(photo: Emil Cohen/City Council)
[Note: this hearing was indeed held on Wednesday June 12; this article is a preview of the hearing]
On Wednesday, the New York City Council transportation committee will hold a hearing on a bill sponsored by Council Speaker Corey Johnson that would mandate the creation of a five-year “master plan” for city streets with a variety of specifications aimed at making the city more friendly to bikers and pedestrians, and less deferential to cars. If passed and implemented, the legislation would have a major impact on the physical landscape of the city and how New Yorkers, as well as visitors to the city, get around and utilize public space.
The plan, which Johnson first announced during his State of the City speech earlier this year, in which he called for municipal control of subways and buses and for ‘breaking the car culture’ in New York, is widely seen as a response, and complement of sorts, to Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Vision Zero street safety program. It calls for substantial increases in the number of new bike and bus lanes created each year, as well as additional pedestrian plazas, and more.
De Blasio launched Vision Zeroed in his first year as mayor, 2014, with the goal of bringing the number of traffic-related fatalities to zero by 2024. While it has been successful, some, including Johnson, believe de Blasio is not moving quickly enough to make city streets safer and more welcoming to those who get around by bus, bike, and foot.
While the city has seen a significant reduction in traffic-related fatalities since the inception of Vision Zero, there’s been a spike in fatalities so far this year compared to the same period last year. The uptick has prompted intensifying calls for de Blasio to do more for the initiative.
Johnson will preside over Wednesday’s hearing on his bill along with City Council Member Ydanis Rodriguez, chair of the transportation committee. The committee will also hear a bill from Council Member Carlos Menchaca that would allow bicyclists to obey traffic signs and signals as if they were pedestrians instead of cars.
The speaker’s master plan legislation would require the New York City Department of Transportation (DOT) to issue and implement a master plan for the use of streets, sidewalks, and pedestrian spaces every five years.
“The way we plan our streets now makes no sense and New Yorkers pay the price every day, stuck on slow buses or risking their own safety cycling without protected bike lanes,” Johnson said in a statement to Gotham Gazette. “That’s why I said in my State of the City speech that I want to completely revolutionize how we share our street space, and that’s what this bill does. This is a roadmap to breaking the car culture in a thoughtful, comprehensive way.”
Representatives from the DOT are expected to testify at the hearing, along with others from transit advocacy groups and members of the public.
“This last few months have been really tough and we – it’s painful because we have had five years of steady decreases in traffic fatalities,” de Blasio said during a May 10 appearance on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show. In 2013, the year before de Blasio took office, there were 297 traffic fatalities (among those in cars, on bikes, and on foot) in New York City. That number has fallen virtually each year since to 202 in 2018.
Under de Blasio’s approach to Vision Zero, “projects are too often planned on a one-off basis, leaving the fate of their actual implementation up to the inscrutable push and pull of local politics,” Families for Safe Streets co-founder Amy Cohen said in a Transportation Alternatives press release about Vision Zero. “In each case, the final outcome is too often determined by who yells the loudest, and not by what will save the most lives.”
Families for Safe Streets is an advocacy group of victims of traffic violence and families whose loved ones have been killed or severely injured by aggressive or reckless driving.
“We need to think seriously about how we share space on our streets,” Johnson, who does not own a car himself, said in March. “Cars cannot continue to rule the road.”
Ten cyclists have been killed in crashes so far in 2019, matching the total number for all of 2018. Johnson’s legislation champions cyclist and pedestrian safety, prioritizing their safety over the convenience of cars. It includes provisions to improve public transportation, especially buses, to incentivize its use.
“Giving our streets back to people is good for business, good for the environment, and good for all New Yorkers,” Johnson said in March, referencing his call for more pedestrian plazas, which often shut off some ground previously open to cars.
Over the course of de Blasio’s five-plus years in office, Vision Zero has continued to evolve, including several announcements this year. De Blasio and DOT Commissioner Polly Trottenberg announced a new “Vision Zero action plan” in February to “target the next wave of streets and intersections the City will make safer for pedestrians, cyclists and drivers,” using crash data to target some of the most dangerous streets and intersections for alterations, including different signal timing to give pedestrians a head start before cars are able to move.
“Over the last four years, DOT’s groundbreaking Borough Pedestrian Safety Plans have enabled us to target our resources where they will save the most lives,” Trottenberg said in the February press release. “In these updated plans, we have used the freshest data to identify new crash-prone corridors and intersections most in need of our full menu of safety interventions.”
More recently, thanks in part to new legislation in Albany, the city announced its plans to add hundreds more speed cameras near schools across the five boroughs. And on Monday, de Blasio and Trottenberg announced the formation of the “Better Buses Advisory Group,” which will help the administration plan and execute the “Better Buses Action Plan” “to increase bus speeds by 25% across the five boroughs by the end of 2020.” The action plan includes 300 more “Transit Signal Priority” intersections, automated camera and NYPD enforcement of bus lanes, improvement of five miles of existing bus lanes per year, installation of 10 to 15 miles of new bus lanes per year, piloting “up to two miles of physically separated bus lanes in 2019,” and working with the MTA on bus network redesigns that are underway.
The Johnson bill would require DOT, which oversees Vision Zero, to achieve specific benchmarks for street redesigns, protected bus lanes, protected bicycle lanes, bicycle parking, pedestrian spaces, commercial loading zones, truck routes, and parking. DOT would be held accountable for the status of the implementation of each benchmark on an annual basis.
“Smart street design saves lives. We need to make our streets safer. We need to break the car culture. When we make our streets safer, we make our streets better. We know this, but we’re moving way too slowly,” Johnson said in March.
Breaking “car culture” does not mean completely stopping people from driving, said Marco Conner, interim executive director of Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group in support of the bill. However, “the extent to which our streets are saturated with cars and trucks is not something that we need,” Conner said during an appearance last week on the Max & Murphy podcast. “And so the ideal New York City that I imagine is one where everyone in New York can get around without a car if they have to.”
Mayor de Blasio has not yet expressed approval of Johnson’s plan, instead expressing concerns about some of the bill’s “specifics.” He declined to mention what specifics he found concerning.
“Now we have aggressive plans in our budget to keep changing street designs to make them safer. So I think there’s a lot of agreement on the basics, some of the specifics we have to work through,” de Blasio said on May 10’s Brian Lehrer Show.
“We have a plan out already to aggressively continue to build out bikes lanes, and it’s a very costly plan, but it’s the right thing to do,” de Blasio said during a question and answer session following a press conference on crime statistics. “It also takes time to do these things. So, I think the plan we have now is the right plan.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Transportation declined to provide insights into how the DOT will testify at the hearing, saying the tesimony was still in process.
City Council Member Menchaca’s legislation will also be heard at the hearing. His bill would establish that “bicyclists crossing a roadway at an intersection must follow pedestrian control signals when local law, rule or regulation provides that those signals supersede traffic control signals.” The hearing follows a pilot run by DOT that showed significant reductions in fatalities on some of the city’s most historically dangerous streets.
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by Noah Berman, Gotham Gazette
@GothamGazette
Council Members Yeger, left, and Cabrera, right (photo: John McCarten/City Council)
Significantly more public funding of political campaigns appears on the way given legislation that the City Council Committee on Governmental Operations passed on Tuesday.
The bill, sponsored by Ben Kallos, a Manhattan Democrat, aims to prevent corruption and increase engagement with local communities by adjusting the public matching funds system to allow candidates to raise only relatively small donations and receive enough public money to reach the spending limit in their race.
Though the bill has over 30 sponsors in the 51-seat Council and passed the committee 4-1 on Tuesday, a last-minute amendment to the legislation caused a significant stir, including accusations of impropriety by Comptroller Scott Stringer against City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, both likely mayoral candidates in the next election.
Expected to be passed by the full Council on Thursday, the bill lifts the cap on how much public funding – or taxpayer money – a participating campaign can receive from Campaign Finance Board. The cap, currently set at 75 percent of the spending limit for participating candidates, would rise to 89.9%, effectively making it a full match relative to the spending limit when the private funds involved are also taken into consideration.
The city’s campaign finance system currently has two tracks, “Option A” and “Option B,” that only apply to the 2021 election cycle, before the newer of the two programs takes full hold. That program, “Option A,” includes lower individual donation thresholds and matches the first $250 of individual contributions at an 8-to-1 ratio for a maximum disbursement of $2,000 in public funds per contribution.
These rules are the result of a November 2018 referendum that both raised the disbursement cap and increased the public matching ratio. But it also left in place the old system, which has much higher contribution limits and matches the first $175 of donations at 6-to-1.
Different offices, from citywide posts like mayor and comptroller to borough presidencies to City Council seats, have different donation and spending limits.
The change to individual contribution limits in Option A dropped the maximum donation limit from $5,100 to $2,000 for citywide candidates who opt into that program.
Related to that new donation cap, an amendment to the legislation being passed this week has caused a rift among mayoral candidates and raised eyebrows around city government.
The amendment requires candidates who opt into the new system to return contributions from 2018 that go over the new maximums, which could mean a $3,100 return on each maximum donation for participants.
The November referendum allowed candidates participating in the system to choose between the new rules – with the higher public match but lower contribution limits – and the old rules until 2022, when candidates will have to conform entirely to the new rules to receive public funds. The 2021 city elections are expected to be highly competitive, crowded affairs, with almost all city seats open due to term limits.
Comptroller Scott Stringer, one of several likely mayoral candidates in the upcoming election, would be particularly impacted by the amendment. He’d have to return many thousands of dollars in campaign donations from the past year if he wanted to opt into the new matching system. As first reported by the Daily News, Stringer viewed this amendment as a “brazen power grab” by fellow mayoral candidate and Council Speaker Corey Johnson.
“The voters passed a groundbreaking campaign finance system to clean up government, not corrupt it,” a Stringer spokesperson said. “Speaker Johnson is trying to circumvent the will of the voters and change the rules to benefit himself. The Council should reject his brazen power grab.”
A spokesperson for Johnson reiterated that it’s optional for candidates to return their contributions and said that the amendment was created at the recommendation of the CFB.
“The changes were made at the strong urging of the CFB. Both because of fairness and administrative efficiency,” Jennifer Femino, a spokesperson for Johnson, said. “That said, no contributions made in a prior election cycle will have to be returned. Any candidate who wants to keep their big money donations from the last cycle is free to do so and maintain their edge over the competition.”
Council Member Kallos stressed to Gotham Gazette that not only did the CFB recommend retroactivity because it would then make administration of the program easier, but that Kallos led an extended conversation on changing the bill to include retroactivity during the initial April hearing on the legislation. The amendment wasn’t made until just days before the committee vote, however.
On Tuesday, governmental operations committee member, Keith Powers, a Manhattan Democrat, referenced the Stringer-Johnson rift during the hearing, though he didn’t name either of them. He said he was “certainly sensitive to the concerns that have been raised amongst those who are current candidates that feel this bill has a negative impact on them,” but remained supportive of the bill and voted yes.
There was opposition to the bill at the hearing, from City Council Member Kalman Yeger, a Brooklyn Democrat. He said it disregards what the voters decided with the 2018 referendum and amounts to little besides another big dip into taxpayers’ pockets.
“It doesn’t seem to me that when the voters voted in November, they put an asterisk next to their vote and said, ‘Hey, this is what we’re voting for, but just in case you get a chance, take some more money out of our pockets and do this a little better,’” Yeger said. “I don’t think we got that message. I didn’t get that message, that’s not what I heard. What I heard was, there was a yes/no question, and the yes won.”
Yeger was the sole no in the 4-1 vote, with Council Members Kallos, Powers, Alan Maisel, and committee chair Fernando Cabrera voting to approve. Two committee members were absent from the vote: Council Member Ydanis Rodriguez and Bill Perkins.
The bill now goes to the full Council for a vote on Thursday. If it passes there, it will go to Mayor Bill de Blasio for likely approval.
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by Caitlyn Rosen, Gotham Gazette
@RosenCaitlyn @GothamGazette
(photo: Benjamin Kanter/Mayoral Photo Office)
The 2019 Charter Revision Commission is set to hold one, perhaps two, public meetings to decide on what changes to city governance and elections it will propose to New Yorkers on the November ballot. The first of the potentially two meetings will be Wednesday night at City Hall, where the 15 commissioners, appointed by various local elected officials, will attempt to agree on which proposals to instruct staff to craft ballot questions around.
They are mostly working off of the “preliminary staff report,” published in late April, that narrowed the field of considerations after a series of public and private commission meetings.
But there remain several areas of disagreement, and one commissioner, former City Council Member Sal Albanese, says there’s likely to be spirited debate to hammer out the selection of the final proposals, and the commission may very well need both potential meetings, the second of which would be next week.
One proposal -- ranked-choice voting, also known as instant-runoff voting -- is very likely to make it onto the ballot, Albanese said, nearly confirming what has been apparent as the commission has done its work over the past nine months.
The 2019 Commission was the first ever created through legislation in the New York City Council. Past commissions have been convened by successive mayors, including Mayor Bill de Blasio, who empanelled his own commission in 2018. The mayor’s commission placed three proposals on last year’s November election ballot to expand the city’s campaign finance program, to impose term limits on community board members, and to create a citywide Civic Engagement Commission. All three proposals were overwhelmingly approved by voters.
The mayor’s commission received testimony broadly in support of ranked-choice voting, which allows voters to choose candidates in order of preference. If no candidate crosses a required threshold (say 40 or 50 percent) to claim victory after all ‘first preference’ votes are counted, then the candidate with the fewest first place votes is eliminated and their voters’ second choices are awarded the votes, a process repeated until a winner is crowned.
The system is meant to eliminate costly and laborious runoffs with low turnout, like the ones held for public advocate in 2009 and 2013. But the commission punted on the issue, saying it needed more time to study it, and urged any future commissions to take it up.
The Council-created commission, first spearheaded by Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer and then-Public Advocate Letitia James, includes appointees from the mayor, Council, and borough presidents. It has worked with a longer timeline than de Blasio’s commission and has spent months delving into complicated issues around city governance, land use and planning, budgeting, police accountability, voting, campaign finance, and more. Ranked-choice voting was one of the issues to which it has paid significant attention.
When the commission released its preliminary staff report in April with detailed recommendations for possible amendments to the City Charter culled from the four focus areas that informed the commission’s public hearings: elections, governance, finance, and land use, there were also several proposals categorized as best left off of future consideration.
The 80-page report narrowed down more than 300 proposals that the commission heard, and made two dozen recommendations to the commissioners. It’s not likely that all of those proposals will advance.
At Wednesday’s hearing (and potentially the second one), the commissioners will determine what will be included in the final report as ballot questions. The commission will then pass a resolution to direct staff to prepare the report, which will then have to be approved by a majority of the commissioners.
Since the preliminary staff report was released, the commission has also held another round of public hearings, one in each borough. The Manhattan hearing focused primarily on the city’s land use process, city planning, and neighborhood rezonings. The staff report had recommended consideration of giving borough presidents and community boards a slightly greater say in how land use rezonings are approved, and had also suggested creating a more coherent process of long-term planning for the city by combining several disparate processes and planning-related documents -- but the staff did not recommend further consideration of possibly suggestion the requirement of a comprehensive city plan, something a coalition of advocates and elected officials has pushed.
The measures the staff did recommend advancing received general support from the public, members of community boards, and from elected officials. There was also testimony in support of ranked-choice voting, creating a rainy day fund for city budgeting, and creating chief diversity officers (a proposal spearheaded by Comptroller Scott Stringer) at city agencies under one new CDO in the mayor’s office.
The hearing in the Bronx also saw support for ranked-choice voting and land use reform, but most of those who testified came out to push for strengthening the Civilian Complaint Review Board, the independent city entity that monitors and investigates complaints of abuse of power and misconduct by police officers. Some called for a popularly elected CCRB, instead of the current structure where CCRB members are appointed by elected officials, mostly the mayor.
The commission is set to meet Wednesday, JUne 12, to debate the final proposals, and has tentatively planned to hold another hearing on June 18. JoAnne Wasserman, a spokesperson for the commission, said the chair, Gail Benjamin, was unlikely to comment prior to the Wednesday meeting.
“I’m expecting two meetings because I believe that there’ll be extensive debate on a number of issues,” said Albanese in a phone interview, arguing that two hearings would also allow the public to gain a better understanding of how the commissioners will arrive at their final vote.
“I think one of the areas that we seem to have general consensus on is ranked-choice voting,” he added. Though he said there might be debate on how it should be implemented -- whether it applies to primary and special elections or general elections as well, and for which offices -- he was certain that it would be included in some form as a ballot question.
Alex Camarda, senior policy advisor at Reinvent Albany, a good government group, was glad the commission appears to be moving ahead on ranked-choice voting. “Establishing ranked-choice voting for primary and special elections could be very significant,” he said in a brief phone interview, “if it was done for all offices.”
The commission may also look at additional ballot proposals that weren’t included in the preliminary staff proposals.
“The report that the staff put together is not necessarily going to be abided by,” said Albanese, the commission appointee of Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams in part for Albanese’s campaign finance reform advocacy, noting that the preliminary staff report is not “the final word” and the commissioners have the authority to go beyond it. For his turn, he intends to continue pushing for a five-year ban on lobbying for all former elected officials and for “democracy vouchers,” which would transform the city’s campaign finance program by giving all New Yorkers an equitable amount of money to donate to campaigns.
He said, though, that the elected CCRB proposal seems certain to fail. “It’s not that it’s controversial, I think a lot of people think it’s just not workable,” he said. “I could be wrong but that’s the consensus that I hear across my conversations with other commissioners.”
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette