City Council Members Question Mayor Adams' Decision to Create New Office for Asylum-Seeker Operations
MOIA Commissioner Castro, center-left, with Mayor Adams & others (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)
Earlier this month, Mayor Eric Adams announced the creation of a new office to handle the influx of tens of thousands of migrant asylum-seekers in the city. But, at a City Council budget hearing focused on immigration services that same day, March 7, administration officials offered barebones details about the new office’s structure and budget, and how it would interact with an existing mayoral office that is already dedicated to immigrant affairs and has been coordinating services for newly-arrived migrants.
New York City is home to more than 3 million immigrants, including about 600,000 undocumented immigrants as of April 2022. For the last year, the city has been dealing with the arrival of tens of thousands of migrants who have crossed the southern border seeking asylum in the United States. According to estimates from the Adams administration, more than 50,000 asylum-seekers have come to the city in the last year, 30,000 of whom are still in the city’s care in shelters and emergency relief centers.
After months of ever-shifting approaches and pleas for more help from other levels of government, this month Mayor Adams announced a comprehensive response to the migrant crisis. It includes creating the new Office of Asylum Seeker Operations (OASO) and releasing a blueprint with plans to provide long- and short-term housing, resettlement services, legal representation, workforce training, and more.
As Adams put it, the new office is an attempt to organize the city’s various efforts at dealing with the migrant crisis. “We're shifting from the response of dealing with that emergency influx to a very organized way,” he told reporters after the announcement.
The mayor did not provide details about who would head up the new office or where the city would set up a new 24/7 arrival center for migrants as a part of the plan; it also was not clear why a new office was needed.
“We're going to open a location, we're going to let everyone know where the location is, and we are going to make a determination of the structured way to make sure the resources that people want to bring is done in an orderly fashion,” he said. “I don't do things in a disorganized way. We will make sure all those who want to assist the asylum-seekers get an opportunity to do so.”
However, the city already has an office dedicated to immigrants, the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs (MOIA), which advises the mayor on policies related to immigrants, provides a myriad of services to the city’s immigrant population from legal assistance to language services, and coordinates with other mayoral offices and city agencies on immigrant services. Over the past year, MOIA has been working closely with the city’s emergency management office and others to provide services to the asylum-seekers who have arrived, along with other ongoing programming.
At a City Council budget hearing after the mayor’s announcement, Council members questioned the rationale behind creating a new office with responsibilities that are already overseen in some fashion by MOIA.
Council members have already been critical of the mayor for his comments in recent months where he has presented, in their opinion, a false dichotomy between providing services and shelter for migrants at the cost of services for New Yorkers who have been living in the city. He has repeatedly used that reasoning when justifying cuts to city agencies in his proposed $102.7 billion preliminary budget for the 2024 fiscal year and while making threats of further cuts.
The city does have a major price tag to contend with. The administration estimates that the migrant crisis will cost about $4.2 billion over the current and next fiscal years. Mayor Adams has called it a “national crisis” and urged the federal and state governments to provide greater assistance to the city. So far, the city has only secured about $8 million from FEMA and is awaiting its share of an $800 million pot of funding appropriated by Congress in December to aid cities that have seen migrants arrive in large numbers. City budget officials have said, though, they don’t expect any of those funds to be delivered before the end of the current fiscal year, June 30.
Governor Kathy Hochul did propose $1 billion in aid to the city in her executive budget, which is being negotiated in Albany and is due by April 1. She also proposed a framework where costs would be borne equally by the federal, state, and city governments.
“It is disappointing that the proposed preliminary budget leaves significant gaps in the city's ability to meet the needs of our immigrant community,” said Council Member Shahana Hanif, a Brooklyn Democrat, co-chair of the Council’s Progressive Caucus, and chair of the Council’s Committee on Immigration, at the hearing.
“This committee rejects the austerity framework that pits new arrivals against longtime residents,” she added. “We call on the administration to restore and increase funding to services that allow our newest New Yorkers to thrive.”
However the more glaring omission that the Council members noted at the hearing was the lack of details about the new Office of Asylum Seeker Operations.
Under questioning from Council members, MOIA Commissioner Manuel Castro attempted to justify the mayor’s announcement. “We don't have details about where it will be housed,” he said of the new office. “I think that's an ongoing conversation. But it is an office that's meant to centralize the work even further.”
When Hanif asked about the structure or budget of the office, Castro had no readily available information to offer. “I think this office will help alleviate some of the pressure on all of us, but we'll certainly share information as we learn more,” he said.
A spokesperson for the mayor had no additional information to share about the new office as of Monday, March 20.
Council Member Gale Brewer, a Manhattan Democrat, seemed bewildered by the mayor’s decision to create a separate office rather than expand MOIA, which is a relatively small office, with a six-person staff and a proposed budget of only $745,000 for the next fiscal year, which starts July 1.
“[T]here must be a new task force for everything right?” Brewer said. “I don't really understand. This one should have been you. I don't know if we need a new one.”
Castro did try to assure the committee that MOIA’s role was not entirely being supplanted, since it will still be coordinating emergency immigrant legal services that the city has allocated $5 million towards.
“We've been told that MOIA will continue to have a significant role. This is not us pulling back,” he said.
The office is necessary, he argued, as the city still has many unknowns to contend with over the next few months as the city expects migrants to continue to arrive. President Joe Biden has also said that the national state of emergency over COVID-19 will end in May, which will also lift the Title 42 policy that has been used to expel more than 2 million migrants arriving at the border.
“We just don't know what will happen in the coming months with Title 42 to be lifted and everything else happening,” Castro said. “It's best to be prepared…We don't want to be alarmist but we don't want to let our guard down. We want to have a plan in place.”
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
At the City Council, Library System Heads Argue Against Mayor's Budget Cuts
Linda Johnson, Tony Marx, & Dennis Walcott (l-r) (photo: @nypl)
The leaders of New York City’s three public library systems appealed to the New York City Council on Monday for its help in pushing back against tens of millions in possible budget cuts in Mayor Eric Adams’ $102.7 billion preliminary budget plan for the 2024 fiscal year.
The New York, Brooklyn, and Queens Public Libraries, along with the city’s Research Libraries, together face a $20.5 million budget cut in the next fiscal year, which starts July 1, as part of a Program to Eliminate the Gap (PEG) that the mayor instituted to cut city spending. The heads of the library systems also want the mayor to reallocate and baseline another $15.7 million, which was previously awarded by the Council for the current fiscal year through discretionary funds.
In total, the library officials and their supporters say that amounts to a possible $36.2 million budget cut that would severely affect their services, on top of $13.5 million in cuts already made by the mayor in the earlier November modification to the current year’s budget.
Overall, the mayor’s budget proposes a combined roughly $411 million for the three public library systems and the research libraries, $42 million lower than the budget adopted last June for the current fiscal year.
On Monday morning, the heads of the library systems (New York Public Library serves Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island) were among those rallying against the cuts on the steps of City Hall before appearing at a budget hearing held by the Council’s Committee on Cultural Affairs, Libraries, and International Intergroup Relations. They received a sympathetic welcome, as the Council has already declared that it will push back against any reduction in funding for libraries. Committee chair Council Member Chi Ossé, a Brooklyn Democrat, was among the Council members who joined the library presidents and others at the rally before the hearing.
“I want to ensure that the Fiscal 2024 Preliminary Plan adequately funds the city’s library systems as they continue providing services to the neighborhoods throughout the city,” said Council Member Chi Ossé, the committee chair. “It is essential that the budget we adopt this year is transparent, accountable, and reflective of the priorities and interests of the Council and the people we represent.”
The city’s libraries provide a broad range of services and programs including early childhood education, afterschool programming, English-language classes, free internet service, and more. During the pandemic, library branches served as vaccination and testing sites. In one particularly severe heatwave, they opened their doors as cooling centers. They help people sign up for the municipal identification program, host participatory budgeting sessions, provide job training, and teach technology to those reentering society after leaving the justice system, among other services. Most recently, they have been part of providing assistance to the tens of thousands of migrant asylum-seekers arriving in the city.
The library leaders said they faced stark choices should they have to absorb the cuts in the mayor’s proposed budget.
“The scale and magnitude of these cuts would impact our operations across the board – our capacity to open new branches just after we've invested huge amounts of capital in them, to keep our current hours, to maintain our collections, to offer the extensive educational and other programs,” said Tony Marx, president and CEO of New York Public Library, in his opening remarks.
The Adams administration has attempted to refute the narrative that the budget will cut funding for libraries. The mayor and his spokespeople have argued that the PEG exercise did not discriminate between city agencies and was necessary as the city faces severe financial pressures including unresolved municipal labor contracts, increasing health care costs, diminishing federal relief aid, and, chiefly, the costs of the migrant asylum-seeker crisis.
“This administration has made critical investments in the city’s three library systems and recognizes the vital role they play in our communities,” said Jonah Allon, a mayoral spokesperson, in a statement to Gotham Gazette last week.
Allon said it was “inaccurate” to say library funding was being cut, however, since that allocation does not yet include state or federal funding, which will be reflected further along during the budget process. He also noted that the Council will have the opportunity to allocate discretionary funds to libraries again before the budget is adopted. “We will continue to evaluate their needs and work with them through the budget process,” he said of the libraries.
[READ: City Libraries Launch Push to Beat Back Mayor Adams' Budget Cuts]
At the hearing, Linda Johnson, president and CEO of Brooklyn Public Library, said the cuts would force BPL to cut 78 vacant positions, at a time when they need to add about 40 more employees to meet the demands of bringing new library branches online. “We're beyond cutting to the bone, we're cutting to the marrow,” she said, insisting that the system would have to brace for emergency closures since they have little wiggle room to operate with limited staff.
Marx said NYPL would have to reduce 85 vacant positions. “A 10% cut to our baseline funding is the equivalent to 10 fewer branches in our system at a moment when we're reopening six,” Marx said.
“All three systems, we’re extremely lean and we’re effective, really, being that lean,” said Dennis Walcott, president and CEO of Queens Public Library. “And any further cuts to the system really goes beyond effectiveness and being lean. It is counterproductive to what we'll be facing.”
Library officials and Council Member Ossé also said that the library cuts are being proposed at a time when transphobic right-wing activists have begun targeting local libraries for hosting drag story hours, and when conservative-led states are banning books that they wrongly label as harmful to children.
“We understand in this moment, in this national climate of a rash of book bans and protests at drag story hours, that we have to stand as an institution,” Marx said. “That is part of our civic engagement, to say we are committed to the mission of everyone having the access to the materials and the programs and the opportunities that they seek.”
“Our very purpose of being here is to be sure that we continue to be the most democratic institution in our society and that we protect everybody's right to read what they choose,” Johnson said.
“We are truly an open democratic institution and we cannot allow our staff, we cannot allow people who come to us as customers, to be impacted, affected by the culture wars that are taking place outside our buildings,” Walcott said.
The library systems have also been affected by the staffing crisis across city government and have been hiring to fill vacancies. But any further cuts will mean that they will lose that hiring momentum, the library officials said.
Ossé also stressed the point that funding for libraries is also essential to public safety. They are the type of “upstream” investments that Mayor Adams has repeatedly talked about.
“We know that the longer that kids are staying in our libraries…and the more interesting programs that we're offering that attract teenagers, the better off they'll be,” Johnson said. “There are a lot of shiny things that are out on the streets and our objective is to keep teenagers in our branches throughout their high school career.”
“In order to achieve the level of public safety that we want, we cannot just be investing in policing,” Marx said. “We need to be investing in how to prevent the kinds of public safety concerns that then feed the debate about policing.”
In April, Mayor Adams will present his executive budget, taking into account the latest fiscal projections, the state budget passed in Albany, and other factors, including the City Council’s response to his preliminary budget, which it will issue after the ongoing weeks of hearings.
On Monday the library officials also stressed the need for libraries to be included in the mayor’s ten-year capital plan and for the city to speed up library capital projects through the Department of Design and Construction, which currently “take twice as long and cost twice as much” as it should, Marx said.
“If we don't have great, inspiring spaces that are not leaking, we can't do any of the other things that people rely on us to do,” he said.
The proposed fiscal year 2024 Preliminary Capital Commitment Plan, which covers fiscal years 2023-2027, allocates $936.6 million for the library systems. The Ten-Year Capital Strategy for fiscal years 2024-2033, which is released every two years, includes $1.3 billion for the systems.
“It would be great if we could be funded enough so that we could do work preventatively instead of just reacting to emergencies,” Johnson said, noting that the BPL has about $340 million in deferred maintenance needs.
The NYPL’s capital needs, Marx said, are about $536 million, while Queens’ needs are about $165 million over ten years.
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
How the Adams Administration is Thinking About Blockchain and Cryptocurrency
Mayor Adams at a tech conference (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)
At a February oversight hearing held by the New York City Council Committee on Technology, the city’s Chief Technology Officer, Matthew Fraser, defended blockchain as a useful tool for stimulating the economy and enhancing government services.
As head of the city’s Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI), Fraser is at the forefront of the Adams administration’s plans to integrate blockchain and other digital tools into municipal operations while also continuing to evaluate the cryptocurrency marketplace. At the hearing, Fraser delved into several tech projects the city is undertaking, including the development of the “MyCity” one-stop portal for city services and public benefits, but much of the discussion focused on how the administration is approaching blockchain.
Blockchain technology strings together “blocks” of digital transaction records to create unique and private data, with a focus on security. Cryptocurrency, which relies on blockchain, is a decentralized digital currency meant to create an alternative to traditional monetary systems.
Mayor Eric Adams, a first-term Democrat who appointed Fraser to his current role last year, has been a big booster of the tech sector broadly and both blockchain and cryptocurrency specifically. Both Adams and Fraser have been supportive of newer technologies and digital assets like blockchain and cryptocurrency, even despite the latter’s volatility, crash, and high-profile scandals. Adams famously used his first two paychecks as mayor to buy the largely unregulated cryptocurrencies, purchasing Bitcoin and other crypto products, investments that have all lost much of their value since.
The City Council technology committee, chaired by Council Member Jennifer Gutiérrez, a Brooklyn Democrat, called the oversight hearing — the first of its kind in the city — to examine how the Adams administration is considering and evaluating blockchain and cryptocurrency. Adams has previously discussed his faith in these technologies to help expand government services, grow New York’s economy, and engage new entrepreneurs, young people, and people historically disenfranchised by the traditional banking and economic gate-keepers.
In her opening statement, Gutiérrez listed transactional freedom and accessibility, data stability and authenticity, and ability to detect fraud as positives, in some cases, of either cryptocurrency or blockchain technology, while raising concerns over energy consumption, volatility that led to incidents like the FTX crypto fund collapse, and difficulty in correcting flaws in decentralized systems.
“We must do our due diligence to not only understand cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, but also make sure New Yorkers can properly access the necessary information to safely navigate these novel technologies,” Gutiérrez said at the hearing. “Today’s hearing aims to draw in any vision for both technologies, ensuring that as a city we are giving thoughtful consideration to this potentially transformational technology and industry, rather than refusing to exchange because the issues are complicated and not yet fully formed.”
“In addition to the blockchain industry helping New York City’s economy recover from the lingering effects of the pandemic, blockchain technology has the potential to streamline and centralize document retention, enable real-time record consolidation, and support asset transfers, among many other applications,” Fraser said in his testimony. “New York City has proudly been a pioneer in embracing the blockchain industry, as it evaluates the potential government applications and plants a flag as a viable home for blockchain companies that can grow our economy and hire new workers.”
Over the course of the hearing, Fraser and several City Council members discussed government use of blockchain and cryptocurrency, educating people to avoid risks, and working with state and federal actors to deal with the emerging technology responsibly and beneficially. While there were large areas of agreement over how data and tracking could be used to streamline government services, some Council members objected to the implications over privacy and the readiness of the city to support new blockchain-based initiatives.
Digital Wallet, Privacy, and Data
One of Mayor Adams’ campaign commitments was to replace traditional city government payroll checks and direct deposit with a “cyber wallet” to pay government workers and public benefit recipients. Fraser told the committee that he expects the first wallets to be introduced by the end of the calendar year.
The cyber wallets may be integrated into the forthcoming MyCity platform, an online hub that connects New Yorkers to city services and public benefit applications.
Asked by Gutiérrez for details on the administration’s plan, Fraser clarified that a cyber wallet, essentially an individual account on a digital finance network, would be able to accept various sources of payments and types of currencies, including cryptocurrency. Centralizing benefits on a single digital platform, he said, would give government agencies better means to keep track of how government-provided money is being spent.
One controversial application of digital wallet technology is the Adams administration’s proposal to track what kind of food users are buying and then use the data to incentivize healthier behavior.
“Imagine for food benefits, if you had a digital wallet where you went out and spent a dollar on vegetables or something healthy versus sugary snacks or soda,” Fraser explained. “The city could provide incentive points, meaning, dollar-matching, dollar-for-dollar, for what you spend on healthy products.”
City Council Member Vickie Paladino, a Queens Republican, used much of her questioning time to press Fraser on the potential ramifications for privacy. “I don’t like the idea that you’re going to monitor people’s spending habits—whether they choose to buy healthy food or a bag of potato chips,” she told Fraser, who clarified that no benefits would be cut based on a recipient’s spending habits.
Recipients would not be required to take part in the incentives program, he added. His answers did not mollify Paladino, who continued to express deep concern over embarking on a heavily digitized, centralized project.
“Everything sounds great in the beginning,” she said. “But five and ten years down the road, this is like something out of a science-fiction movie…I feel like as soon as we give an inch, you take a hand, and as soon as we give a hand, you take an arm, and before we know it, we don’t know how we all got here.”
Less controversially, Fraser said that broadening the eligibility framework and tracking who is taking advantage of public services would allow agencies to spot which services an eligible person might not be taking advantage of.
City Council Member Julie Won, a Queens Democrat, praised blockchain technology but asked whether the Adams administration had built the infrastructure to support their plans for consolidating blockchain data for operational purposes.
Fraser sought to assure the committee that government agencies were in the process of standardizing their data collection and use practices, but Won continued to press him from the perspective of constituents seeking transparency over issues like the progress of a capital project or details of their procurement cycles.
“Right now we have issues with CompStat, CouncilStat, Passport, which is not in real time,” Won said, referring to various city government digital programs. “And the user interface is not something that is easy for folks to use.”
Assessing “real-time” data is something that the New York City police department (NYPD) has done for many years through its CompStat system, which is used for tracking crime and holding police officials accountable at regular internal NYPD meetings while also presenting information to the public. Mayor Adams has said he helped develop CompStat when he was in the police department and often touts its effectiveness. Fraser echoed Adams’ oft-stated plans to expand CompStat-type data aggregation and analysis (and use for government accountability) beyond the NYPD through NYCStat, a more general database for tracking city services that the administration is working to develop.
“We are in the infancy stage, like babies dragging our faces on the floor and trying to get upright,” Fraser told Won, concerning NYCStat. “[CompStat] is the space we’re looking to get to with NYCStat. And it’s not just about one agency’s data, but about operation data across all the agencies.”
Asked by Won if a digital wallet and other data-collecting tools would be used for punitive measures, Fraser assured the committee that they would not. He also said that OTI had no intention of sharing data with third parties, but demurred when asked if they would decline requests for data from law enforcement.
Education
Under questioning from Council Members Gutiérrez and Won, Fraser explained the Office of Technology and Innovation’s efforts to educate the public on careful approaches to cryptocurrency.
“We brought out a number of financial literacy courses,” he said. “I’m hopeful that as we go within the next near or so that we can make more of these courses broadly available, and we can incorporate other things into that like risks associated with these types of monies.”
Fraser later said that OTI had partnered with the Department of Education and higher education institutions like CUNY to circulate information as early as possible and prepare the future workforce for changes in the currency landscape by introducing courses about cryptocurrency and blockchain technology into school curriculums. The DOE has introduced gaming into its curriculum this year, with hopes to add more emerging technology education in the coming year.
In addition to formal coursework, OTI has played a prominent role in organizing relevant conferences and events, including the annual Blockchain Week, which Fraser said “brings together those that are leading innovators of blockchain and leveraging blockchain-related tech, those who are interested in learning blockchain-related tech, and also bringing civic innovation together for those that are in New York that have startups focusing on that space.” Fraser told the Council committee that thousands of people have participated in the event each year.
Implementation and Viability
Since his appointment as Chief Technology Officer in early 2021, Fraser has been working to grow the cryptocurrency industry in New York City and lay the groundwork for integrating blockchain technology into government use, such as the sharing and validation of legal documents. Mayor Adams has talked about the city issuing, for example, birth certificates through blockchain.
In a sign of the Adams administration’s increasing focus on cryptocurrency and blockchain, city government agencies are making several new hires with purview over emerging technology.
The Human Resources Administration is seeking a Director of Security Operations specializing in blockchain technology, while OTI is recruiting two Policy Advisors to investigate and advance government blockchain use cases.
“The individuals who fill these positions will work with government and external stakeholders to identify, assess, and develop strategies to implement blockchain applications in the right way,” Fraser’s office told Gotham Gazette. “It is important to note that while blockchain could have a plethora of use cases in government, our team is laser-focused on researching and determining where blockchain implementation could make more sense than traditional technology.”
According to the job posting shared with Gotham Gazette, other key responsibilities for the OTI Policy Advisors include advising the CTO on how shifting trends might affect New York City government operations and serving as liaisons among the Adams administration, government partners, and industry on matters concerning digital assets.
The city must work closely with the state government’s Department of Financial Services (DFS), which as chief regulator in New York is responsible for setting regulatory standards, issuing BitLicenses for cryptocurrency services, and controlling who can emerge into the digital asset field to do business in the state.
Asked by Gutiérrez about any dialogue with state government leaders, Fraser called Governor Kathy Hochul a “big supporter of New York City” and affirmed that his office “has had a lot of conversations with the governor’s office about the speed it takes to get a BitLicense issued, and other conversations around eligibility criteria, around who can apply, and some of those conversations have resulted in changes by the DFS, including adding additional resources to that office so that they can turn out licenses quicker.”
Part of the process involves lowering what the CTO’s office later referred to as “artificial barriers to entry.” OTI does not yet have a specific year-to-year goal for the number of licenses it would like to see issued, he said. None of the Council members present asked about the potential pitfalls of lowering barriers to entry or speeding up the issuance of BitLicenses.
Fraser also emphasized his bottom line that maintaining New York City’s apparent position as the financial technology (fintech) capital of the world required “smart regulation, not overregulation.”
One significant limitation, which some may call a protection, is that the federal government does not yet recognize cryptocurrency as a legitimate form of currency, which prevents the New York City government from accepting or providing payments in that form. As things stand, OTI is still looking for ways to potentially utilize third-party services like a New York City Coin for New Yorkers to pay their taxes, parking tickets, and other fees in cryptocurrency, which would then be converted into U.S. dollars for the final phase of transaction.
But when it comes to widespread implementation of third-party cryptocurrency services like in Miami, with its controversial MiamiCoin, Fraser exercised more caution. According to OTI, New York City government has no connection to NYCCoin, which is run by the same company that created the now-defunct MiamiCoin.
“As the fintech capital of the world, we can’t afford to make investments while we throw products out that don’t necessarily meet a maturity level that we feel comfortable with,” Fraser told Council members. “Since the start of the administration, we’ve been evaluating what’s the best way to enter the market if we enter the market…at this point, we haven’t made a tangible decision as to whether a New York City Coin would ever emerge, but we are looking for practical applications of blockchain-related technology and how we can use third-party applications to accept payments using crypto.”
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by Nicholas Liu, Gotham Gazette
@GothamGazette
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