‘It’s About Sweating the Small Stuff’: Council Member Brannan on Resiliency Oversight, Improving City Government, and Running for Speaker
City Council Member Justin Brannan (photo: John McCarten/City Council)
Following the severe destruction across the city from Hurricane Ida, City Council Member Justin Brannan is urging immediate measures to better equip the city to withstand severe storms in the future and “our new climate reality.”
Brannan, a Democrat who chairs the Council’s Committee on Resiliency and Waterfronts, appeared recently on the Max Politics podcast from Gotham Gazette to discuss his oversight of the city’s resiliency efforts, including a recent hearing he co-chaired to evaluate what went wrong before and during Ida’s torrential and deadly downpour, and more. Seeking reelection this year, Brannan represents the 43rd City Council district, which includes Bay Ridge, Bensonhurst, Dyker Heights, and Bath Beach.
In the interview with host Ben Max, Brannan discussed issues of accountability and performance in city government, and his bid to become the next Speaker of the City Council, a very powerful perch whose next occupant will be selected by the 51 members of the Council in January, when the next class of Council members is seated.
“Never in a million years did I think that I would be an elected official,” said Brannan, when asked to introduce himself to listeners. “I always thought politics was a bunch of stuff that old guys with white hair argued about in Washington.”
A former punk rocker who eventually got involved in local civic affairs then became an aide to his City Council predecessor, Vincent Gentile, then an intergovernmental official at the Department of Education before being elected in 2017, Brannan said among the issues he expected to tackle when in office, a global pandemic was not one of them. However, he said that the pandemic should serve as a reminder of the need for collectivity among New York City residents and has tested the importance of good, local constituent services.
“Certainly when I ran for office, I never thought that I would be attempting to govern during a pandemic, but here we are,” Brannan said. “But it definitely reminded us all of how interconnected we are and how my health and safety and well-being is related to my neighbor’s health and safety and well-being. If they’re not well, I’m not well. If they’re not safe, I’m not safe.”
One of few seats in city government where general elections can be competitive, Brannan’s district includes a great deal of diversity ideologically, as well as in other ways. Brannan called it a “microcosm for America.”
“It’s not like most of the majority of the city where if you’re a Democrat and you win the primary it’s all done,” said Brannan. “We still have competitive general elections. Democrats don’t win by landslides.” Brian Fox is the Republican nominee hoping to unseat Brannan this fall.
Asked about governing while representing the district and working with a wide variety of constituencies, he said, “It definitely helps make me a better elected official because you have to thread some of those needles and you also have to know when to listen and when to lead and when to take what might be an unpopular position because it’s the right thing to do.”
On the central topics of the interview -- Brannan’s oversight role regarding city resiliency efforts and the city’s ability to handle severe weather, as well as broader issues of government (dys)function -- Brannan expressed frustration. The city’s lack of progress implementing adequate resilience measures, taking the needed urgent action to prepare for the impacts of climate change, and generally upgrading its antiquated infrastructure in an equitable way throughout the city. He also called for and expressed optimism about the passage of his bill mandating the city create a five-borough resiliency plan.
“We’ve never seen anything like this,” he said of Hurricane Ida’s record rains. “This new climate reality and the climate crisis is very much here now.”
[LISTEN: Max Politics Podcast: City Council Member Justin Brannan on Resiliency Oversight & More]
The hearing Brannan recently co-chaired featured testimony from representatives of the Mayor’s Office of Resiliency, the Department of Environmental Protection, the Department of Transportation, and Sanitation Department, and the MTA, but he said it did little to quell his concerns about the city’s vulnerability to disasters.
“I think I went into it and I left it with the same idea, which is that we’re just not remotely ready for the next superstorm,” Brannan said. “For me, it proved what a lot of us had been saying: that the city hasn’t really accomplished very much outside of lower Manhattan in the years since Hurricane Sandy.” Parts of the city, particularly along its coastline, have not completely recovered from that storm, he said, just ahead of the ninth anniversary of its impact.
“A lot of this stuff just requires coordination on every level that is not always the default position for different levels of government,” Brannan said. “We have to have city, state, and federal all working together.”
Brannan stressed that it wouldn’t necessarily require major policy changes in order to implement suitable resiliency measures, but better coordination and management. He praised mayoral frontrunner Eric Adams’ understanding that simple tasks, such as increasing the capacity of sewers or pruning trees, are essential to fortifying the city against future storms, as well as raising confidence in city governments.
“I think Eric is great on this stuff because he understands that there is immediate stuff that the city can do,” said Brannan, who endorsed Adams in the Democratic primary. “The fact that Eric Adams would appreciate something to the relation between tree pruning and the climate crisis is great because it might not make that connection, but it’s all related. That’s sweating the small stuff, and those are the things in the here and now are actions that we can take to mitigate the reality of climate change.”
“It’s about sweating the small stuff,” Brannan said when pressed on how to improve government’s delivery. “When the government fails people on the smallest and most immediate levels, then we can’t be surprised when people don’t trust the same government on the bigger issues. If you can’t get the sewers cleaned out, then how are you going to trust that same government to run a health-care system?”
“If we’re still installing sewers with the same capacity, what are we doing?” Brannan asked rhetorically, referencing that the city’s antiquated sewers are mostly built to handle 1.5 to 2 inches of rain per hour, not the 3 inches an hour of record rainfall during Ida. “Why would we be expecting a different result? It’s concerning.”
In 2019, Brannan and then-Council Member Costa Constantinides introduced legislation to mandate that the mayoral administration creates a five-borough resiliency plan to shield neighborhoods from rising sea levels, dangerous weather, and other climate threats.
“I’m optimistic and I’m almost confident that we’ll get it done,” Brannan said of passing his bill to mandate that plan, even though there are now just three months left in this Council’s term and the second and final term of Mayor Bill de Blasio. “It’s something that should have been done a long time ago, something that probably shouldn’t have required legislation, but whatever, let’s get it done.”
When questioned about his bid for City Council Speaker, Brannan expressed optimism about the incoming class of Council members and underscored the importance of the position in helping Council members to best represent their districts.
“I think the class of 2022 is shaping up to be full of just incredibly smart, and diverse and talented public servants,” Brannan said of that next class, which will be about two-thirds new. “I think when the job is done right, the speaker shouldn’t be in the spotlight. The speaker should be behind the scenes helping these members shine and deliver for their districts.”
“I really see the role of the speaker as the manager of the baseball team,” he continued of his philosophy and pitch to the returning and new members whose votes he’ll need to win the post. “The job is really to wake up every day thinking ‘how can I make sure that everyone has what they need to deliver for their districts?’”
[LISTEN to the full conversation: Max Politics Podcast: City Council Member Justin Brannan on Resiliency Oversight & More]
***
by Alexander Puri, Gotham Gazette
@GothamGazette
Max Politics Podcast: New York City's Climate and Sustainability Efforts
New York City (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)
September 24, 2021 - Max Politics Podcast: New York City's Climate and Sustainability Efforts
Ben Furnas, the director of the mayor's office of climate and sustainability, joined the show to discuss the de Blasio administration's policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and create a more sustainable, livable city.
Listen to the conversation and let us know what you think, on Twitter @TweetBenMax. You can listen to the show through the embedded audio below or download the episode wherever you get your podcasts at Max Politics.
Read more: Max Politics Podcast: New York City's Climate and Sustainability Efforts
‘The Mayor Should Be There’: Council Member Powers on Rikers Oversight, & Running for Speaker
Council Member Keith Powers (photo: City Council)
City Council Member Keith Powers has the crisis in the city’s Rikers Island jail complex directly on his plate. The Manhattan Democrat is chair of the Council’s Committee on Criminal Justice and therefore responsible for one key layer of oversight of city jails.
Just after convening an emergency meeting about conditions on Rikers with several key city officials and ahead of chairing a formal City Council oversight hearing on the subject, Powers appeared on Gotham Gazette’s Max Politics podcast. He told host Ben Max about the key takeaways from the meeting he held and what he hoped to get from the hearing that then took place on September 15. Since the interview and that hearing, Powers also made another visit to Rikers Island to see the dangerous and deadly conditions for himself.
In the interview, Powers discussed the crisis at Rikers and emergency steps to address it, the city’s plan to close the notorious jail complex later this decade, other issues he’s working on, like revitalizing the city’s tourism sector and larger economy, and his bid to become the next Speaker of the City Council when that vote is taken by the new Council class in January. Powers is expected to easily win reelection this fall, part of a relatively small group of returning members who will be joined by roughly three dozen new members in the 51-seat Council.
[LISTEN: City Council Member Keith Powers on Oversight of City Jails & More]
Powers pointed to several major problems at the jail complex, which Mayor Bill de Blasio -- who hasn’t visited Rikers for more than four years -- has announced steps to address. During the September 8 interview, Powers pointed to very high rates of correctional staff absenteeism, covid and other health concerns, an increase in violence in various directions among correction officers and detainees, and other issues.
"The staff absenteeism right now is a crisis unto itself,” he said. Powers and other elected officials who have visited Rikers in recent weeks have reported a “humanitarian crisis” there, while as of September 23, twelve city detainees have died this year.
Too many correction officers have been calling in sick or simply refusing to report to their shifts, Powers said, while also stressing that conditions need to be improved for the officers, like reducing the use of double and triple shifts. Detainees are not getting proper levels of supervision, medical care, covid protections, or transport, and as the jail census has shot up from under 4,000 to over 6,000 in the last year-plus, the situation has become untenable and extremely dangerous for all involved.
“It’s a major inflection point in our system and there’s a number of crises emerging at the same time,” Powers said. Powers added that it was “impossible” to address these issues “if we don’t have appropriate people there to help resource the jails, to provide security, and of course to relieve each other of triple shifts and double shifts and quadruple shifts.”
“It’s always important to get everybody into one place so you can hear people work off each other and to debate and discuss when necessary,” he said of the meeting he convened with key city officials and the hearing he was going to chair. “I think we as a city have to address the jail violence issues.”
Just before the hearing, de Blasio announced a five-point plan to improve conditions at Rikers, including hiring contractors to deliver medical care to employees on duty, suspending correction officers who did not show up for work, hiring additional correction officers, and having NYPD officers relieve correction officers of some of their court duties so the correction staff could remain at the jails.
“At Rikers I saw the most inhumane conditions imaginable,” Powers tweeted on September 16 after his visit to the jails. “Intake was abhorrent—100s of inmates trapped for weeks. Denied water, food, a place to sleep. COVID rampant. Staff doing multiple shifts.”
Powers said in no uncertain terms that de Blasio should visit the Rikers jail complex, but the mayor has still not been, promising to go at some point but arguing that he is focused on improving conditions at the jails.
"It is important that the mayor goes and sees both the current humane crisis...and understands the staffing issues…,” Powers said, but the crisis has only worsened since and de Blasio has still not gone to the scene of the emergency, “...the Mayor should be there, should go there soon...raise the level of urgency on the issues and demonstrate that there's all focus."
As conditions have become more dire and the detainee death count has risen, Powers has called for increasingly extreme measures. He’s said the mayor and Governor Kathy Hochul must do more in their power to reduce the jail census, suggested they bring in personnel help via the state correctional staff or National Guard, and more.
Later in the podcast interview Powers also discussed the city’s economic recovery and the challenges given the ongoing pandemic, including the recent covid spike brought on by the Delta variant and other factors. The city can’t make a complete recovery until the pandemic has subsided, he said.
“We’re going to see a little of a ceiling on that until we come out of this crisis,” Powers said. “You should be looking for these little things to get people back, to get them to spend an evening in New York City, or to come back and do a weekend here. Those people are going to help us keep a little stable until conferences come back, until international tourism comes back, and large-scale events return.”
He explained some of the efforts he’s undertaken to promote tourism and economic activity, which have aspects of particular importance to his East Side district.
One of the hardest-hit sectors of the city’s economy has been it’s nightlife scene. Powers has called for an end to zoning restrictions on dancing in restaurants and bars, which had remained in place even after City Council repealed the antiquated Cabaret Law, which had prohibited dancing in most of the city’s establishments.
“It would be a good thing for the nightlife industry to know that that’s not even a thing,” Powers said of the zoning restrictions, which have seemingly gone largely unenforced but can be a hindrance or a headache for proprietors. “It would be good for the city to show that we’re helping out these businesses.”
On the issue of resilience efforts and the city’s infrastructure following the destruction from Hurricane Ida, Powers suggested that the city implement flooding strategies similar to those for snowstorms.
“When it snows in New York City, we have mountains of salt in different places, we have plows that come out, we repurpose an entire city agency to get out there and plow the streets,” he said. “I wonder if we should have anything like that resiliency in the moment, or preparation in the moment when it comes to flooding.”
Powers said that he’s been encouraged by his conversations with many likely incoming Council members about several of these issues, as he works to win their support and become the next Council Speaker, one of the most important and powerful positions in city government. Powers and his fellow candidates for Speaker need to secure 25 votes plus their own in the 51-seat body in order to be selected the legislative leader.
“I think it’s really an exciting moment because we have all these new colleagues coming in from different backgrounds, different experiences, different ages,” he said. “I’ve been really encouraged by the folks I’ve talked to about their ideas. My message to them is that the Council is really one of the most important parts of the city government. We need members to really be able to help drive the conversation.”
Powers added that he believes the Council needs someone who will take the time to understand the issues across various communities and lead the dialogue about them.
“What members really want and need is somebody who’s gonna really go out there, in their districts and help drive the conversation for the things they need. I think my record in the Council has lent itself to that.”
[LISTEN to the full conversation: Max Politics Podcast: City Council Member Keith Powers on Oversight of City Jails & More]
***
by Alexander Puri, Gotham Gazette
@GothamGazette
Ben Max contributed to this story.
|
Tweet |
