Mayor de Blasio at City Hall (photo: Edwin J. Torres/Mayor's Office)
When the Conflicts of Interest Board issued an advisory opinion last week limiting donations to legal defense funds set up by public officials, Mayor Bill de Blasio pointed out that the opinion posed a “potential solution” in the form of new legislation and that similar defense funds have long existed in other jurisdictions. As de Blasio explores how he will pay significant legal bills incurred during investigations into his fundraising and administration, which resulted in no criminal charges, he has said he intends to establish a legal defense fund.
With the COIB opinion now in hand, de Blasio indicated he may indeed engage the City Council on relevant legislation. Such legislation, if introduced, would apparently permit public officials to raise significantly more for a legal defense fund than the Conflict of Interest Board is allowing in its opinion.
The COIB’s advisory sets a $50 limit on individual contributions to a legal defense fund for elected officials, other than donations from family and close friends. As de Blasio racked up legal bills over the past year, he declined to allow any taxpayer money to pay for any of them, while the city had spent $10.5 million on the administration’s defense as of last month, largely in providing counsel to de Blasio’s aides, none of whom were charged either.
It is unclear how much de Blasio owes in legal fees, but the number could easily be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more. The mayor has repeatedly reminded reporters that he is “not a billionaire” like former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, so he cannot easily afford to pay the bills himself.
“As they’ve indicated, a potential solution is through legislation,” de Blasio said when the COIB opinion was released and he was asked about it at an unrelated news conference. “That’s a perfectly fair possibility. I’m not committing to anything yet because they literally just put it out, we have to think about it, we have to talk to them.”
Along with considering legislation, the mayor also indicated that he would initiate a dialogue with the Board, whose members he nominates, and could point to examples of legal defense funds to make the case for his own. “I don’t know if they looked at the different models that have been used around the country, I just don’t know. We want to have that conversation first and others who are interested should have the conversation as well. And then we’ll see what it means,” de Blasio said.
A mayoral spokesperson did not respond to a request for details of which legal defense fund examples the mayor was referring to or whether he would be reaching out to the City Council on possible legislation.
Robin Levine, spokesperson for Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, said the speaker’s office is reviewing the advisory opinion.
[Related: Conflicts of Interest Board Opinion Could Limit Mayor's Legal Defense Fund]
There are legal defense funds from across the country, and even closer to home, that the mayor can point to, potentially as models for the city and thus, his case.
Council Member Deborah Rose, from Staten Island, used a legal defense fund for her 2009 campaign committee in facing criminal charges of violating election laws. Rose did not personally face charges, and the charges against the campaign committee were eventually dismissed. The fund was also restricted by the rules that apply to campaigns -- requiring the same contribution limits as a City Council campaign and having to disclose its donors to the COIB twice a year.
Former Democratic state Senator Hiram Monserrate, of Queens, who was expelled from the chamber in 2010 after being convicted of assaulting his girlfriend, set up a similar fund when fighting the charges. He faced widespread criticism for accepting contributions from lobbyists and their clients, which the state’s Legislative Ethics Commission found may have violated state ethics law. The contributions were not publicly disclosed.
Joseph Bruno, the former Republican Senate majority leader, used a legal defense fund to successfully fight his conviction on two felony fraud charges. He created the fund after he was indicted in early 2009 and brought in donations nearing $1 million. In 2004, former state Senator Guy Velella, a Bronx Republican, also created a legal defense fund to fight federal bribery charges. The fund was shut down soon after, facing pay-to-play allegations.
Although New York state does not have legislation around legal defense funds, other states have passed laws that regulate an elected official’s legal defense spending. For instance, Michigan passed the Legal Defense Fund Act in 2008 that requires regular reports of contributions and expenditures related to an elected official’s defense against criminal, civil or administrative action that directly concerns their conduct in office.
Legal defense funds were created in California in 2000 through a ballot proposition. Between then and 2007, the Los Angeles Times reported, nearly a dozen elected officials created legal defense funds. Then, near the end of 2007, after state Senator Ron Calderon had used a legal defense fund from an election recount to raise and spend private funds, the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission established stringent guidelines for such funds to prevent misuse.
In Oklahoma, the state Ethics Commission changed the rules so that, after 2015, officials could no longer utilize campaign funds for legal expenses and would have to set up separate legal funds for such purposes, Jennifer Palmer of Oklahoma Watch reported. In February this year, the first fund of this kind was set up by the State Superintendent of Public Instruction Joy Hofmeister to fight charges of evading campaign finance laws.
“I have very little doubt there would be support for legislation of this nature” in the City Council, said Sarah Steiner, an election lawyer. “It could be done in a way similar to the way Congress does it.”
In the U.S. Congress, the Office of Governmental Ethics has established mechanisms for legal expense funds that are set up as trusts under an independent trustee who monitors its fundraising. These funds have to first be approved by the ethics committee of the relevant chamber of Congress, and the trust must file quarterly reports with the office of the clerk. Both houses have similar but varying regulations for such funds. For instance, the House limits contributions to $5,000 for the year for a legal expense fund while the Senate has set $10,000 as the annual contribution limit. OGE also regulates legal expense funds for the executive branch.
If the New York City Council were to pass a similar law, Steiner said, “There would have to be an oversight body to promulgate regulation.”
She said that legislation is an “appropriate option” since the COIB’s opinion has broader implications. “Any Council member that finds themselves investigated for any reason would find themselves personally liable,” she said. “All of a sudden, they would personally be looking at tens of thousands of dollars in fees with no recourse.”
Steiner did insist that any legislation on legal defense funds “ought to be very carefully drafted, and it probably will be.” Indeed, any legal defense fund established by de Blasio or legislation related to legal defense funds for elected officials are political minefields.
It remains to be seen if the City Council will be open to authorizing legal defense funds. And, legislation can take months, if not years, in the Council and any proposal around this issue is likely to be controversial. Some members have already expressed wariness, as have good government groups.
“Legal defense funds should not be the answer in any case,” said Dick Dadey, executive director of Citizens Union, a reform group. “With [the mayor’s] particular situation, the city should just pay his legal bills. We should be done with it and move on. The larger issue of future cases should be discussed but legal defense funds should not be on the table.”
One City Council member, who did not wish to be named, was blunt about the mayor looking to the Council for legislation. “The mayor has dug himself a hole,” the Council member said, “and he shouldn’t count on the Council to bail him out on this.”
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
De Blasio at Rikers (photo: Mayor's Office)
Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Friday that he is putting into motion a planning process to close the jails on Rikers Island. The mayor, a first-term Democrat up for re-election this fall, was pulled somewhat begrudgingly to the politically- and fiscally-tenuous position by City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, who called for Rikers to be closed in her 2016 State of the City speech and formed a commission to create a plan to do so. That commission, led by former Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman, is set to release its recommendations at a news conference on Sunday.
"New York City will close the Rikers Island jail complex," de Blasio said Friday at the outset of a press conference at City Hall, which he held with Mark-Viverito and his criminal justice coordinator, Liz Glazer, and Correction Commissioner Joe Ponte.
After news reports about the Lippman Commission plan and support for it surfaced Thursday evening in The New York Post and Politico New York, the mayor decided to hold the Friday press conference. De Blasio and Mark-Viverito both said they had not yet seen the Lippman report, though a reporter from The New York Times was shown a copy, indicating that the mayor and speaker will explore the broad contours of a 10-year, $10-plus billion plan. As de Blasio said Friday, the city will consider the Lippman Commission plan, but then formulate its own, which will involve continuing efforts to reduce the city’s jails population, which has been decreasing over decades and is currently about 9,300 (three-quarters, or 7,500, of whom are on Rikers) and expanding and creating local jails. The latter is likely to cause a good deal of political turmoil in the city.
The mayor and speaker have not decided how many facilities they will seek to open, or what they will do with the city's jails that are not on Rikers, which are home to about 2,400 beds. The mayor said that for the plan to come to fruition over ten years, the total city jail population will need to be around 5,000 and at least two local communities will have to be open to new facilities.
De Blasio, who originally called closing down Rikers jails a “noble idea” but virtually implausible, was privately frustrated by the speaker forcing the issue onto his agenda last year. He came around as the plan was being finalized by the commission, and also after a loud, persistent, and well-organized “Close Rikers” coalition had been protesting outside his re-election fundraisers, publishing op-eds, and accruing support.
On Friday, de Blasio indicated that not only had he needed time to see more of where crime and the jail population in the city were heading during his ongoing tenure, but that Mark-Viverito had been especially persistent. "The Speaker did something extraordinarily important here by looking constantly for a new solution and pushing hard for a path that would get us to this day. And I will be clear, there were many times I could not see that path – and many attempts we made to find a path off of Rikers Island that we did not find effective – but the Speaker kept not only pushing, but offering more and more ideas and more alternatives to help us get there. Her work has been crucial in bringing us to this day."
"[T]he Speaker raised this issue with me – and I have to say – dozens of times over the last few years," de Blasio said during a question-and-answer session with reporters. "We had to do a lot of work to figure out a path that actually could achieve this goal. And my feeling in the beginning was – if I didn’t believe it could be done, I wasn’t going to say it could be done."
The mayor’s decision to back a Rikers closure plan also comes after many years of terrible conditions at the jails on the island, recently cemented in the public discourse throughout 2014, including from the tragic story of Kalief Browder, who was tormented during his jail stay and later killed himself, while no charges were ever brought against him.
There were also in-depth investigative reports of horrific conditions on the island, particularly by The New York Times, including details of violence in all directions involving guards and inmates, and a lawsuit brought against the city by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York over civil rights violations. De Blasio has indicated that before becoming mayor he did not have a full grasp on how bad things were on Rikers and he has moved a number of reforms on the island, which he has also was long-ignored by his predecessors.
There have been calls to shut down the Rikers facilities for years, including by Neil Barsky, who, in a 2015 New York Times op-ed, argued that “the only way to transform Rikers is to destroy it; it needs to be permanently closed. The buildings are crumbling. The guard culture of prisoner abuse and the gang culture of violence are ingrained. The complex is New York’s Guantánamo Bay: a secluded island, beyond the gaze of watchdogs, where the Constitution is no guide. It is a place that has outlived its usefulness.”
Over time, elected officials like Comptroller Scott Stringer, in late 2015, and City Council Member Dan Garodnick, last week, joined calls for Rikers closure; even Governor Andrew Cuomo began to voice the opinion in recent weeks. The "Close Rikers" campaign, which has many coalition members, has been gaining steam in part based on the strategy and force of the activists involved, led by JustLeadershipUSA's Glenn Martin, who was incarcerated at Rikers and has become a leading national voice on criminal justice reform. He has led protests outside de Blasio fundraising events, which have gotten the mayor's attention.
For weeks de Blasio has been saying that he would have more to announce about the future of the city’s jails around the time of his executive budget plan, which is due in May. But, the timeline was sped up.
In her 2016 State of the City speech, Mark-Viverito said, “Our current Rikers-centric system has been plagued by a culture of violence requiring federal oversight. It is also wildly inefficient.” In announcing the Lippman commission, she concluded, “We must explore how we can get the population of Rikers to be so small that the dream of shutting it down becomes a reality.”
De Blasio’s initial public reaction was tepid. On WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show just after Mark-Viverito’s speech, de Blasio called Rikers closure is “a noble idea” and said, “we’re going to work with Judge Lippman...to see what’s possible.” While stressing that no matter what the city must continue improving conditions at Rikers in the short-term, de Blasio said of closure, “any proposal like that would take many years to be achieved.” He promised to “look at every alternative going forward. I have to remind people, it could well cost many billions of dollars and we have to prove that we have the money but we’ll certainly work with the Speaker and Judge Lippman.”
Earlier this week, de Blasio announced a new set of education and job-training programs to help those detained at the city’s jails, including a guaranteed temporary job for everyone who has completed a sentence at a city jail. Most of the population at Rikers are pretrial detainees, often those who cannot afford bail, which was the case for Browder. De Blasio and others have been working on bail reform, as well as other efforts to reduce the jail population, which includes a City Council-led effort to move enforcement of many low-level, nonviolent offenses from criminal to civil proceedings.
When making his reentry program announcement on Wednesday, de Blasio highlighted that the city’s jail population is down 18% since he took office, bolstered by a 23% drop on Rikers Island. Still, the complex has been plagued by violence and is notoriously dangerous, expensive, and antiquated.
De Blasio repeatedly stressed on Friday that it will be a long-term plan that could be adjusted. He said a lot will ride on the City Council and the land use process in which individual Council members hold a lot of sway over whether a new facility comes to their district. Mark-Viverito, who is term-limited out of office at the end of this year, promised to fight for the plan into the future. A lot will ride on her successor as Council Speaker, as well as individual members being willing to explore siting a jail facility in their neighborhoods.
“Shuttering Rikers would be an audacious move for Mr. de Blasio,” Barsky wrote in 2015, “who would have to find alternatives for the island’s roughly 10,000 overwhelmingly male, African-American and Latino inmates. This may not be as hard as it might seem, though it would probably involve some new or expanded detention facilities in the boroughs, risking not-in-my-backyard blowback.”
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by Ben Max, Gotham Gazette
@tweetBenMax @GothamGazette
Note: this article has been updated in several places to include information from Friday's press conference and clarify several points.
Council Members Vanessa Gibson and Robert Cornegy (photo: William Alatriste)
At a preliminary budget hearing before the City Council committee on Public Safety Thursday morning, the district attorneys of Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island and representatives for the district attorneys of Brooklyn and Queens and the Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor laid out the case for their budget priorities.
Several themes emerged during the hearing chaired by Council Member Vanessa Gibson, chiefly the issues of salaries for the offices’ hundreds of assistant district attorneys, the entry position for much of the essential staff; the ongoing opioid crisis and its public health and budgetary implications; and the efficiency and speed of the criminal justice system.
Also looming were potential state and federal budget cuts; Manhattan D.A. Cyrus Vance Jr. said that his office “could be losing $675,000” in federal grant money and an additional $500,000 in state funds, a burden that the city may have to shoulder.
Prompted by a question from Queens Council Member Elizabeth Crowley, the D.A.s and their representatives stated that the range of salaries for entry-level A.D.A.s went from $60,000 in Brooklyn, the lowest paid, to $68,000 on Staten Island. All said that they needed to raise those numbers to combat what Leroy Frazer Jr., chief of staff to Acting Brooklyn D.A. Eric Gonzalez, called “record attrition.”
“Are they going to white-shoe firms? No. To Fortune 500 companies? No. They’re going other city and state agencies...that pay better,” said Bronx D.A. Darcel Clark. Each office is seeking additional funds for A.D.A. recruitment and retention, with the Brooklyn office seeking the most, at $1.8 million.
The subject of the city’s opioid problem was discussed at length. Steven Goldstein, Chief Assistant District Attorney with the Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor, called the popular synthetic opioid fentanyl, which in some forms can be 10,000 times more potent than morphine, “truly a game-changer.” Overdose deaths have increased for six consecutive years in all five boroughs. Mayor Bill de Blasio recently announced a new plan to reduce those deaths.
Staten Island D.A. Michael McMahon, who tied drug crime to domestic violence and crimes against children, touted the importance of the Heroin Overdose Prevention & Education (HOPE) program. “We need to get people in the throes of addiction into treatment earlier,” he said. In response to a question from Minority Leader Steven Matteo, a Staten Island Republican, about the use of naloxone, a drug that is used to cut short overdoses, McMahon said the drug was “saving lives” and that he and his public safety colleagues “understand the public health aspect of this issue.”
Other common budgetary requests centered around upgrading computer systems and finding suitable office space, with Frazer stating that the Brooklyn D.A.’s office had been run out of the same office space for almost 20 years. The Queen’s D.A.’s office’s budget presentation included a $3.8 million request for upgrades in network infrastructure, including cabling, power supplies, and network hardware like routers.
In general, the five D.A. offices have budget allocations that vary widely.
As it stands, the preliminary budget for fiscal year 2018 allocates $103.9 million for the Manhattan D.A.’s office, an increase of $1.3 million over FY 2017’s adopted budget; $72.3 million for the Bronx D.A.’s office, an increase of $713,360 over FY 2017; $97.1 million for the Brooklyn D.A.’s office, an increase of $886,590 over FY 2017; $63.8 million for the Queens D.A.’s office, an increase of $792,905 over FY 2017; $14.2 million for the Staten Island D.A.’s office, an increase of $263,143 over FY 2017; and $22.4 million for the Special Narcotics Prosecutor, an increase of $231,750 over FY 2017. The total FY 2018 budget for the prosecutors is $373.6 million.
In a notable exchange, Brooklyn Council Member Robert Cornegy commended Vance for charging white supremacist James Jackson with murder in the first and second degrees as an act of terrorism. Jackson, who is white, came to the city from Baltimore with the intention of killing black men, resulting in the stabbing death of 66-year-old Queens native Timothy Caughman. Cornegy called the charge “landmark” and asked if Vance had received pushback from colleagues at the federal level. Vance indicated that he had not.
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by Felipe De La Hoz, Gotham Gazette
@FelipeDLH @GothamGazette