Council Member Johnson with Council hopeful Carlina Rivera (photo: @CoreyinNYC)
Corey Johnson wants to be the next Speaker of the City Council. In his pursuit of the position, Johnson is aggressively traveling the city, as evidenced by his just-concluded weekend. Johnson was in at least four boroughs this weekend, helping colleagues and potential colleagues campaign in their districts.
The Speaker position is voted on internally by City Council members every four years, with a vote coming up in January after elections for all 51 Council seats take place this fall. Johnson is running for re-election to his West Village seat, which he will easily win, and his sights are set on what is possibly the second most powerful position in city government, behind the Mayor.
While it’s early in the process, Johnson is seen as a leading contender in what is a crowded field including Council Members Mark Levine, Ydanis Rodriguez, Robert Cornegy, Jimmy Van Bramer, Donovan Richards, Jumaane Williams, and possibly others. Julissa Ferreras-Copeland was seen as top contender, but she recently surprised the New York political world by announcing that she is not seeking reelection, instead moving to Maryland for family reasons.
For months, Johnson has been the most aggressive of the Speaker candidates, keeping a busy schedule of visits to members’ districts and meetings with borough Democratic Party leaders, who hold some sway in the Speaker selection process.
If this weekend is any indication, Johnson has kicked his campaigning into a new gear. And he’s not being shy about it.
According to his posts on Twitter, Johnson campaigned all over the city this weekend, appearing with City Council Members Debi Rose (Staten Island), Elizabeth Crowley (Queens), and Carlos Menchaca (Brooklyn), and Council hopefuls Carlina Rivera (Manhattan) and Francisco Moya, an Assembly member seeking to replace Ferreras-Copeland in Queens. Johnson also made several other event appearances over the weekend, including at an annual ceremony put on by Congressional Rep. Yvette Clarke, at which City Council Member Laurie Cumbo, among others, was present.
The weekend prior, Johnson attended Council Member Ritchie Torres’ reelection campaign launch in the Bronx, the one borough he doesn’t appear to have campaigned in this weekend. Johnson's increased activity not only comes as September's primary day approaches, but also during ballot petitioning, when candidates must get hundreds of signatures to make the ballot.
Council Members Levine and Richards were also spotted campaigning this weekend with Council Member Crowley in Queens.
As election season continues, Johnson, Levine, and other Speaker candidates are likely to start donating campaign money to some of their colleagues and potential colleagues, especially in tight races, like those for the eight "open" seats where there is no incumbent running. There are also several incumbents, including Cumbo, facing tough primary challenges.
Mayor Bill de Blasio is also a factor in the race. De Blasio, who is expected to win a second term this fall, was instrumental in helping the current Council Speaker, Melissa Mark-Viverito, attain the necessary support in the Council. De Blasio recently said he won't shy away from getting involved again, given how important it is to his agenda to have an ally as Speaker. All of the Speaker candidates are Democrats like de Blasio, with varying closeness to the mayor.
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by Ben Max, Gotham Gazette
@tweetBenMax @GothamGazette
NYC Planning Labs, a new unit in the Department of City Planning introduced on Monday, is a next step in both civic technology and city planning. Planning Labs will use open platforms that will engage people outside of city government, but largely work to provide tools to others at City Planning, so they can find solutions to the city’s planning challenges as New York continues to grow and the de Blasio administration moves ahead with its affordable housing, community development, and other initiatives.
The new effort intends to “bring civic data to life through interactive maps and visualizations, create tools to help New Yorkers better understand the built environment, and build simple web-based tools to streamline internal workflows,” according to the NYC Planning Labs website.
Open source software allows others to use it for their own purposes, which can make it easier to build websites, apps, and other products. It also creates transparency, giving anyone and everyone access. Some people will only be able to view what Planning Labs and City Planning put forth, as using and modifying certain software and data visualization projects requires skill, but the theme is more information and engagement, not less.
Prior to the announcement, a team of urban planners from the Department of City Planning experimented with the Capital Planning Platform for a year, which was the first step toward creating “a place for planners to access the maps, data, and analytics that they need to plan for public investments in neighborhoods and collaborate with one another.”
One of the systems created during this time was the NYC Facilities Explorer, which can show exactly how many education centers, libraries, parks, public safety facilities, and health and human services are available in any given area of the five boroughs.
Equipped with a color-coded legend, this interactive map makes massive amounts of data far easier to digest than a spreadsheet and can clearly show which communities have more or fewer resources.
NYC Planning Labs is another step toward reaching two goals that the team outlines in its charter: “to design and build modern, lightweight, sustainable, and impactful technology products that support the mission of the Department of City Planning” and “to implement and promote the use of agile methods, human-centered design, and open technology to support the above, maximizing the benefits of community-driven product development.”
Chris Whong, a civic technologist who established and heads NYC Planning Labs, stated on his blog that “We are focusing on small projects that can go from concept to shipped in 4 to 6 weeks, with our customers being the internal divisions of the agency. These can be web map explorers similar to the NYC Facilities Explorer, interactive data visualizations and animations, or simple purpose-built data tools that replace or complement our Planners’ routine workflows.”
Web map explorers can have flaws. Missing records or inaccurate data can sometimes skew the visual information, and while this is not the only type of technology NYC Planning Labs will be working with, it is an example of how even modern systems have weaknesses.
In a statement to Gotham Gazette, Whong also said, “We will be taking on small builds to maximize reach around the agency. These projects must have a well-defined problem and may include new interfaces for the agency's map and data products, or lightweight web tools...We are not limited just to web-based projects, and may also have hardware, IoT [Internet of Things], or design-oriented engagements with our customers.”
More details about the specific projects the team will take on are yet to be determined, but when asked how NYC Planning Labs would impact the broader community, Whong said, “Those projects that provide better or easier access to civic data can have benefit for community groups. The impact will depend on the scope and goals of individual projects, and at this early stage, we don't have a clearly-defined project pipeline.”
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by Amanda Tukaj
@atukaj @GothamGazette
The Mayor & his jobs plan (photo: Felipe De La Hoz)
Holding up a glossy, 114-page booklet emblazoned with “New York Works” in bold yellow lettering – the same words hanging from the wall behind him – Mayor Bill de Blasio promised on Thursday to make New York City the “capital of cyber security.”
Cyber security is one plank in the mayor’s ten-year job creation plan, which he announced from the sleek Garment District offices of SecurityScorecard, a firm specializing in cyber security monitoring and threat detection. Cyber security has been identified as a growth sector, one that will be home to more jobs if the city helps spur it along, the mayor explained.
The overall jobs plan, largely put together by Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development Alicia Glen, promises 100,000 jobs with “good wages” – defined as an annual salary of at least $50,000, which the mayor admitted was somewhat an arbitrary number – through 25 initiatives.
Ultimately, the proposal was framed as a way to create a “critical mass” of tech innovation, as the mayor put it, and ensure New Yorkers enter into fields allowing them to live in the city without being “rent-burdened” – spending more than 30 percent of one’s income on rent. The jobs plan is the other side of the coin to the mayor’s 200,000-unit affordable housing plan, which he and Glen unveiled in 2014; both of which attack the city’s affordability crisis and the inequality that the mayor promised to address as a candidate.
During the announcement and the press questioning that followed, de Blasio and Glen repeatedly stressed that the plan’s purpose was to create “jobs that would not be created otherwise” as opposed to riding the wave of growing industries and claiming credit. Glen, who said she had spent time studying other jobs plans at the municipal, state, and federal level, derided them as “usually about positioning yourself to take credit for a lot of different things that are going on in the economy already,” but insisted that this plan would supercede those by having a “quality screen” to the jobs.
She said that only jobs that could be directly traced to the administration’s efforts would be counted towards the stated job-creation goal, though the exact criteria that would be used was not made clear. The administration committed to providing yearly progress reports.
The mayor also couched the proposal as part of what he called a “high investment model of government,” and characterized the proposals -- a variety of city efforts including new uses of city land, workforce development, deal-brokering, and more -- as “investment,” with job gains the expected return.
“Private sector folks do key off of government signals, and government actions, and government investments,” he said, and alluded to conversations with tech leaders in which an obstacle had been “a certain amount of lack of cognition on how to get started in New York.” He argued that the investments would demonstrate to job-creators that New York City was serious about accepting their business.
The initiatives are subdivided into five areas: tech – the largest, with 30,000 projected jobs; life sciences and healthcare (15,000 projected jobs); industrial and manufacturing (20,000 projected jobs); creative and cultural sectors (10,000 projected jobs); and, the especially and purposefully vague “space for jobs of the future” (25,000 projected jobs). The job targets are further broken down into particular projects, in what Economic Development Corporation President James Patchett called a “framework” that would be adjusted depending on changing industries and sectors. Patchett’s job includes shepherding the plan, adjusting its pieces, and meeting the targets.
Under the industrial plank, the Brooklyn Navy Yard expansion is estimated to create 4,800 “good-paying jobs,” but some points are less clear, such as “discretionary tax incentives” leading to 1,500 jobs. The programs will be funded by $1.1 billion in already allocated spending, plus $250 million that “the administration will apply in its November and January updates to the budget.”
The job-creation plan comes at a time when the city’s unemployment rate has hovered at around 4 percent, a modern record-low and fact that has been routinely emphasized by the mayor. But, de Blasio explained the need to create jobs with good wages and long-term career options, allowing the city to “shape our own destiny” and lift more New Yorkers out of poverty.
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by Felipe De La Hoz, Gotham Gazette
@FelipeDLH @GothamGazette