Staffing Shortages Undermine Anti-Corruption Efforts at City Agencies, New Report Finds
Inside City Hall (photo: William Alatriste/New York City Council)
Two-thirds of New York City government agencies say that difficulties in recruiting and retaining employees have negatively affected their anti-corruption efforts, raising the risk of fraud and waste, according to a new report from a city corruption watchdog.
The New York City Department of Investigation (DOI), the oversight agency that monitors and investigates corruption and other dysfunction at city agencies, released its 2022 Annual Anti-Corruption Report on Monday, pointing to serious risks arising from the city’s ongoing municipal staffing crisis. There are more than 23,000 budgeted vacancies across city agencies.
Unlike past reports that focused on corruption issues and agency responses to them, DOI surveyed city agencies on how persisting staffing challenges have affected their efforts to monitor and tackle fraud and waste. The report was based on detailed questionnaires sent to 64 mayoral and non-mayoral city agencies, and covers the period from October 1, 2021 through September 30, 2022 — meaning the final three months of the de Blasio administration and first nine months of the Adams administration.
Of those 64 agencies, 66% reported to DOI that a decrease in their staff was adversely affecting or posing risks to their anti-corruption efforts. “These challenges, should they continue, could have a long-term negative impact on the City’s anti-corruption efforts and therefore could increase the risks of corruption, fraud, waste, and abuse,” said DOI Commissioner Jocelyn Strauber, in a statement accompanying the report.
Those agencies reported “reductions in oversight, auditing, and internal control functions,” according to the report, as well as risks to anti-corruption activities because of “delays, lowered capacity, inexperienced staff, and burnout.” In response, agencies said they have had to rearrange staff roles, take longer to complete certain tasks, and even forego new programs to monitor or prevent corruption.
Only one agency pointed to a specific instance of suspected theft (valued at $5,000 or less) that agency management said could have been avoided if there was sufficient staffing.
DOI itself has been struggling with staffing and budget cuts as its workload has increased. Strauber testified at a Council budget hearing in March that those factors have led to a slower pace of work and attention diverted more to administrative tasks than investigations.
Council Member Gale Brewer, a Manhattan Democrat who chairs the Council’s oversight and investigations committee, has spent months advocating for funding boosts for oversight agencies like DOI and urging the administration to quickly fill vacancies. “It’s not just the oversight agencies but its all the anti-corruption work that goes on in the agencies that is impacted by vacancies,” she said in a phone interview, responding to DOI’s report.
Brewer said she had no idea of the extent of the adverse effects until she saw the report. “You don't have oversight. You don't have the audit teams. You don't have the internal control functions. All of that is needed to do anti-corruption work,” she said.
The report does note that the municipal staffing shortage is not limited to New York City. Since the pandemic, changes in employment trends have created a tight labor market nationally. And there are various reasons behind the vacancy crisis affecting city agencies including previous hiring freezes instituted at the height of the pandemic, the city’s vaccination mandate and the administration’s insistence that employees return to the office.
Higher pay scales in the private sector have also drawn away workers from city agencies, leading to unprecedented attrition. The report even noted that inadequate pay raises the risk of corruption, “with one agency expressing concerns that inspectors who are not compensated properly would be at a higher risk of accepting bribes.”
While slow to act, Mayor Eric Adams’ administration has started to take steps to address the vacancy crisis. Those steps have come after the period covered in the report and DOI does credit the administration for them, though it has not been clear why Adams did not take more aggressive steps earlier in his tenure given the vacancy crisis he inherited. In December, the mayor also created the Mayor’s Office of Risk Management and Compliance and Mayor’s Office of Municipal Services Assessment to tackle corruption and waste.
“While we continue to recruit aggressively and remain laser-focused on hiring new employees to serve New Yorkers, as the report states, there is a nationwide labor shortage and hiring challenges are not unique to New York City,” said Fabien Levy, a spokesperson for the mayor, in a statement. “Even with our vacancies, the report — which addresses conditions this administration inherited — makes clear that there has not been any demonstrable increase in corruption among city employees. Our city employees remain committed to doing the difficult work New Yorkers rely on with honesty and integrity. We continue to improve our hiring process and welcome input to overcome the challenges that the city — like employers across the country — faces in recruiting and retaining employees.”
Among the steps the administration has taken include ending in December its 2-for-1 hiring policy that mandated that agencies could hire one employee for every two vacancies, allowing agencies to increase salaries by 15% in high-attrition positions, appointing Agency Recruitment Czars at every agency, expedited responses to agency hiring requests, and several “Hiring Halls” to fill vacancies.
The administration also slightly softened its stance on hybrid work schedules, reaching a contract agreement with DC37, the largest municipal workers union, which included a flexible work pilot program and increased wages. The city’s recent contract with the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the largest police union representing rank-and-file officers, also included more flexibility for officers besides increased salaries. But the mayor has not taken assertive executive action outside of union labor contracts to shift personnel policies for the city's many non-union employees, such as allowing some work-from-home for positions where those tasks can be done remotely.
Critics, including Comptroller Brad Lander and City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, have said that the vacancy crisis was exacerbated by the mayor’s administration and that he did not move fast enough to address it. They have raised concerns that the vacancies, compounded by cuts imposed in the proposed city budget for next year, could be detrimental to city agencies and affect their ability to provide services to New Yorkers.
In her State of the City speech in March, Speaker Adams stressed the urgency of tackling the agency staffing crisis. “It has created a domino effect, and now New Yorkers who rely on essential services are feeling those impacts in real time,” she said.
“As our Title Vacant and Understaffed, Underserved reports lay out, the high number of vacancies at city agencies pose risks to the quality of city services, including basic oversight of agency operations,” Lander said in a statement to Gotham Gazette. “DOI’s anti-corruption report echoes our recommendations like higher salaries, accelerated hiring processes, and hybrid/remote work policies to strengthen the retention and recruitment of staff who perform mission critical oversight roles.”
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
Leading Immigrant Advocacy Group Releases NYC Agenda, Countering Mayor's Budget
Make the Road New York (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)
With Mayor Eric Adams soon to release his executive budget plan, Make the Road New York, a leading immigrant advocacy organization, is releasing a policy and budget agenda to push the mayor and City Council to adopt a more immigrant- and worker-friendly budget.
With 25,000 members across the state, Make the Road is the largest member-based group of immigrant advocates in the state and a prominent voice for progressive legislation. The group will release its “Dignity, Community and Power” agenda at its community center in Jackson Heights, Queens on Wednesday afternoon, advocating for immigrant protections, a right to shelter and housing, education equity, stronger worker protections, expanded health care, fairness for nonprofit human-services providers, and a reduction in the “bloated” annual NYPD budget.
The agenda includes both policy proposals and funding measures that Make the Road believes should be included in the city’s budget for the next fiscal year, which starts July 1. Some of the measures echo efforts from the City Council, especially its Progressive Caucus, where Make the Road has many allies.
The mayor’s $102.7 billion preliminary budget, released earlier this year, has been a source of broad controversy as he has mandated spending cuts across city agencies that critics say will further hurt basic city services. Adams has repeatedly said that he has been forced to make tough financial decisions as the city faces several major challenges, chiefly an influx of tens of thousands of migrant asylum-seekers, a crisis that his administration projects will cost the city about $4.3 billion by July 2024.
Elected officials, including City Council leadership, and immigrant advocates have spent months pushing back against the mayor’s suggestions that funding services and shelter for migrants will come at the cost of taking care of New Yorkers that have already been here. And they have called on him to use billions in expected surplus revenue to invest in the city’s most vulnerable populations.
Make the Road’s agenda directly outlines measures to achieve that goal. “It is a community-based and -guided platform which we hope that, this next fiscal year, the city can fund, and looks at issues where brown, and Black and immigrant New Yorkers, the working class, are going to see relief in their everyday lives,” said Natalia Aristizabal Betancur, Make the Road’s deputy director, in a phone interview. The mayor and City Council must agree on a new city budget by the July 1 start to the next fiscal year.
A chief criticism of Adams has been that he is proposing significant cuts to agencies that serve the neediest New Yorkers and has failed to more aggressively get thousands of budgeted but vacant personnel positions filled, while making little attempt to rein in ballooning costs at the NYPD and Department of Correction. The police department, which costs the city about $11 billion annually in operating expenses and fringe benefits, has already exceeded its overtime budget for the current fiscal year by $100 million and growing, despite promises by the mayor to bring those costs under control. Make the Road’s agenda takes direct aim at those costs, calling for substantial cuts to police funding, though without a specific dollar figure in mind, and greater transparency and accountability from the department.
“The way that Mayor Adams has been handling the budget has not been centering the people who need the most help in New York City,” Betancur said, specifically highlighting cuts to schools while the police budget remains largely unchanged. “We hope that this year, he understands that he needs to be delivering more for the people who voted for him and not for [wealthy] New York City interests.”
The organization is also calling for an end to the NYPD’s School Safety division, and to redirect its $450 million budget to school resources, staff, mental health services, and restorative justice practices. The agenda urges the city to immediately place a hiring freeze on school safety agents, eliminate 600 vacant school safety positions, eliminate $47.5 million allocated for “enhanced security measures” including surveillance, and disband the Youth Coordination Officers program that costs $106.2 million.
Make the Road is also calling for eliminating the police department’s VICE unit and using its $25 million in funding to provide health, legal, and educational services to workers in the sex trades; eliminating the NYPD’s Mental Health Co-Response Teams (which cost $5.7 million) and police officers within the Department of Homeless Services (which cost $30.1 million); as well as the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group and its public relations budget, which altogether cost the city about $138.7 million annually. All that funding, the advocacy group argues, should instead be reinvested in community-based public safety solutions such as ending homelessness, building housing, expanding mental health services, harm reduction programs, education, and youth services.
The agenda calls for an additional $50 million in immigration legal services; $1 million in baselined funding for the Rapid Response Legal Collaborative, a city-state operation first created in 2019 and providing legal counsel to those in detention or facing deportation; and maintaining $16.6 million for the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project.
The organization is also pushing for the passage of three bills before the City Council – Intro. 158, which would amend the city’s civil immigration detainer laws to allow individuals to sue if they are wrongfully detained by the NYPD, the Department of Correction (DOC), or the
Department of Probation; Intro. 184, which would prevent the NYPD from detaining an individual on a civil immigration detainer past their release date without a signed warrant; and Intro 185, which would prevent the DOC from disclosing information about people in their custody to federal immigration authorities.
As the housing and homelessness crisis worsens in the city in the wake of the pandemic and given the arrival of so many asylum-seekers, Make the Road is pushing for the administration to ensure that all New Yorkers have a “right to a roof” by expanding eligibility to undocumented immigrants for the CityFHEPS vouchers – a rental subsidy which helps people who are either living in homeless shelters or facing homelessness find permanent housing. The organization is also calling for a comprehensive housing plan that ensures New Yorkers can live in safe and healthy homes, including through greater penalties on landlords who fail to make repairs to homes.
Among the more prominent criticisms leveled against the mayor’s budget is that it will reduce funding to Department of Education schools, CUNY, and public libraries, with low-income communities of color experiencing the worst effects of those funding cuts. Make the Road’s agenda calls for restoring up to $500 million in education funding, while preventing any further cuts. It also urges the city to baseline $20.4 million for adult literacy programs run by the Department of Youth and Community Development (which the City Council has also pushed for); pushes the City Council to renew a $4 million discretionary adult literacy initiative, and renew and expand a separate $5 million discretionary adult literacy pilot project. It also calls for restoring $9.2 million in funding for 52
community schools, which provide more holistic services to students and families.
The agenda includes several worker protections including support for the passage of Intro. 837, also called the Secure Jobs Act, which would prohibit terminating an employee without just cause. It calls for renewing and expanding the Low-Wage Worker Support Initiative to $3 million; restoring $2.4 million in funding for the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection to avoid vacancy reductions; restoring $3 million in funding to ensure adequate staffing at the Law Enforcement Bureau of the city’s Commission on Human Rights; and $5.3 million for the Consortium for Worker Education “Jobs to Build On” program and $2.4 million for Worker Service Centers.
Expanding access to health care for immigrants and workers has been a major priority for advocates. Make the Road’s agenda includes several proposals to achieve that goal including $4 million to expand funding for the Access Health Initiative; $2.3 million for the Managed Care Consumer Assistance Program (MCCAP); maintaining $7.7 million for the Ending the Epidemic initiative focused on ending HIV; and $2 million for the Immigrant Health Initiative.
The agenda also calls for $100 million annually to expand the NYC Care program, which is overseen by NYC Health + Hospitals and provides low- to no-cost health services to individuals who do not qualify for or cannot afford health insurance, including undocumented New Yorkers. Additionally, Make the Road is calling for a new Community Health Worker Project to help community-based organizations hire Community Health Workers that will aid navigation of the system at health-care facilities.
Even prior to Adams’ tenure, city government has long been criticized for failing to fairly pay nonprofit human-services providers. That, along with lengthy delays in payments, have led much of the industry to the brink of insolvency. In its agenda, Make the Road urges the city pay providers “what we are worth,” in-full and on-time by first providing a 6.5% cost-of-living
adjustment to all providers through $200 million in the next budget and then providing them a multi-year pay agreement on par with DC37, the city’s largest municipal union that recently ratified a new contract with the city. The group also calls for changing the Indirect Cost Rate manual to make indirect funding a fixed budget cost that is fully funded and to ensure on-time registration and payment of contracts with legal enforcement for delays and late payment.
Many of the items on Make the Road’s agenda align with the New York City Council’s recently-released preliminary budget response and the Council Progressive Caucus’ budget priorities, both of which call for rolling back education cuts, investing in affordable housing and expanding mental health services, while broadly investing in working New Yorkers, particularly low-income communities of color.
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
‘A Crisis That Threatens the Very Future of Our Borough’: Manhattan BP Levine’s Housing Vision and Other Top Priorities
Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine (photo: William Alatriste/NYC Council)
Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine is taking aim at housing, sidewalk scaffolding, and more as his second year in the borough-wide office progresses.
This week, Levine announced an online portal for Manhattan residents to suggest potential sites or vacant lots that can be developed into housing, as part of Levine’s “Housing Manhattanites” plan. The plan, which Levine announced during his State of the Borough address in January, laid out his office’s research into lots and spaces across Manhattan that could be developed into housing, areas of the borough for upzonings, and other ideas to improve the rental market and encourage more affordable growth over the coming years.
"Since the announcement of the “Housing Manhattanites” plan, we’ve been met with an overwhelmingly positive response from community members, city officials, and even from the Mayor Adams administration,” Levine said in an April14 statement announcing the new portal. “Many people offered suggestions for potential development sites, which demonstrated a clear desire for a more democratic approach, so we decided to open up the process and involve our constituents at the ground level."
All submissions will be reviewed by Levine’s office and, if found achievable, added to the more than 170 sites already listed in the “Housing Manhattanites” plan. Levine talked about his plan and focus on including borough residents in the fight against the housing crisis on Gotham Gazette’s Max Politics podcast following his State of the Borough address earlier this year. During that conversation, he said that he was surprised that the overwhelming initial reaction to his housing plan was not criticism but people quickly offering his office additional sites ripe for more housing.
Levine also talked on the podcast about his larger vision for the future of Manhattan, including rethinking uses of public space, reducing sidewalk scaffolding, improving public health, and more. After previewing on the podcast his plan to take on construction-related sidewalk sheds, often called scaffolding, he subsequently released its details, coinciding with efforts by City Council members to introduce relevant legislation.
Levine, a former City Council member representing the 7th district in Upper Manhattan, won a crowded and competitive Democratic primary in 2021 that all but secured him the boroughwide post given Manhattan’s overwhelming Democratic voter enrollment.
Though borough presidents have few concrete powers, they are a significant player in the land-use decision making process, control millions of dollars in discretionary spending, can act as a convener, and have a bully pulpit. They can also help craft and boost City Council legislation, though they do not get to vote in the Council.
The State of the Borough Address allows borough presidents to tout accomplishments but also to set the tone for their next year of policy initiatives, and gain needed support from other elected officials, advocates, and their constituents.
“We are not just facing a shortage of housing in New York City, and especially Manhattan,” Levine said on the podcast. “We are facing a full-blown affordability crisis. The worst in our history. This is a crisis that threatens the very future of our borough.”
“Well, you can't build anything in Manhattan without it being a fight, because every inch is precious here,” Levine added later, discussing the daunting nature of the task at hand, but saying he is undaunted given the housing emergency. “And there's competing uses for every inch.”
Housing Manhattanites, Tenant Rights, and an Affordability Crisis
Upon release, the “Housing Manhattanites” plan highlighted 171 sites — including parking lots, single floor commercial spaces, old manufacturing buildings, and vacant spots — which it says have the potential to house more than 73,000 apartment units. “These sites span Downtown to Uptown, in all 12 community boards and almost every neighborhood,” Levine said in his State of the Borough speech.
Levine reported that the Manhattan housing growth rate is half of what it was five years ago, with only 3,500 new apartments built last year. He said the average rent for an apartment in Manhattan is now over $5,000 per month. “Our borough is turning into a place where even middle-class families are getting priced out — teachers, bus drivers, nurses simply cannot find any apartment they can afford here,” Levine said.
Nine neighborhoods were also listed in the plan where new zoning could open up the opportunity to build more residential spaces. These neighborhoods, it says, are currently built out areas where no residential spaces can be built under current zoning.
“Neighborhoods like Hells Kitchen in Community Board 4, where a rezoning would make it possible to create housing in old manufacturing areas, and enhance the neighborhood with vibrant, mixed uses and as much as 4,400 new homes,” Levine said.
Of the 73,000 proposed housing units, 30,000 would be affordable. Levine plans to spread out affordable units throughout the borough, saying that too many prior plans have centered in low-income areas Uptown. To combat this, 75% of the prospective units identified in “Housing Manhattanites” are below 96th Street.
Levine also said that while he’s supportive of attempts to spur housing development out of Governor Kathy Hochul’s administration, his office did not take into account any particular policy changes in crafting its estimate. Meaning, in a sense, it took a conservative forecasting approach.
Parking has been a major point of contention, with debates over parking minimums attached to new housing, questions about how to use public space currently devoted to parking, and the promise — as those including Levine see it — of using parking lots in the fight against the housing crisis by turning them into new buildings.
Open Plans, a nonprofit advocacy group, released a report on March 23 to push for lifting housing-attached parking mandates city-wide. Parking mandates require minimum off-street parking space to be built alongside any commercial, residential, or mix-use building.
“Lifting parking mandates in our city is essential to achieving our goals of creating more housing – especially affordable housing – and responding to the climate crisis,” Levine said at a rally hosted by Open Plans to accompany its report. “These mandates don’t reflect the modern needs of New Yorkers, and every parking space that we build keeps us from becoming a more livable, resilient city. We’ve seen the benefits of doing away with parking mandates in other cities – now, it's time for New York to act."
Open Plans reported that a poll found 68% of city residents are in support of fully lifting parking mandates, and found that, “for every 1.2 parking spaces constructed, one unit of housing is lost — an almost one to one tradeoff,” according to the report. Levine is among the elected officials joining Open Plans in calling for a full removal of city-wide parking mandates.
Levine’s focus on housing is in part centered around the younger generation, people who, he said, grew up in the borough but are not able to live in their own neighborhoods when they need apartments of their own. Instead they are forced out to areas including the Bronx, lower Westchester County, New Jersey, and even Pennsylvania.
“A plan like we are proposing would create hundreds of units that would be affordable, that people who grew up in the neighborhood could apply for,” Levine said on the podcast. “It would be just a wonderful way to retain the vibrancy and diversity of this community.”
Two of the most contentious specific sites that are currently part of the housing conversation in the borough are a truck depot on West 145th Street in Harlem and the neighborhood surrounding Penn Station. Levine said both sites should be turned into large residential initiatives, and that the truck depot is currently releasing harmful toxins in a vibrant neighborhood. He said that Penn Station will need billions of dollars to refurbish the historic train station, and there should be housing funding for the surrounding neighborhood within the plan, which is now being reevaluated.
Levine is optimistic about the future of Manhattan, but stressed real solutions to the housing crisis cannot be achieved without the help of community members and other elected officials. He said almost all of the 171 individual sites in his plan are going to need some public action, and many are owned by different city agencies.
“This is going to take work and we have to roll up our sleeves on this — community boards, council members, elected officials, other stakeholders,” Levine said on the podcast. “And absolutely we want local engagement on these projects, we want to think about the historic context of neighborhoods, think about livability neighborhoods going forward, we have to balance all of that, but we can't ignore the urgency of creating housing.”
Levine is hopeful that the plan will see less opposition from City Council members, and said the severity of the housing crisis has led to an increasingly strong commitment from elected officials of various political stripes to pursue more housing development, among other key strategies. He also said he’s seeing progress at the community board level, notorious for anti-growth sentiment and ‘NIMBYism.’
“Even some of the individuals and boards which, in the last year, have been opposing [housing] projects, are now trying to find a way to be pro-housing in the neighborhoods,” Levine said on the podcast. “And so I expect that while there's gonna be contentious discussions on all of this, that we're gonna have enough good partners on the boards to get really great housing built in Manhattan.”
Many of Levine’s comments on housing growth were similar to what several of his fellow borough presidents — Gibson in the Bronx, Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, and Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso — are saying: that it is essential for every neighborhood in each borough to grow and welcome more housing.
Tenants’ right to counsel has been another housing priority for Levine since his time as a City Council member. In 2017, Levine and now-Bronx Borough President Vanessa Gibson passed New York City’s Right to Counsel law, providing low-income tenants facing eviction the right to free legal representation in court. Since then, however, Levine said there have not been enough lawyers to represent the number of tenants facing eviction, and courts have decided to move forward with cases where tenants do not have legal representation.
“This is unacceptable,” Levine said in his State of the Borough address. “And the solution to this is obvious — we are demanding that the State court system ensure that no eviction case moves forward in New York City if the tenant does not have access to an attorney.”
Changing the Manhattan Landscape
Along with housing growth, Levine is focused on other pieces of the Manhattan landscape. That includes looking at scaffolding reform to work on ensuring that construction-related sidewalk sheds are not up longer than they need to be, and much more. Levine has joined the four other Borough Presidents in a plan to plant 1 million more trees throughout the city, noting trees are disproportionately planted in higher-income neighborhoods.
“Planting a millions more trees will enable us to close that equity gap,” Levine said in his State of the Borough. “And it will make it possible for us to achieve the critical goal of 30% green canopy cover for our city.”
As city waterfronts have continued to be impacted and eroded since Hurricane Sandy in 2012, Levine is calling for a new Waterfront Protection Agency. He said 11 existing city departments that work around waterfronts would form the new agency that will ensure vulnerable waterfronts will be protected from future storm surges and other natural disasters.
In his speech, Levine also discussed the New York State-funded Downtown Redevelopment Initiative, with projects recently selected to utilize the $20 million investment in Chinatown previously announced by the Hochul administration, and another $10 million investment in East Harlem, with projects there to be selected within the next year.
“We will be implementing capital improvements to beautify and improve accessibility at Park Row from the Brooklyn Bridge to Kimlau Square, and we’ll be fully renovating Kimlau Square itself, as well as upgrading Sara D. Roosevelt Park, and building the first-ever welcome arch for Chinatown,” Levine said of the Chinatown projects selected.
Aside from area specific investments, Levine also stressed the importance of providing economic aid to small businesses throughout the borough who have been impacted over the last three years due to COVID-19. In May 2022, Levine noted, his office and the Hebrew Free Loan Society launched a zero-interest $2 million loan fund for small businesses throughout Manhattan.
With an eye on public space management and the movement of people and goods, Levine is pushing a plan to create more dedicated curb-side delivery spaces and garages for package-sorting before delivery, so sidewalks are kept clear. And when it comes to government vehicles, "We have got to electrify everything that moves—from school buses to sanitation trucks,” Levine said.
Levine also wants to put garbage bags in containers (“Let’s containerize the trash put out in front of large buildings, so we don’t have to walk around mountains of trash bags on the sidewalk,” he said), to put more research into the layout of 5G towers before they are installed on sidewalks throughout the borough, and to install more public bathrooms city-wide.
“I am thrilled to have passed, together with my partner in this effort, Councilmember Rita Joseph, a bill requiring the City to find one place in every Zip Code to open a new public bathroom,” Levine said. “This is a question of quality of life, public health, and yes, equity.”
A city-wide composting program plan was announced by Mayor Eric Adams earlier this year, but Manhattan is slated to be the last borough to receive universal bins and pick-up — currently planned to launch in the borough October 7, 2024. Though Levine welcomes the program and is thrilled it is being rolled out, he believes Manhattan cannot wait more than a year and a half for compost bins.
“I want to accelerate the timeline,” Levine said on the podcast. “And I do think in the meantime, there has been this pilot program rolling out orange bins that collect compost on street corners. And we've had enough time with them and they have been fabulously successful. So I certainly want that rolled out city-wide. But while celebrating the news that we're going to have compost pickup in every building, I do want to speed up the timeline.”
As three licenses for full casinos are in the offing for the downstate region, and proposals have been released by a number of interested parties, at least one Manhattan location is under consideration - Times Square. During a lightning round of quick questions on the podcast, Levine said that five applications are pending in Manhattan, and he will have a primary role in the approval process. Declining to get into specifics, Levine said that though there are many options and regulations to consider, he believes the approval process for at least one application could begin as soon as the middle of this year.
Education, Medical Services, and Public and Mental Health Funding
Levine, formerly chair of the City Council health committee, is also stressing the importance of funding public health initiatives that will prepare for another COVID-19 surge or future health emergency like a pandemic. Levine announced new legislation with City Council Member Keith Powers around improving air circulation and filtration throughout the city. He has also made a priority providing resources for medical and public health professionals coming off of record high hospitalizations, including providing covid safety kits with masks, pulse oximeters, and digital thermometers.
“Our nurses, our doctors, our EMS workers, our public health professionals — they have been through the equivalent of war-time service over the past three years,” Levine said during his speech. “And they are continuing to battle an incredibly heavy load, because of patients suffering with covid and much else. We owe it to these heroes to continue fighting for good health policy in this city, for our own benefit, and to relieve the pressure on exhausted health care workers.”
On education, Levine said he is pushing for more funding for all Manhattan public schools, as well as access to computer science, coding, genetics, robotics, and AI curricula for all students. He also emphasized the need for more Department of Education social workers, substance use counselors, and a full-time permanent nurse in every public school to provide adequate care for students' emotional and mental health following the pandemic.
“We also have to fight for the workers of tomorrow,” Levine said. “By ensuring that our young people are prepared for the careers of the future.”
In order to provide greater care and services for people suffering from severe mental illness throughout Manhattan, Levine is pushing to reverse the loss of inpatient psychiatric beds in Manhattan hospitals and ensure “that when patients are discharged from these hospitals they continue to receive care at well-funded, community-based, peer-led mental health programs.”
Levine also touted that he helped bring together half a dozen city agencies, including the NYPD’s 25th precinct, Department of Homeless Services, and Department of Sanitation to work together on multiple safety initiatives across 125th Street.
“While there are certainly still challenges on this part of 125th Street, it is safer, cleaner, healthier than it’s been in years,” Levine said in his speech. “We are now looking to replicate this successful multi-agency strategy in Hell’s Kitchen, another neighborhood which has faced similar challenges.”
Scaffolding Reform
On the podcast, Levine said he was working on scaffolding reform, and to “stay tuned.” Not long after, in March, the Manhattan Borough President’s office released its “Shed the Shed” report, which outlined a vision for more efficient building maintenance in order to bring down scaffolding and sidewalk sheds faster. Meant to protect pedestrians from potential falling debris and other building hazards during various types of construction, scaffolding remains on streets for an average of 498 days, according to the report, often far longer than needed.
“Across the city, these sheds, built to comply with local law inspection and repair requirements, are too often left up for months, or even years,” the report reads. “Over 230 scaffoldings across the city have been up for over five years.”
In conjunction with Levine’s report, five City Council members put forward a package of bills to decrease the time scaffolding and sidewalk sheds stay up. Council Members Powers, Erik Bottcher, Pierina Sanchez, Chris Marte, and Shaun Abreu (four Manhattanites plus Sanchez, a Bronxite who chairs the housing and buildings committee) put forward a total of nine bills. The bills range from requiring scaffolding to avoid green spaces, including playgrounds and gardens, to a pilot program to use drones and in-person examiners to conduct inspections of building facade work.
[Listen to the full conversation: Max Politics Podcast: Borough President Mark Levine's Vision for Manhattan]
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