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What To Watch For In The Mayor's Executive Budget


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Mayor de Blasio (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)


Mayor Bill de Blasio will release his Executive Budget for fiscal year 2017 on Tuesday and the nonpartisan, nonprofit Citizens Budget Commission has posed eight questions that people should be asking, including what to expect in terms of new revenue streams, new spending, the city’s fiscal reserves and agency savings, the impact of the state budget, and the city’s investment in capital projects.

The mayor’s budget presentation will come after he released his preliminary spending plan in January, a month of City Council hearings, the passage of the state budget, and the Council’s formal response outlining what it wants to see adjusted in the executive budget. Other than great consternation over major cuts to city funding that Gov. Andrew Cuomo had proposed but for the most part did not appear in the final state spending plan, it has been a fairly quiet budget season thus far. Still, there are a variety of issues to watch for as on Tuesday de Blasio takes the next step in the process that will yield a new city budget by the July 1 start of the fiscal year.

The mayor’s preliminary budget projected $82.1 billion in revenue (and expense, which includes dedicated savings) for fiscal 2017, up from $81.7 billion in 2016, owing to a steadily growing economy. This increase in revenue will help the mayor and the City Council pay for new initiatives.

Since the January release of a fairly cautious preliminary budget, the Mayor has announced additional spending and new policies that will be accounted for in the executive budget. This includes the merger of the Human Resources Administration and the Department of Homeless Services; a $21 million campaign to fight the mosquito-borne Zika Virus; an increase in emergency medical services necessitated by the bankruptcy of a private ambulance provider; new sustainability initiatives; and more.

On Monday, de Blasio announced a plan to change water and sewer bills paid by homeowners that will be factored into the executive budget, he said. This plan includes a $183 credit for 664,000 homeowners across the city, the mayor said at a press conference in Bay Ridge. The de Blasio administration also announced Monday that it would be offering $20 million to the city Board of Elections to reform its operations, pending an agreement to the mayor's terms, which have been the source of a great deal of criticism of late.

Another Monday announcement outlined an additional $450,000 in funding to fight drug addiction on Staten Island. The Daily News is reporting additional funding for more ambulance tours and seasonal parks workers. Politico New York is reporting $30 million in additional funding to aid homeless students, both at schools and in shelters.

One thing still unknown is how much the mayor is dedicating in the first budget allocation for the new Department of Veterans Affairs.

“Other priorities including combating homelessness, expanding advanced placement courses and gifted and talented programs, establishing a comprehensive mental health system, and reforming Rikers Island may also require additional investments,” Maria Doulis and Mariana Alexander of CBC wrote in Monday’s blog post.

The budget may also include some or all of $790 million in initiatives (new spending and tax reductions) outlined by the City Council in its response to the mayor’s preliminary budget. The Council estimated that the net increase to the budget per its requests would only be about $127 million once greater city agency savings and changes in debt service payments are factored in. Even with additional spending, the Council estimates a budget surplus of $258 million in fiscal 2017.

In the preliminary budget, the mayor continued last year’s practice of putting aside money for a rainy day. This includes $1 billion each year in the General Reserve, $3.4 billion in the Retiree Health Benefit Trust, and $500 million in the newly-created Capital Stabilization Reserve. The preliminary budget release stated, “The administration is also managing out-year gaps and continuing to find savings across City government. As of the Preliminary Budget, agency and debt savings will reduce expenses by over $1 billion in FY16-17, with more to come in the Executive Budget this spring.”

These agency savings are expected to come from the Citywide Savings Plan (CSP), a voluntary effort by agencies to identify ways of cutting costs while maintaining services. The preliminary budget estimated $1.85 billion in savings from fiscal 2016 through fiscal 2020. But CBC has criticized what it sees as low levels of savings by the de Blasio administration. “The CSP was small relative to the size of the budget and savings programs of past years and insufficient to meaningfully offset the cost of new initiatives or to boost reserves,” CBC’s new post reads. “Furthermore, it relied mostly on debt service savings from refinancings and included few efforts to improve efficiency.”

The City Council also began preliminary budget hearings with the stated goal of increasing savings and itself eventually identified at least $91.2 million in additional agency savings that were not included in the preliminary budget.

One of the areas where budget watchdogs, Council members and city Comptroller Scott Stringer have increasingly called on the mayor to cut costs is overtime spending, which reached a high of $1.4 billion in fiscal 2015. Most of the increase in OT costs has come from uniformed agencies, particularly NYPD. Last year, the Council approved an increase in the number of police officers contingent on the city reining in OT costs. Comptroller Scott Stringer, in his analysis of the preliminary budget, estimated that overtime spending will exceed city expectations by $136 million in FY 2016, $221 million in FY 2017, and $200 million in outyears.

An important part of the budget process this year was the effect of proposals in the governor’s executive budget, which he outlined in January. Two proposals in particular would have shifted hundreds of millions of costs for funding Medicaid and CUNY from the state to the city. These were ultimately dropped from the enacted state budget, leaving the city mostly in the clear. However, the final state budget re-directed $600 million in city sales tax revenue to the state -- $200 million annually -- while increasing funding for schools by about $525 million. About $160 million of this school aid increase was not included in the mayor’s preliminary budget.

Capital investment additions made since January will also have to be included in the executive budget. The preliminary budget proposed a $47.3 billion capital commitment plan for fiscal 2017 and the next three fiscal years (the capital spending plan is separate from the expense budget, which is what is typically referred to as the city budget). That has changed some since the mayor’s announcement that he would speed up the completion of City Water Tunnel No. 3, the release of the revised capital plan for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) and the City Council’s changes to the mayor’s housing program.

“In addition, the New York City Housing Authority has extensive capital needs, and the Mayor may increase its capital allocation,” CBC’s Doulis and Alexander write. “Expanding the city’s capital plan will increase its outstanding debt.”

The Daily News is reporting that $70 million in capital funds will be included in the mayor's new spending plan to open a new police precinct in southeast Queens - something that City Council members in the area have been pushing for. Politco New York is reporting a combination of capital and expense spending related to the city's prisons, including funding for a new facility for the youngest detainees, classes for Rikers inmates, and more. De Blasio is also announcing funding for new, smaller snow plows to help ensure smoother snow removal during storms.

CBC also points to issues around funding NYC Health + Hospitals, the city’s beleaguered public hospital network. State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli estimated in October that the system is on the verge of going broke and will have only enough funding to last six days after the end of the fiscal year on June 30. Mayor de Blasio injected $337 million into the ailing system via the preliminary budget to keep it afloat, and announced a plan to overhaul its operations.

“That plan should accompany the Executive Budget and may require additional City support,” write Doulis and Alexander. Not long after their post was published, The New York Times reported that de Blasio is included an additional $700 million in this year's budget to support Health + Hospitals.

Stringer identified a number of risks and revenue offsets to the budget which he estimated would bring the city $599 million in additional resources for fiscal 2016 but would lead to gaps in coming years of about $200 million in FY 2017, growing to $2.72 billion in FY 2018, $3.83 billion in FY 2019, and $3.77 billion in FY 2020. “Given the uncertainty of the economy, large outyear budget gaps are now a greater cause for concern and reinforce the need for prudent fiscal management,” said Stringer’s report.

Following the release of the executive budget, the City Council will hold another round of hearings and then move to private negotiations with the administration. The final city budget is due before the start of the next fiscal year on July 1.

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

Read more by this writer.

Note: this article has been updated.

Rethinking ‘Women’s Issues’ in Public Policy


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Council Members Rosenthal (front) and Cumbo (photo: William Alatriste)


Access to reproductive health care is generally viewed as a “women’s issue,” a label that some say excludes men and more specific impacted groups from a variety of important conversations, and can make it more difficult for so-labeled issues to get the attention they deserve from public policy-makers. While closing the wage gap, securing paid family leave, combatting sexual assault and domestic violence, and protecting and improving access to reproductive health care impact everyone, not just women, the “women’s issue” label often marginalizes examination. Women, as 50 percent of the population, also have stake in every issue, from housing to economic development to transportation.

New York City Council Members Laurie Cumbo and Helen Rosenthal aim to use their roles as newly-elected co-chairs of the Council’s Women’s Caucus to “invite, include, and encourage men to be a part of the conversation,” as Cumbo said, and to make sure that women’s issues are not seen as separate, but rather, as the “economic issues” and “community issues” that they are, Rosenthal said, so that the responsibility of recognizing and responding to “women’s issues” falls on the entire City Council, not just the Council’s Committee on Women’s Issues.

“It’s critical that we recognize that families are being shortchanged when women aren’t bringing their whole dollar home,” Cumbo told Gotham Gazette, referring to the fact that women earn 79 cents for every dollar that a man earns in a parallel position. Cumbo said closing the wage gap - ensuring “equal pay for equal work” - and improving the public safety of women in New York City at a time when reported cases of sexual assault are on the rise are her top priorities, both as co-chair of the Women’s Caucus and as chair of the Committee on Women’s Issues.

The Council’s women’s issues committee has oversight of the Mayor's Office to Combat Domestic Violence, and holds hearings on issues deemed to be a public policy concern for women, like fairness in physical testing and the effectiveness of human tracking intervention courts. For Council budget hearings, the committee joins the Committee on General Welfare to examine social services agencies like the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS).

While some of the traditional focus of the women’s issues committee has been on typical “women’s issues,” there is evidence of movement beyond those domains, beginning with how Cumbo and Rosenthal are conceptualizing their work as caucus co-chairs.

April 12 was Equal Pay Day, a date that symbolizes how far into the new year the average American woman would have to continue to work in order to earn what the average American man earned in just the previous year. A report released by the office of Public Advocate Letitia James right before Equal Pay Day found that the wage gap for women working in New York City government is three times as large (18 percent) than for women working in the private for-profit sector (six percent).  

“The wage gap doesn’t just hurt moms and their families, it hurts the economy,” Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, CEO and executive director of MomsRising.org, said in the press release that accompanied James’ report. “Women, and moms in particular, are the primary consumers in most families. When they can’t afford to buy basic necessities for their families, it also hurts our local and national economies.”

The report includes recommendations of equal pay for equal work (paying women and men the same when they are in parallel positions) and shows that women tend to be concentrated in certain city agencies, such as the Department of Education (77 percent women) and the Administration for Children’s Services (73 percent women), where the median annual full-time base salaries are $69,901 and $49,606, respectively.

Men overwhelmingly staff agencies like the Fire Department and the Department of Sanitation (91 percent men in both) where the median annual full-time base salaries are $76,488 and $69,339, respectively.

Rosenthal and others have called for valuing, monetarily, traditionally female-dominated professions on par with typically male-dominated professions.

James’ report also recommends that workplaces advance family-friendly policies that support working parents, something New York State recently did when lawmakers passed a budget including a 12-week paid family leave policy. Governor Cuomo signed paid family leave into law on April 4 and the state will begin the multi-year ramp up to the full policy. New York joins four other states that mandate some form of paid parental leave.

The United States, Suriname, and Papua New Guinea are the only three, out of 185 countries with available data, that do not require the availability of paid parental leave.

“Women's issues are everyone's issues," said Council Member Ben Kallos, the only man on the City Council’s five-member Committee on Women's Issues, in a statement to Gotham Gazette. "We need a focused effort on issues like reproductive health and pay equity in order for everybody to rise together.”

Framing access to comprehensive reproductive health care as a “women’s issue” seems to ignore the link between a woman’s reproductive rights and her participation in the broader economy and society. As the Supreme Court majority wrote in a 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, “The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.”

Research shows that “characterizing something as a women’s issue actually reduces the probability that it will succeed,” said Alexis Grenell, a Democratic political strategist and City and State columnist. “The data shows that gender balance is very important for a bill to succeed, for several reasons.”

According to one such study, published in the journal Politics & Gender, “scholars find that increasing gender diversity within a legislature may lead to increased attention to, and successful passage of, women’s issues bills.”

The authors of the study go on to warn that “within this current framework, women’s issues may become synonymous with “not-men’s issues,” implicitly exonerating male legislators from taking leadership roles in these policy domains.”

The lack of women in the New York City Council is a concern to Council Member Rosenthal, who says she intends to use her platform as co-chair of the Women’s Caucus to highlight the gender imbalance of the Council and encourage more women to run for office. Currently, 14 of the City Council’s 51 members are women, and five of the 14 are term-limited out in 2017, including Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito.

“We want to replace those women with women, and hopefully pick up a few more,” Rosenthal said, while acknowledging what a challenge that would be, given that only eight total seats will be open due to term limits in 2017. The “long game,” Rosenthal said, is to “get us into a position, when there’s a lot more turnover in 2021 to get ourselves up to 21 [female] Council members.”

To Rosenthal, achieving this goal means raising the issue at every given opportunity. At a “Women’s Herstory” event organized by Council Member Cumbo to honor women in uniform during Women’s History Month, Rosenthal says she and Cumbo “took that opportunity with a room full of female leaders from a lot of different uniformed agencies to talk about women in leadership roles, and again raise awareness” of the Council’s gender imbalance. Rosenthal also brought up the issue during a press conference on the steps of City Hall on Equal Pay Day.

On April 7, members of the Council’s Women’s Caucus each hosted a young woman to serve as “Council Members for a Day,” an annual tradition at a full-body meeting of the Council.

Another program started by women in the City Council that aims to invest in girls and women is the Young Women’s Initiative, launched by Mark-Viverito last year. The YWI brings together stakeholders from community-based organizations, advocates, policy experts, and young women to identify gaps in services and create policy solutions to address gender and racial disparities.

Last year, Mayor de Blasio established a Commission on Gender Equity, which replaces the previous Commission on Women's Issues, and aims to improve the economic opportunity for all New Yorkers, particularly women and girls. The simple shift in language away from “women’s issues” to “gender equity” is significant in itself, implying a more inclusive commission that aims to achieve equity and involve more than just women. A bill has also been introduced in the City Council by Mark-Viverito that would establish a gender equity advisory board to study discrimination faced by New York City women and girls and the impact of that discrimination on their economic, civic, and social well-being.

Another priority for Rosenthal as co-chair of the Women’s Caucus is to “support women economically,” and “make sure that in all our areas of Council work, we’re identifying the disparity between men and women,” and ensuring that the Council addresses the needs of women, “both when it comes to funding items in the budget and in the legislation that we work on.”

Rosenthal’s role as co-chair has led her to increasingly view issues through the lens of how they affect women, she says. For example, Rosenthal is chair of the Committee on Contracts, and wondered aloud during an April 4 hearing on the challenges facing the human services sector whether gender is essential to the fact that the government pays the full costs of construction contracts, but does not cover the full cost of contracts with human services providers. The construction industry is male-dominated, while the human services sector is staffed mostly by women.

“We need families to be strong economically,” Rosenthal said, “and how can that happen when women” make less to begin with, and on top of that, “work in a sector where the contract itself is getting 80 cents on the dollar?”

Council Member Cumbo believes that classifying problems under the umbrella of “women’s issues” can be helpful, but only to a point. Calling something like preventing sexual assault or domestic violence a women’s issue may help rally stakeholders in support of the cause, yet, Cumbo says, “It is up to us to message it to say, ‘This is an issue that all people should be concerned about, and this is a discussion that men are very welcome to be a part of’ - it’s important that we work collaboratively to address these issues.”

Rosenthal also sees some merit in the “women’s issues” label. “I see it more as an opportunity - it’s simply another opportunity to talk about the role that women play in the working world and in their families, and another opportunity to make sure that their needs are addressed,” Rosenthal said, citing the fundamental biological differences between men and women when it comes to starting a family as something that needs to be addressed when creating policy. If men want to have a child, for example, they can do so with essentially no physical burden impacting their ability to go into the office, nor physical recovery time needed after a child is born.

Yet “from a policy standpoint,” Grenell says, “it’s not productive” to lump social problems under the women’s issues label, a construction that Grenell believes “creates a pink ghetto. This pink ghetto excludes men and gender nonconforming people and that reduces the efficacy of this construction.”

“Calling it a “women’s issue” makes it into a sort of niche matter, whereas abortion, paid family leave - these are not just women’s issues, these are people’s issues,” Grenell said.

The authors of the previously referenced study on the policy implications of female leadership on “women's issues” say their findings highlight the importance of reexamining the label - their results suggest that “legislators wishing to push for state investment in a woman’s issue may achieve the highest probability of success when they can gather a strong coalition of female sponsors and a near-equitable number of male legislators to join this sponsoring coalition.”

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by Meg O'Connor, Gotham Gazette
     

Read more by this writer.

As Problems Persist, City Council to Examine Board of Elections


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Mayor de Blasio voting (via The Mayor's Office @BilldeBlasio)


On Tuesday, April 19, thousands of New Yorkers cried foul about how the city was running the state’s most consequential presidential primary elections in decades. Polling sites opened late. Ballot scanners failed. About 125,000 Democratic voters were purged from the Brooklyn rolls while others found their party affiliation had inexplicably changed. While many pointed to what is seen as typical city Board of Elections dysfunction, complaints from across the city prompted a strong official response.

Comptroller Scott Stringer announced an audit of the BOE, Mayor Bill de Blasio promised to hold the BOE responsible, and Attorney General Eric Schneiderman initiated an investigation into the matter. On Thursday, City Council Member Ben Kallos, chair of the governmental operations committee, which has oversight of the BOE, joined the chorus, telling Gotham Gazette that he would hold an oversight hearing within the next two months to “get to the bottom of what happened.”

“I think there are recurring problems that continue to happen despite our efforts,” Kallos said.

For all the hand-wringing and accusations of incompetence around Tuesday’s election, New Yorkers had little cause for surprise. The problems at the BOE that made headlines across the country are far from new. For years, the body charged with running elections, maintaining the electoral rolls, educating and registering voters has been criticized for its functional inefficiencies, hiring practices, mistakes, and structure.

Fundamental flaws at the BOE were identified in a comprehensive report from December 2013 by the city’s Department of Investigation, which recommended more than 40 reforms. At an oversight hearing of the City Council’s governmental operations committee in February 2014, new DOI Commissioner Mark Peters testified that his office found issues of gross nepotism, pressure on staff to engage in political activities, deficient voter rolls, poorly trained poll workers, and inadequate, inefficient, and outdated procedures.

“The illegalities, misconduct, and antiquated operations detailed in the report are deeply corrosive and must end,” Peters said at the hearing. He called on the BOE to provide a corrective action plan to implement those reforms.

A DOI spokesperson told Gotham Gazette that the BOE had implemented a small percentage of those reforms but did not provide an official corrective action plan, did not implement key reforms, or keep DOI updated on whether additional reforms have been put in place. BOE officials did not respond to requests for comment.  

Many have praised BOE Executive Director Michael Ryan, who took over in 2013, while continuing to point to problems in both BOE function and the state laws that govern the BOE.

Kallos said that many BOE issues had indeed been resolved over the past two years, but “I was disappointed that despite moving forward on a lot of improvements, the BOE still has a lot of problems.”

The February 2014 hearing was Kallos’ first as chair of the governmental operations committee and he has since worked hard to impress upon the BOE the need for reform. In an interview, he was clear that to him the two main issues at the BOE are the political patronage in appointments and the lack of an efficient voter information portal.

Recent history illustrates Kallos’ point. In October 2010, George Gonzalez, former BOE executive director, was fired following the dismal management of primary elections that year and issues with ballots for the pending general election. Gonzalez had been acting executive director and was officially selected to the position that August. Then, in 2013, a Chinese translation error in ballots for the November election cost one employee their job while another resigned. In 2014, then-president of the BOE Jose Miguel Araujo was fined by the Conflicts of Interest Board for temporarily hiring his wife to work for the board. Two other employees faced penalties for nepotism. Just last year, the president after Araujo, Michael Michel, was fined for helping his son-in-law get three different positions at the board. Michel is still a BOE commissioner.

Even in the months leading up to Tuesday’s primary, tiny cracks were beginning to appear in the BOE’s handling of this year’s elections. It misprinted absentee ballots and sent vague and confusing election notices to voters. Then, just as people were heading to vote on April 19, WNYC radio discovered that more than 60,000 Brooklyn Democrats had been removed from the electoral rolls in what turned out to be a major clerical error that has already led to one employee suspension and helped prompt the launch of multiple investigations by government regulators. The number actually turned out to be 126,000 Brooklyn Democrats removed from the rolls.

Kallos, who has long advocated for BOE reform, first brought up the online voter information portal in 2007, when more than a million voters were removed from the rolls ahead of the 2008 presidential elections. On Wednesday, he did his own analysis of the voter purge in Brooklyn, crunching the numbers from the state voter file and looking at how Kings County routinely purges thousands of people from the rolls every year. It is normal practice for the BOE’s different borough offices to remove inactive voters from the rolls based on people who have died or moved away. But, the extent of the purge is the question.

Kallos intends to find out more once he gets BOE officials in front of him. “It’s a concern that eight years after I raised this, it continues to be a problem,” he said. “The issue is state law. If someone doesn’t vote and fails to respond to one letter (from the BOE), they get removed from the rolls. We really need Albany to do its job here.”

A major concern for Kallos is the political structure of the BOE. The board is composed of ten commissioners, two each from New York’s five boroughs. The candidates are recommended by the political parties, typically the county chair of each party, and confirmed by the City Council to serve four-year terms. Staff is also hired on a partisan basis. Kallos believes the city should stop funding these “patronage positions” and hire qualified people through publicly advertised jobs.

“The staff people who lack the competence to fix these problems need to be replaced with staff that can do the job,” he said, discussing the issue of the full-time BOE staff, which only begins to touch on the issue of the election day provisional staff who administer voting throughout the city and often commit mistakes.

Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, a good government group, shares Kallos’ views. “We pick people based on their party affiliation and who they know, and that means sometimes we get very capable people and sometimes we don’t, and that’s not a good way to choose people,” Lerner said.

Lerner compared New York’s flawed system with Los Angeles, which has a nonpartisan professional election administration that, she said, is responsive to voters and taxpayers. “Our Board of Elections is not responsive to either and that is a matter of state law,” she added. “The lines of accountability are completely unclear.” She did say that the BOE had improved to a degree under recent management.

Another government reform group, the New York Public Interest Research Group, also bemoaned the administration of Tuesday’s election. In a press statement, NYPIRG called on Governor Andrew Cuomo and the state Legislature to establish automatic voter registration and updating of enrollment data and same-day registration (as in, on election day), and echoed calls for eliminating patronage in selection of BOE employees. The group also said the state should shrink its registration and change of enrollment deadlines to ten days prior to the election. For this year’s primary, the deadline for people to change their party affiliation was October 9 last year -- the earliest deadline of any state in the country.

Some members of the state Legislature acknowledged these issues and the dire need for reform. Assemblymember Brian Kavanagh, a Manhattan Democrat, and State Senator Michael Gianaris, a Queens Democrat, have sponsored the Voter Empowerment Act, which provides for automatic registration of eligible voters and online registration, and changes the deadlines for registration and party enrollment.

“The system now generates a lot of obstacles to voting,” Kavanagh told Gotham Gazette. “And it’s important that we not get too focused on any one of them, and instead think about it as a broad, systematic set of problems with a series of solutions, all of which we should consider and many of which we should implement.”

Among the issues Kavanagh raised are BOE staffing and poll worker training, long shifts for poll workers on election days, and simply “bad, outdated” election laws.

Ryan downplayed people’s concerns about the primary election, telling Fox5’s Greg Kelly on Wednesday morning that “No one was disenfranchised.” He attempted to deflect blame to certain voters themselves. “What we did see was a concerted effort by some folks to apparently, to protest New York’s closed primary process by showing up to vote when they weren’t registered to vote. We tracked down dozens who say they were disenfranchised and as it turns out, they weren’t registered in the parties that they were trying to vote for,” he said.

Since then, however, the BOE changed it’s tune somewhat. A long-serving BOE official, chief clerk in Brooklyn Diane Haslett-Rudiano, was suspended over the purging of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls. Initial reports indicate that Haslett-Rudiano made a clerical mistake, but a series of investigations will seek to get to the bottom of what happened.

Part of the problem is the BOE’s failure to communicate with the public, said Matt Sollars, press secretary for the New York City Campaign Finance Board. “It’s troubling that the BOE provided little notice to the public about its efforts to clean the voter rolls, or guidance on how to resolve the issue for voters who had been removed,” Sollars said. “Particularly in the run-up to a high-profile election, the BOE should do more to clearly communicate to voters about what it is doing and what actions they need to take, if any.”

Many of the problems, Sollars said, would be resolved by updating the state’s “archaic” voting laws. The CFB, with its voter engagement arm, NYC Votes, and a broad coalition is putting forward a “Vote Better NY” platform, which includes several changes to voting rules.

On Wednesday, City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito seemed to echo all these frustrations. “Obviously my interest, as everybody’s interest here, is to make sure that our Board of Elections conducts an election process that is thorough, fair, and as smooth as possible,” she said, responding to reporters at a news conference at City Hall. “Unfortunately, the reality is that every election we have problems and issues -- polls open late, etc., and those are things that we can’t tolerate.”

“The concerns that were raised are ones that we’ve heard in other elections as well,” she added. “And we’ve gotta make sure that this just stops at some point.”

Last week's was the first of four election days this year in New York City, with congressional primaries coming up in June, state-level primaries in September, and Election Day in November.

In a radio interview on Friday, Mayor de Blasio criticized long standing issues at the BOE. “The BOE is governed by state law, obviously with a partisan dynamic, in terms of the party structures play a role in it, and I think the whole thing needs to be reexamined now,” he told WNYC’s Brian Lehrer. The mayor pledged to leverage the city’s budgetary power over the BOE and his own leadership position in the Democratic Party to make changes at the board. He also insisted that the voter purge in Brooklyn be reversed immediately, while calling on Albany to update New York laws governing the board and the wider administration of elections.

“From my point of view,” he said, “we’ve seen it time and again with the BOE, an arcane structure that has to be modernized and has to be made efficient so people are encouraged to vote.”

“A vote would have to happen in the Legislature to change the rules and change the structure,” de Blasio added. “But I’m going to work for it, because from my point of view I could not be more frustrated by the notion of people trying to exercise their right to vote and, time and time again, having a bad experience.”

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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