32BJ's Hector Figueroa, with Mayor de Blasio and others (photo: @32BJSEIU)
Mayor Bill de Blasio on Thursday continued his eleventh-hour push for the ballot proposals put forth by his Charter Revision Commission, with a rally at the headquarters of labor union 32BJ SEIU, where he was joined by other unions, elected officials, and advocates in favor of the three reforms that will appear on New York City voters’ ballots on Election Day.
De Blasio, who announced the commission in his 2018 State of the City address to examine and propose revisions to the city’s charter, characterizes the three proposals as ones that will strengthen democracy in New York City. Broadly speaking, though each has numerous accompanying details, the proposals are to lower individual campaign contribution limits and increase the public match ratio; create a civic engagement commission that would run a citywide participatory budgeting program and do other tasks to promote civic involvement; and, most controversially, term limits for community board members and other changes to the community board membership process.
After saying virtually nothing about them for weeks, the mayor has been on something of a last-minute whirlwind tour in favor of the proposals. On Sunday, the mayor stumped for them at two Manhattan churches. On Tuesday, he conducted a telephone town hall and published an op-ed in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle supporting the measures. He and his team have been urging allies, including Senator Bernie Sanders, to promote “yes” votes, and the mayor’s social media feeds have been promoting the measures and expressions of support for them.
The Thursday rally, backed by the “Democracy Yes” coalition of unions, advocates, good government groups, and community groups that support the proposals, is the latest in de Blasio’s campaign sweep through the city in favor of the charter revisions.
The mayor and the assembled crowd characterized the measures as a way to wrest control of the democratic process away from old, wealthy, white men and towards more democratic control and greater representation for young people, people of color, immigrants, and low-income people.
“If what young people hear from everyone else around them is, ‘wait your turn,’ that is not a way to create a healthier, stronger democracy,” de Blasio said, referencing opposition to the community board term limit proposal. Critics say term limits would lead to a brain drain on community boards to the benefit of real estate developers, though the real estate lobby itself is against term limits. The proposal would limit members to four consectuve two-year terms, but those term-limited from reapplying would only have to sit out one two-year term before being eligible for reappointment by their borough president.
The borough presidents, aside from Brooklyn’s Eric Adams, and Comptroller Scott Stringer (the former Manhattan borough president) have led the charge against Proposal 3.
“Our message needs to be the opposite,” the mayor continued.
“Imagine if the system was not rigged against everyday people, but actually strengthened the hand of everyday New Yorkers so we could lead our own city,” de Blasio said.
The Rev. Al Sharpton also spoke in favor of all three proposals, making racial justice arguments and calling the measures models for the country and bulwarks against voter suppression nationwide, invoking the memory of civil rights movement protesters.
“These measures that we’re voting in New York is what they fought for to give us the right to vote,” Sharpton said. “They did not fight, and some die, to give us the right to vote for only people with rich friends to be able to run for office.”
The city’s public campaign financing system, whereby the first or up to $175 of a donation is matched 6-to-1 by public dollars, is often considered a model for the nation for how to achieve sustainable public financing of campaigns. Proposal 1 would increase the match to 8-to-1, and match donations up to $250. It would also lower campaign contribution limits for all city offices. Advocates say that it would allow more people to run for office and lower prospective candidates’ reliance on wealthy people for funding.
“When we consider running for office, we encounter barriers so difficult to overcome, many feel defeated,” said Hercules Reid, the former student government president at the New York City College of Technology and current legislative director for the CUNY University Student Senate. “It is a herculean task trying to get elected in this city.”
“Barriers to office are real, and a real big one is that not a lot of us know a ton of rich people,” Reid continued. De Blasio later echoed this point, though the mayor has raised significant funds from large donors, both for his election campaigns and outside groups. It was fundraising for those outside groups -- nonprofit advocacy organizations -- that led to investigations of de Blasio and his associates that resulted in no criminal charges but sharp criticism from law enforcement leaders and good government advocates, among others, as well as new city laws meant to curb the type of fundraising de Blasio did.
The second ballot question would establish a “civic engagement commission” to increase participation in New York’s civic life, including voting. The mayor noted improving translation services at the polls as a particularly important item for the commission to take up, while City Council Member Brad Lander discussed increasing community engagement with and knowledge of community boards, PTAs, and other institutions. The most significant job of the commission, however, would be to expand participatory budgeting citywide.
Practiced in 31 of the 51 City Council districts this year, participatory budgeting allows community residents to suggest and vote on specific projects within their districts that they would like to fund with tax dollars allocated through the local Council member’s capital funds.
“A little over half the city now has it, but almost half does not, and most New Yorkers don’t yet know about it, because we’ve not been able to invest real citywide resources in it,” Lander said. “Participatory budgeting functions like a gateway drug to democracy.” Some projects funded in Lander’s district in the last cycle include replacing “derelict Kindergarten sinks at PS 282,” replacing a broken gate at the PS 118 schoolyard to make it accessible, and building a “playground” for seniors.
Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer and Comptroller Stringer both take issue with the civic engagement commission, which Stringer characterizes as a power grab by the mayor, who would appoint a majority of its members. Brewer, who has formed an independent expenditure committee in opposition to questions 2 and 3, asserts that the commission’s outreach and assistance efforts with community boards would be an encroachment by the mayor on a duty typically performed by borough presidents.
“A ‘Civic Engagement Commission’ controlled by any Mayor also puts communities at a disadvantage and won’t enhance democracy in our neighborhoods,” Stringer said in a statement released soon after the mayor’s rally. Asked for a response, de Blasio said that the commission’s structure as proposed is “organized for effectiveness” but didn’t elaborate, and noted that he supports a “professionalized” Board of Elections.
On the third and most controversial proposal, which is centered on term limits for community board members, the mayor and advocates claim that term limits have been successful for elected city officials, and instituting them for community boards would free up space for new voices where older and whiter ones than the communities they represent typically reign. The proposal would also require borough presidents to seek people of “diverse backgrounds” for appointments, to make the boards more accurately represent their communities, and provide more public information.
“If the door’s not open, that’s not democracy,” de Blasio said. “Community boards have to be for everyone, every community, every background, young, old, everyone needs a chance to serve. Term limits for community boards is simply the way of saying ‘let’s give everyone a chance to participate.’”
Opponents of term limits, such as Brewer and Stringer, have charged that an exodus of longtime, experienced community board members would cause both a brain drain and a diminution of influence on complex land use decisions, allowing developers to run roughshod over them.
“It would have the effect of allowing developers and their lawyers—who are never term limited!—to dominate development negotiations, because those long-time members will be gone,” Brewer wrote in an email to supporters in October signaling her opposition to Questions 2 and 3. “And on long-term city projects like street redesign or sustainability, newly-appointed community board members would have little influence over long-term projects. Every Board’s institutional memory would be wiped out.”
De Blasio did not buy the arguments. “I have term limits, my colleagues in the City Council have term limits, the President of the United States has term limits,” he said. “I think there’s something healthy about the notion that all public servants have an opportunity to turn over the reins once in a while.”
“Let’s say someone served for 20 years on their community board,” he continued. “Under this ballot measure, they will get to serve another eight years, they would take a two year break, and if they wanted to come back and there was a seat, they could have that seat. I think there will be plenty of institutional knowledge preserved. But honestly, what we’re missing right now is new voices, we’re missing diversity, we’re missing young people.”
Another charter revision commission, empaneled by the City Council through legislation pushed by Brewer and Public Advocate Letitia James, started while the mayor’s commission was underway and is working to produce its own ballot measures for 2019. The mayor told Gotham Gazette that the commissions are not rivaling each other, and that his office is working with the 2019 commission, on which he has several appointees.
Some issues were considered and rejected by the mayor’s commission, including independent redistricting of City Council districts and ranked-choice voting. The mayor told Gotham Gazette that he hopes the 2019 commission continues looking into ranked-choice voting, in particular.
“There was a very vibrant discussion in this charter revision commission, for example, about ranked-choice voting,” he said. “For me, the jury’s still out on ranked-choice voting. I grew up with it, in Massachusetts. I think it has strengths and I think it has weaknesses, and I’d certainly like to see a lot more research on it. But there’s a lot of people who believe it might be very beneficial in New York City. That’s the kind of thing that deserves a really thorough airing of all the facts.”
***
by Ben Brachfeld, Gotham Gazette
@GothamGazette
Veterans Services Commissioner Loree Sutton, middle (photo: Emil Cohen/City Council)
The New York City Council’s Committee on Veterans met Monday to discuss a bill that would require the city’s Department of Veterans Services to release an annual report detailing certain information about its work to help the city’s military veterans, including the number of its employees and types services it is providing.
The chair of the committee, Council Member Chaim Deutsch, a Brooklyn Democrat, advocated for the bill, Intro. 1118, as a necessary step toward better understanding of what DVS is doing and what may be needed to improve services for veterans. However, DVS Commissioner Loree Sutton suggested that an additional report would be redundant, as DVS is already required to give a report to the committee under law (Local Law 23 of 2015, introduced by Council Member Paul Vallone, a Queens Democrat) and it also takes part in the Mayor’s Management Report, which gives detailed accounts of city agencies and their effectiveness.
“Currently, City budget documents and the MMR include most of the information sought through Intro. 1118,” Sutton said. “While DVS looks forward to continued collaboration with the City Council concerning DVS personnel and performance metrics, we are confident that these aims can be best achieved through existing reporting mechanisms.”
The bill would specifically ask for the title of and services provided by each employee, as well as the number of veterans and families to whom services had been provided and how they learned about the services.
Most of this information is indeed available elsewhere. The Mayor’s Management Report gives a summary of the services provided by DVS, the number of veterans and their families engaged by DVS and the number of them given assistance. When it comes to DVS employees and their titles, those can be found on the department’s website. However, this leaves questions concerning how the veterans and their families learned about services provided by the department and what services each employee specifically provides unanswered.
While Sutton believes any additional information should simply be added to the current required report, Deutsch said the bill is an important step forward.
“I think that this bill is a step forward to receiving the information that we need and we deserve and the veterans deserve,” Deutsch said. “And this way we can better continue to understand what the issues are and how we could better implement [solutions in] some of the areas that need improvement.”
After discussion between Deutsch and Sutton, the committee allowed advocates to voice their views.
President and Founding Director of NYC Veterans Alliance Kristen Rouse said the bill does not require enough reporting on the part of DVS.
“We state our strong support for this committee providing oversight of the services provided to veterans and their families by DVS and other city agencies, programs, and funding,” Rouse said. “We are, however, uncertain of whether Intro. 1118 or other recent bill proposals will effectively accomplish the oversight and accountability that our community has called for and deserves.”
Rouse went on to mention that the information DVS provided the committee under Local Law 23 had not yet been made publicly available, and that even better than the proposed bill would be “for this committee to examine ways it can further empower DVS to accomplish its mission.” Asking for the report to be made public, better tracking of services provided by DVS through VetConnect, and the creation of an Agency Chief Contracting Officer to manage city contracts for veterans services, Rouse proposed multiple reforms to which Deutsch responded, “we’ll have the committee get back to you.”
Director of the Veteran Advocacy Project Coco Culhane said her organization “supports the introduction of Local Law 1118 and believes that DVS reporting on even more figures than they already do will benefit the entire community.”
Senior Veteran Transition Manager of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America Vadim Panasyuk noted the redundancy of the bill Sutton alluded to earlier, suggesting that different metrics should be used to better evaluate DVS.
“IAVA supports the intent behind this bill,” Panasyuk said. “However, it appears that it is somewhat redundant as some of the data is already available, and does not require the reporting of necessary metrics to accurately evaluate this department’s performance and many of its various initiatives.”
Panasyuk would like to see more qualitative data used in conjunction with “organizational and programmatic” metrics in order to better understand the population being served by DVS and the needs of that population.
Another adjustment to the bill was suggested by Vallone, who said it was “critical” that they incorporate a requirement for DVS to distinguish in reports which veterans found them through sister agencies and which came directly to them.
Ashton Stewart, coordinator with SAGE Vets Program, an LGBT veterans advocacy group, also requested a more detailed report. “This bill is just a start of the reporting, we need to start from somewhere,” Deutsch said.
Earlier in the hearing, other topics were discussed as part of oversight by the committee. Deutsch expressed concern over a decrease in applications for and awards of vending licenses to veterans, and inquired about why significantly more veterans where using federal housing vouchers in the Bronx than any other borough. Sutton commented on the delay of federal GI Bill housing allowances for student veterans, noting that DVS would collaborate with the Department of Social Services to attempt to allocate resources towards supporting students negatively affected by the delays.
***
by Victor Porcelli, Gotham Gazette
@GothamGazette
Sayu Bhojwani (photo: Sean Zanni)
On the same day the planes struck the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Sayu Bhojwani cast her first ever ballot in an American election.
It was a series of strange coincidences for Bhojwani: a newly naturalized citizen voting for the first time, a tragic event triggering a hostile and xenophobic environment for many immigrant communities in New York, and a referendum on the ballot that fateful Tuesday that would establish an Office for Immigrant Affairs in the city Charter – the very office Mayor Michael Bloomberg would appoint her to helm as the first commissioner just six months later.
“Had I been appointed commissioner a year earlier, before September 11, it would have felt very different,” said Bhojwani, 51, at a recent press conference with NYU journalism students. An Indian immigrant from Belize, she first arrived in the U.S. at age 17 for college. “The symbolism of someone from my community being in that position was far more important than I realized to the community,” she said.
Bhojwani has been busy in the 14 years since her two-year stint as the commissioner of the Office of Immigrant Affairs, where she acted as a liaison between the Bloomberg administration and the city’s many immigrant communities and an advisor to the mayor on related policy. This month, the New Press published her debut book, “People Like Us: The New Wave of Candidates Knocking at Democracy’s Door,” a quasi-how-to-run manual centered on immigrant experiences in politics. Much of the book’s anecdotes come from candidates who worked with New American Leaders, the non-partisan organization Bhojwani founded in 2010 that trains immigrants and other underrepresented communities to run for office.
Her timely appointment as the first commissioner of Immigrant Affairs in New York City may seem serendipitous, but the main tenet of “People Like Us” is not to say that representatives from marginalized communities are elected through happenstance. Rather, her book highlights the unique struggles that distinguish candidates of color – and, in particular, those with immigrant backgrounds – from the usual players and power-brokers within the political system.
So often, immigrants running for office face what Bhojwani calls “our own glass ceilings,” a psychological barrier that keeps candidates from believing that they are ready to serve in public office. But there are also systematic setbacks, like a lack of financial means to run a competitive campaign, that keep people from entering the political arena. Candidates of color often do not have the same access to wealth as white candidates, they are often not part of the same networks of power.
“We don’t realize that it’s a system. That’s the problem,” Bhojwani said. “We think, ‘Oh, it’s us. If only I had more networks. If only I studied more.’”
Bhojwani mentions that New York City dismantles several institutional setbacks present in other places or levels of government. The city has term limits and a public financing system for municipal positions, pays good salaries, and is home to single-member districts – all of which help to prime the political arena for newcomers.
Still, New York can do better, Bhojwani argues, at both the city and state levels.
In 2015, Latinos made up 8 percent of the New York State Legislature although they composed nearly 19 percent of the state’s population, according to a study conducted by the National Conference of State Legislatures and the Pew Charitable Trusts. Additionally, only two Asian-American representatives, Assemblymembers Ron Kim and Yuh-Line Niou, currently serve in a Legislature of 213 seats. And in a city where women are over 50 percent of the population, only 11 of the City Council’s 51 members are female. In fact, the underrepresentation of women in the City Council spurred 21 in ‘21, an initiative launched by former City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and others to elect at least 21 women into the Council by the year 2021, which is the next city election cycle.
Along with underrepresentation in New York government, newcomer candidates must also overcome the challenge presented by establishment-backed competitors, including incumbents, and the state’s well-oiled Democratic machinery.
“The Democratic machine is incredibly strong in New York,” Bhojwani said. However, in the wake of a robust primary season that saw insurgent, progressive challengers unseat a web of incumbents in the State Senate as well as long-time Congressional Rep. Joe Crowley, she added, “I think everything is topsy-turvy this year.”
Candidates like Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez, who defeated Crowley, and Julia Salazar, women of color who both handily defeated Democratic incumbents in their respective district primaries after campaigning on their immigrant backstories (Salazar with much controversy), are part of this reactionary wave of young progressives aiming to carve out a place for themselves and their community in the political landscape.
After the 2016 election of President Donald Trump, Bhojwani said that New American Leaders (NAL) experienced an 80 percent increase in the number of applications that same year.
Catalina Cruz – likely to become the first ‘Dreamer’ to serve in elected office in New York after winning her primary election for State Assembly in a Queens district including neighborhoods like Jackson Heights, Elmhurst and Corona – tapped into NAL’s network after deciding she wanted to run in November of last year.
“The importance of having a program that recognizes the uniqueness of the immigrant experience of trying to run for office, it’s key at getting more immigrants and people of color to actually run for office,” Cruz said of NAL in comparison to other candidate-training organizations.
At a weekend-long conference hosted by NAL, Cruz gained crucial insight on how to run a campaign and to navigate different elements of the political system. The path to political office is a trail she says is tread upon differently by women of color and, particularly, those from low-income backgrounds, than by traditional politicians. Asking for campaign donations, for example, was a psychological barrier she had to overcome. “When you grow up poor, like a lot of us did in [NAL’s conference], you have a very different relationship with money,” Cruz said. “So asking for donations is not the easiest thing to do because you are taught that nobody outside your house was supposed to know you're having money issues.” For Cruz, NAL’s training session helped to unpack this key campaign component.
“What we face when we walk in a room in politics is very different than people who are not immigrants,” Cruz said.
NAL training sessions – which require a $150 registration fee, although waivers are available for those who can’t afford it – hone the skills that potential candidates already have. The workshops also provide resources for the basics of running a campaign, such as public speaking, fundraising, and campaign messaging.
The organization emphasizes the importance of preserving a candidate’s story. “There’s a lot of whitewashing that happens of candidates,” Bhojwani said. “We really emphasize the importance of showing up the way you are and talking about it.”
NAL has trained over 600 people since its inception in 2010, with 63 alumni in elected office. One of them is Carlos Menchaca, the City Council member for Brooklyn’s District 38, who is also the city’s first Mexican-American in public office and the first openly gay Council member from Brooklyn.
“One of the biggest influences that the New American Leaders has had on me is helping me realize how powerful my immigrant story is,” said Menchaca, who is featured in Bhojwani’s book. “That can be one of the most powerful things that can happen in a campaign running for office.”
When Menchaca first ran for City Council in 2013, he attempted to unseat incumbent Sara Gonzalez, a daunting task that he took on with enthusiasm and skill, but no infrastructure. Menchaca started small. He called his friends, old classmates, people who knew him, and asked each for a $38 donation for the 38th district. “That's the thing about the New American Leaders,” Menchaca said. “They make you realize that you have a powerful network of people who believe in you and and that share the values that you have.” Within the first two weeks, Menchaca raised $40,000 – twice the required amount needed to run – for his campaign.
He ended up winning a hard-fought primary, the only candidate to unseat an incumbent in that year’s primaries, and went on to win the general election with 90 percent of the vote. However, unseating establishment-backed incumbents -- or any incumbents, really -- is “not the kind of thing that happens regularly in New York,” Bhojwani said.
“Machine politics are very strong with the caveat that the ground is shaking beneath us right now,” Bhojwani said of 2018.
What comes next is unclear. While NAL experienced a surge of applications in the wake of Trump’s inauguration, it is still hard to generalize an entire movement or to predict its trajectory in dismantling a system of barriers for immigrants in U.S. politics, Bhojwani said.
“I think about the work we do as being about expanding the tent of democracy…rather than saying, 'OK, I'm going to run and I'm going to get South Asian voters to support me,'” Bhojwani said. “That is not how Catalina or Alexandria…won, right? They won by inviting more people to participate.”
***
by Chelsey Sanchez, Gotham Gazette
@chelseynsanchez @GothamGazette>