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2019 Mayor’s Management Report Gives Snapshot of Government Services, City Trends


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(photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)


Mayor Bill de Blasio released the latest Mayor’s Management Report, an exhaustive document  of data behind city government -- the metrics the city uses, at least in theory, to determine whether government services are being delivered effectively and that the public can use to hold city government accountable. The report is broken down by agency, with each listing a set of broad goals, the progress toward which is illustrated by indicators.

The dense report covers data for fiscal year (FY) 2019, which began July 1, 2018 and ended June 30, 2019, and includes comparative data from fiscal years going back to FY15, the first full fiscal year of de Blasio’s mayoralty. Forty-five municipal agencies contribute to the report, which is aggregated under the Mayor’s Office of Operations.

Captured in its numbers are the contours of various aspects of life in the biggest city in the United States. Gotham Gazette went through many of the indicators -- ranging from the headline-grabbing to the obscure -- that illustrate, in part, how city government is doing.

Outlined below are metrics in key categories like education, children’s services, housing and homelessness, policing, jails, transportation, and sanitation. (There are dozens more areas of the report that are not included here -- to learn more about the city’s performance according to the mayor’s office, find the report here or visit specific sections using this navigation page.)

Education
In FY19, approximately 1,126,500 students were enrolled in the public school system from pre-kindergarten through twelfth grade (not including charter school students). This is roughly 4,000 more students than in FY15, but about 9,000 fewer than in the previous fiscal year.

Average class sizes for kindergarten through eighth grade have stayed roughly the same over the last five years.

Based on state test scores, students in grades three through eight are doing far better in math and English language arts than they were in FY15. Last year, 45.6 percent of students met or exceeded math standards, up roughly 10 percent; for English language standards, that number was 47.4 percent -- up 17 points since FY15. But, the tests have changed significantly over the last few years, making FY19 to FY15 comparisons limited in value.

Teachers on average are slightly less experienced than they were five years ago. In FY19, 67.3 percent of teachers had five or more years of teaching experience, compared with 71.2 percent of teachers in FY15. But principals are becoming more experienced: 68.8 percent had four or more years of experience as principals in FY19, while five years ago 60 percent did.

The Mayor’s Management Report does not include metrics on school diversity or racial, ethnic, or economic segregation in city schools.

Child Welfare
The Administration for Children’s Services reports families entering child welfare prevention services has decreased over the last five years from roughly 11,000 to 9,960. Children entering foster care has also fallen, from 4,233 in FY15 to 3,729 in FY19.

Of those entering foster care 28.9% are placed in homes in their community, down from 36-37 percent the previous four years; 93.8 percent are placed in the same home as siblings when applicable, up from 88.9 percent in FY15. The greater increase is the number of children entering foster care who are placed with relatives, which went from 29.5 percent in FY15 to 40.4 percent in FY19.

Housing and Homelessness
Of the roughly 60,000 people in homeless shelters across the city, the average number of single adults in shelters daily has risen every year over the last five years, from roughly 11,000 in FY15 to 16,000 in FY19. The daily average in the most recent year of reporting is more than 1,000 greater than it was the year before. The average number of families without children living in shelters every day has also risen year after year -- from 2,110 to 2,510. The averages for families with children is far greater -- 12,415 in FY19 -- but has stayed relatively constant over the last five years.

Under the mayor’s Housing New York plan to create or preserve 300,000 affordable housing units over 12 years, the process to construct new or preserve existing “affordable” (meaning rent-regulated in some way) apartments began on just over 25,000 units, meeting the administration’s stated goal for FY19. Another 18,200 units were completed under Housing New York and another initiative started under Bloomberg called the New Housing Marketplace Plan.

Under Housing NY in FY19, the city began financing 2,682 affordable units geared specifically toward homeless individuals and families. Another 1,968 will serve senior households.

The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), reports 173,000 apartments in public housing developments, down 3,000 from FY18 and 5,000 from FY15. The occupancy rate for NYCHA housing is 98.9 percent. About 2,450 homeless individuals who applied for public housing either in NYCHA or through Section 8 vouchers were placed. That number has fallen every year since FY16 from a high of 2,868.

Policing
The New York Police Department (NYPD) reported a roughly 10 percent decrease in major felony crimes over the four years: 93,631 in FY19, down from 103,872 in FY15. Major felony crimes include murder, rape, robbery, assault, burglary, and grand larceny. Notably, despite this overall drop, reports of forcible rape have increased relatively steadily (with a small drop between FY16 and FY17); 304 more cases were reported in FY19 than in FY15, an increase of about 29 percent.

Narcotics arrests have dropped precipitously. In fiscal year 2015, the first full fiscal year de Blasio held office, 61,007 narcotics arrests were made. In FY19, only 25,098 narcotics arrests were made, indicative of the city’s changing marijuana enforcement. Last year marked the most significant year-to-year drop, about 42 percent down from 43,574 arrests in FY18.

The number of non-violent “quality-of-life” summonses has also fallen to less than half of what it was in FY15. According to the report, the summonses are issued for “offenses that have a negative impact on City residents, including unreasonable noise, aggressive panhandling, window washing, and urinating in public.” The greatest drop -- almost 40 percent -- took place between FY17 to FY18. They were down another 24 percent in FY19, to 128,265 summonses. This trend was in large part spurred by the Criminal Justice Reform Act.

The report does not reveal much about “customer service” for people interacting with police. The police department reported 275,981 completed requests for interpretation, roughly the same as in FY15 (but a five percent drop from FY18). Yet, the report does not indicate how many interpretation requests were made, so it is difficult to assess the department’s overall performance. For the first time since FY10, the police department also did not report a CORE (Customers Observing and Reporting Experiences) facility ratings, which measures physical conditions and the quality of service in walk-in facilities.

There were 844 more complaints against uniformed police officers to the Civilian Complaint Review Board, an oversight body tasked with investigating and prosecuting certain types of officer misconduct, in FY19 than the previous fiscal year -- a nearly 20 percent increase. FY15 had over a thousand fewer complaints than in FY19, a change of almost 26 percent over five years.

The time it takes the CCRB to complete a full investigation also increased, which the report says is consistent with the heightened number of complaints and the increased use of body-worn camera footage in investigations. “The amount of time it takes to obtain footage has also significantly contributed to the increase, as does instances where false negatives or false positives necessitate multiple follow-up requests,” the report also notes.

The police department reports paying $178 million in settlements or verdicts in state and federal court in FY19. The reported payout in FY15 was higher: $202,600,000.

Jails
The number of people in Department of Correction custody has declined steadily during de Blasio’s mayoralty, from average daily populations of 10,240 in FY15 to 7,938 in FY19. While the jail population has decreased, violent incidents among detainees and guards as a proportion of the total detainee population have risen dramatically. In FY19, there were about 70 violent detainee-to-detainee incidents per 1,000 people in custody, compared with just 38 in FY15 and 56 in FY18. Assaults on staff increased from roughly 9 to 13 per 1,000 detainees over the same five-year period.

Department of Correction staff is far more regularly using force against people in their custody than they were in FY15. In FY19, there were 6,670 incidents of force by custodial staff, an increase of 51 percent over de Blasio’s mayoralty. Use of force against adolescents has risen too: of the 6,670 incident of force, 571 were against adolescents, compared with 378 in FY15.

The number of people in custody with mental health diagnoses has risen from 41 percent to 45 percent over five years. The number of inmates with “serious mental health diagnosis” has gone up from 11.1 percent in FY15 to 16.8 percent in FY19.

Transportation
There were nine more traffic fatalities in FY19 than the year before, but 31 fewer than in FY15. There were over 223,000 crashes in FY19 (422 involved Department of Transportation vehicles).

Fatalities among cyclists and pedestrians between FY15 and 19 have dropped overall from 159 to 137, but between FY18 and 19 they rose by nine. The city installed 67.5 miles of bike lane in FY19. That is significant growth from FY15 when roughly 51 miles were installed, but a drop from FY17 when nearly 83 miles were built.

Annual CitiBike memberships have more than doubled over five years to a high of 154,830 in FY19. And while bike ridership overall has picked up over five years, the number of adults who ride regularly fell by about 6,000 between FY18 and FY19.

The number of accessible medallion taxis has nearly quintupled in the last five years, coming to over 2,700 accessible cabs in FY19. There are only 579 accessible for-hire vehicles, such as through Uber or Lyft app-based services, and this is the first year the data from the Taxi and Limousine Commission has been included it in the Mayor’s Management Report.

Yellow and green cab safety and emissions inspections have dropped, with only about 32,000 taking place in FY19, compared to 48,000 the year before and 52,000 in FY15. The percentage of inspections completed on schedule also dropped dramatically to 55 percent in FY19 from the mid-nineties in all other years. At the same time the failure rate rose almost seven percentage points last year to 33.6 percent, while the re-inspection rate dropped a point to 6.1 percent.

It seems much of that effort has been transferred to safety and emissions inspections for the app-based for-hire vehicles. In FY19, 84,000 FHVs were inspected, compared to 47,000 in FY15, of which 96.8 percent were completed on schedule. About 29 percent fail the initial inspection, and only 8.4 percent are re-inspected.

The average time it takes the Department of Transportation to fix a pothole was 3.2 days in FY19, down from 5.6 in FY15. The average time it takes DOT to respond to “high priority” traffic signal defects that have made the roads unsafe is 21 minutes faster than the previous fiscal year.

Sanitation
The Department of Sanitation reportedly disposes of 3,248,100 tons of refuse annually, a two percent increase from FY15. The department handled 868,000 tons of recycling in FY19 at a rate of 2,783 tons per day.

The Mayor’s Management Report did not provide data on the costs per ton for refuse and recycling collection and disposal, though those prices in almost every case have risen every fiscal year for at least the last five. Collecting recycling alone costs $706 per ton, up from $645 in FY15. (The city does, however, earn $12 per ton in revenue for paper recycling.)

The report does not include data on street and sidewalk cleanliness for the first time in at least the last five fiscal years, while quality-of-life issues are a stated priority of de Blasio’s Deputy Mayor of Operations, Laura Anglin.

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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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Max & Murphy Podcast: The City's Fight Against Homelessness


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Steve Banks, right, with the Mayor and First Lady (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)


September 18, 2019 - Max & Murphy Podcast: The City's Fight Against Homelessness

dss commissioner banks wbai 150Steve Banks, Commissioner of the Department of Social Services and Mayor de Blasio's homelessness czar, joined the show to discuss the city's fight against homelessness, the progress he believes the city has made over the past five-plus years since de Blasio took office and named him to head the Human Resources Administration (HRA), and more.

Listen to the conversation and let us know what you think -- we're on Twitter @TweetBenMax and @JarrettMurphy. You can listen to the show through the embedded audio below or download the episode wherever you get your podcasts, under "Max & Murphy," and listen to Max & Murphy live on Wednesdays at 5 p.m. on WBAI radio, 99.5FM or wbai.org

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by Ben Max, Gotham Gazette
     

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7 Years After Sandy - Part III: Is the City's Emergency Responsiveness Ready for Whatever Comes Our Way?


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(photo: NYC Gov)


This is part three of a three-part series on '7 Years After Sandy.' Find part one here: Pieces In Place That Worked, Rebuilding Efforts That Failed and part two here: The City's Limited Resiliency Efforts Since the StormThis series is part of Gotham Gazette's work in participation with the Covering Climate Now project, which includes over 250 media outlets focusing on climate coverage in the week leading up to the 2019 United Nations Climate Summit on September 23.

Forty-three. 

That’s how many people in New York City were killed from the immediate effects of Hurricane Sandy, nearly seven years ago. Most were due to drowning, while a smaller number of those who died from the October 2012 storm were attributed to downed power lines. A CDC report from May 2013 found that 45% of drowning deaths occurred in Evacuation Zone A, which was not fully evacuated despite orders from city officials. The same report concluded that such drowning deaths are “preventable with advance warning systems and evacuation plans.”

The New York City Office of Emergency Management, responsible for communication, evacuation, and coordination during storms, shouldered much of the blame for Sandy’s disastrous impact. It was especially blamed for its procedures for lower-mobility residents, like seniors and disabled people, who often had difficulty evacuating. 

In November 2013, a federal judge ruled “that the City has violated the ADA, the Rehabilitation Act, and the NYCHRL by failing to provide people with disabilities meaningful access to its emergency preparedness program in several ways.”

“There were a lot of things that didn’t go well” in the city’s response to Sandy, according to Thad Pawloski, Director at Columbia University’s Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes, in an interview with Gotham Gazette. “Nursing homes and hospitals in the flood zones should have been better equipped to deal with downed utilities,” Pawlowski said, as an example, though he did commend the city for having an overall effective disaster response.

Seven years later -- and as the city continues to deal with storms, blackouts, heat waves, terror attacks, and more -- one key question for New Yorkers is whether the city’s emergency management has improved so that when emergencies hit loss of life can be avoided, communication and medical care happen as efficiently and effectively as possible, and further negative ramifications are limited. Those in charge of the city’s emergency responsiveness say that it is much improved, pointing to new and updated systems in place, some based on lessons from Sandy and its aftermath.

Now called New York City Emergency Management, NYCEM’s leadership has acknowledged mistakes from Sandy. In a 2017 interview with NY1, then-commissioner of NYCEM Joe Esposito (who was not the EM commissioner during Sandy, but was a top NYPD official) admitted, “We had the evacuation — I think maybe we could have pushed that harder.” However, Esposito was adamant that “the vast majority of those people would not have died if they would have listened to the evacuation orders.”

Now, with another Sandy anniversary approaching, NYCEM is displaying its many new and updated programs as evidence that it has become smarter and more effective since the storm.

“After any emergency, we take a hard look at what went well, and areas where we need some improvement,” said Megan Pribram, NYCEM’s assistant commissioner for planning and preparedness, in an interview with Gotham Gazette. “I think that we’ve gotten a lot stronger since Sandy. We learned from that incident, and we continue to improve our plans and enhance, and I think we’re a much stronger and more resilient city as a result.”

One of the programs that NYCEM has significantly expanded since 2012 is its Advance Warning System, which provides special alerts for organizations serving people with disabilities or other functional needs. Organizations that sign up for the program, launched ten years ago, receive public preparedness emails or text messages in the event of an emergency. The program has recently grown to cover 1,900 service providers, which Pribram called a “huge increase” over pre-Sandy numbers.

Another program that has seen a major boost in reach since Sandy is Notify NYC, a public communications service that texts subscribers emergency alerts specific to their zip code. A spokesperson for the city said that Notify NYC has grown from around 140,000 subscribers before 2012 to over 765,000 as of August 6. 

Several other programs have been launched since 2012 as part of NYCEM’s larger effort to reduce complacency, including:

-Know Your Zone, an awareness campaign to make sure residents know when and where to evacuate, started in 2014. The campaign has released videos, infographics, maps of evacuation zones, a hashtag (#knowyourzone), and a virtual badge displaying hurricane zone numbers.

-The Share Your Space Survey, which aims to identify community spaces that could be used to support emergency operations, started in 2016. Through the survey, NYCEM has built a database of spaces that are available for use during emergencies, as well as for training classes and exercises.

-The Community Emergency Planning Toolkit, a customized guideline to help communities handle storm preparation, started in 2017. The toolkit is downloadable online, and a boot camp for local organizations is also available.

-The High Water Mark Initiative, a series of signs showing what level Sandy’s storm surge reached to increase awareness in vulnerable areas, also started in 2017.

-Prep Talk, a podcast covering emergency management-related topics, has had 36 episodes air since launching in 2018 (episodes average around 500 listens on Soundcloud).

“When we’re asking people to evacuate, the sun is shining, and it’s very hard to convince someone that a hurricane is on the way when they’re looking at 85 degrees on a beautiful day,” then-First Deputy Commissioner for NYCEM Calvin Drayton said at an October 2018 City Council hearing on his agency’s strategic plan. “We have to do a much better job in getting the public to adhere to the word when the mayor says to evacuate.”

NYCEM’s strategic plan itself, however, is largely focused on issues other than emergency notices and civilian preparedness. Among the goals laid out by the 2017-2021 plan are increasing coordination with community organizations and other city agencies, making the agency more responsive and flexible during crises, and “advanc[ing] the Profession of Emergency Management” in New York and nationwide.

One of the changes that Pribram of NYCEM cited in accordance with these goals is a revision of the city’s hurricane evacuation zones from three zones to six. Pribram said the change “provides us with more flexibility to evacuate for different storm types,” as it allows for more gradations in the scale of evacuation.

Pribram also noted several internal-facing improvements that NYCEM has made post-Sandy, which may make future emergencies more manageable, such as updating its debris management plan and establishing connections with more agencies and organizations to help mitigate future storm effects. After an emergency like Sandy, “we add new partners,” Pribram said, “that we realized have key roles sometimes. So we have enhanced how we actually do the coordination during emergencies as well.”

NYCEM also runs training exercises for its own staff and the staff of other agencies that play roles in emergency situations. Pribram said in August that the agency had recently held a tabletop exercise with its emergency partners as hurricane season approaches.

September is National Preparedness Month, NYCEM recently publicized, saying that it wants “New Yorkers to take the opportunity to plan for emergencies.” NYCEM held a fair “to help inform New Yorkers about the importance of being prepared” and introduced a new multilingual PSA in English and Spanish, called “Communicate When It Counts,” that “encourages New Yorkers to talk with their families to develop an emergency plan before disasters such as flooding, power outages and hurricanes strike.”

NYCEM wants New York City residents to “learn the steps to make a plan, gather supplies, and stay informed.”

One idea that has also been floated to further bolster the city’s emergency response is to institute a 211 system, which would direct 211 calls to a specialized line that includes information on the city’s many non-profit service-providers. Pribram said, however, that such a system would likely not fall under NYCEM’s jurisdiction.

The preliminary Mayor’s Management Report released in February 2019 -- which includes data for fiscal years 2016, 2017, and 2018 -- presents some interesting data on several NYCEM programs, with mixed results.

There was a sharp decline in visits to the Ready New York webpage, which serves as a landing page for many NYCEM programs. The site had 24,561 visits in FY2018, down from 81,570 in FY2016. The average time between an incident and a Notify NYC message going out has also moved in the wrong direction: seven minutes and 50 seconds in FY2018, up from six minutes in FY2016.

Other indicators, such as the number of tabletop exercises and participants at emergency training sessions, have remained relatively the same over time, although the agency’s goal is to eventually increase the number of exercises performed. The office’s expenditures have increased dramatically, from $35.7 million in FY2016 to $58.9 million in FY2018.

With no truly devastating storms hitting the city since Sandy, it is difficult to gauge whether NYCEM improvements and new programs have been enough, but a somewhat recent incident showed potential shortcomings.

An unexpected snowstorm in November 2018 left the city’s transportation network crippled, a crisis many blamed on poor coordination and responses from city agencies. NYCEM Commissioner Esposito was soon messily fired by Mayor Bill de Blasio, although de Blasio insisted that the move was unrelated to Esposito’s storm response; Deanne Criswell took over at the agency in mid-July of this year.

Many blamed the city’s poor response on faulty weather predictions, rather than on municipal agencies; de Blasio said in a press conference that “I don’t think it’s fair to say that the city agencies could have stopped all of this.” But the storm nevertheless displayed the city’s weaknesses when caught off-guard -- school buses, for example, were stuck for hours on city roadways that ground to a snow- and traffic-filled halt, and parents often had no way of knowing where their young children were.

For Eric Goldstein, NYC Environment Director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group, the city still has not done enough to prepare for emergencies.

“There certainly is more that needs to be done, particularly in low-income areas and communities of color,” Goldstein said in a phone interview. “If you were to survey NYCHA properties, for example, you would find that there are still some very significant challenges that remain, in terms of preparedness and ensuring that handicapped people on higher floors can get the assistance they need and get the information they need. Some steps have been taken, but a bunch more needs to be done.”

Pawloski of Columbia, on the other hand, argued that the city often doesn’t get enough credit for the relative strength of its systems. “New York’s [plan] is pretty strong for an American city,” said Pawloski, who has worked with NYCEM in the past. “The coastal storm plan addressed debris management, utility restoration, mass evacuation of coastal areas and sheltering,” unlike many out-of-date federal maps and plans.

As another Sandy anniversary arrives, much of the city’s attention is focused on building out or rebuilding the city’s coastlines to better withstand the effects of major storms, through the Mayor’s Office of Resiliency and partners. The City Council recently formed a new Committee on Waterfronts and Resiliency, chaired by Council Member Justin Brannan of Southern Brooklyn, who has been surveying coastal areas across the city and plans to hold a major oversight hearing this fall, in conjunction with the Council’s Committee on Environmental Protection, chaired by Council Member Costa Constantinides.

Brannan recently said on the Max & Murphy podcast that they are looking at resiliency planning, preparedness for the next big storm, but also emergency management more broadly, which can range from a localized blackout in relatively unthreatening weather to much more severe instances where lives are immediately at risk across a larger swathe of the sprawling city.

On NYCEM, Brannan was supportive of the awareness work the agency does, but thinks it could do more to prevent future disasters. “I give OEM a lot of credit,” Brannan said of how the agency responds to a given emergency situation, but added he wants to have a more proactive conversation about “what they’re doing to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.”

Comptroller Scott Stringer, who in May put out his own coastal resiliency plan for the city while showing that the mayoral administration is not spending billions of dollars in allocated resiliency funding quickly enough, is also asking questions about emergency management plans to ensure best possible responses to crisis situations.

Some of the answers Stringer is seeking, as outlined in a September 6 letter to Mayor de Blasio, were provided to Gotham Gazette in August for this article, but the comptroller has asked for a good deal more, including related to NYCHA and emergency contracting to get needed supplies and services on a greatly expedited timeline.

“I am writing to request updates on the City’s emergency preparedness plans and the degree to which lessons learned from Superstorm Sandy have been built into the way our agencies plan, procure and prepare for the next great storm,” Stringer wrote. “As climate change escalates and sea levels continue to rise, New York City must be prepared to contend with the ever greater risk posed by hurricanes and floodwaters. Already, scientists estimate that storms on the scale of Sandy could be one-in-25-year events, rather than one-in-500-year anomalies.”

Stringer went on to request a variety of information on the city’s resiliency and emergency planning, which he sought by September 15. According to Hazel Crampton-Hays, a spokesperson for Stringer, the comptroller’s office has “not yet received a formal response to our letter. We look forward to reviewing the City’s emergency preparedness plans and continuing to push for robust resiliency measures to protect vulnerable communities.”

This is part three of a three-part series on '7 Years After Sandy.' Find part one here: Pieces In Place That Worked, Rebuilding Efforts That Failed and part two here: The City's Limited Resiliency Efforts Since the StormThis series is part of Gotham Gazette's work in participation with the Covering Climate Now project, which includes over 250 media outlets focusing on climate coverage in the week leading up to the 2019 United Nations Climate Summit on September 23.

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by Joey Fox, Gotham Gazette

Read more by this writer.

Ben Max contributed to this article.



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