New York City Council Stated Meeting Report
Every two weeks the New York City Council meets for its Stated Meeting to introduce and pass legislation. As a regular feature, Searchlight covers these meetings and posts a summary of the bills passed.
STATED MEETING - October 15, 2003
Quote of the Day:
"It seems as if the city has turned the corner fiscally." - Council Speaker Gifford Miller responding to news that there is an unexpected $110 million surplus in the city's 2003 budget.
Meeting Summary:
On October 15, the New York City Council passed a bill (Intro 569-A) giving the city the power to place advertising on newsstands, to require that the stands meet uniform standards, and to build bus shelters and public pay toilets.
"This is will totally revamp and revolutionize the way New York City administers street furniture," said Speaker Gifford Miler. "It will provide the city with a new aesthetic framework for our streets and sidewalks and will also raise substantial revenues through the sale of advertising space."
The city hopes advertising will generate $400 million over the next 20 years.
Newsstand owners and some advertisers opposed the plan, arguing that it would take away space on the outside of the stands and make it more difficult to attract business.
"For many distressed operators, who are already under tremendous pressure from half-priced subscriptions, street hawkers, and internet cigarette distributors, this will be the last straw," said Steve Stollman, a former newsstand operator.
The City Council members said compromises were made in the legislation to address some newsstand owner concerns. For example, it ensures that current stands cannot be closed or moved for at least six years. The bill passed by a vote of 45 to 3 (3 members were absent). Council members Allan Jennings, Hiram Monserrate, and Charles Barron voted "no." Barron said some of the advertising revenue should be shared with newsstand owners and said the plan favored the "fat cats over the little cats."
The council also unanimously approved legislation (Intro 262-A) mandating air conditioning on all buses and vehicles used to transport children with disabilities to school. Corona Councilmember Hiram Monserrate, who was upset that his 7-year-old son with autism was forced to ride a bus on 100-degree days, authored the bill.
"No child should be subjected to heat and illness to get to school, especially those with limited ability to communicate their needs," said Monserrate.
The council also passed several budget modifications, including one that transferred a surplus of $110 million from fiscal year 2003 into a new account. The unexpected money resulted because tax revenue was higher than expected.
Speaker Gifford Miller said that the additional revenue along with other positive financial reports signaled that New York City's economy is rebounding.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently ordered on all city agencies, except the Department of Education, to cut funding three percent. Miller said he wanted to use the additional revenue to limit budget cuts and said he hopes to reduce property taxes for senior citizens on fixed incomes.
"It is time to move away from budget cuts that will further curtail vital services," said Speaker Miller.
The next Stated Meeting is scheduled for October 30.
For an archive of past meetings and council votes, visit Gotham Gazette's Searchlight.
The current gubernatorial recall election in California provides further ammunition for those who like to dismiss the West Coast, and especially Los Angeles, as offering little more than a comically surreal contrast to a real place like New York. But there are actually some striking similarities between America's two largest cities, and there are ways in which each can learn from the other's errors and innovations.
The most publicized example of New York's influence on Los Angeles is the hiring of William Bratton to be L.A. police commissioner in the hopes that he will repeat the success he and others had in fighting crime while he was police commissioner in New York. But the flow need not go in only one direction. There is plenty that New York can learn from Los Angeles.
The City of Los Angeles adopted a new charter in 2000 and during the four years of debate preceding adoption two New York modes of governance were considered. The strong mayoralty model was vehemently rejected. New York community boards, on the other hand, were accepted, though quietly and in a somewhat different form - a form that could be instructive to New York.
On the strong mayoralty, then-Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan wanted the ability to appoint and fire department heads without City Council approval in the same way as New York's commissioners serve at the mayor's pleasure. Opponents in Los Angeles heatedly resisted giving the mayor such powers, arguing that to do so would vastly increase the possibilities of what they termed "New York-style" political corruption and mayoral abuse of power.
On the other hand the new Los Angeles charter adopted, and largely copied, one of New York City's most fascinating innovations, community planning boards, which in the form introduced into Los Angeles were called "neighborhood councils." The impetus for introducing these neighborhood councils in Los Angeles was the powerful San Fernando Valley secession movement (similar to the 1993 Staten Island secession movement), which, had it succeeded, would have taken 36 percent of the population out of the city of Los Angeles to become the sixth-largest city in the US, comprised of about 1.35 million people. So the secession stakes were high. It was felt in Los Angeles that neighborhood councils, by promising some local autonomy to neighborhoods, would undercut secession, and New York's community boards were the only existing model for such an experiment in any large U.S. city.
In both cities, the neighborhood councils/community boards are strictly advisory. In Los Angeles it was felt, for example, that there would be no way of avoiding the "not-in-my-backyard" problem if neighborhood councils were given decision-making powers. (In a bold move, though, area planning commissions were created in Los Angeles that do have some land use powers.) But beyond that basic similarity, Los Angeles's neighborhood councils differ in two significant ways from New York's community boards, making them more democratic. In Los Angeles, needing to start from scratch with no pre-determined boundaries, it was left to the people from each neighborhood to determine the geographic boundaries of each council, in a process that included some basic specifications, but that gave a startling amount of decision-making power to the communities themselves.
A second difference from New York is that in Los Angeles the officers of the neighborhood council (once its geographic boundaries have been approved), are elected by the residents of the neighborhood. In New York, by contrast, the fifty members of each community board are appointed, half by the borough president, the rest by the city council members within whose district the board's boundaries fall.
As the city of Los Angeles moves along with this experiment, it might be time for New York City to look more closely at its own experiment with community boards.
This closer look seems especially appropriate at a time when political parties, the main mechanism for citizen participation in the local political process, continue to lose effectiveness. Mayor Michael Bloomberg's proposal to introduce non-partisan elections in New York (a system that already exists in Los Angeles, by the way) may or may not succeed, but if it does succeed, it will leave community boards to play a greater role as links between ordinary citizens and political power.
On economic policy, a widely discussed study published recently by the Center for an Urban Future, urged New York City to follow the example of Los Angeles, and other cities such as Houston, which have acknowledged that in the last 20 years, a majority of jobs nationwide have been created by companies that employ fewer than 100 people. L.A. has encouraged the growth of small and medium sized businesses, often owned by minorities or immigrants, and successfully rebuilt its economy in this way. The report chided New York City for its "doomed strategy" of heavily subsidizing, via tax abatements and real estate abatements, a few large firms in select industries such as finance, insurance and real estate, in an attempt to prevent these firms from leaving the city for the suburbs. Such unfair subsidies drove up the price of real estate for small and medium sized businesses, and were also often ineffective in convincing the companies to stay. New York City was also urged to go beyond its traditional focus on Manhattan's midtown and downtown business districts, the first and third largest in the country respectively. Instead, the city should encourage multiple-downtowns fostering economic development in all five boroughs, for example in downtown Brooklyn, and in Flushing and Long Island City in Queens.
"Multiple-downtowns" sound like a version of the "edge cities" for which Los Angeles is famous, but modified for the needs of New York City. Edge cities, which have been developing over the last 30 years, challenge the traditional view that economic growth is concentrated in a central core downtown. Most urban regions are now made up of a multiplicity of edge cities (also known as "economic nodes") scattered around their entire geographic area. Formally, edge cities are defined as places that have substantial office and retail space, unlike the standard bedroom suburb. Some edge cities, especially in the Los Angeles region, are industrial districts. The New York region has many examples of edge cities (e.g. Melville and Hauppauge on Long Island and White Plains and Purchase in the rest of New York State, Woodbridge and Mahwah in New Jersey, and Stamford/Greenwich and Westport in Connecticut.) The obvious dilemma facing New York City as it moves to encourage economic growth in its outer boroughs is how to do this without seeing such development slide beyond the city borders.
Daniel Doctoroff, New York City's deputy mayor for economic development, said he agreed with most of the study and that the city was already implementing many of its recommendations, including cultivating business districts beyond midtown and downtown Manhattan.
New York City justly prides itself on its measures to guarantee services to immigrants regardless of their legal status, in sharp contrast to what is widely perceived as a deep anti-immigrant attitude in most of California. Nine years ago, for example, then-Governor Pete Wilson made support for Proposition 187, which excluded immigrants from receiving major social services, a major focus of his reelection campaign. However, on September 5 of this year, current Governor Gray Davis signed a bill allowing illegal immigrants to obtain California driver's licenses. This goes further than New York City, where residents whose immigration status is illegal cannot get driver's licenses.
The anti-immigrant movement in California has been undermined by California court decisions that invalidated most of Proposition 187, and by the passage of welfare reform on the federal level in 1996, which took some of the sting out of charges that immigrants were exploiting the welfare system. But it was demographics that pressured Davis to take a step to shore up his support. Latinos and Asians now comprise over a quarter of the state's population, the highest in the nation. It is no accident that the bill allowing California driver's licenses for illegal immigrants had been pushed since 1998 by a Democratic State Senator from the City of Los Angeles, Gil Cedillo. By 2000 the proportion of foreign born in the City of Los Angeles was 41 percent, which exceeds that in New York City (36 percent), the latter itself at its highest since 1910.
In short, this recall election signals that California's days as a bastion of anti-immigrant sentiment and legislation may be over, allowing for the emergence of the City of Los Angeles as an engine of pro-immigrant sentiment comparable to, and even in some respects outdoing, New York City. Defending his driver's license bill against those who said it was a security threat, Cedillo argued that the law would actually improve national security by placing on file at the Department of Motor Vehicles the fingerprints and home addresses of illegal immigrants. How long now before pressure mounts to allow illegal immigrants in New York to get driver's licenses too?
Crime fighting is an area where the City of Los Angeles has decided, correctly, that it has much to learn from New York. In 2002 when Los Angeles surpassed New York City in the annual number of murders despite having a population (3.7 million) less than half New York's, the Los Angeles media and many politicians began to refer to Los Angeles in shame as the "murder capital of America."
In November of that year the Los Angeles City Council confirmed former New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton as Mayor Richard Hahn's choice to head the Los Angeles Police Department. Fighting crime, Hahn said, was the single most important issue on which his mayoralty should be judged. He added that provided crime fell he did not care if Bratton became the most famous man in Los Angeles (a reference to Mayor Rudy Giuliani having fired Bratton for becoming too visible).
Over the last eleven months Bratton has been implementing in Los Angeles many of the tactics he and others successfully adopted in New York City.
Bratton has also introduced some measures less familiar to New Yorkers. Risking the wrath of homeowners, he said that 92 percent of burglar alarms in LA are false, resulting in a huge waste of police time. The LAPD would no longer respond to home burglar alarms unless some human on the spot verified an actual problem. Bratton also pushed to end high-speed car chases. These, he said, jeopardized innocent lives in often ineffectual grandstanding for a live television audience.
But even in the area of policing, New York can learn some things from L.A.
The saddest example is probably the issue of helicopter rescue from tall buildings, raised acutely by the World Trade Center attack. Los Angeles is the only major city in the United States that requires all high-rise buildings to have helicopter pads on their roofs, and has elaborate plans and procedures, successfully implemented on several occasions, for rescuing people by helicopter from burning high-rise buildings. For about an hour-and-a-half after the first and second planes struck in New York on September 11, hundreds of people were trapped in the upper floors of the World Trade Center above the flames, unable or uncertain whether to descend by stairs, and calling for help on their cell phones, as recent transcripts in the New York Times revealed. Although police helicopters were hovering nearby, there were no helicopter landing facilities on the top of either tower and the doors to the roof were securely locked.
But what New York can best learn from Los Angeles is whether what happened to crime in New York City was some kind of fluke or whether there is truth to Bratton's theory that police reforms introduced by an energetic leadership can make a major difference in crime rates and police culture. Indeed, the causes of the drop in crime in New York City, as well as in America generally, have been among the most hotly debated topics in contemporary America. Bratton forcefully attributed the drop to new police tactics adopted while he was commissioner. Critics replied that since the number of murders in New York City was falling for two years before Bratton became commissioner, if anyone in city government is to get credit it should be then Mayor David Dinkins and his police commissioner Raymond Kelly. But these critics also questioned whether police tactics had anything much to do with the drop in crime, which they pointed out occurred in other cities where the New York Police Department's tactics were not adopted. They argued instead that demographics (especially a drop in the teenage population, which commits a disproportionate share of crime) and the decline in the crack epidemic were responsible for the decline in murders. Bratton and his supporters replied that the teenage population was not, in fact, declining in most of these cities including New York, and even if the number of murders was falling in New York City before Bratton became commissioner, it fell at a much faster rate after he took over. Others added that some of Bratton's reforms had, indeed, been introduced two years earlier by Raymond Kelly, which would explain why crime rates started to fall before Bratton began. Reflecting a view that the complete causes of the decline have not been understood, one of the recent studies of the topic was titled New York Murder Mystery.
Although it is still far too soon to be sure, the latest data from the City of Los Angeles are starting to support those who credit Bratton. By the end of August, 2003, homicides there had fallen 26 percent compared with the same time last year, from a total of 420 to 326. Further supportive of Bratton is the fact that in the rest of Los Angeles County -- the bailiwick of County Sheriff Boca, not Bratton and the LAPD -- homicides rose by 11 percent (to 217) during the same period.
Though most of these examples show lessons that New York can learn from Los Angeles, the truth is, New York has already picked up plenty. The movie industry is a major example. The best New York film makers -- Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, Woody Allen, Brian De Palma, Susan Seidelman, et al -- have showed, starting in the mid-1970s, that it is possible to "go Hollywood" while maintaining a Manhattan address.
Meanwhile, while Lincoln Center has scaled back its plans, Disney Hall, the new Frank Gehry-designed home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, will open this month, not in some well-to-do suburb but in the heart of downtown, and has attracted rock-concert-like lines to purchase tickets for Bach and Mozart.
David Halle is director of the UCLA LeRoy Neiman Center for the Study of American Society and Culture and adjunct professor of sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is editor of the recently published New York and Los Angeles: Politics, Society and Culture.
On the corner of Williams and Liberty Street, a new 30-story apartment building is going up, but before the luxury apartments are habitable, the
construction workers must go underground and rip apart the city's guts - electrical cables, water pipes, gas mains, and sewers lines, replacing the crumbling pipes with new ones.
It is a precarious and disruptive project. Many of the old metal pipes are literally falling apart from years of rust. Workers with welding torches and saws crawl on their hands and knees through the tangle of pipes held up by ropes tied to wooden beams.
New Yorkers rarely think about the hidden systems that keep the city running, until a huge construction project gets in their way, a water main breaks, or until - like, most spectacularly, last August - the lights go out and everything shuts down.
"The blackout did not originate in New York, but people learned quickly that it affected everything," said Rae Zimmerman of the Institute of Civil Infrastructure at New York University.
When the electricity failed, thousands of commuters were trapped in subways. Residents who lived above the sixth floor of their apartment buildings could not get water. Sewage spilled into the city's waterways and shut down beaches. Cell phones failed.
But those who monitor the systems that keep the city running say it is not just events like September 11 or blackouts that pose a threat to the city. The biggest threat may be the everyday wear-and-tear on the city's systems.
There are thousands of potential hazards - most hidden from public view - that could paralyze the city.
In 1998, the City Comptroller released a 900-page report (in pdf format) detailing crumbling water mains, cracking sewers, and broken subway rails. The report estimated that it would take the city 10 years and $48 billion to get the roads, subways, water, sewers, and sanitation systems in working order.
At the time, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani dismissed the report as a "wish list" and said New Yorkers could not afford an increase in taxes. But others warn that New Yorkers can no longer afford to ignore the city's aging public works.
"These systems are critical for an urban environment," said Richard Anderson of the New York Building Congress. "It is absolutely essential that New York has reliable electricity, clean water, and working sewers."
The city's infrastructure is old, with much of it being built 50 to 100 years ago. Just maintaining this system, which cracks and breaks every day, is a monumental task.
Every time a water main breaks - which happens more than 500 times a year - not only are workers from the Department of Environmental Protection called in, but also police, fire department, and transit officials. Multiple utility companies also must monitor their own lines.
This year alone, the city has received 1,300 complaints about faulty cable TV reception, responded to 3,000 sewer backups, and issued more than 18,000 permits for road construction.
Although repair workers can often fix the problem by climbing into one of the city's 600,000 manholes, which were invented as a way to minimize street disruptions, New York streets are constantly being torn up.
Accidental damage to pipes and cables by construction remains one of the most common reasons for power outages, telephone trouble, and water leaks.
The city's ability to meet its ongoing repairs and plan for the future is limited by government regulations and a lack of funding.
Most of the city's capital projects - fixing roads, repairing sewers, and building new water treatment plants - are funded by debt. State law restricts the amount of loans the city can take. For example, the city's General Obligation Debt, which will provide about $26 billion over the next 10 years, cannot exceed a specific percentage of the taxable real estate value in the city.
So the city seeks other funding, such as tobacco settlement money and state and federal aid. In the 1970's, when the city faced bankruptcy, many projects were simply delayed because of a lack of funds. This year, faced with another huge budget deficit, Mayor Michael Bloomberg cut the 2004 capital budget.
And for utilities like phones, gas, electricity, and water, customers pay the price to improve the systems in their monthly bills.
"There is a saying out there, 'do more with less,' but that is not how it works in the real world," said Jameel Ahmad, a civil engineer who teaches at Cooper Union. "I expect we will see an erosion of our infrastructure. Every budget has been cut, and things will get worse."
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A 2003 report card on New York's infrastructure by the American Society of Civil Engineers, cited roads and bridges as the top infrastructure concerns. According to the study:
And even when repairs are done, engineers say, they are not done correctly.
"New York City often mills the top surface of roadways when repaving. However they don't fix the base and subsurface and the problems keep coming back," one engineer wrote in the report. "On all highways within the city, everything a student is taught never to do is done."
Con Edison maintains some 126,000 miles of cables, about two thirds of which are underground. And compared with the rest of the country, experts say Con Ed has one of the most reliable systems in the country.
"Because of the way the system is laid out and the maintenance, it is by far the most reliable system. No one even comes close to them," said Walter Zinger, an electrical engineer with the Electric Power Research Institute in a recent Gotham Gazette article.
Still there are over 2,000 power-line failures a year in the city and critics say that power companies are neglecting their old cables. A 2000 study released by the New York State Energy Planning Board found that capital investments in the power transmission system declined by nearly $200 million between 1988 to 1998
Deregulation - the loosening of energy regulations in the late 1990's that allowed for more competition between power companies - presents additional problems. For example, Con Edison must maintain its power lines, but the New York Independent Operator, a state agency that manages the energy market, is responsible for the whole system.
Experts say there is little economic incentive or will to build new transmission wires or upgrade systems.
The city gets its 1.3 billion gallons of daily water from two tunnels that run from upstate reservoirs into the city. In 1969, the city began building a third tunnel to meet growing demand and to serve as a backup in case one of the other tunnels failed. Some fear the project will still not be finished by the year 2020.
Tunnel 3, which runs 60 miles and weaves through four boroughs, has been called "the greatest nondefense construction project in the history of Western Civilization." Already 24 people have died digging the tunnel - roughly a man for every mile built.
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Some fear that the tunnels could collapse all at once, shutting down water to much of the city - if not all of it.
"There would be no water," Christopher Ward, the head of the city's Department of Environmental Protection, told the New Yorker magazine in a recent article. "These fixes aren't a day or two. You're talking about two to three years."
Because of the city's financial problems in the 1970's, construction on Tunnel 3 stopped for a decade and then proceeded slowly through the 1980's.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has said that the "the city could be brought to its knees if one of the aqueducts collapsed," has increased funding for the Department of Environmental Protection, but other projects, like a new aqueduct and filtration plant, will consume much of the money.
For the last ten years, the city's Department of Environmental Protection has spent 40 percent of its capital budget to upgrade the city's 14 sewage treatment plants. The city was required to do so by the federal Clean Water Act, which reduced the amount of sewage that could be released into the city's waterways.
But as the recent blackout demonstrated, not all of the systems are running smoothly.
When the electricity went out, backup generators at two of the city's fourteen wastewater treatment plants - Red Hook and North River - failed. And the 13th Street pump station on the East River does not have a backup generator even though the state issued an order to build one in 1995.
The result was that more than 490 million gallons of sewage spilled into the city's waterways, closing beaches and creating health and environmental hazards.
As the terrorist attacks of September 11 and the recent blackout demonstrated, the city's telecommunications systems are susceptible to failure.
On September 11 2001, when 7 World Trade Center collapsed, Verizon lost an estimated 200,000 telephone lines and 3.5 million data circuits. Only one in 20 cell phone calls were connected. And emergency responders had trouble communicating.
Again during the August blackout, the top six cell phone carriers had unreliable service and landline systems were overloaded.
"The 9/11 attacks illustrated how fragile and poorly engineered our cellular communications system is," Anthony Townsend, a professor at New York University who specializes in telecommunications told CNET News. "It is incapable of dealing with crisis."
In an effort to create backup systems and lure high-tech business to New York, the city is converting unused water pipes under the city streets into conduits for fiber-optic cables.
However, the effort behind this resourceful idea diminished greatly with the dotcom bust. "Much of the fiber put down in the late 1990's was done haphazardly and some of those companies are gone now," said Townsend.
New York City generates more than 11,000 tons of garbage a day. For years, the trash went to the Fresh Kills landfill, but the dump closed in 2001.
Today, the waste is collected by nearly 1,500 sanitation trucks and transported to private waste transfer stations in the city and surrounding counties. There, most of the refuse is loaded onto 18-wheel trailers and transported to landfills in Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Residents in neighborhoods with a high number of waste transfer stations complain of heavy truck traffic through neighborhoods that cause noise, create pollution, and tear up local streets.
Meanwhile, the cost of disposing garbage has risen from $44 per ton in 1997 to over $88 per ton in 2001.
New York has one of the most extensive public transportation systems in the world, which moves 2.4 billion passengers every year. Still it has been more than six decades since a new subway line has been built, in part because maintaining the current system is a monumental task.
"The top priority was, is, and will always be the maintenance and repair of the existing subway system," said Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign. "It is only in the last few years that our organization has come out in favor of expansion."
The MTA reports that subway tracks and switches are currently in a "state of good repair." The immediate focus is on renovating subway stations, which it hopes to complete by the year 2019.
Still the city is hoping to undertake several massive subway expansion that will tear up streets and cause disruptions to existing subway lines.
A new transportation hub in lower Manhattan will connect nine subway lines, the PATH train to New Jersey, and a high-speed link to Newark and John F. Kennedy airports. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has presented a plan for redeveloping the west side of Manhattan, which would include an extension of the 7-subway train. And despite lingering questions about how the city will pay for the project, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is moving ahead with a plan for the Second Avenue Subway. The Second Avenue subway project would be the most disruptive to traffic and the existing infrastructure. The 8.5-mile line will stretch from 125th Street to Hanover Square in lower Manhattan and will not be completed until 2020.
MTA officials plan to use a technique known as "tunnel boring," using large drills to cut underground with less noise and vibration on the street. However, much of the construction would require underground blasting of explosives, which can cause damage to existing pipes and cables near the surface of the street. Some of the subway line requires a "cut-and-cover" technique, which requires opening the street, digging the tunnel, and then rebuilding all of the cables and pipes and resurfacing the street.
How the city will pay for all of these projects and how traffic would be rerouted for the next two decades is still unclear. "Some of these projects will never happen," said Russianoff. "There are finite resources."
In 1988, the city paid a high price for years of neglect on the Williamsburg Bridge. The bridge was declared unsafe; merchants near the bridge complained that business was down because people avoided the bridge.
The city was faced with a choice:
The city decided that repairing it would be the least disruptive option.
Engineers estimated that if the city had done regular repairs over the bridge's 100-year history, it would have cost about $190 million in today's dollars. Instead it ended up costing more than $600 million.
These types of problems will occur again and again, experts say, unless the city plans ahead.
"No one is looking at the whole picture," said Anderson. "Each level of government deals with the short term and what they control. But looking at all of the systems as a whole, thinking in the long term, and finding adequate financing - those things are not being done."