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Campaign Finance Board to Propose Reforms at Charter Commission Hearing


mayor cityhall march

(photo: Benjamin Kanter/Mayoral Photo Office)


New York City’s modern campaign finance system is undoubtedly a model program -- it’s being emulated in other municipalities -- that has diversified and democratized the city’s quadrennial local elections since it was created 30 years ago. Among its strengths is that the public-matching program is consistently tweaked and updated with the times, and the Campaign Finance Board is taking the opportunity afforded by a mayoral charter revision commission to propose further reforms to the system.

CFB officials are set to present five proposals to the charter revision commission, empaneled in April by Mayor Bill de Blasio, on Thursday afternoon, at an issue forum at NYU focused on campaign finance reform, which was one of the mayor’s stated goals in creating the commission. The commission has been holding public hearings for the last few months and is now digging deeper into a few core subject areas including election administration, voter access and participation, land use, community boards, civic engagement, and independent redistricting.

The CFB’s proposals are meant to enhance its voluntary public matching funds system, which encourages candidates to seek small-dollar donations that are matched at a 6-to-1 ratio for contributions up to $175, or the first $175 of larger donations. The program aids those seeking public office without the help of wealthy donors or support from political party machinery, and gives everyday New Yorkers a greater voice by boosting the impact of their contributions.

Perhaps the CFB’s most significant proposal involves significantly lowering contribution limits for all offices. Currently, individual donors can give candidates for citywide office up to $5,100; candidates for borough president can receive up to $3,950, and City Council candidates can get $2,850 at maximum. The CFB proposes reducing those limits by more than half to $2,250, $1,750, and $1,250 respectively.   

There’s a clear rationale for these changes. In the 2017 election, the CFB noted, contributions to mayoral candidates larger than $2,250 accounted for only 5 percent of all contributions but 59 percent of the total funds raised by those candidates. Similarly, donations of $1,250 and more made up only 2 percent of contributions to City Council candidates but 32 percent of the money raised.

A few of the proposals are directly targeted at citywide positions -- mayor, comptroller and public advocate -- where large donors tend to play a greater role. The CFB suggests increasing the matching fund ratio for citywides from 6-to-1 to 8-to-1 and increasing the matchable donations from $175 to $250. In essence, candidates would be further incentivized to seek small-dollar donations, which would carry a bigger reward. For instance, a donation of $175 to a participating candidate would currently get them another $1,050 in public funds. The changed formula would mean that a $250 donation would net candidates an additional $2,000 in public funds.

Reforms along the lines of the CFB’s proposals have been advanced in the City Council but members have waited to act as the charter commission carries out its work. The CFB, an independently-operating body whose members are chosen by the mayor and the City Council speaker, releases a mandated post-election report every four years with a series of recommendations that typically leads to City Council legislation and at least some tweaks to the system that are passed into law. Such a report is expected by September, and is likely to include proposals similar to those being presented to the mayor’s charter revision commission. When de Blasio announced his charter revision commission and said he intended it to focus in part on campaign finance reform, some questioned why he wouldn’t allow the usual process to unfold.

The mayoral charter revision commission’s proposals will be announced in early September and placed on the ballot in the November general election, with city voters approving or rejecting them.

A second charter revision commission is being formed after legislation passed the City Council earlier this year. Its work will culminate with ballot proposals in 2019.

One bill currently at the City Council, proposed by Council Member Ben Kallos, would increase the cap on public campaign matching funds from the current 55 percent of the spending limit for a particular seat to 85 percent. The CFB is now proposing a more moderate increase to 65 percent of the spending limit, reasoning that it nonetheless boosts small donations while giving candidates the flexibility to raise and spend funds from private sources since public funds payments are usually doled out in the closing stretches of each election cycle.

Two other new CFB proposals would alter the thresholds for candidates to qualify for public funds. As it stands now, citywide candidates have to raise a minimum amount from a minimum number of donations. As an example, mayoral candidates have to raise at least $250,000 from at least 1,000 donors who gave a minimum of $10, while comptroller and public advocate candidates have to raise $125,000 from 500 donors giving at least $10. The CFB is proposing reducing these thresholds to $125,000 for mayor and $75,000 for the other citywide seats, while also pitching a new “geographic requirement” that each candidate receive at least 50 contributions from each of the five boroughs. They are also proposing lowering the minimum qualifying contribution to $5 for all elected positions.

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

Read more by this writer.

Mayoral Charter Revision Commission Hears Expert Testimony on Voting and Elections


de blasio voting charter

(photo: Samar Khurshid/Gotham Gazette)


The New York City Charter Revision Commission called by Mayor Bill de Blasio convened on Tuesday afternoon to collect expert testimony on ways to foster increased participation in municipal elections.

Eleven of the commission’s 15 members sat at the hearing, which was divided into two parts, one focused generally on voting rights and election administration in the city, and a second centered on the ranked-choice voting system, otherwise known as instant runoff primaries, that may be proposed to voters later this year, among other measures deemed appropriate by the commission.

The charter revision commission was established by de Blasio in April and is charged with collecting public input on recommendations to amend or revise the Charter of the City of New York, a slate of proposals that will be made official in September and placed on the ballot in November. Though any charter revision commission is able to look at any aspect of city governance it chooses, de Blasio said he was forming this commission to look at voting, elections, and campaign finance reform.

After an open hearing in each borough where members of the public were invited to testify, the commission announced its focus areas, which led it to four additional public meetings to hear from invited experts.

Panelists for the first portion of Tuesday’s hearing — Catherine Gray, co-president of the League of Women Voters of the City of New York; Perry Grossman, of the New York Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project; Susan Lerner, Executive Director of Common Cause New York; Jerry Vattamala, of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund; and Andrew Wilkes, Director of Policy and Advocacy at Generation Citizen — spoke at length about specific challenges facing New York City voters and what they identified as problems with the city’s electoral system.

Grossman opened testimony recounting the “archaic voting practices” restricting voting in the city. New York State (and thus the city), he said, does not allow early voting, automatic registration, same-day registration, or online voting registration, and has restrictive access to absentee ballots.

Adopting these measures, as several states and other municipalities have already done, would go far to increase voter turnout here, Grossman said, pointing out that New York State ranked 47th nationally in voter registration and 44th nationally in turnout for the 2016 Presidential Election.

His suggestions to the commission, including instating early voting and strengthening the ability of city agencies to electronically transmit voter registration records to the Board of Elections were echoed by several other panelists.

But they ran up against a question inherent to the commission’s role as a city body attempting structural change with statewide and national implications: How far can it go?

Commission Chair Cesar Perales, Governor Andrew Cuomo’s former Secretary of State, told Grossman that it’s “not clear what the city can do on its own without violating state law,” specifically with regard to expanding access to absentee ballots, which is legislated by the state. All of the reforms Grossman called for have been the topic of debate in Albany, where they have failed to pass the Republican-controlled State Senate.

Commissioner Wendy Weiser, Director of the Democracy Program of NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, echoed Perales’ concerns, asking Grossman if New York City’s home rule gives it greater freedom in running its own elections to the extent that it could offer expanded voting rights for municipal elections while retaining restrictive measures for state and federal elections.

Grossman answered affirmatively, and several others who testified, advocating for measures ranging from lowering the voting age to 16 to enfranchising non-citizens to adopting voter pre-registration, proposed similar systems of tiered franchise, by which the city could give new classes of New Yorkers the ability to vote in local elections, but not anywhere else.

Several panelists also pointed out that the city’s lackluster language services restrict voting in what is, by some measures, the world’s most lingually-diverse place.

Vattamala, of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, focused his testimony on this hindrance, recounting the Board of Elections’ repeated failures to provide City Council-mandated translation services. The BOE is a state entity that the city funds and thus has some oversight of.

In 1990, Vattamala explained in providing examples, after the City Council ordered the provision of Chinese-language voting services, the Board of Elections sent Mandarin translators to the mainly Cantonese-speaking Chinatown in Manhattan and Cantonese translators to the mainly Mandarin-speaking Chinatown in Queens.

In 2000, the Board of Elections mistranslated Chinese ballots in the primary election, writing “Democrat” where the English said “Republican” and vice-versa, and, in 2013, the Board simply failed to provide the Bengali-language ballots necessary in Queens.

Horror stories of the Board of Elections were widely-recounted at the hearing. Common Cause’s Lerner spoke of the BOE preventing translators from entering polling stations during the November 2016 election, and failing to implement several initiatives of the City Council and the previous charter revision commission.

Several commissioners seemed keenly aware of the difficulties of enacting whatever they may propose for a new charter.

Commissioner Rachel Godsil responded to Lerner’s specific suggestions to the commission — that the charter should amplify a constitutional right to vote, clarify conflicts of interest law, and consolidate and enhance already-existing city agencies, among other proposals — with a question about the feasibility of effecting change.

With the Board of Elections not following previous recommendations, she said, “can we do anything?”

Later, Commissioner Larian Angelo asked a panelist who’d spoken at length about incompetence among some poll workers how, in that case, she could see “any reforms happen, ever?”

Panelists offered several ideas for accountability mechanisms for the commission’s recommendations, but the question of enforcement remained.

Throughout the three-hour hearing, the commissioners’ faces betrayed little. A few times throughout, a commissioner seemed particularly interested in a suggestion: Commissioner Dale Ho nodded when Andrew Wilkes suggested lowering the municipal voting age to 16; Wendy Weiser nodded at the proposal that the city’s charter offer an express right to vote in local elections.

While the problems and solutions brought up at the first half of the hearing ranged widely in scope and subject, the second half was tightly focused on ranked-choice voting, a reform that has widespread support and appears likely to be included in the commission’s recommendations.

Ranked-choice voting is a system used in 16 American cities and in limited capacity in several states, including Maine and Virginia. It allows voters to specify a first-choice candidate, second-choice candidate, third-choice, and so on, until the legal maximum. If no candidate wins a majority -- or whatever the set threshold -- in the first round of voting, the least-supported candidate (or, in some jurisdictions, all but the top two) is disqualified, and that candidate’s voters have their votes added to the totals of their second choices. Low-performing candidates are winnowed off until a single candidate has amassed enough votes to claim victory.

Four panelists — Rob Ritchie of Fair Vote; Jerry Vattamala; Susan Lerner; Grace Wachlarowicz of the Minneapolis City Clerk’s Office; and David Kallick of the Fiscal Policy Institute — seemed to support New York City adopting ranked-choice voting. (Though Wachlarowicz clarified, for the record, that, as a civil servant, she could not personally advocate for or against a political proposal.)

Panelists explained what they saw as the benefits: incentives for candidates to appeal to voters beyond their base; cost-saving; and retained participation relative to an expensive and poorly-attended runoff election, which is the current next-step if a candidate does not win in the first round of voting; and, based off the results in American jurisdictions that have implemented ranked-choice, seemingly increased election of candidates of color.

The commissioners seemed generally supportive, or, at least, interested in the system.

Commissioner John Siegal told Ritchie that he has “an open mind about this proposal,” and questions to those testifying mainly concerned the commissioners’ own understanding and feasibility concerns, like cost and machine malfunctions.

When the final expert, Hofstra University Professor Craig Burnett, spoke about the system’s flaws, which include “ballot exhaustion,” the prospect that all of an individual’s ranked choices will be eliminated in early rounds of vote-counting, and racial and ethnic minorities being less likely to complete a full ballot and therefore facing a higher risk of exhaustion, he faced a less-friendly commission.

Chair Perales interrupted Burnett during his five minutes of testimony, which he had not done to any other panelist, and asked Ritchie to “retort” immediately following Burnett’s speech.

The final round of questioning was more free-wheeling than previous rounds, which had been directed at a single panelist. In closing the hearing, the commission asked the assembled experts about the risks of strategic voting, dynamics of incumbent power, minority community representation, and effects on campaign finance.

Then, citing “commission exhaustion,” Perales asked for a motion to adjourn. The commission will hold a second of its four expert hearings on Thursday, with a focus on campaign finance.

[Read: Mayoral Charter Revision Commission Announces Focus Areas]

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by Daniel Yadin for Gotham Gazette

Read more by this writer.

Note: this article has been updated to clarify remarks made to the commission by Perry Grossman.

Council Sanitation Chair Says Mayor Must Get ‘Bold’ on Waste Management


reynoso ready nyc

Council Member Reynoso, middle (photo: @JoeEspoNYC)


“Trash — it’s not sexy,” said City Council Member Antonio Reynoso. “It’s the hardest thing to get people to care about and it’s also something that’s out of sight and out of mind because it gets picked up -- for the most part, the Department of Sanitation does a great job.”

But there’s a lot about trash -- waste management, really -- to discuss, and Reynoso is at the forefront of the conversations as chair of the City Council’s sanitation committee, a position he has held for more than four years, continuing in the post into a second and final term.

Reynoso discussed major waste management issues facing New York City during a recent appearance on the What’s The [Data] Point? podcast from Gotham Gazette and Citizens Budget Commission, touching on regulating the private caring industry, which is the source of a great deal of controversy; changing the waste-hauling zones in the city to reduce pollution and increase efficiency; mandating more recycling from New Yorkers, such as of solid food waste, also known as composting; and more.

Reynoso, who represents a district that includes Williamsburg, Bushwick, and Ridgewood, crossing from Brooklyn into Queens, and a lot of the city’s manufacturing space. Many of his constituents rely on the L train, and Reynoso touched upon the line’s looming closure.

Born in Williamsburg to immigrant parents, Reynoso was the chief of staff for City Council Member Diana Reyna before he ran for the Council in 2013 and defeated former Assemblymember Vito Lopez in the Democratic Party.

“Scandal hit [Lopez] very hard,” Reynoso said on the podcast, referring to the fact that Lopez had been forced from the Assembly over a sexual harassment scandal. “He tried to run and I went against him, people still bet on me to lose. I didn’t get all the endorsements, surprisingly, but I won. I was very fortunate, my community had my back, I had people around me, and it was a very joyous moment for me.”

Reynoso easily won the general election in a heavily Democratic district and cruised to reelection in 2017. Throughout his time in the Council, he has chaired the sanitation committee and had oversight of key agencies related to trash, snow, and more.

In New York, every commercial establishment that will not heave its own trash is obliged by law to have its waste removed by a private carter licensed by the Business Integrity Commission. There are more than 200 carters licensed by the BIC that can lawfully gather trash from commercial establishments in the city.

However, many of these carters have bad safety records and recent journalism, largely by ProPublica, has exposed the rogue and dangerous world of private carting. Reynoso said the BIC, which was originally an anti-organized crime unit, is failing to regulate the city’s private waste industry, even after two deaths involving Sanitation Salvage, a private carter, in the last six months.

“They were put in to weed out organized crime and they’ve done a great job at doing that, but they also have other responsibilities and one of those responsibilities is regulating this industry relating to safety as well,” Reynoso said of BIC. “They’ve never done that.”

Not only is better safety regulation of private carters essential, Reynoso said, but the city must also return to a zoned system for collections, where a small number of companies wins contracts for certain geographic areas.

“It’s funny, they had a zone system when they had organized crime because they knew it was more efficient and they knew it was more profitable — you can’t make this stuff up,” Reynoso said. “The only problem is that their zoning was corrupt. We would be doing it in a way that’s fair.”

A plan is expected soon from the de Blasio administration with proposed zones and other regulations.

Reynoso discussed the importance of requiring what he called “mandatory organics recycling.” This would involve adding organics to the list of required recyclables that already includes metal, glass, plastic, and paper.

“It’s eggshells, it’s food, all that stuff you throw away,” Reynoso said. “Once you seperate it, you’ll notice that maybe 5% of your trash is not organics or recycling and that would help considerably.”

For this directive to work it must be compulsory, not voluntary, Reynoso said.

“We have to mandate that,” Reynoso said. “We can’t tell people ‘We’re going to let you volunteer or it’s a choice.’ We don’t work with choice. Unfortunately in the city of New York, you have to tell us what to do or we won’t do it.”

Throughout the podcast, Reynoso repeatedly emphasized the word “bold” in discussing the need for the city to pursue and see real change.

“To be honest, being bold is the thing that we lack here in New York City when it comes to trash,” Reynoso said. “Almost everywhere else, whether it’s immigration, housing or education, people are trying to do something. A community school here, a sanctuary city there, there’s an attempt at something bold to change the landscape of what we consider a crisis, but not sanitation.”

He called on Mayor de Blasio to take the lead.

“Being bold — having someone like a mayor that would be able to say ‘We’re going to do this, this is what’s going to happen, it’s my last four years, it’s good for the future of the City of New York so I’m going to stand up and do it.’” Reynoso said. “If we don’t see that, we’re going to have trouble and it’s not going to change.”

Beyond trash and sanitation, Reynoso was briefly asked about the upcoming L train shutdown, which will begin in 2019 and force hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who use the subway line to go between Manhattan and Brooklyn every day to find alternate routes.

In 2012, Hurricane Sandy flooded the Canarsie Tunnel under the East River with gallons of salt water, which caused critical destruction. The MTA has released a wide-ranging plan to alleviate the consequences of the eventual stoppage, including a busway and bikeway in Manhattan and increased subway service throughout the city on other lines. A number of details still need to be worked out, some of which rely on the city’s Department of Transportation.

Reynoso said an audacious effort by DOT is required for city transportation to run smoothly following the shutdown.

“We’re going to have a hard time here,” Reynoso said. “We’ll see the crisis in the first three weeks and DOT has to be very flexible to be able to fix it…I want them to be bold.”

He said the DOT has not planned enough change on the Williamsburg Bridge for a smooth transition. He is calling for an exclusive bus lane that runs 24/7 and the importance of shutting down streets for pedestrians, buses, and bikes.

“We really need to start looking at how to move around the city of New York outside of vehicles. DOT has a perfect chance to prove that they can do it here…you have an opportunity, there’s a crisis, take advantage of it.”

[Listen: What's The [Data] Point? 1,988, with Antonio Reynoso]

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by Jordan Kimmel, Gotham Gazette
@GothamGazette

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