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Experts Point to Anxiety, Short-Sightedness and Political Climate in Amazon Deal Demise


Amazon deal New York announcement

Announcing the Amazon deal that later fell apart (photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)


Current and former city officials and veteran city planners met Monday night to discuss the interplay of politics and policy in the notorious demise of the plan to site an Amazon campus in Long Island City.

A central theme of the panel discussion, hosted by the Urban Land Institute in midtown Manhattan, was the balance the city must strike between articulating and acting on its long-term need for growth and the experiences of people immediately impacted by development.

How the dynamics of those relationships played out in the lifecycle of the Amazon deal was the source of regret and reflection amongst the panel participants, all of whom presented views in support of the tech giant’s migration to New York.

Entitled “Does Amazon Signal the End of a Pro-Growth Political Climate in NYC?,” the discussion occurred before an audience of many urbanists, developers, and architects; and featured James Patchett, president and CEO of the city’s Economic Development Corporation; Carl Weisbrod, former chair of the City Planning Commission; Vishaan Chakrabarti, an architect who oversaw the Manhattan office of the Department of City Planning in the early 2000s; and Kathryn Wylde, president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City, who served as moderator.

The conversation had an air of familiarity -- the result, for the most part, of decades working at the center of New York City development efforts. While all four participants agreed that continued growth is a necessity and the Amazon campus was a lost opportunity, there were nuanced opinions on whether growth is inevitable in a city as big and diverse as New York, and what the political climate has to do with it.

As they agreed on the need for growth, the panelists also agreed populist opposition to economic development projects around the city has shown that the city needs to do a better job communicating the benefits of those projects to the city as a whole.

“We do have a process problem,” Chakrabarti said. “Process is important and I think that people needed to feel like things weren’t happening in some backroom deal.”

Shortly before Amazon announced its plan to move to Queens last November, Crain’s reported that the state intended to circumvent the city’s land use review process, which gives deference to local City Council members and incorporates a lengthy public process. Days later, Amazon announced it would come to New York, triggering a backlash to the project, expressed largely by a core of progressive politicians and advocates expressing a range of criticisms about Amazon as a company, as well as the deal and the process that led to it.

“I think it's less what we -- we meaning the city and state governments -- did wrong than the times that we are in, in New York,” said Weisbrod, who after decades mostly in city government is now a consultant. “And I do think we all know we're in a period, on one hand, of extraordinary success in New York, and at the same time that success has created a lot of anxiety among a lot of people.”

Patchett, who was intimately involved in wooing Amazon to the city, expanded on the idea of an emerging psychology of anxiety around growth as opposed to stagnation, remarking that the city is experiencing “a moment in time when we're having a lot of growth -- we're not in a recession. So it feels like what we have today, we don't need to be as worried about what we might have tomorrow.”

“We have a youngish population who has experienced brutal housing prices and a congested subway system, who really have no memory or inkling of a time when this city was against the ropes,” added Chakrabarti, who helped lead post-9/11 economic recovery efforts, a bit later in the program. “And it's really hard to explain to people that that could and will happen again, probably at some point for some shock we don't know about sitting here today, and that those 25,000 jobs and the multiplier effects it would have had would help insulate us against that future shock.”

For Weisbrod, who has been a fixture in New York City urban development projects since the 1970s, this represents a “fundamental change” in the conversation. “We've always been a city that has, irrespective of political ideology, sort of implicitly if not explicitly recognized that we have to grow, not only for growth's sake, but because we are a city that provides more in the way of social benefits to our residents than any other city in the country.”

Because of the particularities of New York City -- it’s incorporation of five counties rather than being a part of a single one, its commitment to providing broad social services, and the lack of federal contributions to the tax base -- “we are increasingly dependent on our own ability to generate revenue,” Weisbrod added.

Another shift in the public dialogue, revealed by opposition to Amazon moving to a so-called outer borough, has to do with location.

“For 50 years at least...the city has had an economic development strategy of diversifying and dispersing jobs outside of the Manhattan core,” said Weisbrod. “And the irony is that this resistance to 25,000 jobs, however narrow-minded that resistance was, is the kind of resistance that took place because this was an effort to further the city's economic development policy, not simply in terms of tech, but also in terms of geography.”

Wylde challenged the panel to consider whether the problem had as much to do with the city’s approach to the deal -- especially its ability to engage with community stakeholders -- as the evening’s conversation suggested.

“Do we really think that this would have happened if it wasn't the biggest corporation, run by the richest man in the world, after the 2018 primary election?” she asked, with apparent reference to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s upset victory over Joe Crowley in last year’s congressional primary, representing a Queens and Bronx district.

For Chakrabarti, it is a combination of the political moment’s hostility toward “big corporate” and local anxieties Weisbrod referred to. “It's really hard to extricate that because people were taking advantage of those anxieties in order to make their political point,” he said.

During a question-and-answer session, one audience member disagreed with the thrust of the conversation. The spectator told the panel, “I'm a little disturbed by the attitude that I hear from the EDC and also the Mayor that the primary problems involved in this were around communication, Amazon not being willing to work with the city, the national climate, and not really lending a lot of credence to people's opposition, that either for a large number of people this would negatively impact their lives or at very least they have very few mechanisms for pushing back at the way the city is transforming around them.”

According to Patchett, of the EDC, two-thirds of New Yorkers thought the Amazon deal would be good for the city, including more than 70 percent of Queens residents. “But that is not to undermine the very legitimate concerns that people had about this case” and about growth in general, he told the audience. “That's not just a feeling, that's a reality for a lot of people.”

But for the panel of city planners and economic development experts with pro-growth lenses, the look back at the Amazon deal was more of a post-mortem than an assessment of local concerns.

“I sort of have a sense like I’m at a memorial service here,” Weisbrod said at the outset.

***
by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

Read more by this writer.

De Blasio's Budget Savings Plan Contains Few Real Efficiencies, Experts Say


Mayor de Blasio city budget executive plan

Mayor de Blasio (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)


Mayor Bill de Blasio’s much-touted budget savings program is not what he has made it seem.

After rapidly growing the budget over his first five years in office and resisting calls to find significant efficiencies at city agencies, de Blasio this year instituted his first “program to eliminate the gap,” or PEG, to achieve hundreds of millions of dollars in “savings.” But though the mayor boasted at his executive budget presentation of $916 million in identified savings over the current and next fiscal years -- including $629 million in agency PEG savings -- his budget has little by way of true city agency cuts to existing spending.

The mayor’s spendthrift approach has led to a $20 billion increase in the city budget since he took power, while savings and rainy day funds, though solid, have remained below optimal levels, according to budget experts. Exceedingly good economic times have allowed the mayor to spend somewhat lavishly on programs and personnel without having to make many tough decisions about cuts.

The city is also maintaining about $5.72 billion in reserves each year, though the mayor has not added to them this year and the City Council is pushing for an additional $250 million infusion.

The mayor’s latest spending plan, a whopping $92.5 billion executive budget proposal for the 2020 fiscal year, is no exception to his spending growth trend. And as de Blasio touts new savings, fiscal watchdogs are casting doubts and poking holes.

One in particular, Citizens Budget Commission, says city budget officials are misclassifying savings, passing off re-estimated spending and cost shifts as efficiencies at city agencies.

Instituting a targeted PEG for the first time this year, de Blasio required city agencies to make specific spending reductions through various means -- efficiencies, re-estimates of spending and revenue, and service reductions. The mandated PEG, with target amounts for each agency set by the mayor’s budget office, came after years of the administration relying on a Citywide Savings Plan, which had agencies offer voluntary savings, re-estimates, and revenue-raising ideas.

All told, the mayor’s executive budget estimated the $916 million in savings between fiscal years 2019 ($419 millions) and 2020 ($496 million). An analysis by Citizens Budget Commission, a nonprofit fiscal watchdog, of the overall savings plan shows that for 2020 the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget identified about 62.5% of the savings from what it classified as agency efficiencies.

Melanie Hartzog, the director of the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget, in testimony before the City Council at a budget hearing last month, stressed the “high levels of efficiency savings” at city agencies that were found through the PEG. That included service reduction for the first time under de Blasio.

“In Fiscal Year 2020, the first full year impacted by the PEG, efficiencies account for two-thirds of the savings. To achieve these savings agencies streamlined and improved practices, yet maintained service levels,” she said.

But CBC’s analysis shows that the estimate of efficiencies in the executive budget savings plan may be overblown. Agency efficiencies in fiscal year 2020 only accounted for about 20.77% of the savings, while re-estimates and funding shifts accounted for the bulk, about 66.4%, according to the analysis, performed by CBC’s Riley Edwards.

City Council Member Daniel Dromm, chair of the finance committee, echoed CBC’s concerns about finding true efficiencies at last month’s budget hearing, saying the Council “is struggling to understand the purpose of the PEG.” He noted, as CBC pointed out, that the PEG and savings plan together did not find sufficient efficiencies or recurring savings at agencies. He noted that PEGs are supposed to force administrations to find “true efficiencies and recurring savings.”

Dromm pointed out that the mayor has typically relied on the voluntary CSP instead of a PEG, during a period of healthy growth and positive economic conditions.

“Since the implementation of that program, the Council has been urging the administration to search for savings more rigorously because the majority of the program consisted of accruals, re-estimates, and increased revenue projections that would have occurred even in the absence of a savings program,” Dromm added. “So, when the administration announced a mandatory PEG this year, the Council was hopeful that the mayor was finally getting serious about reining in inefficient spending. Unfortunately, the result of the PEG is just more of the same.”

CBC experts point out that certain categories of savings that OMB classifies as efficiencies aren’t truly that, including swaps where state or federal funds are used in place of city funds or the hiring freeze that OMB says saved about $116 million across fiscal years 2019 and 2020. According to OMB, the hiring freeze involves permanently taking down 1,600 positions in the executive budget (many are currently filled and will be eliminated when they become vacant without affecting agency performance) after 1,000 vacancies were already eliminated in November. The freeze reduced net planned headcount growth this year for the first time under de Blasio and is meant to create savings every year till 2023.

“Because we’re dealing with positions that are already vacant, we consider that a re-estimate rather than an efficiency,” said CBC’s Edwards, in a phone interview.

CBC director of city studies Ana Champeny said this savings plan has largely been a “continuation” of past years’ plans. “There was a change in their approach in setting the targets for the agencies but they still haven’t delivered substantially more efficiency savings,” she said. According to CBC, these could be achieved through redesigning programs and shrinking or eliminating inefficient ones, as the mayor did by eliminating Extended Time Learning at Renewal and RISE schools; by using technology to improve operations; sharing resources across agencies; finding alternative service providers within or outside the public sector; and strengthening centralized management of cross-agency operations.

Champeny said the city should not stop looking for savings through re-estimates or funding shifts, which are “routine budget management that you would expect every administration to be doing. Our criticism is that there should be more PEG savings, more efficiency savings in addition to this routine budget and fiscal management.”

Ideally, efficiency savings in one year would equal about one percent of the city-funded budget, she said. “That’s about $700 million in one year, not across two years,” she said.

Nicole Gelinas, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a think tank, concurred. “I think the PEG is pretty superficial in the context of this larger budget,” she said, noting that the executive budget increases overall agency spending by about $1.4 billion compared to the mayor’s initial proposal released in January, allowed by higher revenues than earlier projections. Those higher revenues “are giving them some room to increase spending while sticking to this narrative of savings,” she said. “Overall, agency spending is not shrinking by any means. It would be hard to call this an austerity program.”

“It would be good if agency spending pretty much kept pace with inflation, going up 1.5-2% a year,” she said.

Budget watchdogs have also repeatedly urged the administration to find long-term recurring savings rather than temporary ones. Gelinas pointed out that hiring freezes, in particular, “don’t last forever” as a source of savings.

“It’s kind of superficial because the mayor has increased hiring by so much already that it’s kinda time for a pause,” she said. “Hiring freezes are not very good management. This is the same problem at the MTA. If you need a new person to do something, you should hire that person. If there’s something that the government is doing that it shouldn’t be doing anymore, repurpose that person. But just a sort of general hiring freeze oftentimes means positions that should be filled aren’t being filled. So it’s kind of the opposite of efficient.” 

De Blasio has overseen a large increase in the city workforce, from about 297,000 employees when he took office to roughly 332,000 now. Still, he has budgeted for many more positions at various agencies that have gone unfilled each year, with many of those now “frozen” and the act of keeping them empty being counted toward savings.

OMB spokesperson Michael Greenberg said in a statement Tuesday, “Our aggressive approach helped us meet ongoing, fundamental needs, and balance the budget. We will continue to find ways to save money for New Yorkers in future financial plans.”

In a Thursday statement, after this article was published, Greenberg pushed back against the criticism from Gelinas and CBC. "The 2,600 positions we have permanently eliminated since November will lead to hundreds of millions of dollars in savings, much of it recurring annually, and agencies will provide the same level of service with fewer employees. Despite what others might say, this is the actual definition of 'efficiency savings,'" he said. 

Short of creating more efficiencies, the city risks major service reductions should an economic downturn set in. Even without a downturn, the city faces a budget gap of $3.5 billion in 2021 and $3 billion annually in the years after, according to its own documents. While those numbers are manageable and fairly typical, they become much more concerning if there is a recession.

“A recession could easily double or triple these out-year budget gaps that we already need to fill,” Champeny said. “Right now you have the ability to take the time and do a careful analysis of where you can make efficiency changes or improve your processes whereas if you’re cutting during a recession, you’re sometimes looking for quick savings and you’re not as precise and you’re going to have more negative impacts in services reduction.”

Gelinas added, “The city always depends on revenues coming in higher than expected and then because it says it conservatively budgeted, it has these extra revenues. So these budget deficits basically disappear. But that only happens if the city’s economy is doing well. If we do fall into a recession...then suddenly these are real deficits so you’d need a lot more than a billion dollars in savings in two years. So that’s when you really start to see layoffs and service cuts.”

***
by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

Read more by this writer.

Note - This article has been updated with additional details about the administration's partial hiring freeze. 

Note - This article has been updated with additional comment from OMB spokesperson Michael Greenberg. 

Former City Taxi Commissioner on Regulating the App Companies and Saving the Yellows


Meera Joshi taxis

Meera Joshi, right, at a rally (photo: Benjamin Kanter/Mayor's Office)


Meera Joshi’s five-year tenure as the head of the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission coincided with a tumultuous time for the industry she was tasked with overseeing and regulating. Joshi, who left the de Blasio administration in March, joined the What’s The [Data] Point? podcast from Citizens Budget Commission and Gotham Gazette to discuss her tenure, the taxi industry and key steps she spearheaded to regulate it, and what’s next for app-based for-hire vehicle companies like Uber and Lyft.

The introduction and explosion of those ride-hailing apps has shaken the overall for-hire vehicle industry, disrupting the traditional taxi sector in New York City and beyond, and creating new challenges in terms of street congestion, driver working conditions, and more. In two years, the number of for-hire vehicles in New York City grew 59% and they now outnumber yellow and green taxi cabs my many thousands, having surpassed taxis in 2017, according to TLC data. As of last year, there weree 13,587 licensed yellow cabs in the city, along with 3,570 green cabs, and 107,435 app-based for-hire vehicles.

At the same time, the value of taxi cab medallions has depreciated from a peak over $1 million to $175,000, leading to financial hardship and even suicide, and questions about a government bailout.

On the podcast, Joshi discussed the challenges of regulating an emerging business model while also attending to the decline of another, as well as other issues that came up during her tenure as chair and CEO of the Taxi and Limousine Commission, a position she was appointed to in 2014 by Mayor Bill de Blasio. Joshi had served under the pior TLC commissioner and also held positions at the city’s Department of Investigation and with its police oversight body, the Civilian Complaint Review Board.

During Joshi’s five years leading the TLC, the de Blasio administration, at times working with the City Council, sought to be aggressive in response to the industry disruption posed by Uber and Lyft.

Under her and de Blasio’s leadership, the city made a failed attempt to extend some regulations to the for-hire apps in 2015, when the companies were smaller, losing a battle over placing a cap on the number of new cars that could be licensed after a high-profile battle with the companies and their supporters. The Taxi and Limousine Commission did mandate that larger app-baseds companies share trip data with the city, taking a significant step toward understanding how the emerging sector was influencing traffic and travel patterns in the city.

The city wound up getting the cap in 2018, while also creating sweeping new pay protection for for-hire drivers. New York City was the first municipality in the country to take the series of actions, leading to significant changes for both the companies, their traditional taxi competitors, and the city’s transit scene.

“In New York City, we have a good history of data-driven policy,” Joshi said on the podcast. She pointed out that taxi cabs have been tracked in great detail since 2007. The city Department of Transportation uses that information to understand traffic flow and the TLC uses it to make driver protection, licensing, and other regulations. The city’s mandate that app-based taxis share trip data followed this precedent and allows for similar data-driven policy, according to Joshi.

In what would become the final months of her tenure, New York City rolled out several new regulations that have impacted the app companies.

Last year, the City Council, with the blessing of Mayor de Blasio, voted for a one-year cap on new for-hire vehicle licenses, unless for wheelchair accessible cars, and mandated a minimum wage of $17.22 per hour for rideshare drivers. It also empowered the TLC to set minimum pay rates. These actions enabled the TLC to study the impact of ride-hail apps on the city’s congestion, among other dynamics. Uber and Lyft have opposed these legislative and regulatory actions.

The city’s recent actions have come under legal scrutiny since they were announced, but the city has prevailed when legal challenges have been filed and the cases have been closed. “This is an industry that is very litigious,” Joshi admitted.

New state congestion charges for taxis ($2.50) and rideshare vehicles ($2.75) were ruled to be legal by a New York judge in February. This month, another judge upheld the new minimum wage rates against challenges from Lyft and Juno. However, the app companies’ lawsuit against the one-year cap is still ongoing.

The new regulations are having clear effects. In April, Uber and Lyft both stopped accepting new driver applications, perhaps because of the new utilization rate structure and wage minimums, not to mention the vehicle license cap. The utilization rate structure effectively penalizes rideshare companies for having a large number of drivers on the road at the same time who are not moving passengers.

During the interview, Joshi explained that “40% of every hour the app drivers that are on the road don’t have passengers. The driver pay rules try to address that balance in a way that works off of incentives and penalties. You’re going to have to pay more if you can’t keep your drivers busy,” she said. She pointed to the April announcements from Uber and Lyft as being “great news” for existing drivers, because they are the ones most hurt by oversaturation.

Joshi also believes the move was “a good example of where regulation and the market worked together,” where “the regulation is aimed at the problem and the reaction came from the companies.” This was the main goal of the policy, according to Joshi, who said “closing the pool is what we really wanted to get at.”

On May 8, some app-based drivers in New York and other cities across the country went on strike in protest of low wages and low quality of life at work, though some in New York hailed the city’s new laws and said they were striking in solidarity with drivers elsewhere and against the companies more generally. This came just ahead of Uber’s initial public offering (IPO) of stock. The New York Taxi Workers Associations coordinated the strike in New York City.

Despite her criticisms of ridesharing apps, Joshi also recognized the benefits that the industry had for the city. She said that “this is a good service, a popular service filling a void.” According to Joshi, the boroughs outside Manhattan have seen the biggest benefit from the apps and the effect on those areas “was the concern when the cap legislation was passed.”

However, Joshi also said that TLC data has shown “that there is still continuous growth” in mobility in boroughs other than Manhattan through the apps, which she attributes to the “built-in excess in the business model.”

While Joshi oversaw these new regulations and implemented them in the face of opposition from the major companies, she has also been criticized for negative consequences that the growth of these apps, including the falling value of taxi cab medallions and wages for taxi drivers, to the increased stress and suicide rates of drivers.

When asked why she is not in favor of a bailout for taxi medallion owners, Joshi said that “the problem stems from the loan,” pointing out that taxis earn profits when they are on the road and saying that banks were irresponsible in their lending.

“So many of these taxi medallions have outsized loans attached to them because the price was inflated,” comparing the situation to the housing bubble of the late 2000s. She believes that a bailout would primarily benefit the banks who offered loans for taxi drivers to acquire the medallions, saying, “I don’t know if the individual owner is better off, because they still may owe a tremendous amount of money to the banks.”

Joshi believes that banks “are going to have to write [the loans] down anyway” and “resize them for what they’re selling for now, because they have to take the loss and they might as well keep the borrower.”

As Joshi moves on to a position at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Policy as a visiting scholar and a policy advisor at Remix, the debat eover the future of the taxi industry in New York City continues, with some of her moves hailed as major progress to help save the yellow taxis and improve the lives of drivers of those and other for-hire vehicles, while others say the city has not acted quickly or aggressively enough to help taxi medallion owners, for-hire vehicle drivers, and others.

Inarguably, New York City was the first U.S. city to effectively increase regulation of the app-based for-hire vehicle companies, despite significant opposition from the industry.

Additionally, TLC was one of the agencies responsible for implementing Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Vision Zero street safety program. Fatalities involving TLC vehicles dropped 50% during Joshi’s tenure. Lastly, Joshi has been credited with overseeing an increase in wheelchair-accessible vehicle availability.

[Listen to the full conversation: What's The [Data} Point? with former Taxi Commissioner Meera Joshi]

***
by Andrew Millman, Gotham Gazette
   

Read more by this writer.

Ben Max contributed to this story.



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