Every two weeks the New York City Council meets for its Stated Meeting to introduce and pass legislation. Gotham Gazette covers these meetings and posts a summary of the bills passed.
QUOTE OF THE DAY:
"Government bureaucracy gives compassion a bad name." - Councilmember Eric Gioia arguing that New Yorkers should be allowed to apply for food stamps online and by fax.
MEETING SUMMARY:
HEALTH CARE SECURITY ACT
Calling health care coverage a "moral responsibility," the New York City Council passed a bill that requires employers in the grocery and food industry to pay their workers' medical costs.
The legislation ( Intro 468-A) dubbed the "Health Care Security Act," requires grocery stores with more than 35 employees to contribute $2.50 toward health care for each hour an employee works, or $5,000 a year for a full-time employee.
Employers can pay the money into an insurance plan or reimburse workers for medical bills. Those that fail to comply face fines equal to the amount of health coverage.
The council estimates that the legislation will apply to 300 grocery stores and ensure health care coverage for 27,000 workers. It also applies to large chain stores - like Wal-Mart - that dedicate more than 10,000 square feet of their buildings to food.
"For a hard day's work, you should get the health care you deserve," said Councilmember Christine Quinn, who helped draft the bill.
The council argues that the measure will save taxpayers money because uninsured workers will no longer have to enroll in government programs or use emergency rooms as their only option for medical care.
The bill has support from companies like Fairway, Gristedes, D’Agostinos, Key Food, and Pathmark, as well as many local unions.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg opposes the measure, arguing that it violates the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act, which limits state and local government involvement in employee benefits. He also says it unfairly targets the grocery industry, and he has vowed to veto the measure.
The measure passed the council by a vote of 46 to 1; only Republican Councilmember Andrew Lanza voted "no." The council only needs 34 votes to override a mayoral veto.
Supporters of the bill see it as a pilot program and would like to extend the same regulations to building service employers, construction companies, and the hotel industry in the future.
FOOD STAMPS
The council also overrode a series of vetoes from Mayor Bloomberg.
Three of the bills aim at expanding the city's food stamp program. The council argues that 500,000 New Yorkers who are eligible for the federally funded program do not receive them because regulations are too cumbersome.
"Government bureaucracy gives compassion a bad name," said Councilmember Eric Gioia, who promised the measures would make it easier for needy families and their children to get the food.
Intro 593-A allows people to submit food stamp applications online.
Intro 594-A ensures that food stamp applications are available in city-funded food pantries and shelters.
And Intro 615-A will require the city to accept food stamp applications by fax and allow applicants to skip in-person interviews in cases of hardship.
Critics - including Mayor Bloomberg - say the measures open up the system to fraud. Supporter say that if more people are enrolled in the program the city will get hundreds of millions in federal aid that will be spent in local stores and bodegas.
The council overrode the mayor's veto by a vote of 43 to 4. Three Republican Councilmembers Dennis Gallagher, Andrew Lanza, and James Oddo and Democrat Madeline Provenzano voted "no." (Councilmember Peter Vallone, Jr. abstained from votes on Intro 594-A and 615-A).
TENANT EMPOWERMENT ACT
The council also overrode the mayor's veto of Intro 186-A, known as the "Tenant Empowerment Act." The legislation would give tenants of subsidized housing the right to purchase a building if the owner tries to sell it.
Under the bill, if the owner of a building in the Mitchell-Lama program or with a significant population of Section 8 tenants wants to sell a property, they must give residents 12 months notice. The tenants would then have the "first rights" to purchase the building at a fair-market value.
"If we do not pass this, we will evict tens of thousands of New Yorkers,” said Councilmember Alan Gerson who drafted the measure. “We will never be able to make up for the affordable housing that is lost."
The mayor argues that it puts an unfair burden on property owners.
The council overrode the veto by a vote of 44 to 3. Republicans Dennis Gallagher, Andrew Lanza, and James Oddo voted "no."
WETLAND PROTECTION
In an effort to save the city's wetlands - fragile bay area ecosystems that house plant, bird, and aquatic life - the council voted to create a task force which will look into transferring city-owned land to the parks department.
The measure (Intro 566-A) creates a seven-member panel –- with three members appointed by the Speaker of the Council and four appointed by the mayor –- to make recommendations on which city-owned wetlands would be better protected by the parks department.
"The city has lost more than 85 percent of its wetlands and continues to lose them at a great rate," said Councilmember James Gennaro.
The measure passed unanimously.
SIDEWALK FOOD VENDORS
The most vigorous debate of the council meeting was not over health care, food stamps, or housing, but over the city's sidewalks and how they are used.
The council voted on a bill (Intro 699-A) that bars permits for so-called "stoop-line" stands - sidewalk stands for fruits, vegetables, candy, ice cream or soft drinks - unless the city's Department of Transportation certifies that they will not block pedestrian traffic.
Councilmember John Liu, who drafted the legislation, said that such regulations already exist, but that the city does not enforce them. As a result, pedestrians are too often blocked from walking down the sidewalk.
"The sidewalks of New York City are meant for people to walk safely," said Liu.
However, several council members raised questions about the bill, arguing that it will hurt vendors, particularly immigrants.
"These are small merchants, many of them don't know the language well," said Councilmember Oliver Koppell. "We are placing impediments on them to earn a livelihood."
Others raised questions about the process, asking why the bill, which had just one hearing earlier in the morning, was moved onto the council's schedule for a vote, while other bills languish for months or years.
"I know that it's the political season and it's important for people to get bills passed, but we owe it to ourselves and our constituents to do better," said Councilmember Simcha Felder.
After much debate, the bill passed by a vote of 36 to 9 with two abstentions.
Tony Avella, Erik Dilan, Simcha Felder, Oliver Koppell, Margarita Lopez, Michael Nelson, Madeline Provenzano, Hiram Monserrate, and David Yassky voted "no." Charles Barron and Tish James abstained.
Councilmember Maria Baez, Allan Jennings, Anabel Palma, and Phil Reed were absent.
The meeting was the last before the Primary Election Day. The next City Council Stated Meeting is scheduled for September 15, 2005.
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The culture of mayoral politics in this city continues to invoke strict allegiance to the imperial power of the office. The game is how you get to City Hall so you, the mayor, can make things happen -- not how you can help neighborhood residents make things happen. And most people, whether in office or not, don’t have the foggiest idea how the arcane systems of zoning and planning work.
None of the mayoral candidates are making land use issues the front and center of their campaigns, though they mention them in their ideas about housing. But a little digging unearths some distinctly different approaches.
Buried among Bloomberg’s claims of accomplishments are two initiatives connected to land use -- down-zonings and up-zonings.
The down-zonings are of low-density neighborhoods in the outer boroughs to prevent “overdevelopment.” The down-zonings are aimed at preventing new housing development and conversions that build to the maximum floor area permitted under existing zoning. In other words, they keep developers out. While in some cases these down-zonings are long-overdue measures to help preserve stable communities, in other cases they end up having little effect except helping homeowners in the areas to decide who to pull the lever for in November. In many cases they respond to anti-immigrant prejudices, since many of their new neighbors happen to be immigrants.
The other controversial Bloomberg policy has been to up-zone areas in more dense in-lying residential communities, like Greenpoint and Williamsburg in Brooklyn, one of the deeds for which Bloomberg counts the numbers of jobs and housing that are projected to be created, but has nothing to say about the enormous local resistance he faced.
Fernando Ferrer offers a clear alternative to Bloomberg. The Bloomberg administration continues to oppose mandatory “inclusionary zoning”--the use of zoning to make housing developers include units for people with low and moderate incomes. At first, Bloomberg’s planning experts claimed that inclusionary zoning doesn’t work, and they opposed a proposal to incorporate inclusionary provisions in the Fourth Avenue rezoning in Brooklyn, which would have allowed developers to voluntarily incorporate affordable housing units in return for getting more square feet of building space. Then, after considerable pressure over the mayor’s rezoning of Greenpoint and Williamsburg in Brooklyn, the administration went along with voluntary inclusionary measures.
In contrast, Ferrer proposes to mandate inclusionary zoning in target areas that are under development pressure. He would require that 30 percent of new housing units in these areas be affordable -- 15 percent for low-income and 15 percent for moderate-income households. In return, he would offer a series of bonuses and incentives to developers to make it worth their while. If they provide more than 50 percent affordable units, they would receive financial incentives and density bonuses. Under certain conditions, they could transfer their development rights to other parcels of land or contribute to a housing fund that would produce affordable units elsewhere.
Ferrer also proposes a comprehensive zoning overhaul and reduction of red tape, but it’s not clear what this would mean; in the past, City Hall has retreated every time they faced the Herculean task of changing the thousands of custom-made zoning provisions that developers and individuals are invested in, and communities have fought for or against, over the last half century.
Ferrer recently chose to announce his plan for housing while in the Melrose neighborhood of the Bronx., where he had supported community residents who opposed a city housing proposal that would have displaced many people when he was Bronx Borough president. He funded their alternative plan, which was then adopted by the city, and which has led to revitalization of the neighborhood. Subsequently Ferrer has been an advocate of community-based planning, and supported the principles of the Campaign for Community-based Planning in the last election.
Anthony Weiner, however, hits the hardest at the planning process under the Bloomberg administration. He derides “too many insider deals” and says that too many of the new projects are financed “off budget” -- through PILOTS (Payments in Lieu of Taxes) and new special authorities like the ones used in the mayor’s Midtown West plan. Weiner calls for “legal requirements that ban insider deals” and “laws that open up the bidding process,” ending the practice of no-bid contracts. Weiner also criticizes the environmental review process, saying that Environmental Impact Statements are “tools of development rather than what they were intended to be.”
C. Virginia Fields claims credit for having sponsored an alternative plan for Manhattan’s West Side that did not include Bloomberg’s ill-fated Jets stadium. Fields has also come out in favor of mandatory inclusionary zoning in neighborhoods “shifting from affordable to market-rate housing” and a voluntary program in other areas.
Beyond the mayoral candidates, at least two others who are running this year have come out with relevant statements.
Norman Siegel, candidate for Public Advocate, has been calling for a more open process of planning and has come out strongly against the use of eminent domain to promote new development.
Scott Stringer, candidate for Manhattan Borough President, recently released a series of recommendations for reforming Manhattan community boards. They include provision of a professional planner to each community board and greater support for the 197-a planning process, in which community boards can prepare plans and get them officially approved.
The Community-based Planning Task Force has launched a campaign to get candidates to put community planning issues on their agendas for discussion in the campaign. Their recommendations are detailed in their report Livable Neighborhoods for a Livable City (in pdf format), and the candidates are being surveyed to see if they agree with the recommendations. They have not yet formally responded.
Tom Angotti is Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College, City University of NY, editor of Progressive Planning Magazine, and a member of the Task Force on Community-based Planning.
Whoever is mayor on January, 2006 will face monumental decisions about New York City’s budget, thanks in part to the $4.5 billion deficits projected for each of the next two fiscal years.
A budget ultimately reflects the values of those who make it and approve it, and the mayor’s choices on the following ten budget-related issues go to the heart of his or her values and vision for the city.
1. Education Education plays an immense role in the city’s finances, with spending on it for operational expenses expected to reach $17 billion in 2006, or 32 percent of the total city budget. The city’s share of that funding has increased an average of almost four percent each year since 2000.
The big unknown in education is the city’s obligation, if any, to meet the state court order in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit. The court has ordered an increase in city education operational spending by $5.6 billion over four years and $9.2 billion in capital spending over the next five years. It is not clear what the state and city shares would be.
Specific issue: Whether the city will share in the new spending required by the CFE case, and how much that share will be.
2. City Workforce.
No city union currently has a contract for the 2006-2009 financial plan period. Yet, the Bloomberg administration’s current plan assumes future settlements will be at half the rate of inflation. Higher agreements will mean finding hundreds of millions of additional dollars.
Specific issue: Negotiating union contracts, and paying for future city labor settlements.
3. Public Safety
Major crimes continue to decline in New York City, even as the number of police officers declined by some 3,700 officers in 2005, or over nine percent, from a peak of approximately 40,000 in 2000, according to a report by the Independent Budget Office (in pdf format). The agency’s report also notes that another reasonable money-saving budget choice is available – civilianization, using lower-paid civilians to do work currently being done by higher-paid uniformed officers.
Specific issue: What the number of uniformed police officers should be, and whether to expand civilianization in the department.
4. Sanitation
One of the major increases in city spending in the past few years has been the escalating cost of residential waste disposal. Disposal has tripled in cost since the closing of the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island in 1998, to $300 million currently, according to a recent Independent Budget Office report (in pdf format). The use of new marine transfer stations and rail lines that would reduce the costs of the very expensive truck-based system used today raises important cost, equity, and environmental issues.
Specific issue: How to reduce the escalating costs of the current truck-based waste disposal system in the city
5. Overtime
The cost of overtime for police, firefighters, and the city’s other uniformed services in 2005 again reached more than $700 million, nearly $200 million more than was initially budgeted for the year, according to a report by the Financial Control Board. The underestimating of overtime costs is, in fact, a pattern that goes back well into the 1990s, and the Financial Control Board sees the pattern continuing in the Bloomberg administration’s new financial plan.
Specific issue: What management measures to employ in order to reduce the exceedingly high overtime costs for the uniformed services.
6. Property Tax
The city’s property tax will bring in an estimated $12.4 billion in 2006, or about 43 percent of all city tax revenues. It’s also the only city tax projected to increase substantially in the next four years (by $3.2 billion, says the Financial Control Board). The tax became a hot issue in November 2002 when Mayor Bloomberg and the City Council increased the rate by 18.5 percent – after a decade in which the average tax rate had been frozen. The $1.8 billion in new revenues produced by the increase helped solve a budget deficit that at one point had reached $6 billion.
The mayor’s $400 rebate to homeowners – continued in the four-year plan at a cost of over $250 million a year -- has wiped out that increase for many homeowners, but has left the burden on commercial owners and renters (who pay a substantial percentage of a landlord’s property tax). The rebates have exacerbated a bizarre, confusing property tax system in which private house owners pay lower property taxes than coop and condo owners; worse yet, renters, with lower incomes than homeowners on average, pay by far the highest residential rate.
Specific issue: What to do to reform the city’s bizarre property tax system, while maintaining its place as a vital source of city revenue.
7. Personal Income Tax
The personal income tax, or PIT, is the second largest -- and most progressive -- city tax, bringing in $6 billion (20 percent of tax revenues) in 2005. Its rates currently range from 2.9 percent of income for lower-paid taxpayers to 4.45 percent for households earning over $500,000. The two highest rates (4.25 and 4.45 percent), which added about $540 million in revenues to the 2005 budget, will be eliminated at the end of this calendar year. That will make the PIT less progressive, and make it more difficult to resolve the city’s long-term budget deficits.
Specific issue: Whether to restore the higher personal income tax rates for higher-earning New Yorkers.
8. Rainy Day Fund and Structural Budget Balance
The $3.5 billion surplus in the fiscal year 2005, along with the $1.9 billion surplus in 2004, have triggered a lot of interest, most recently by the City Comptroller in his July report, in establishing a so-called “rainy day fund,” which means saving all (or some of) any budget surplus and setting up procedures for using it over time – as, say, when an economic recession cuts revenues sharply. Under current state law, any surplus must be spent in the fiscal year of the surplus.
Mayors Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg have used billions of dollars of annual surpluses to pre-pay the next year’s expenses. That is politically attractive – I call the surplus a “sunny day fund” for mayors – because it’s an easy way to avoid new taxes or reduced spending for 12 months. The downside is that it’s a one-time revenue. Without the recent surplus, the mayor and council would have had to find $3.5 billion in service cuts and new revenues. If there were $3.5 billion of recurring cuts and revenues in the 2006 budget, next year’s deficit at this point would be $1 billion, not $4.5 billion; the four-year plan would be considered close to “structurally balanced,” that is, long-term revenue and expense projections would be roughly equal.
Specific issue: Whether to create a rainy day fund as the most reasonable way to achieve a more structurally balanced financial plan
9. Capital Budget
The July report by the Financial Control Board calls the Bloomberg administration’s latest 10-year, $62.4 billion capital budget strategy – the separate city budget that funds (by borrowing money in the financial markets) the rehabilitation, replacement, and new construction of public facilities – “by far the largest ten-year strategy ever presented.” The education portion is $18 billion, or 29 percent of the total. Since the debt service for this capital work is paid out of the operating budget, fiscal monitors worry about the burden of such an investment: $4.3 billion in debt service in 2006 (14.4 percent of city tax revenues), rising to $5.9 billion in 2009 (17.4 percent of city tax revenues).
Specific issue: Whether to support the city’s current 10-year capital budget strategy and its priorities.
10. Budget Process
The current mayor’s Charter Revision Commission has spent eleven months discussing possible changes in the city’s charter, and their work has focused in large part on two important questions: 1) public (and fiscal monitor) access to city budget information, and 2) the quality (and usefulness) of many charter-mandated budget and management reports. (The commission has said it is no longer considering the second question for the ballot in November, but it remains an important issue.) A running theme among critics of the commission’s proposals has been deep concern about possible expansion of the already extraordinary power that the city’s mayors have over the city budget.
Specific issue: What to do to expand the public’s knowledge of, and participation in, the city’s annual budget process.
Glenn Pasanen, who teaches political science at Lehman College, has been in charge of Gotham Gazette's finance topic page since 2001.Â