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For Local Defenders and Their Clients, This Year Is Different


seymour james legal aid

Seymour W. James Jr., the author


It's budget season at City Hall. Since early March and for the next few weeks, the City Council will hold a gamut of hearings reviewing the financial needs of each city agency for the upcoming fiscal year. Press conferences are held, commissioners are grilled, and community based organizations try to make the case to Council members for more funding to serve their constituents.

The Legal Aid Society testified last Tuesday before the Committee on Courts and Legal Services, and we too urged for increased dollars to handle growing demand for the services we provide.

But this time it's different. It's different because our clients and other low-income New Yorkers are dealing with a growing number of unprecedented external threats like no other time in recent memory. Immigrants, LGBTQ, and black and brown communities have all felt this change in the wind. If New York is truly going to be a sanctuary, truly going to be a place of gender inclusivity and acceptance, and truly going defend the ground we've made reforming the criminal justice system and protecting civil rights, we need a budget that reflects these priorities and reflects these values.

By now, there’s no hiding President Trump’s prejudice against immigrants. His slapdash executive orders and homeland security memorandums - building on the vitriolic diatribes from his campaign – have made this crystal clear. What we’ve seen from the White House over the last 60 days is just the beginning and New York City needs to fortify local organizations working in the trenches to protect immigrant and other vulnerable families.

One way the city can step up is to baseline funding guaranteeing legal representation for those in deportation proceedings – a right unfortunately not provided by the constitution. The New York City Council, under the leadership of Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, has increased funding tremendously to support this exact effort through the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project (NYIFUP). The results are staggering, and NYIFUP has kept many local families together. Mayor de Blasio must work with the Council to ensure NYIFUP’s network of direct providers has the tools to fight today, tomorrow, and well into the future.

Another specific concern relating to immigration that needs funding priority is legal protection for unaccompanied minors. Violence is the leading factor forcing unaccompanied children from Central America to the United States. No law or program shields these minors from being sent back to their home countries – almost every child who arrives in the United States is put into deportation proceedings. The City Council’s Unaccompanied Minors and Adults with Children initiatives provide legal representation, but the current funding allocation doesn’t meet the need. Given Trump’s crusade against all undocumented, only a significant enhancement of this initiative will close the service gap for children newly coming before New York immigration court.

Last, but equally important, is Legal Aid’s continued work on Rikers Island and in other correctional facilities through our Prisoners’ Rights Project (PRP). For nearly 40 years, PRP has worked through litigation, advocacy, and monitoring to change policies and practices which have created unjust and abusive treatment of locally incarcerated men and women.

The Council understands this plight and created an initiative to exclusively support PRP's work in the city’s jails, but the conditions in state prisons are also deplorable and raising PRP’s Council allotment to $1 million will broaden our capacity to represent New York City residents imprisoned in the state system.

So in the spirit of Gideon vs Wainwright, a precedent-setting court case that turns 54 this week, and one that guaranteed representation to defendants in criminal court, the city must step up in these tough times. We are mindful of the financial challenges posed by the Trump administration but these programs should be strengthened; low-income New Yorkers need counsel now more than ever.

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Seymour W. James Jr. is Attorney-In-Chief of The Legal Aid Society. On Twitter @LegalAidNYC.

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Needed: Fresh Eyes to Improve New York’s Constitution (Part II)


excelsior image for snider column


This is part two of a two-part series entitled Needed: Fresh Eyes to Improve New York’s Constitution. Read part one: New York’s Mandarin Constitutional Culture.

Implementing First Amendment Values in the 21st Century

Drawing an analogy between Chinese Mandarin culture of the 18th and 19th centuries and New York’s constitutional culture in the early 21st Century, I argued in Part I of this series that New York’s current debate over constitutional reform lacks fresh ideas for systemic reasons. One reason stems from the incentive of legislatures to veto democratic reforms in areas, such as legislative redistricting, term limits, and ballot access, where they have a conflict of interest with the public. That’s a problem because for democratic innovators to do the difficult and costly work of innovation, they need to believe that their ideas have a chance of being implemented.  Another reason is that the young are usually society’s innovators. But New York’s mandarin constitutional reform culture favors the old.

I propose an idea emblematic of the type that should but hasn’t been part of the current debate over New York State constitutional convention based reform. Its goal is to dramatically enhance First Amendment values in the election process, and it is premised on the close but rarely recognized link between technology and constitutional design. Specifically, new information technology has made ballot access ripe for constitutional innovation.

Currently, New York government has exclusive control over both ballot data and ballot interfaces. I propose requiring it to give up control over ballot interfaces while retaining its control over ballot data.

In the pre-internet era of paper ballot technology, this couldn’t be done without sacrificing important democratic values, notably the secret ballot. Until the late 19th Century, control of ballot data and interfaces were separate.  For example, political parties would print pre-filled ballots (called “party tickets”) and distribute them to voters.  But this rightly came to be viewed as intolerable because the party officials and others who handed out the ballots at the polling booth could keep track of which ballot a voter submitted and reward voters who submitted their preferred, prefilled ballot. The solution was the “secret ballot,” which is now mandated in New York’s Constitution and gave government control over the ballot interface as well as ballot data.

Unfortunately, giving government control over the ballot interface came with huge costs. It gave legislators much greater control over both which candidates are included on the ballot presented to voters and how information about them, including endorsements (popularly known as party labels), are used. Such control is inconsistent with First Amendment values of public participation and free speech.

Modern information technology makes it possible to separate ballot data and interfaces without the compromises associated with print technology. Specifically, voters should be allowed to choose non-government ballot interfaces that are directly linked to public ballot data. Ironically, we currently allow the public access to non-government media, except the media most vital to preserve First Amendment values: the ballot interface.

Online voting, such as has already been successfully implemented in Estonia, could one day greatly improve the implementation of this idea. But its successful implementation does not depend on online voting. As with absentee voting, the voter could simply print a machine-readable ballot with the necessary data and then either bring it to the voting booth or mail it in.

Effectively separating ballot data and interfaces is a non-trivial matter of both technology and institutional design. It is probably comparable in difficulty to the online voting system developed by Estonia. But it also isn’t a moonshot. Most important, it would generate a huge payoff, especially for down ballot elections where ballot interfaces have been most influential.

Candidates, interest groups, and political parties currently spend billions of dollars every major election cycle on providing repetitious, soundbite-long, and often misleading information trying to influence voters. Not only is the quality of information very poor, but the high cost of paying for it heavily tilts the playing field in favor of deep-pocketed special interests.

Providing a voter friendly ballot interface when voters are most motivated and able to use election-related information would radically reduce barriers to political entry, thus revolutionizing campaign finance and providing a fundamentally different paradigm for campaign finance reform.

Legislatures opposed to separating ballot interfaces from data will use the admittedly difficult technological challenges to doing so as their primary excuse. But the primary roadblock to implementing this innovation is no longer technological; it is that incumbent legislators—regardless of party—view such a separation as a threat to their incumbency advantage. For them, opening the ballot interface is tantamount to giving free publicity to their opponents.

Thus, in New York, only through a constitutional convention can this barrier to political competition be removed.

Government control over ballot interfaces may one day be viewed as hostile to First Amendment values as the 17th century British government’s practice of licensing access to the printing press. A state constitutional convention is the most plausible institutional mechanism to address this First Amendment abomination. But if New York’s mandarin state constitutional culture persists, that won’t happen. A similar failure to innovate didn’t work out well for the late 18th Century Chinese when they were the world’s leading power.

New York’s motto, excelsior, for “Ever Upward,” clearly indicates that preserving the status quo at the expense of the people isn’t the goal. But if Exelsior excludes modernizing New York’s constitution, then in the long run the rest of the Excelsior agenda won’t matter.

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Estonia’s 36-year old prime minister explains Estonia’s e-voting system for parliament.  According to Freedom House, the world’s leading source of data on the comparative democratization of countries, Estonia ranks #1 on Internet freedom.

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Investing in the Parks System New York City Deserves


Mark Levine Council Parks

Council Member Levine, the author (photo: William Alatriste)


The numbers are startling: 42 million visitors per year in Central Park -- double the number of visitors to Disney World. Over 7 million people visit the High Line annually and 5 million visit Bryant Park. On a peak summer weekend 127,000 visit Brooklyn Bridge Park.

Park use in New York City is surging. And with the population in the five boroughs continuing to grow and tourism booming, this trend will surely continue.

But the story is not the same everywhere in our city. The marquee parks that are increasingly overwhelmed with visitors fortunately have the benefit of millions of dollars in private contributions to help them manage the onslaught. These funds enable them to provide the extra staffing needed to keep their parks looking beautiful despite the record levels of trampling.

Meanwhile, hundreds of parks in the city’s low- and moderate-income neighborhoods must survive on public funds alone. And those funds are often not enough to keep up with maintenance in the face of rising usage.

In the 1960s, New York City’s Parks Department had full-time staff of over 7,500. Since then the city’s population has grown by 1 million, but today the full-time headcount is just over 4,000. Over the decades the share of our city’s total budget devoted to parks has fallen from 1.7% to under 0.6% today. We now spend less per capita on our parks than San Francisco, Minneapolis, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.

We need to reverse this trend. The Parks Department budget must increase to meet swelling demand, and to ensure that low- and moderate-income neighborhoods have the great parks they deserve.

But we also need to grow our park system to serve a rising population.

This is especially true in neighborhoods being upzoned for greater residential density, including East New York, East Harlem, and the Jerome Avenue corridor in the Bronx. If those areas are to remain livable as they gain thousands of additional residents, they will require not just new schools and expanded transit capacity, but more open space as well.

Many neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs face a shortage of park space even without population growth: one-quarter of New Yorkers today have no park within a ten-minute walk from their home. We need new parks to fill in these gaps, most of which are in the outer boroughs.

Inspiring, transformative park projects are waiting for funding all over the city.

The Queensway would convert an abandoned rail line in central Queens into a 3.5-mile linear park. The BQ Green would deck-over part of the BQE, creating green space in park-starved Bushwick. The Lowline, on the Lower East Side, would turn an abandoned trolley terminal into the world’s first underground park, in an area where open space is being gobbled up by a building boom.

We also must pick up the pace of restoration of our city’s natural areas -- 10,000 acres of forest, wetlands, and grasslands in the five boroughs which many New Yorkers don’t even know exists. Modernized and better mapped trails will allow more people to discover these marvelous natural places which are often just a subway ride away.

And let’s find an environmentally sensitive way to open up parts of our park system that are now off-limits to the public, like the spellbinding North Brother Island -- a Lost City off the coast of the South Bronx, long ago overtaken by the forest. Let’s find a way to open up nearby Hart Island, whose 120 scenic acres are home to our city’s potter’s field and a century-and-a-half of history.

Mayor de Blasio’s preliminary budget for the coming fiscal year does little to reverse the trend of inadequate funding for our parks system. It leaves staffing flat and holds the Parks Department to less than 0.6% of the total city budget. It is critical that these numbers improve during negotiations with the City Council in the months leading up to the budget’s final passage in June.

A thriving park system isn’t just a luxury in a dense city of 8.5 million people. It’s essential to livability. Let’s invest now to ensure that every corner of the five boroughs remains livable for the years and decades to come.

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City Council Member Mark Levine represents parts of Upper Manhattan and is chair of the Council's parks committee. On Twitter @MarkLevineNYC.

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