Gotham Gazette

The Place for New York Policy and politics

CITY

City

Bill Aims to Increase Agency Accountability on Capital Projects


council member cohen bill de blasio

City Council Member Andrew Cohen (photo: William Alatriste/City Council)


New York City government capital projects -- the building of a school or park, or the reconstruction of a bridge, for example -- are notorious for their delays and tendency to exceed initial budget projections. In an attempt to address these long-standing issues, City Council Member Andrew Cohen of the Bronx is introducing a bill that will require city government agencies to inform communities and their elected officials about expected delays and cost overruns to capital projects in their districts.

No matter the project or the city agency, communities and their elected representatives are frequently left in the dark as to when and at what cost promised improvements will be complete. Frequently, the agencies involved are the Parks Department, Department of Transportation, Department of Design & Construction, and Department of Housing Preservation & Development.

Cohen’s bill, which he’ll introduce at the City Council on Wednesday, will require that agencies send electronic notice to the relevant City Council member, borough president, and community board within 30 days of learning of “any projected or actual delay of sixty days or more,” as well as “any projected or actual change of ten percent or more of the total estimated cost of the capital project.” The bill also mandates that the notice must also include an explanation of the reason for the delay or cost increase.

Speaking with Gotham Gazette, Council Member Cohen said that the impetus for the bill “was really just about improving accountability, telling these agencies that when you make a commitment to our communities, you have to deliver on it, and if you don’t, there will be consequences.”

According to data provided to Gotham Gazette by the Citizens Budget Commission (CBC), a nonpartisan budget watchdog, as of November 2016, 86 of the 191 city capital projects with budgets of over $25 million are delayed by at least 12 months. Of those 86, 33 have been delayed by more than 24 months, with the median delay for such projects totaling 126 days.

In regards to budgetary concerns, CBC also reported that, of the 191 projects, 81 have current forecasted budgets greater than 120 percent of their original budget. Of those, 18 are projected to double their original baseline projection, leaving the median change in overall budget at an increase of $6.5 million. The total net change in current forecasted budgets for the 191 projects is $5.6 billion above the original forecasted budgets for all projects ($19.4 billion), an aggregate increase of 29 percent.

Jamison Hague, the Director of Infrastructure Studies at CBC, was quick to note that while a number of projects might exceed their initial budget or schedule, this can often be due to a “change in scope,” which, from an agency perspective, would not constitute an over-budget or behind-schedule project.

Council Member Cohen noted that the difficulties he has faced in his district have often been with the Parks Department, but added that every Council member has their own horror story. “Talk to any member and they will agree,” he said. “Every member is frustrated with this issue.”

***
by Luke Foley, Gotham Gazette

De Blasio Could Still Face Penalties in State Senate Fundraising Investigation


de blasio crane shadow

Mayor de Blasio (photo: Edwin J. Torres/Mayor's Office)


Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance recently concluded his investigation into the effort by Mayor Bill de Blasio and his aides to funnel campaign funds to Democratic state Senate candidates in 2014. Vance did not bring any charges in the case, writing in a ten-page letter to the state Board of Elections enforcement counsel Risa Sugarman, who had referred the case for prosecution, that “the parties involved cannot be appropriately prosecuted, given their reliance on the advice of counsel.”

But, Vance’s decision did not entirely vindicate the mayor. He criticized de Blasio and his team for their actions that “appear contrary to the intent and spirit of the laws,” and also wrote that his decision “does not foreclose the BOE or others from pursuing any civil or regulatory action that they determine might be warranted by these facts; such a remedy might well provide guidance to those involved in the electoral process.”

Vance’s investigation -- which ran parallel to a federal investigation of the mayor’s fundraising and City Hall behavior that also concluded with no charges filed -- delved into whether the mayor and his aides had solicited and directed campaign contributions far in excess of election law limits to individual candidate committees, using county committees as intermediaries.

At the behest of de Blasio and his associates, large donations were made to county committees, which can receive up to $102,300 from an individual, union or LLC, instead of directly to candidate committees, which can receive a maximum of $10,300. County committees can give unlimited funds to candidate committees. The money was funneled to a handful of Democratic candidate campaigns in swing districts, and largely used to pay hefty consulting fees to firms with close links to de Blasio, including BerlinRosen, AKPD, and Red Horse Strategies.

Vance’s office could not make a case for prosecution beyond a reasonable doubt, in part because of the legal advice de Blasio and his team had received that gave them the go-ahead for their maneuvers. But the BOE has a lower burden of proof for its own enforcement actions, which include civil penalties reaching thousands of dollars.

[Related: De Blasio and Aides Won't Face Charges in Dual Investigations]

Under state election law, the BOE chief enforcement counsel could potentially refer a case to a hearing officer who could then determine whether “based on a preponderance of the evidence” an individual, on behalf of a candidate or campaign committee, had committed violations of the law. Based on the hearing officer’s report, the case could be settled out of court or the enforcement counsel can initiate a special proceeding in state supreme court to obtain a civil penalty.

“The Board of Elections now does have the opportunity to determine whether or not there was a violation of the rules governing campaign activities,” said Dick Dadey, executive director of Citizens Union, a government reform group that has long called for closing holes in election law. “It is up to them now to determine whether there was a violation of the rules and whether or not to determine fault and to assign penalties based on this investigation.”

Vance’s investigation found that individual contributions and transfers complied with regulations. But viewed as a whole, they showed a pattern that implied a coordinated effort to circumvent the law. “The flow of money from donor to county committee to campaign committee to consultant often occurred within days,” the DA’s letter to the BOE reads. “In most cases, the time from donation to payment of a consultant invoice was so short that the only reasonable conclusion is that the Coordinated Campaign had pre-determined the ultimate recipient of the funds at the time the donation was solicited.” (The “Coordinated Campaign” referred to de Blasio’s team.)

The DA’s conclusions were similar to those that had spurred Sugarman’s referral.

Vance noted, for instance, that the Putnam County Democratic Committee received just over $671,000 in contributions in 2014, and within days transferred more than $640,000 to authorized candidate committees of Terry Gipson and Justin Wagner, two Democrats attempting to swing Senate seats. The most contributions that the PCDC had received in the previous five years was about $39,000 in 2012. The two committees associated with Gipson and Wagner “almost immediately expended virtually all of the funds on political consultants,” Vance wrote.

When the BOE’s letter referring the matter for prosecution leaked in April last year, the mayor alluded that it may have been politically motivated. Sugarman, the enforcement counsel, is an appointee of Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has a long-running feud with the mayor. At a news conference, the mayor said, “In this instance, there is an obvious question mark around that memo that was leaked to the press and real questions about motivation and obviously huge questions about accuracy in terms of the law.”

At a news conference on March 17 of this year, when Gotham Gazette asked if he was concerned about the matter being referred back to the BOE and his prior allusions about it being politically motivated, de Blasio refused to comment. “I’m not going to speak to that,” he said. “I think what I’ve said in the past speaks for itself.” De Blasio’s campaign spokesperson declined to comment for this article. The mayor has all along insisted that he and his associates acted ethically and legally, and de Blasio disputed Vance's characterization that his team violated the spirit of the law.

“I don’t think there’s any lack of will” for civil and regulatory action by the BOE, said Sarah Steiner, an election lawyer. Steiner did not address the de Blasio case in particular, but she said, “If there was a referral to a prosecutorial agency and then it was kicked back to the Board of Elections, we would have no way of knowing [its status] because it is confidential.”

She also said that routine criminal prosecutions by the BOE are “fairly new” and have not been “well executed.” She added, “I don’t think their discretion is well used.”

The enforcement counsel position at the BOE was created in 2014 as part of a deal on ethics reform between Governor Andrew Cuomo and state legislators, part of the governor’s controversial decision to shut down the Moreland Commission to Investigate Public Corruption. (This decision was itself investigated by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara’s office, which determined it had not found sufficient evidence to charge Cuomo or his associates with a crime.)

It’s unclear whether the BOE will indeed move forward with any enforcement procedures in the de Blasio matter, or who the target of that enforcement would be. BOE’s Sugarman did not respond to requests for comment.

After an Inspector General for the BOE identified John Conklin, a Republican BOE spokesperson, as the source of the leak, Sugarman and Cuomo both called on the mayor to apologize for his remarks. “Allegations were made primarily by the New York City Mayor that I leaked the report due to political motivations,” Sugarman told the New York Post, in a statement. “Now that we know the facts, I hope the mayor will apologize for maligning my integrity and professionalism.”

De Blasio never apologized and stood by his remarks, which he again confirmed in recent weeks.

The election law states that a person who wilfully accepts illegal over-the-limit contributions would be required to repay the amount that exceeds contribution limits, and can face a civil penalty equal to that excess amount and an additional fine of $10,000. But, in de Blasio’s case, the candidate committees that benefited from the campaign contributions were not known to be the subject of investigation and appear to have acted within the law in receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from county committees.

“I’m not sure who would be penalized,” said Dadey from Citizens Union, “because often times it’s not the candidate but the committees that get penalized. So there could be some state Senate candidate committees that could be at fault as well because the mayor’s political team’s activities were there to support the candidate committees.” All of the candidates de Blasio’s team supported lost in 2014, and efforts by the mayor and his associates to flip the Senate to Democrats failed.

“I’m not sure what the Board could do,” Dadey said, “but it’s important that they at least review the analysis of the investigation conducted by the district attorney.”

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

Read more by this writer.

Note: Gotham Gazette is an independent publication of Citizens Union Foundation, sister organization of Citizens Union.

Stakeholders Discuss Next Steps in Eliminating Homelessness Among Military Veterans


veterans homelessness panel

The panel (photo: Felipe De La Hoz/Gotham Gazette)


A forum held Thursday night at the New York City Bar Association featured advocates and officials at the city and federal levels to discuss the insidious problem of homelessness among military veterans. The city’s newly created Department of Veterans Services estimates that New York City is home to over 210,000 veterans.

If the city’s homelessness crisis is already complicated, former service members’ housing challenges have unique dimensions of both complexity and potential solutions, some of which the panelists attempted to unpack.

A theme throughout was the need for individualized attention to each veteran, as each case may require any of a patchwork of state and federal grants or programs depending on its specific circumstances. “Any one of these strategies alone wouldn’t have worked,” said Nicole Branca, Assistant Commissioner at the Department of Veterans Services (DVS).

She was referring to the mixed use of programs like the federal Department of Veterans Affairs-subsidized transitional housing at Borden Avenue in Queens; the V.A. Supportive Housing (VASH) program, which is run with the federal department of Housing and Urban Development; and the city’s own veteran peer coordinators, fellow veterans who help at-risk veterans find and retain housing.

One goal of DVS, which was established just last year when the city expanded the Mayor’s Office of Veterans Affairs into a full-blown city agency, is to make sure that veterans are helped effectively at every step, which includes both preventing homelessness and addressing it quickly when it does occur. Ultimately, the agency wants to reach what it calls “functional zero,” or no more than 300 veterans facing homelessness at any one time, and none chronically so.

The agency has made significant progress towards this goal; by the end of last year, the agency estimated that the number of homeless veterans stood at just under 560, a 90% reduction from the estimated 4,677 in 2011. At the end of 2015, the city was recognized by the federal departments of Housing and Urban Development, Veterans Affairs, and the Interagency Council on Homelessness for ending “chronic veteran homelessness,” a narrow designation which applies to disabled veterans who have been homeless for at least a year, or experience four episodes of homelessness in three years.

According to Daniel Farrell, a senior vice president at supportive housing non-profit HELP USA, “our work should be around shelters, before and after the shelter.” This partly involves simply making veterans aware of the services available to them.

Branca also said that the city is exploring ways to extend legal services to veterans after moderator Peter Kempner, director of the Veterans Project at Legal Services NYC, brought up broader recent efforts to provide tenants facing eviction with free legal aid, worrying that “the most disabled vets are going to get cut out of that.”

An obstacle to aiding homeless veterans in New York is the ever-pertinent problem of housing availability. “We could have all the subsidies in the world, but what we need is the units,” said Branca. New York City has a miniscule vacancy rate, scarce available affordable housing with rent caps, known as rent-stabilized housing, and about 60,000 people living in shelters.

Farrell referred to his organization’s operations in Las Vegas, where “we will house [veterans] that same day. No credit? Doesn’t matter. Here, you can have perfect credit, even make some money, have no history of homelessness, and we will not house you that day, or even that week.”

Kristen Rouse, a U.S. Army veteran and director of the NYC Veterans Alliance, highlighted the fact that it isn’t only the lack of housing stock itself but landlords’ discomfort with veterans and their support structures that led to shortage. “We hear about landlords who don’t accept G.I. bill benefits, or disability benefits,” she said. In response, her group is pushing a bill in the City Council, sponsored by Brooklyn Council Member Jumaane Williams, who chairs the housing committee, that would include veterans as a protected category in the city’s Human Rights Law.

“Discrimination is illegal under federal law, but who are they going to call?... If you can call a 212 area number, or call 311, it’s a whole lot easier to address,” Rouse told Gotham Gazette. In addition, she is supporting a bill sponsored by Staten Island Council Member Steven Matteo, the Republican minority leader, that would extend property tax exemption for veterans to cover school property taxes. “School taxes have gone up 60% since 2003. Disability and social security? They’re not going up,” said Rouse.

***
by Felipe De La Hoz, Gotham Gazette
     

Read more by this writer.



Print Friendly and PDF

Editor's Choice


Gotham Gazette: New York Voters Approve $4.2 Billion Environmental Bond Act
New York Voters Approve $4.2 Billion Environmental Bond Act
Gotham Gazette: 
New York City Voters Approve Racial Justice Ballot Measures
New York City Voters Approve Racial Justice Ballot Measures
Gotham Gazette: 
Housing Development in New York City Slows to a Crawl as Officials Debate Tax Incentives
Housing Development in New York City Slows to a Crawl as Officials Debate Tax Incentives
Gotham Gazette: 
City Council Examines Low Voter Turnout, Moving Local Elections to Even Years City Council Examines Low Voter Turnout, Moving Local Elections to Even Years