped proto-Trump Governor Paul LePage, it did have one major liberal leg up on New York: far more voter-friendly ballot access laws.

Here in the Empire State, the Constitution bars no-excuse absentee voting and same-day registration, we choose city officials in off years, and a patronage-addled Board of Elections system prevents career professionals from running our elections. These endemic issues leave New York straggling on voter participation. Compared to other states in the Northeast, we’re dead last. On one front of fairer and more representative democratic processes, though, New York City is finally catching up to the redder Maine electorate: we now have ranked-choice voting.

Unfortunately, many New York leaders—including progressives who should be celebrating this improvement to our democratic processes, and some of the candidates competing in the races for mayor and other offices—are parroting fear-mongering talking points about RCV straight out of the LePage playbook. This rhetoric misinforms New Yorkers and risks a failure to fully reap the upside of a more engaged and energized electorate. 

Worse, misplaced criticism of RCV can stoke distrust in the integrity of the election; after living through propagation of the Big Lie about the 2020 presidential race and the resulting insurrection, that’s the last thing we should want to emulate in the Big Apple.

On a recent episode of the Max & Murphy podcast, for example, two former mayoral candidates, former City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and former Comptroller Bill Thompson, were among the latest Democratic leaders to misguidedly criticize RCV. Ranking candidates might depress turnout by confusing voters, they said. Besides, we don’t need it, since we already have a diverse City Council. And it’s easier for voters to decide on one candidate than to make decisions more complex than A vs. B. And only a few places in America use RCV: is it really necessary here?

Quinn and Thompson aren’t alone in driving this narrative. Mayoral candidates Eric Adams and Ray McGuire have spoken out against RCV; an Adams spokesperson said the Brooklyn borough president is “deeply concerned that ranked choice voting will disenfranchise voters of color.” As of May 21, neither Adams nor McGuire had even confirmed that they would accept ranked-choice results. 

Beyond the candidates, six City Council members, including Majority Leader Laurie Cumbo, unsuccessfully filed suit in December 2020 to delay RCV’s implementation. Just this week, Cumbo and three other Council members—endorsers of Adams and Andrew Yang, who is now lagging in some polls—introduced new legislation to repeal RCV. The repeal would still have to go in front of city voters as a charter amendment, but these electeds are doing all they can to undermine voters’ faith in our voting processes just weeks before we go to the polls.

While concerns about RCV may be sincere, they are simply not borne out by the facts—nor by the experiences of Mainers, who have been voting via ranked-choice for years. They have twice affirmed their preference for RCV in statewide ballot referenda; once voters get a taste, they don’t want to go back. That’s because plurality voting, though we’re used to it, has obvious drawbacks. With eight major candidates on our Democratic mayoral ballot, a candidate could come in first with just 20% of the primary vote—around what the current first-place candidates are getting in polls—and then advance to a lower-turnout two-person runoff with another candidate who polled even lower in the initial balloting.

Even the old runoff system didn't guarantee broad consensus on a party nominee. Multi-candidate primaries that didn't require the 40% threshold for a win without a runoff -- races for borough-wide and City Council seats -- were decided with a winner getting less than that amount nearly 30% of the time. And in the last open mayoral primary, Bill de Blasio narrowly dodged a runoff with just over 40% of the vote: he was the first choice of just 282,000 New Yorkers, less than 3.5% of the city’s 2013 population and it was enough for him to end up in Gracie Mansion given the uncompetitive general election. 

That fact alone is galling, and it’s augmented by the circumscribed campaign strategy it incentivizes: just marshal a small block of die-hards, perhaps along demographic or geographic lines, and forget appealing to voters citywide. If this sounds familiar, it’s because Donald Trump won the Republican presidential nomination riding a similar wave of plurality-winner-take-all primaries. New Yorkers should want an election system that is as representative as possible, and that means one where a primary winner has to be near the top of most voters’ lists. Indeed, New Yorkers do want RCV: the switch was chosen by a 3-to-1 margin in a 2019 referendum.

Moreover, as progressives, we pride ourselves on following facts, and social science research proves that RCV has its intended impact. Directly contravening the assertions of RCV critics, studies show that RCV drives higher turnout by engaging more voters (with multiple studies showing a roughly ten-point increase), leads to more civil elections given the candidates’ needs to reach more voters, with RCV voters reporting greater satisfaction with the tone of campaigning; and leads to elected officials of greater diversity, specifically benefitting women and candidates of color.

On Max & Murphy, Quinn said we already have a racially diverse City Council, but it still underrepresents women and AAPI New Yorkers. And we’ve only had one non-white mayor—and no woman, as Quinn knows first-hand. There is no reason to be satisfied with our electoral status quo, especially given the terrible turnout we often see in citywide elections. RCV is a time-tested and data-driven solution to these problems.

Both Quinn and Thompson also spoke for many critics in calling this first covid-era citywide race “the worst time” to roll out RCV, implying that pandemic restrictions are forestalling face-to-face voter education. But we should take the opposite view: the high levels of attention on the open mayoral race makes it a remarkable opportunity to excite every voter with their ability to choose more than one candidate. Far more alienating than ranking multiple candidates would be a voter picking just one of over a dozen people, each with little chance to win—far worse would be conducting a primary election in which 80% of voters could see their candidate come up short. 

Education is more than possible with proper political will. Last year, I led an effort to ensure all of Maine’s general election voters—roughly the same number who will likely vote in our primary in June—could successfully request, complete, and return their ballots. Our educational lift was huge. Unprecedented numbers of citizens learned to request absentee ballots to cast by mail; at the same time, we worked to expand early voting opportunities and get the word out; and, after our advocacy, Maine rolled out new methods for curing defective ballots so they’d be counted even if voters made small mistakes. 

We saw record turnout—including myriad first-time and non-English-speaking voters. Maine is home to many immigrant voters who speak Somali and Arabic and others who are native speakers of Spanish and French. Learning how to register, get a ballot, return it, and cure it: these were the obstacles that threatened to keep voters out of the process. Filling in first-choice and second-choice circles next to candidates’ names was far more intuitive than navigating the broader bureaucracy of election administration.

Now it’s our turn. Not only will RCV be better for New York voters this year, but it will drive more engagement with local elections over the long-haul. By embracing RCV, we can foster a more aware and activated electorate that expects better from elections administrators and demands more from the officials we put in City Hall—even if those officials aren’t the number one choices on our ballots. 

My experience as voter protection director for Joe Biden and down-ballot Democrats in Maine threw into stark relief how important all (small-d) democratic reforms are. After the January 6 insurrection and the raft of suppressive laws being churned through state legislatures that followed Biden’s victory, the task of reinforcing our democracy is even clearer. Any process to increase voter participation and representativeness in our elections and government is crucial far beyond the implications of any one race; the dots from a ranked mayoral ballot to a thriving American democracy are, to me and other voter protection professionals, easy to connect. 

Thankfully, the Campaign Finance Board is running a $2 million education campaign, and initial skeptics like the New York City chapter of the NAACP are getting on board, among many other education efforts by the de Blasio administration, local civic groups, and others. It’s time for the rest of New York’s political leaders, and the still-mum mayoral candidates, to connect the dots on RCV—for themselves and their constituents. Besides, we’re the greatest city in the world. If Farmington and Fort Kent can do it, the five boroughs certainly can too.

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Ryder Kessler, a former executive board member of Manhattan’s Community Board 2, served as the Maine Democratic Party’s 2020 Voter Protection Director for Joe Biden and down-ballot Democrats. On Twitter @ryderkessler.

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