There is no doubt the City Council is gearing up to say goodbye to summer and hello to its more hectic legislative schedule. To do that, members have recently introduced bills to regulate everything from Peeping Toms to construction companies.
While some of the bills claim to improve safety in the city, advocacy groups have criticized a number of the measures, calling some overreaching or utterly unenforceable. One organization described a piece of legislation as a threat to civil liberties.
Over the next several months, these bills may or may not come up for hearings. So here is a little preview of what could be in store at City Hall.
In mid-July, a retaining wall collapsed on the Upper West Side, forcing residents out of their homes. Although the cause of the wall's collapse has not yet been determined, some city officials and residents attribute it to blasting at an adjacent construction site on Columbus Avenue.
In response, the district's councilmember, Melissa Mark Viverito, proposed (Intro 613) legislation that would strengthen the city's blasting regulations, specifically reducing a blasting permit's validity from three years to three months. The applicant would, however, have an opportunity to request a one-year extension.
The legislation would also require a trained representative from the fire department or Department of Buildings to be on site during demolitions involving blasting and excavations on privately owned property.
" At a time when development appears to overrun our neighborhoods and inconvenience our lives, it is our responsibility as legislators to ensure that development is as responsible, safe and accountable as possible," said Viverito following the legislation's introduction.
The legislation also proposes to increase community notification in the area where blasting is occurring and coordinate communication between the departments that oversee this type of construction, such as the Department of Buildings and the fire department.
Although the fire department is charged with issuing an explosives permit, under the new legislation it must coordinate with the Department of Buildings and the Department of Environmental Protection, including noticing them on permit requests.
A spokesperson for the Department of Buildings said it is currently reviewing the legislation and "looks forward" to working with the council.
So far the bill has 13 sponsors, including Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who held a press conference announcing the measure. Quinn's support essentially guarantees the bill's approval.
When several women in his Queens district complained of a so-called "Peeping Tom" looking up their skirts while they climbed the steps to an elevated subway station, Councilmember Peter Vallone discovered the action wasn't a crime.
Now, he wants to make it a misdemeanor, which comes with a maximum 90-day jail sentence and a $500 fine.
" These perverts use their eyes to invade the privacy of people's bodies, leaving many feeling violated," Vallone said in a prepared statement. "Yet up until now, there has been a peephole loophole that gives anyone a license to gawk, leer and spy anywhere they please."
Vallone's voyeurism legislation (Intro 617) would make it illegal for an individual to repeatedly and deliberatively view another person's "intimate parts" without their knowledge or consent in public places, like at an elevated subway station. In private settings, the bill would apply to viewing another person without their knowledge or consent when that person has a reasonable expectation of privacy, such as drilling a hole in a private bathroom.
Although the councilmember said the bill is modeled after similar statutes in Washington, South Carolina and Arizona, others contend the legislation is unenforceable.
" The proposed law seeks to address behavior that is ambiguous and imprecise, and the language of the bill reflects that ambiguity and imprecision," said http://www.nyclu.org/ New York Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Donna Lieberman. "This lack of clarity confers a license for abuse on those empowered to enforce the law by leaving it up to the individual police officer to decide which kinds of viewing are lawful and which kinds are degrading and hence unlawful."
Others agree. A New York Times editorial contends Vallone's most recent crusade "feels like something akin to outlawing wolf whistles from a construction site and, then, banning the corresponding hand signal from the street."
In yet another battle over semantics, the City Council could soon be rehashing a debate over common epithets. Earlier this year it was the n-word, now, thanks to Councilmember Darlene Mealy, it’s the b-word and the h-word.
While it is entirely symbolic, her resolution (Reso 960) would create a moratorium on the pejorative use of bitch and ho. The legislation reads like the guest list to the Grammy Awards, citing the words' usage by various hip hop artists and most other media outlets and calling it "insulting and cruel."
In February, the City Council garnered national attention when it passed a resolution banning the n-word. So far support for this resolution in the council seems promising, having accumulated nearly 20 sponsors.
Although the "b-word" is used as a term for a female dog, its pejorative use, first documented in 1811, is offensive and hateful, according to the resolution.
Soon cars carrying minors could become smoke-free zones under legislation introduced by Councilmember James Gennaro. In an attempt to blow away second hand smoke, known to contain 4,000 chemicals, 250 poisons and 43 carcinogens, the bill (Intro 611) would create civil penalties for smoking in a private vehicle with children under 18 years old. It would be enforced by the police department and apply to smoking passengers and drivers.
“ It is my belief that people’s right to privacy doesn’t extend to force-feeding their children cigarettes within the confines of the car,” Gennaro said in a prepared statement. “This legislation will act as a deterrent, will inform parents of the dangers of secondhand smoke and will help to de-normalize smoking.”
On the other hand, some smoking advocates have said the legislation is an invasion of privacy.
Under the bill, fines could be as much as $400 for a first violation and spike to $2,000 for three violations in one year. Rockland County has moved to ban smoking in cars with minors, and similar measures have been adopted in New Jersey, Maine, Puerto Rico, Arkansas and Louisiana.
Approximately 153 million Styrofoam trays are used by the Department of Education annually to serve lunch to the city's students. Because Styrofoam is not biodegradable, Councilmember Bill de Blasio is hoping to eradicate its use by all city agencies and city-run food establishments.
The legislation (Intro 609) would prohibit the use of Styrofoam, or Polystyrene, and it would apply primarily to city-operated delis or establishments that use the containers for "to-go" items.
Communities across the country, many in California, have adopted similar bans. The councilmember also introduced a companion resolution (Reso 996) urging the city's Department of Education, which is not controlled by the council, to adopt a similar policy.
“ It is mind boggling that our city, which is becoming a leader on environmental issues, is still using Styrofoam when we know it is extremely harmful to our environment and creating massive amounts of waste,” said de Blasio.
The legislation provides for several exemptions, such as when an establishment has exhausted all other alternatives and for "health or safety" reasons cannot find an alternative packing material.
Styrofoam contains the chemicals benzene, styrene and ethylene, which have all been flagged on the Environmental Protection Agency's hazardous substance list. According to the legislation, Styrofoam is also resistant to compacting and takes hundreds of years to decompose.
With the Michael Vick dog fighting scandal as a backdrop, Councilmember Vallone also introduced legislation that would drastically increase fines for harboring or owning a fighting dog.
Under the bill, (Intro 616) maximum civil penalties would be raised from $5,000 to $25,000, while the minimum fine would jump from $500 to $10,000.
Councilmember Joseph Addabbo is attempting to stretch handicap parking to the blind by introducing legislation that (Intro 607) allows those transporting the visually impaired to acquire handicap parking permits. Both transportation and disability advocates have expressed support for the bill.
Â
As you wait for the subway one morning in the next few weeks, a transit employee may stop you and ask your opinion of the subway you are about to take to work. This spring, the Department of Education and an advocacy group both vied to find out what you think of the school your child attends. And 311 operators tally your complaints to find out whether, like most New Yorkers, you want a little peace and quiet.
For decades, citizens had few opportunities to voice their complaints – or even praise. They could throw the rascals out at the voting both, write an irate letter or show up at a rare public hearing and hope to be called upon and, even less likely, listened to. But now the New York City government, various agencies and advocacy groups are asking citizens what they think and, with that information along with other data, are compiling report cards on everything from bathhouses at city beaches to the safety of city classrooms.
Leading this drive is an effort by the Bloomberg administration to conduct a “customer satisfaction” survey in the next several months to find out what New Yorkers think of their interactions with city agencies. “It’s something we should do,” said Jeffrey Kay, director of the mayor’s Office of Operations, who said the survey is part of a greater focus on customer satisfaction.
The surveys, by the government and others, represent a growing trend toward measuring and evaluating public services. This movement accelerated in the 1990s after Compstat, a program pinpointing crime and police efforts to combat it, was widely credited with playing a key role in reducing crime in New York. Since then, many cities have copied the idea – on crime and other issues as well. At the same time, advocacy groups, taking advantage of new technology, picked up on the trend, offering their own report cards and ratings.
The Bloomberg administration has already undertaken a number of steps to measure performance. Like previous administrations, it compiles a Mayor’s Management Report, grading government operations on a number of measures. Much of this information focuses on what social scientists call inputs – the amount of staff time or money spent on a service – and on outputs or easily quantified results. The data is far less likely to indicate the quality of the services offered. So a survey of a park might report that it has six working water fountains but it would not say that the water tastes funny.
The Office of Operations also tabulates the calls to the city’s 311 non-emergency hotline. That information, Kay said, is useful but, “it is complaint driven and not everyone calls.”
At the same time, various city agencies have embarked on their own measurement efforts (some of which are described below), and others distribute cards to New Yorkers who come into their offices, asking them how the visit went: Was the office clean, was the staff friendly and helpful and so on.
A number of experts, in and out of government, have wanted the city to do more. In the 1990s the Fund for the City of New York conducted 15 focus groups, with 151 people from all five boroughs and 29 different communities to find out their concerns about city services. They listed the condition of city streets as a top issue – something that few so-called experts might put so high on the list. Their views sparked the fund’s street smoothness project.
More recently, the Office of the Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum has been working on its own citizen satisfaction efforts. In fall 2006, her office and the Baruch College School of Public Affairs assembled a group of civic leaders to try to come up with topics and questions for a citizen survey. To get a sense of how such groups can fly in the face of conventional wisdom, they rated "safety from violent crime” only 24th on the “extremely important” list, far below other public safety issues such as police response times, drug abuse and drug dealing and police-community relations.
Now the city is moving forward on a project similar to that envisioned by Gotbaum. Although the administration has not yet worked out many of the details, it does promise that the survey will be part of a more comprehensive look at what citizens think. The idea, said Kay, is to come up with information that is useful to the agencies.
The city has put out a request for proposals, which Kay said was “pretty open” in terms of how the survey is conducted and other issues. For example the survey could be conducted on line, could be mailed or done by telephone.
In planning for a “citywide view of customer satisfaction,” Kay, said he has two key considerations. One, he said, is gathering information that will help agencies better serve their customers – the residents of New York City. And, he said, “we want to make sure we’re not doing anything political.” Partly to address that, he said he expects the public advocate’s office to play a continuing role in the surveys.
Once the survey results are available, sometime next year, the public will be able to learn what they themselves think. “It’s the public’s information,” Kay said.
Beyond the survey, the administration plans to step up the use of “comment cards” in city offices. Although some agencies already solicit feedback, Kay said the city has not had any uniform approach. That, he said, will change.
For its part, the public advocate’s office said it welcomes the opportunity to play a role in the survey. “We’re thrilled that there will finally be a citizens satisfaction survey in New York City being it’s an important tool for government,” said Gotbaum’s chief of staff, Anat Jacobson.
In addition, she said, the office will work with the Fund for the City of New York on another set of focus groups similar to what the fund did in the 1990s. Results of the satisfaction survey will help guide the topics of discussion for the focus groups. Then, Jacobson said, the groups will have discussions aimed at producing the kind of “information you need to make substantive policy recommendations.”
New Yorkers don’t have to wait until this winter’s results to get a sense of how some government agencies do their job. Already an array of government and advocacy groups are rating services and finding out what citizens think of them. Here is a guide to some of those surveys and ratings.
|
City Services
The city has a number of guides to overall services.
-- Mayor’s Management Report: This annual amalgam of statistics is required under the City Charter. Broken down agency by agency, it sets some standards for city services and reports how well the agency has done in meeting those standards. But while the report contains lots of facts, critics often cite what it leaves out.
Commenting on the 2005 report, Glenn Pasanen wrote in Gotham Gazette, “It includes too many insignificant indicators, lacks any overview or sense of priorities, and says little or nothing about such major (and problematic) policies as the reorganization of city schools, big changes in homeless services, the costs of school construction and high levels of overtime among the city’s uniformed services.”
Part of this has to do with the nature of the report, which tends to lean toward information that can be added subtracted, multiplied and divided. Using cultural affairs as an example, Diana Fortuna of the Citizens Budget Commission has written, “The Mayor's Management Report lists payments made to the cultural institutions group and new capital projects initiated. But from the citizens' perspective you could have questions about overall satisfaction with cultural arts programs and whether people feel the city supports a diverse range of cultural programs.”
-- My Neighborhood Statistics: This annual report lets New Yorkers type in their address (or intersection) and get a wealth of data about their neighborhood. This includes a breakdown of 311 complaints, some basic mortality information, a few facts about education, the state of streets and parks and crime information. While not an in depth report, it does provide some intriguing numbers and a kind of statistical thumbnail of any city neighborhood.
Crime
The Police Department issues crime statistics every week. Its report – with city wide, borough and precinct numbers – provides figures on seven major crimes, the number of reports in the past week and how they compare with similar periods in the past.
Education
Perhaps no part of city government is as obsessed with grades and ratings as the Department of Education. Students, of course, have long received grades from teachers, but now students also get marked on a whole battery of standardized tests. Those scores—along with other measures, such as graduation rates, discipline reports and attendance – go into general school report cards and count toward the letter grade that every school will receive.
Now, though, the department will add another measure: the opinions of parents, teachers and students in grades six and up. The department distributed its questionnaires last school year and hopes to have the results available – both on a system wide and school basis – around the time school opens next month. Although the department has not released any preliminary data, School Chancellor Joel Klein has said he is pleased with the response, said Andrews Jacobs, a department spokesman.
Beyond counting toward the grade, the idea, said Jacobs, is to give individual schools “really specific suggestions on how they can improve.” And he added, “We think the people closest to school know best how they can improve.”
Like everything in education, the survey has not been without controversy. Class Size Matters, an advocacy group, in conjunction with the National Center for Schools and Communities at Fordham University issued their own survey. The group has gotten close to 1,000 responses, according to Leonie Haimson, head of Class Size Matters.
Haimson said the group decided to send out its own questions after she and some other education advocates participated in focus groups to help the city shape its questionnaire. In those discussions, Haimson said, parents wanted the survey to include queries on class size, test prep and how responsive principals were to their concerns. But she said, those topics did not make it to the final form. “If it impacts on the quallity of education on the class level, it should be on the survey,” Haimson said.
The city, which has frequently clashed with parents and other advocates over class size, did not include class size, Andrews said, because the department wanted to “put everything in the context of a specific school” rather than confront broader educational policy issues.
Meanwhile, Inside Schools, a private non-profit group, provides reports on all public schools in the city. The group’s reports do not provide a letter grade but include some basic numbers – size, racial breakdown, indicators of test scores and the like – as well as a narrative based on a staff member’s visit to the school. The write-ups, a mainstay for parents looking for schools for their children, also include comments by parents and students.
Health
With Michael Bloomberg having made a push to improve public health as a hallmark of his administration, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene offers a number of measures of New Yorkers’ well being and what the government is doing about it.
-- Take Care New York: This report outlines key health policy measures and reports on how well New Yorkers are meeting specific goals. Undergoing a colonoscopy screening is viewed as an important measure to improve health. So, the report lists how many New Yorkers have taken that step and finds that the number has increased by 44 percent in the last 10 years. Having a primary care physician also promotes health, the city believes, and it finds the number of New Yorkers with their own doctors has climbed slightly in recent years.
--Individual reports: The department also issues papers on specific health problems in New York and the city’s progress in confronting them. One recent paper described the “large and growing toll” taken by diabetes, while another found that cases of childhood lead poisoning have dropped sharply since 1995.
-- Community Health Profiles: These provide in depth information on health in every neighborhood throughout the city, featuring information from how many people in a given community have health insurance to the frequency of binge drinking in a given neighborhood.
Housing
In a city where real estate is an obsession, there is always a hunger for numbers on housing. The City Planning Department offers a number of tools on its site, including Community District Profiles, which are essentially portraits, about 35 pages long, of each community district in the city, based on the 2000 census.
NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy analyzes data from the city government and other sources to compile its yearly report on the State of New York City's Housing and Neighborhoods. This book shows how each of the city's communities has been changing and compares community districts, by ranking them on a number of indicators. It also interprets the data in interesting ways, devising, for example, an indicator of racial diversity and of income diversity.
Parks
-- Parks Inspection Program: The parks department publishes the results of its inspection of city facilities, giving cleanliness, landscaping and structures a grade of acceptable or unacceptable.
--2007 Report Card on Parks: This annual report by New Yorkers for Parks focuses on small neighborhood parks, reporting on conditions in spaces from one to 20 acres. This year the report card found that, “despite some areas of improvement, overall the parks are in worse shape than last year,” Anne Schwartz wrote in Gotham Gazette. The report card concluded that parks that have access to private funds tend to score high, while maintenance remains a problem at many parks that rely exclusively on private funding.
The parks department disputed those findings. The report card "flies in the face of reality, which is that parks continue to get better," parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe has said.
-- Report Card on Beaches 2007: Another project of New Yorkers for Parks, this report card rates conditions at the seven beaches run by the city parks department. In general, the report finds room for improvement.
Street Cleanliness
This report, compiled by the Mayor’s Office of Operations, rates all community boards on the cleanliness of their streets and sidewalks on a scale of 1 to 3, with 1 being the cleanest, 3 the dirtiest and any place scoring above 1.5 not considered “acceptably clean.” The rating is based on public perception, inspection and looking at photographs. The ratings, though, are for an entire community board so if you cannot use it as ammunition against your slovenly neighbor.
This fall, though, the city will take this a step further, sending out teams on scooters to inspect every street in the city for potholes, litter and other irritants of life in the city.
Transit
The Metropolitan Transit Authority is going line by line, asking riders to grade their subways. Straphangers can award letter grades on 22 different measures, covering such areas as delays, cleanliness, announcements and graffiti. The report card form, issued in 14 different languages, is being distributed in subway stations on designated days (the MTA handed them out in Number 7 and L stations earlier this month) and can also be completed on line by clicking here. So far, the response has been larger than anticipated, according to the MTA.
“People are taking us up on the opportunity to open a dialogue,” said Paul Fleuranges, vice president for corporate communications for New York City Transit. “If you don’t vote, you can’t complain. It’s the same sentiment here.”
Fleuranges said the results will be released to the public. Perhaps more importantly to riders, though, the results of the survey will guide MTA decisions. “Asking riders what improvements they would like to see will allow us to invest scarce resources in areas that will contribute the most to an overall improvement in customer satisfaction,” NYC Transit President Howard H. Roberts, Jr. said in a written statement.
The private Straphangers Campaign has been rating subways for a number of years in its State of the Subways Report Card. Like the transit authority, Straphangers goes line by line, evaluating the trains on a variety of criteria. Much of this material comes from transit authority data and observations by Straphangers staff. Â
New Yorkers will have to keep their residential trash out of public litter baskets or face a fine of up to $400 under legislation unanimously approved by the City Council.
At its stated meeting on August 22, the City Council sharply increased fines for dumping residential or commercial waste in public litter baskets. The council also approved a Business Improvement District for Sunnyside, Queens, passed legislation requiring certain payments to city contractors be made electronically and made a technical correction to the Brooklyn Navy Yard/North Brooklyn Empire Zone.
The Department of Sanitation has long estimated that 20 percent of trash collected from public litter baskets is either residential or commercial waste. To deter businesses or residents from using these baskets as personal dumping grounds, Councilmember Michael McMahon introduced (Intro 110-A) legislation, which raises fines by approximately 30 to 300 percent.
Under the new legislation, the penalty for the first violation will increase to $100 to $300 from a range of $25 to $100; the second violation from $100 to $200 to between $250 and $350; and the third violation will be raised from $200 to $300 to $350 to $400. Higher fines would apply to subsequent violations that occur within a year of the first violation.
The increased fines, said McMahon, who is chair of the council's Committee on Sanitation and Solid Waste Management, will free up space in public wastebaskets and, in turn, keep New York City's streets cleaner.
" The problem we have is our public litter baskets become overfilled and the trash overflows," said McMahon "It's not only unsightly, but (the baskets) themselves become the source of litter."
McMahon said the Department of Sanitation will identify violators at its own "discretion," typically by finding addresses or names from bundled trash in a public basket and from observation of certain street corners. The legislation, which was approved by a vote of 43 to 0, also incorporates a presumption that any trash with identifying information, such as addresses or names, in fact belongs to the individual who committed the violation.
To fight this presumption, the individual would have to appear before the Environmental Control Board, officials said. McMahon estimates the Department of Sanitation issued approximately 2,500 violations for illegal dumping of this kind last year.
" The fines aren't being raised to generate revenue," said City Council Speaker Christine Quinn. "They are being raised as a deterrent."
The City Council also unanimously approved a Business Improvement District in Sunnyside, Queens (Intro 585) to boost business in the area. The district will include 92 properties and 300 businesses.
According to a report from the council's Finance Committee, the district will receive $300,000 its first year, and the funding will be distributed to various projects aimed at cleaning up the neighborhood, such as graffiti removal, maintenance, sanitation and holiday lighting.
As of July, there were 56 business improvement districts throughout the five boroughs, which provide $83 million in services annually.
At the suggestion of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the council also approved legislation (Intro 570-A) requiring all city contractors be paid electronically if their contract exceeds $25,000. The legislation aims to reduce bureaucracy and paperwork and save money on postage by mandating an electronic funds transfer for these payments, which will also help reduce the nearly 800,000 checks cut by the city annually.
" The elimination of postage, as well as unnecessary bank costs, is the logical next step in generating savings for the city," said Councilmember Letitia James, chair of the Contracts Committee. "This legislation is designed to help both the city of New York and contractors manage their funds more effectively."
The council also made a minor change (Intro 603-A) to an Empire Zone in North Brooklyn and the Brooklyn Navy Yard after a parcel was inadvertently excluded from legislation approved last year. Overall, the Empire Zone entitles tenants in the area to certain business incentives and tax breaks.
Â