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The Week Ahead in New York Politics, November 21


New York City Hall

New York City Hall


What to watch for this week in New York politics:

It’s a short Thanksgiving week, but there’s a lot going on, starting with Mayor Bill de Blasio giving a major address on Monday morning -- details below. There are several other things happening before the holiday, including a few City Council hearings -- see our rundown below. Including de Blasio’s remarks, the week is sure to continue to be focused on President-elect Donald Trump and the reactions to his election and early actions as president-elect.

The weekend was dominated by such responses to the election of Trump as President and the wave of hate crimes and racist actions that have accompanied it in New York and elsewhere. Elected officials and others have been expressing objections to Trump naming Steve Bannon as a senior advisor, nominating Senator Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, and other planned or considered nominations. Bannon, Sessions, and others that Trump has named or is considering have been criticized for past behavior that has included racist, white nationalist, anti-Semitic, and other problematic actions.

In New York, elected officials have received threats, Swastikas have been painted around the city, and other acts of bias and hate have been on the rise. At a Friday press conference led by Mayor de Blasio that was focused on plans to protect President-elect Trump while he is in Manhattan and related traffic concerns in midtown, NYPD officials also addressed the spike in hate crimes around the city. The Chief of Detectives, Bob Boyce, noted the spike, connected it to the timing of the election, and said the NYPD is investigating, but he did not identify causation. While he said investigations are ongoing, Boyce also expressed his opinion that there is not a direct connection between Trump’s campaign and election and the rise in bias and hate crimes. "I don't think he has anything to do with these Swastikas, to be perfectly honest with you," Boyce said. Mayor de Blasio sought to clarify, saying it wasn’t yet clear, but that Trump’s campaign was full of concerning rhetoric.

For his part, Trump has sent out several Twitter messages criticizing the New York Times for its reporting and the cast of Hamilton for Friday evening remarks to Vice President-elect Mike Pence, who was in their audience, asking Pence and the new administration to protect all of their diverse constituents when they take office. Trump has not sent out tweets admonishing those drawing Swastikas or committing hate crimes. Pushed on 60 Minutes last week, he did tell anyone doing such things to “stop it.”

On Saturday, Queens City Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer, who has received hateful messages, led a march of hundreds from Queens to Trump Tower to respond to hateful actions. City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and other elected officials and activists participated. On Sunday, Brooklyn elected officials and others gathered at Adam Yauch Park to denounce hateful actions in response to Swastikas that were drawn on the playground there, alongside the words “Go Trump.”

On Sunday, City Council Member Ydanis Rodriguez and Assemblymember-elect Carmen De La Rosa, both born in The Dominican Republic, spoke out to repudiate “racist remarks from Attorney General nominee Jeff Sessions regarding Dominicans.” With Sessions’ nomination by Trump, past Sessions remarks on the floor of the Senate resurfaced in which he said Dominicans coming to the U.S. did not possess “provable skills” to contribute to society.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo spoke at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem on Sunday, calling on New Yorkers “to unite in the fight for tolerance and justice.” Cuomo “announced several actions to protect civil rights and combat hate crimes in New York, including the creation of a State Police unit to investigate reports of hate crimes, an expansion of the state’s human rights law to protect all students, and the establishment of a new emergency legal defense fund for immigrants.”

For his part, Mayor de Blasio spoke at churches in Brooklyn and in Harlem on Sunday. He also received endorsements for his re-election from former Mayor David Dinkins and Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams. On Sunday evening at The LGBT Center in Manhattan, City Council Member Corey Johnson hosted a discussion, “Rise Together: the American Majority Against Trump," at which both Mayor de Blasio and First Lady Chirlane McCray were scheduled to speak. De Blasio also spoke Sunday evening at at Ohel Children’s Home and Family Services’ 47th Annual Gala in Manhattan.

On Sunday afternoon in Jackson Heights, Queens, Public Advocate Letitia James held a rally and laid out “a legislative, policy, and legal agenda to protect progress. Her multi-point agenda will address concrete ways to protect fundamental rights (such as reproductive choice, public education, immigrant rights, stop & frisk reforms, and more) through legislation, policy changes, and litigation.” James took these actions “In response to New Yorkers who have expressed concern that they will lose some of their basic rights following the election,” according to her office.

Much of these actions pushed to the backburner Friday news that Trump had settled a fraud lawsuit against him over Trump University, a deal that was announced by Attorney General Eric Schneiderman on Friday. Trump agreed to pay a total of $25 million to the plaintiffs and the state of New York to settle the matter.

Several events to be aware of this week - see our day-by-day rundown below.

***Do you have events or topics for us to include in an upcoming Week Ahead in New York Politics?
e-mail Gotham Gazette editor Ben Max: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.***

The run of the week in detail:

Monday
Mayor de Blasio has three public events Monday: he will deliver a public address at Cooper Union at 11 a.m. Later, at 7 p.m., the mayor and City Council Member Andy King will host a town hall with Bronx residents. Also at 7 p.m., the mayor's taped appearance on NY1's Inside City Hall will air.

At the City Council on Monday:

  • The Subcommittee on Zoning and Franchises will meet at 9:30 a.m.
  • The Committee on Standards and Ethics will meet at 10 a.m. to discuss proposed laws related to the city’s campaign finance system, campaign contributions, and conflicts of interest for elected officials.
  • The Committees on General Welfare and Mental Health, Developmental Disability, Alcoholism, Substance Abuse and Disability Services will hold a joint oversight hearing at 10 a.m. on mental health services in the DHS Shelter System, and to discuss a proposed law on mental health services in shelters.
  • The Subcommittee on Planning, Dispositions and Concessions will meet at 1 p.m.

At 8 a.m. Monday, the Food Bank for New York City will hold a breakfast. This breakfast feature release of “a new report on need at NYC food pantries and soup kitchens,” honor Congressman Charles B. Rangel with the Food Bank’s “Freedom From Want” award, and hold an “expert panel discussion on the most effective solutions to ending hunger and poverty.”

On Monday at noon, "Brooklyn Borough President Eric L. Adams will unveil the details of his arts and cultural institutions capital budget for Fiscal Year 2017 (FY17), an investment of more than $7.8 million in facilities across Brooklyn. He will make the announcement at Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Plaza, home to the Billie Holiday Theatre."

At 1 p.m. Monday in Albany, “With this coming week marking the one-year anniversary since people in Hoosick Falls were first informed of the dangers of drinking water contaminated with Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), residents will release a #1YrCheckup report card which grades Governor Cuomo and state government on four key areas: PFOA Advisory Levels;  Bio and Medical Monitoring; Identification of New Water Source; Government Actions and Transparency.”

At 2:30 p.m. Monday at City Hall, First Lady Chirlane McCray and NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill will be recognized by UN Women for “the City of New York’s commitment to preventing domestic violence.”

At 4 p.m. Monday, the Center for Community and Ethnic Media at CUNY Journalism School will have its “Post-Election Panel on Legal Protections and Rights of Immigrants.” This panel is being held in the wake of post-election concerns about the status of immigrants, particularly undocumented immigrants, and will include Nisha Agarwal, Commissioner, Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs; Camille J. Mackler, Director of Legal Initiatives, New York Immigration Coalition; Alina Das, Co-Director, Immigrant Rights Clinic, New York University School of Law; Alizabeth Newman, Director, Immigrant Initiatives, CUNY Law School; and Jojo Annobil, Executive Director, Immigrant Justice Corps.

On Monday evening, Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer and Hunter College President Jennifer Raa​b are hosting a memorial for Maggi Peyton. Comptroller Scott Stringer will speak.

At 6:30 p.m. Monday, the CUNY Rising Alliance will have a Call to Action Meeting for its campaign to have free and quality CUNY education everywhere. The Alliance will have another such meeting on Tuesday night as well.

Tuesday
At the City Council on Tuesday:

  • The Committees on Public Safety and Courts and Legal Services will hold a joint meeting at 10 a.m. to discuss oversight on the city’s plans for the provision of indigent defense trial-level services for homicides.
  • The Committees on Finance and Housing and Buildings will hold a joint meeting at 10 a.m. to discuss oversight on 421-a enforcement, two proposed laws related to the 421-a tax exemption, and one proposed law related to “an online database for registered dwellings.”
  • The Committee on Youth Services will meet at 10 a.m. to discuss oversight on “disconnected youth: out of work and out of school,” and to discuss a proposed law on “a disconnected youth task force” and a proposed law on workforce development.
  • The Committee on Land Use will meet at 11 a.m.
  • The Committee on Education will meet at 1 p.m. to discuss several proposed laws including ones that call for school uniforms and for establishing Diwali as a holiday in the New York City Public Schools.

At 10 a.m. Tuesday, the Center for New York City Affairs will hold “Growing Up NYC.” This event will discuss how today’s young children in New York are faring, and how conditions for young children could improve. Deputy Mayor Richard Buery will present how the city is tackling the issues of young children today, and the speakers include Cecilia Clarke, President and CEO, Brooklyn Community Foundation; Paul Forbes, Director, Expanded Success Initiative; Jeremy Kohomban, President and CEO, The Children's Village; Benita Miller, Executive Director, The Children's Cabinet; Kristin Morse, Executive Director, Center for New York City Affairs; and David Van Zandt, President, The New School.

On Tuesday at noon at City Hall, "NYC Council Members Mark Levine and Rafael Espinal, as well as advocates from the education and business communities will call for a robust expansion of foreign language education and financial literacy programs in New York City public schools. The press conference comes ahead of an education hearing chaired by Council Member Daniel Dromm and will focus on City Council Resolutions 845 and 890, introduced by Council Members Espinal and Levine respectively."

At 2 p.m. Tuesday at City Hall, "there will be a "press conference and rally announcing historic endorsement by city leaders of Home Stability Support, a proposal to address New York's growing homeless crisis" through state adoption of the "proposal to increase the state's outdated rental assistance subsidies and prevent New York families from becoming homeless." The rally will be led by "New York City Public Advocate Letitia James, Council Member Barry Grodenchik (D - Oakland Gardens), Council Member Stephen Levin (D - Brooklyn), Council Member Donovan Richards (D - Far Rockaway), State Assembly Member Andrew Hevesi (D - Forest Hills), Members of the City Council, Home Stability Support coalition members and homelessness advocates."

Wednesday Through The Weekend
No events on our radar for Wednesday and Thursday is Thanksgiving -- happy Thanksgiving!

We'll be back with our next Week Ahead on Sunday, November 27. In the meantime, read our latest reporting here.

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Have events or topics for us to include in an upcoming Week Ahead in New York Politics? E-mail Gotham Gazette executive editor Ben Max any time: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (please use "For Week Ahead" as email subject).

***
by Brendan Birth and Ben Max
@GothamGazette

De Blasio Appeals for Support in Pushing Albany on Voting Reform


bdb speech flag

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


In order to improve New York’s dismal voter turnout rates, it’s necessary to “shake the foundations of things,” said Mayor Bill de Blasio in his keynote speech at a voter turnout symposium at New York Law School on Friday.

Speaking to an audience of more than a hundred people, many of them advocates of voting and election reform, the mayor made a forceful appeal to reinforce his recent call for reform bills in Albany. De Blasio lamented the fact that New York is well behind dozens of other states in making voter registration and the act of voting easier and asked those in attendance to help him push the state government to act.

“We know that the system as it’s currently structured under our state law literally cannot keep up with the reality of our modern democracy,” de Blasio said, bemoaning the state’s “arcane” electoral laws kept in place by entrenched lawmakers in Albany. “This state, this theoretically progressive modern state, when it comes to electoral laws, shows no evidence of being progressive and innovative and modern,” he added.

De Blasio is calling for same-day voter registration, early voting, electronic poll-books, and other reforms, including wholesale restructuring of the state law that governs the city Board of Elections. Promising to push state lawmakers in the coming months, de Blasio told the crowd that the status quo is not working. “Now we have to take this battle to Albany, once and for all. And I hope you will join me in that,” he said.

The symposium was hosted by Citizens Union, a government reform group, and co-sponsored by a number of organizations that promote voting reform and ballot accessibility. De Blasio’s keynote came after several panels on issues related to voting and elections that featured elected officials, advocates, and other experts. One participant was Assembly Member Brian Kavanagh, a Manhattan Democrat who sponsors a variety of the related bills in Albany, where they have passed the Democratically-controlled Assembly, but not the Republican-controlled Senate. Gov. Andrew Cuomo has expressed his support for the slate of election and voting reforms.

In the run up to the November 8 general election, and in the days since, the mayor has shown a renewed interest in voting reform. He held a major news conference the day before the state deadline for voters to register for the general election, hosted a number of Get-Out-The-Vote events before and on Election Day, and has been vocal about the need for reform on radio and television appearances.

On Friday, he reiterated his call for reforms, again citing the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign as motivation, and saying that in their absence the state has passively disenfranchised millions of voters. There are roughly 2 million eligible voters in New York State who are unregistered, he said, 1 million of whom live in New York City alone.

In the 2016 election, only 52.4 percent of voting-eligible New Yorkers cast a ballot, the 7th lowest turnout rate in the country and below the national rate of 58.1 percent, according to materials from Citizens Union handed out at the event. While voter participation has been increasing in recent election cycles, New York has consistently ranked below the national average turnout since 2000.

On the national level, the mayor spoke of the need to do away with the electoral college system, which allows a presidential candidate to be victorious without winning the popular vote. (Case in point, de Blasio-backed Hillary Clinton’s popular vote lead over President-elect Donald Trump has surpassed 1 million votes.) He also criticized the Citizens United Supreme Court verdict, as he often does, for facilitating the entry of massive amounts of money and corporate interests into elections. (De Blasio and his allies are the subject of multiple law enforcement investigations, including around whether the de Blasio administration did favors for donors to a political nonprofit the mayor's allies established. No one has been charged and de Blasio maintains no laws were broken.)

Closer to home, de Blasio called out the city Board of Elections, saying it would be a more efficient agency if he was allowed to manage it, if it was restructured, or if it at least accepted his offer of $20 million in exchange for substantive reform.

The mayor was preceded by reform advocates who delved into the myriad issues with voting in New York. They cited the lack of civics education in schools, the control exerted by political party machinery, a trust deficit in the political system, and voter fatigue as a few of the many reasons that the state has one of the lowest turnout rates in the country.

De Blasio was introduced by Dick Dadey, executive director of Citizens Union, who thanked the mayor for his attention to voting and election reform. Dadey also praised the mayor for following through on campaign promises and remembered first collaborating with de Blasio in the early 1990s when the current mayor was an aide to then-Mayor David Dinkins and the two worked on advancing LGBT rights.

“There is a status quo that is not working for a lot of people in this city, in this state, in this country,” de Blasio said of the political machinery and bureaucracy. “We have to be the ones to break through. I think this is one of those historical moments. It is our time, the momentum is with us, all of us who want reform.”

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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.

City May Soon Have More Formal ‘Fair Share’ Discussion


bronx recycling center

A recycling center in the Bronx (photo: Sofie Hecht for Gotham Gazette)


For months, residents and elected officials from Wakefield in the Bronx protested a de Blasio administration proposal to site a homeless shelter in the neighborhood. They were concerned that the community would be overburdened by yet another shelter within a four-block radius, decreasing public safety and hurting “quality of life.” On August 15, the administration dropped its proposal, giving residents occasion to rejoice, while sending the City back to the drawing board.

A similar situation played out more recently in Maspeth, Queens, but with a community where even one shelter is seen as too many, and residents aggressively pushed back on a city plan to fully convert into a shelter a hotel that has been used to house homeless people. After several contentious weeks, the city announced that the plan would not move forward.

Wakefield and Maspeth are microcosms of issues facing the entire city. Some neighborhoods, particularly low-income communities of color, are overburdened by facilities like homeless shelters and underserved by others, like hospitals; while some neighborhoods want to ensure that no challenging facilities, like waste transfer stations, come into their communities at all. There are local fights over how homeless people are housed, where garbage is trucked, and how to provide adequate health care -- and thus, old and new conversations around whether the city’s “Fair Share” criteria, designed to equitably distribute facilities like shelters throughout the five boroughs, is effective enough and has been modernized to ensure justice and equity in providing essential city services to New Yorkers and not overburdening communities.

Not only are there always local fair share issues flaring up, at times prompting larger conversations -- which happened around the Maspeth fight -- but city leaders have indicated that it is time to reevaluate the fair share criteria. Both Mayor Bill de Blasio and City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito have indicated an interest in modernizing the guidelines, first adopted in 1990 by the City Planning Commission.

The Fair Share guidelines state as purpose: “to foster neighborhood stability and revitalization by furthering the fair distribution among communities of city facilities.” Eight goals fall under that purpose, according to the criteria, which include equitable siting that balances needs for services, efficiency and effectiveness, and “social, economic, and environmental impacts of city facilities upon surrounding areas.”

In her February 2016 State of the City speech, Mark-Viverito announced her intention to seek updates to the Fair Share criteria, something she reiterated in an August interview with Gotham Gazette, pointing to problems with the overburdening of some communities and the lack of willingness in others to accept certain responsibilities.

In her State of the City, titled “More Justice,” Mark-Viverito discussed Fair Share as a weak spot in the quest for more justice in community planning, land use, and services.

“Our Fair Share guidelines are vague and difficult to enforce,” Mark-Viverito said in her address. “They haven’t been updated in 25 years and there is limited information available to the public to inform these critical decisions. Too often, less desirable facilities are concentrated in just a few communities - like this one, in the South Bronx,” she said, from the Samuel Gompers school.

The Fair Share criteria is meant to be a two-edged sword, insisting on shared responsibility and protecting communities, especially those that have historically had less political clout -- but that sword has long been blunt on both sides. Now, 27 years after the inception of the criteria, elected officials appear to be looking at giving new life to a once-promising idea.

“I believe the Fair Share reality needs to be really looked at,” Mark-Viverito told Gotham Gazette in August. “I think there needs to be more equity in the way that services are distributed. There are literally some districts that have no shelters in them. You look at one like mine, that we have probably over 2,000, 3,000 beds,” the speaker said of her home district, which is mostly East Harlem. “So the issue of equity comes into the siting of services as well. And that’s a real challenge.”

Along with homeless shelters, when discussing fair share Mark-Viverito references the desegregation of city schools and her goal of closing the Rikers Island jail complex, which would require additional small, localized jails.

“We’ve been doing some thinking internally, we’ve been analyzing this and...we’ve got to figure out what are the things we can do as a city, and we have the authority to do, to create some more equity,” she said. “So we think that there’s some things - hopefully, we’ll be rolling something out soon, with some ideas, or a policy paper or something.”

According to a Council spokesperson, that discussion is ongoing. Mark-Viverito is about to enter her final year in the Council, she is term-limited out of office at the end of 2017, and will deliver her last State of the City as speaker in February.

For his part, Mayor de Blasio has been frustrated by the type of pushback seen by residents and officials from Maspeth. Speaking on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show in mid-September, de Blasio admonished those who were protesting against a shelter in their Queens neighborhood and said that the city was moving ahead with its plan (which was dropped when the hotel owner backed away, according to the city). Maspeth residents even took buses to protest outside of a city commissioner’s home in Brooklyn, which de Blasio took particular issue with.

Criticizing the “not in my backyard” response, de Blasio said the “NIMBY mindset has grown over decades in New York City,” but that it is important to “tell people the truth that every community needs to bear its fair share, that this is how we turn around homelessness and get people off the streets once and for all.”

The mayor went on to say that the city is siting facilities in all types of neighborhoods, including more affluent ones, and that he aims to modify the siting process. “I want our shelter system to evolve from what is a very cumbersome citywide approach to, first, a borough-based approach, and then even more localized,” de Blasio told Lehrer.

Following the Wakefield announcement, Congressional Rep. Eliot Engel, a Bronx Democrat, said in a public statement, “Everyone agrees that the City must do more for homeless populations. However, it is unreasonable to expect one community to maintain this effort on its own. The people of Wakefield and the surrounding neighborhoods have done more than their fair share.”

Referring to the city’s Department of Homeless Services, Engel said, “It appears that DHS has come to realize that one more shelter within an area that already has been saturated with similar facilities just didn’t make sense.”

Engel’s argument is one that goes back decades and is hot today as the city grapples not only with homelessness, but also with waste transfer facilities, jails, health clinics, drug treatment centers, and more. Fair share has also been scrutinized on the flip side: ensuring more equitable distribution of open green space and other public community amenities.

During her 2015 State of the City speech, Mark-Viverito, a Democrat, was not far from the Hunt’s Point neighborhood, which -- like much of the South Bronx -- contains far more burdensome facilities than some of its higher-income neighbors. The area is home to a wastewater treatment facility, power plants, a floating jail barge, and the largest food distribution center of its kind in the world, which, while it creates jobs, also creates traffic and related community health and safety concerns.

Not surprisingly, the South Bronx shares the distinction of shouldering comparatively high numbers of undesirable facilities with other low-income neighborhoods of color: East Harlem; Central Harlem; Jamaica, Queens; and Bedford-Stuyvesant; among others. DNAinfo reported in August 2015 that just 10 New York City community board districts contain more homeless shelters than the remaining 49 districts combined.

Clearly, the problem that the Fair Share criteria was crafted to address - the unequal allotment of burdens and benefits among New York City boroughs, neighborhoods, and communities - remains unsolved today.

The issue perpetually arises in policy discussions, whether around homeless shelters or waste transfer stations, or even new Citi Bike docking sites. As the city recently went through the process of changing its zoning codes and land use rules to promote affordable housing and neighborhood development, the issue of fair share was omnipresent. One condition of the recently passed rezoning of part of East New York was the closure of three homeless shelters.

The failure of the Fair Share criteria and of political leadership to more evenly distribute facilities throughout the city is complex, and raises questions of what equitable land use really looks like: by-the-numbers equality of city sites across boroughs, community boards, and neighborhoods? More shelters located in neighborhoods where the need is greatest, or more of those facilities built in areas that aren’t already saturated? What is fair, and to whom?

The angry cousin of Fair Share is, of course, the NIMBYism that de Blasio recently railed against -- people do not want burdensome facilities in their neighborhoods. Wealthy communities are often more able to fight off such sitings.

The issue of fair share is perhaps the most central flashpoint in the ongoing debate over the closing of Rikers Island jails. In her same State of the City speech, Mark-Viverito called for moving toward closing Rikers. To make good on her proposal to close the island’s nine active jails, the city would need to relocate several thousand prisoners held there -- as of October 20, the Rikers census was about 7,500, but Mark-Viverito has said that the goal is first to reduce that population, which has been dropping over many years, through criminal justice reforms. She announced the formation of a commission to study additional reforms and closing Rikers and expects to have new things to announce by her next State of the City.

As the New York Times noted, closing a jail riddled with neglect and violence and moving prisoners to safe, clean, and humane community-based facilities is a nice idea - until any one neighborhood finds itself the potential site of a new jail facility. The reaction from various communities, regardless of demography, against receiving detainees from Rikers Island was swift and defiant.

Among the most vocal were officials from Staten Island, where worries that the city would open a jail on the South Shore resulted in an oppositional back-and-forth between Staten Island City Council Member Joseph Borelli and Mark-Viverito. City Council Member Steven Matteo, a Republican from Staten Island like Borelli, said outright that the possibility of a new prison anywhere on Staten Island is a “non-starter” in his opinion.

Mayor de Blasio has expressed skepticism about the notion of closing Rikers jails, but his language around it has warmed somewhat over the course of the year.

While Mark-Viverito’s commission explores the possibility of and path toward closing Rikers and critics continue to label the plan intractable and unrealistic, any Fair Share criteria update proposed by the speaker could also become a complicating factor should the time come to site new, smaller community jails or expand existing detention centers where about 2,200 detainees are currently held on any given day (the total Department of Correction headcount was 9,764 on October 20).

But separate from the closure of Rikers, the city’s fair share rules may be up for modernization.

As is, it seems clear that Fair Share is not particularly successful at preventing an uneven distribution of undesirable facilities. It is less clear why such well-intentioned city policy has not been effective -- other than, perhaps, that the criteria are too vague and that the political will to more strongly enforce the spirit of fair share has not been present.

Reasons for the criteria’s opacity and lack of efficacy may lie in its origins, as well as the complexity of how to use city-owned land in the most populous urban center in North America.

“The current fair share system was a noble idea,” City Council Member Brad Lander, a city planning expert, told Gotham Gazette in an interview. “Creating the criteria was the first time these issues were addressed in municipal public policy. But as years have gone by, the criteria have not proven to be an effective system.”

Fair Share Origins
The Fair Share Criteria emerged during a period of intense political transition and structural transformation in New York City government. In 1989, sustained protest from low-income communities and wealthy neighborhoods alike prompted the passage of the criteria.

The criteria lay down considerations the city must keep in mind when looking to site a new local or citywide facility, or expand, close or reduce an existing facility. According to the guidelines, the city must explore whether a new or expanded facility is compatible with existing ones, city-owned and private, in the immediate vicinity; whether the facility would have an adverse impact on the neighborhood; whether a site is suitable to deliver cost-effective services; and whether the facility is compatible with the facility proposals in the annual Statement of Needs compiled by the Mayor under Section 204 of the City Charter. In closing or reducing the capacity of a facility, the city must consider whether it would create an imbalance in service delivery by doing so.

The same 1989 revision of the city charter that required that the City Planning Commission adopt the Fair Share Criteria was also called “the most thorough overhaul of the municipal government since the Greater City of New York was created in 1898” by the New York Times just after November elections in 1989.

The charter revision, which passed with a fairly slim margin of 55% of the vote, dissolved the Board of Estimate, which was comprised by the mayor, comptroller, president of the City Council, and the five borough presidents, and had been “at the heart of city affairs for almost 100 years,” wrote the Times. The change was proposed after the U.S. Supreme Court declared the Board of Estimate to be unconstitutional on the grounds that Brooklyn, despite being the most populous borough, had no more representation than Staten Island, the least populous.

The revision shifted powers over land use, the city budget, and city contracts, among others, to the mayor and the City Council, and expanded the Council from 35 to 51 members.

The change also restructured the City Planning Commission, growing it from seven mayor-appointed members to 13 members, with seven appointed by the mayor, one chosen by each of the borough presidents, and one by the then-City Council President. The 13th commissioner is now appointed by the Public Advocate.

The mandates included in the 1989 charter revision essentially constructed the form of New York City governance that remains to this day, and revolutionized the way that land use, zoning, and city planning would be executed in the future.

So it was the newly-expanded City Planning Commission that formally adopted the Criteria for the Location of City Facilities, or the Fair Share Criteria, in 1990.

That same year, the Office of the Mayor passed from Ed Koch to David Dinkins, and a group of borough presidents who’d pushed for liberal reforms to Koch’s housing and environmental policies took office. With a new administration, revised charter, and a restructured and significantly larger city government, Ruth Messinger, inaugurated as Manhattan Borough President that year, called the shift a “generational change” for city government.

The Fair Share Criteria became effective in July of 1991, at which time the commission called on the Department of City Planning to “monitor and evaluate the effects of these new and untested guidelines and periodically report its findings.”

The DCP issued its one and only assessment in 1995, when it published “Fair Share: An Assessment of New York City's Facility Siting Process,” which “outlined a range of issues and shortcomings” based on community board comments, past litigation, testimony from public officials and citizens, and various other feedback sources, but did not affect any significant change to the way the criteria are structured or implemented.

In 1998, Planning Commissioner Joseph Rose, under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, published “The Fair Share Criteria: A Guide for City Agencies.” The lengthy document, after acknowledging that “developing a consistent approach to the criteria was especially challenging during the early years of new regulation,” provides detailed clarifications of the criteria, followed by descriptions of how and in what spirit the criteria should be applied as agencies attempt to open, close, or alter sites for city facilities.

The last substantive change was made to the criteria in 2010, when Mayor Michael Bloomberg appointed a Charter Revision Commission to recommend changes to the City Charter for voter approval. The New York City Environmental Justice Alliance successfully advocated that the Charter Commission propose an amendment to include all public and private waste and transportation infrastructure facilities on the atlas that formerly only included city-owned or leased facilities.

The Criteria, Explained
The Criteria for the Location of City Facilities, or Fair Share Criteria, found in section 203 of the City Charter, are a set of processes meant “to further the fair distribution of burdens and benefits associated with city facilities.” According to the 1998 city assessment of fair share, the criteria were created in response to the “widespread perception -- and sometimes the reality -- that some communities were becoming dumping grounds for unwanted city facilities” by way of “poorly planned and often secretive siting decisions driven by expediency.” Residents of the city’s lower-income neighborhoods, the report says, believed that they were being saturated with facilities like shelters because most city-owned property is located in those neighborhoods, and because residents lacked the resources to adequately protest new sitings in their communities.

For the purposes of the criteria, a “City facility” is defined as “a facility providing City services whose location, expansion, closing, or reduction in size is subject to control and supervision by a City agency, operated by the City on property owned or leased by the City which is greater than 750 square feet in total floor area; or, used primarily for a program or programs operated pursuant to a written agreement on behalf of the City and derives at least 50 percent and at least $50,000 of its annual funding from the City.”

According to the 1998 assessment, the Fair Share Criteria are guided by a number of core goals: balancing considerations of community need for services and the cost and impact of facilities; long-term planning for land use, budget and service delivery; soliciting public input and creating consensus in the planning process; ensuring fair distribution according to local needs and reducing disparities in level of responsibility; preserving neighborhood character; and accountability in mitigating negative effects and monitoring impact after sites are built.

The document goes on to say that the criteria should be applied “whenever the City sites a new facility by purchase, condemnation, new lease, or new contract, expands or reduces size of a facility by 25% or more, substantially changes the use of an existing facility, relocates a facility, or closes a facility and does not replace it at new location.”

The criteria do not apply to the siting of facilities by private entities, state or federal agencies - an important exclusion that critics of the Fair Share Criteria say prevents communities from gaining a full understanding of the burdensome facilities in their neighborhoods.

The city ostensibly checks to see if the criteria have been applied when a city agency submits a land use (ULURP) application. The criteria guide says that agencies must prove that all criteria have been considered before a ULURP application is certified, and must account for any inconsistencies or conflicts.

This means that if the Department of Sanitation wishes to site a new waste transfer facility, it conducts its own fair share analysis, submits the application and analysis to City Planning, which then chooses whether to certify the agency’s ULURP application, in part based on whether the Sanitation adequately considered the Fair Share Criteria when choosing the new site.

Though the actual, original criteria are housed in a 14-page technical manual, they are not meant to be viewed as a silver bullet for equitable planning, according to Sarah Goldwyn, director of planning coordination at the Department of City Planning.

“Rather than being a strict set of rules or regulations used for enforcement, the criteria are intended to serve as a set of considerations to support an early and informed public dialogue and assist decision-makers in the process for siting city facilities,” Goldwyn told Gotham Gazette.

The criteria attempt to achieve this both by providing guidelines for agencies to consider when choosing sites for city facilities, and by creating a public review process once those sites have been identified.

The guidelines span a great deal of potential siting scenarios, but some of the most salient areas concern logistical feasibility (“Site should be optimally located, other sites being more cost-prohibitive because of location or positioning”), and clustering of burdensome facilities (“Agency must consider presence of other sites within a half mile with similar environmental impact”).

To ensure public review of all new city sites, Section 204 makes necessary the Citywide Statement of Needs, in which the city must publish annually all facilities that the city “plans to site, close or substantially change in size over the next two years.” This document, City Planning says, allows community boards, City Council members, and borough presidents to review facilities that will appear or be removed from their jurisdiction so that they may offer statements or propose new facilities. The Citywide Statement of Needs is published each fall by the mayor.

According to the criteria, the statement of needs must be accompanied by a list and map of city-owned and leased properties, called the Gazetteer and Atlas of City Property. Today, the “gazetteer” is an online database of City Owned and Leased Properties (COLP), and the sites formerly found in the atlas are now available as “Uses on City Owned and Leased Properties” on ZoLa, the city’s zoning and land use website.

COLP and ZoLa include only properties owned or leased by New York City - not private facilities, and not facilities owned or leased by state and federal agencies. Private facilities, which can include waste transfer stations and recycling facilities, are stored in a separate database.

The database, which includes geographic data, type of use and agency will be updated again in mid-November of this year along with the map of city-owned properties. The properties fall in general categories according to use, including cultural and recreation, education, health and social services, public safety and criminal justice, and residential, among others.

While the Fair Share Criteria are outlined in considerable detail, their real-world application is less clear. The 1998 revision of the criteria state that, although an agency’s consideration of the criteria is not publicly reviewed until the ULURP or contract procurement process is underway, “project planners should begin to keep the criteria in mind well before that time - when they evaluate service needs and consider new facilities or chances in facilities.”

While City Planning emphasizes that the Fair Share Criteria were never meant to be hard-and-fast rules for how the city sites facilities, some hold that the criteria should have - and could have - been a more helpful tool in building a more equitable New York.

This is part one of a two-part series on Fair Share. READ PART TWO >>> FAIR SHARE: DESIGN FLAWS, FLASHPOINTS & POSSIBLE UPDATES

***
by Maggie Calmes & Samar Khurshid
@GothamGazette



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