As Comptroller, Lander Would Use ‘Environmental, Social and Governance’ Factors to Inform Pension Investment
Council Member Brad Lander (photo: John McCarten/City Council)
The New York City Comptroller is an investment advisor and fiduciary for New York City’s $266 billion public pension system that serves 700,000 current and former teachers, firefighters, health care workers, police officers, and other retired city employees.
Brad Lander, the Democratic nominee for Comptroller, is all but certain to win the general election this fall in the overwhelmingly Democratic city after prevailing in a competitive primary earlier this year. If successful, Lander would be inaugurated in January and soon be able to make recommendations to the Boards of Trustees of the city’s five public pension funds on how their many billions should be invested, while also voting directly on four of the five pension boards, making him the key figure in almost all investment decisions.
The implications are significant given that city workers’ pensions are on the line, and because the city guarantees those pensions, billions are spent each year to make up for what the pensions themselves don’t produce in returns. Better returns from pension fund investments can save city government a significant amount of money that could be used for other priorities or put aside for a crisis.
Those investment decisions can also be made to further other goals than simply the funds’ bottom lines, though the returns and overall financial health of the pension funds are the comptroller’s main city charter-mandated responsibility.
As Lander, who ran the most progressive campaign in the comptroller primary with support from much of the city’s leftist groups and individuals, looks to take over the office from term-limited Comptroller Scott Stringer, who has been a progressive “activist investor” in the role, New York City could see an even more aggressive test case of the infusion of socio-economic principles into the management of the massive pension fund investments.
But, it’s not simply a left-wing experiment. In the past decade, the use of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics to inform investment decisions has gained momentum in the financial world, with asset management giants like BlackRock and Morgan Stanley making pushes to integrate ESG measures into their investment practices. ESG metrics are non-conventional measures of investment risk that take into account a company’s impact on broader society, balance sheet aside.
Asset managers use these metrics to construct ESG funds that tout a commitment to a social good like boardroom diversity or low carbon footprint. And while the metrics themselves are not tied to traditional financial analysis, in 2020, ESG funds outperformed their traditional peers.
At times working with Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has representatives on the same four boards as the comptroller, Stringer has taken steps during his nearly eight-year tenure to incorporate these considerations into the city’s pension investment strategy with initiatives like the Boardroom Accountability Project, which calls on companies to consider women and people of color for all board and CEO positions, and partial divestment from the fossil fuel industry.
Lander has a Strategic Plan for Responsible Fiduciary Investing that goes further. To “direct and influence corporate and fund manager behavior,” Lander writes on his campaign website, he plans to integrate ESG metrics into New York City’s pension investment strategy through several strategies. Lander pledges to do so by assembling a team of financial and ESG experts, reviewing and re-evaluating investment decisions made in the past five years, and creating a standard framework to evaluate and measure ESG funds that Lander “would consider developing” for broader, possible private, use, according to Naomi Dann, Lander’s spokesperson, in an email response to Gotham Gazette questions.
Paying attention to ESGs when investing is necessary to mitigating long-term risk, Lander’s team told Gotham Gazette. “Achieving maximum risk-adjusted market returns for the retired workers who rely on the funds now, and those who will in the years to come, requires an integrated approach that is mindful of long term risks, including climate change and inequality,” said Dann.
Paying attention to these social impact indicators, Lander explains in his plan, means that New York City could back up political commitments like upholding the Paris Climate Agreement, supporting racial and gender equity, promoting workers’ rights and representation, and prioritizing local business, in its investment decisions.
“The Strategic Plan for Responsible Fiduciary Investing will strengthen environmental, social, and governance commitments,” Lander says on his website, “including more specific language around tackling climate change, accounting for environmental justice, and addressing wealth and income inequality, consistent with fiduciary duty.”
Lander’s plan establishes a Chief Diversity Officer in the Comptroller Office’s Bureau of Asset Management to assemble a diverse team of asset managers and advisers who will work with trustees to develop fund-specific fiduciary blueprints that incorporate ESG measures into investment practices.
His initial proposals include using shareholder activism to vote out corporate directors who fail to take action to comply with the Paris Climate Agreement minimum standards, push companies to release workers’ rights information like wages, and require corporate political spending to be reported.
On behalf of Lander, Dann told Gotham Gazette that shareholder activism allows the comptroller to “achieve better ESG integration without putting the funds at risk by leveraging all of the tools available to us as an institutional investor, balancing divestment and investment efforts with fund manager diversity and strategic shareholder engagement to promote change from within the City’s existing portfolio.” For companies unwilling to respond to such requests, as well as those with ties to fossil fuels, private prisons, and gun manufacturing, Lander proposes pension fund divestment.
But to get any of this done, Lander has to first convince the other fund trustees, who also have a vote in investment decisions, to approve any of his plans for investor activism, a feat proven somewhat difficult by the recent fossil fuel divestment push, where two of the five boards declined to go along with Stringer’s and de Blasio’s divestment plan. Not only that but trustees can’t base their investment decisions solely off political commitments and ESG considerations, as their fiduciary duty requires them by law to make investments that are in the financial interest of all fund beneficiaries.
The Center for International Environmental Law describes this duty as a “standard of prudence” that demands trustees use “reasonable care, skill, and caution” to make sure they put the fund money where it will make the most money without too much risk.
Studies finding a positive correlation between ESG consideration and stock performance are proving that socially responsible investing can be consistent with fiduciary duty, giving legal cover for fiduciaries like Stringer and Lander to use pension fund money to make socially-conscious investments. And for Lander, fiduciary duty “must include strong attention to those core systemic risks, including the climate crisis, rampant inequality, and racial injustice.”
At the state level, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, who serves as the sole fiduciary to the state’s public pension fund, recently started to move toward significant divestment from fossil fuel holdings, promising to transition the state’s $266 billion pension fund investment portfolio to net-zero emissions by 2040.
Not only that, but failure to account for climate change might even result in liability lawsuits against trustees, the Center for International Environmental Law argues. The reality of climate change, according to CIEL, means that fiduciaries must take climate impact into consideration: “the potential financial cost of physical impacts due to climate change, the inability to generate revenue from fossil fuel reserves already held or in development, the costs of transitioning to a low-carbon economy, and legal liabilities related to climate change” in investment decisions.
Beyond climate risk (the ‘E’ in ESG), a McKinsey report found that diverse governance can also be an indicator of financial viability on top of being socially conscious. “When companies commit themselves to diverse leadership,” the 2015 “Why diversity matters” report states, “they are more successful,” because companies “are better able to win top talent and improve their customer orientation, employee satisfaction, and decision making, and all that leads to a virtuous cycle of increasing returns.”
In 2018, de Blasio, Stringer, and others announced a commitment to divest $4 billion of the city’s pension funds from the fossil fuel industry and reinvest the money into climate change solutions. This March, de Blasio upped the ante, promising to invest $6 billion of the funds into “climate change solutions such as wind, solar power, energy efficient technologies.”
De Blasio said in a press release that the goal of New York’s divestment is “to change the paradigm for public pension plans and set a new standard for how asset owners, such as pension funds, can use their substantial investments to both do well for our beneficiaries and do good for the planet.”
“Divestment is a critical part of our strategy to fight climate change while insulating our pension funds,” said de Blasio of the commitment, adding, “we must take action now to protect our portfolios as well as our planet for future generations.”
Stringer said similarly, including about how “investing in climate change solutions is in the fiduciary interest of our beneficiaries and together we’re leading the charge to build a cleaner and greener future for all.”
So far, Stringer and de Blasio have worked with three of the city’s five pension funds to make the fossil fuel company divestment commitment, while the fire and police pension funds are more weary about making financial decisions based on additional concerns. The next comptroller and mayor will decide whether or how to approach getting those two funds on board, among other potential goals and tactics.
Lander, who introduced a resolution at City Council in April 2020 calling for banks and asset managers that the city does business with to stop investing in the fossil fuel industry, told HuffPost, “If we’re going to have any chance at actually bending the curve on CO2 emissions, we have to confront the capital that is driving it at its scale.”
As Brooklyn borough president and therefore a trustee of the largest of the retirement funds, Eric Adams, likely New York’s next mayor, has consistently voted in favor of the city’s fossil fuel divestment initiatives. “As a trustee of the New York City Employees' Retirement System,” Adams said after he voted to divest in 2018, “I am proud to help advance an increased investment in the climate change solutions of today and tomorrow. Sustainable investments are good for our environmental and fiscal health of our city. In fact, going green will earn us green.”
If both are elected in November, Lander and Adams would work closely on pension initiatives, including, potentially, to implement Lander’s responsible fiduciary investing plan. The two have historically seen eye-to-eye in this area, but it remains to be seen whether Adams, who is generally more moderate than Lander, will be on the same page about this overall fiduciary vision.
There’s another, smaller but still significant place Lander, if victorious, will be able to potentially influence pension fund investment. The comptroller can utilize the current 2% of pension assets allocated to “economically targeted investments” (ETIs), which Lander suggests using to continue investment into affordable housing preservation and construction, allocating $10-$15 million to finance solar installations and retrofit buildings for increased efficiency, and providing start-up money for minority- and women-owned business enterprises (M/WBEs).
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by Carmen Vintro
@GothamGazette
De Blasio Outlines Spending Plan for $5.9 Billion in Direct Federal Pandemic Aid
Mayor de Blasio's 'recovery budget' was helped by federal aid (photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)
Since the March passage of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, the nation's most recent pandemic-era stimulus package, de Blasio administration officials have been crafting a plan to use close to $5.9 billion in direct federal funding to New York City government.
A new report from the de Blasio administration, required by the federal stimulus law, outlines how the city plans to spend the money.
The funding will be spread across five years (from fiscal year 2021 to 2025) for 45 projects ranging from healthcare infrastructure to housing assistance to educational support. The direct aid, known as "State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds," or SLFRF, is part of a slew of federal pandemic payments to the city totalling an estimated $22 billion over the course of multiple stimulus packages under two presidents.
Those funds include FEMA reimbursements, "education stabilization funds" from the U.S. Department of Education, and payouts from the CARES Act, Centers for Disease Control, and American Rescue Plan.
While billions in federal aid had been flowing to the city, the American Rescue Plan funds were, according to Mayor Bill de Blasio, the key bailout the city's operating budget needed. He and partners had lobbied for many months, seeing new hope and realization under President Joe Biden and a Democratic Congress, with New York Senator Chuck Schumer installed as Senate Majority Leader.
"The American people want a real stimulus...to get us back on our feet...and that includes helping city and state government to be strong so we can serve people and lead the recovery," de Blasio said on January 29, just after Joe Biden was inaugurated as president.
The city had slashed city spending in the fiscal year 2021 budget to make up for billions of dollars in lost tax revenue during the pandemic. The city is putting the bulk of the American Rescue Plan’s SLFRF -- $2.3 billion, or 39% -- toward restoring lost revenue and supporting the restoration of city services, programs, and personnel that had been cut. Over $1.5 billion of the total fund was allocated for fiscal year 2021 and more than half of it, $3.4 billion, will be spent in the current fiscal year 2022, according to a Mayor's Office spokesperson.
The next three fiscal years, which will unfold under the next mayor and City Council, set to take office in January, will see $283 million, $226 million, and $452 million of the funding, respectively, under the de Blasio administration’s plan.
After Congress passed and President Joe Biden signed the American Rescue Plan, de Blasio called it "the single biggest shot in the arm for the American people since the New Deal."
"This is going to change everything. This is going to make recovery possible," he said.
The $5.9 billion is broken down into four broad categories outlined by the U.S. Treasury Department: restoring lost city revenue, mitigating the pandemic's economic impact, addressing public health, and providing services for disproportionately impacted communities. In a pandemic that touched nearly every aspect of public and private life -- more so in some communities than others -- the city will need that to cover a lot of ground. The de Blasio administration report notes that projects may "evolve over time" as city officials continue to assess needs.
"The City’s decisions to invest these funds now will help keep New Yorkers safe, restart the economy, rebuild the tax base, increase equity, and enable greater economic growth in future years," the “New York City Recovery Plan” report states.
After replacing lost revenue, the next largest spending categories are “negative economic impacts” and “public health.” Each makes up about a quarter of the SLFRF spending under the city's plan.
While services for the hardest-hit communities is the smallest of the four major categories of the SLFRF as outlined in the mayor's office report -- 11%, or $650 million -- many of the other categories include programs aimed at underserved communities. Over $300 million of the SLFRF will go to community-based organizations serving low- and middle-income neighborhoods, according to the report, for a range of services and messaging around city efforts like vaccine services, food assistance, and mental health support.
Thirty city agencies are being tapped to carry out projects using the funds. As of the report's August 31 publication date, they have spent roughly $475 million. Many of the projects are recognizable in the most recent city budget, totalling $98.7 billion and dubbed by de Blasio the "recovery budget," which was enacted at the July start of fiscal year 2022. While the current city expense budget and separate capital infrastructure spending plan outline some expenditures of federal funds in future years, final decisions will be made by the next mayor and City Council, due to take office in January.
The 72-page report breaks down the funding categories and lists the agencies and programs that will be supported by the relief. It states the SLFRF spending will be updated annually.
Tax Revenue Replacement
The largest slice of the SLFRF -- nearly $2.3 billion, or 39% -- is slated to go to replacing tax revenue lost during the city's covid-induced economic downturn to ensure the continuation of essential city services. Of that funding, the de Blasio administration plans to spend $1.7 billion to maintain the salaries of correction officers, sanitation workers, and fire department officials (including EMTs and building inspectors). Another nearly half-billion dollars will go to waste collection.
Around $42 million will be used to support the Emergency Food Assistance Program, which has become a lifeline for 10 million New Yorkers annually, including individuals and families who have lost income and housing security as a result of the pandemic, according to the city. The SLFRF is currently positioned to shore up the program for the current fiscal year through June 2026.
Other revenue replacement funds will go toward the Build It Back program for Hurricane Sandy recovery and environmental resiliency projects. Some crisis support programs, de Blasio's Vision Zero street safety initiative, and the state-mandated Conditional Release Commission, which can determine the release of individuals incarcerated in city jails, will also receive federal funding.
Pandemic Economic Impact Mitigation
Roughly a quarter of the SLFRF, or about $1.5 billion, will go to supporting workers and small businesses in the industries most severely impacted by the pandemic, the de Blasio administration says in the report. Much of that will go to food, rent, and mortgage assistance to impacted families.
The de Blasio administration plans for about $329 million to go to rental assistance vouchers and another $62 million is slated for legal support for tenants facing eviction.
Another large piece of the funding will go toward the "New Deal-style job creation" de Blasio has touted as part of the recovery budget. That includes $230 million for the City Cleanup Corps, intended to employ 10,000 workers, targeting residents in the 33 neighborhoods identified by the city's Task Force on Racial Inclusion and Equity as hardest hit by the pandemic. About $156 million will go towards the salaries of 536 public employees across 27 agencies "associated with a hiring and attrition management policy change," the report states.
The city's Public Health Corps will receive $50 million and to the Summer Youth Employment Program another $13 million in federal funds. Some of those also include workforce development funding and the SLFRF contains an additional $5.5 million for job training, and $170,000 will go to the NYCHA Food and Catering Business Pathways programs for a targeted 300 public housing residents to start their own food businesses.
About $172 million will go towards small business assistance in the form of grants and loans administered by the city’s Department of Small Business Services. The fund also contains support specifically for the tourism, travel, and hospitality industries to the tune of $53 million "to promote local, regional, national and international visitation through marketing campaigns, branding, and sponsorships." Another $20 million will go toward making the city’s Open Restaurants program permanent, and $25 million in grants and other aid will go to the arts.
The Taxi Medallion Relief Fund for the distressed driver-owners in the yellow cab industry will get $65 million.
Public Health
Public health spending of $1.45 billion makes up another quarter of the New York City SLFRF. A large portion of that will go toward the payroll costs of COVID-19 responders.
Another $450 million will go toward mental health services. Around $163 million has been outlined for senior support services. And nearly $73 million is currently intended for covid mitigation strategies in congregate living facilities, like nursing homes, prisons and jails, as well as dense work settings and schools.
The city's test and trace program is slated for $328 million and vaccine operations another $21 million. Covid-related payroll expenses at the city’s Departments of City Administrative Services (DCAS), Information Technology (DoITT), Small Business Services, and other agencies could take as much as $441 million of the SLFRF.
The city's emergency supply stockpile -- the cache of personal protective equipment and other medical supplies developed by late 2020 in response to the first wave of the pandemic -- will take close to $1 million in SLFRF. That includes the costs of replacing perishable items in fiscal year 2022.
Services for Hard-Hit Communities
Services for hard-hit communities, predominantly comprised of Black, Latino, and immigrant residents, makes up the smallest of the four sections of the SLFRF breakdown, 11% or $650 million. More than half of that will go towards education assistance and shrinking the so-called achievement gap, which is said to have been exacerbated by the pandemic's disjointed school years. That includes both educational support and school-based health programs.
About $150 million of this category is intended for children's services, more than half of which includes child care. Another $124 million will go to housing assistance for homeless New Yorkers.
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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
@GeringerSameth @GothamGazette
Differing Visions for Public Safety in Western Queens City Council Race
Tiffany Cabán, left, and Felicia Kalan
As in many other races in New York City this election cycle, public safety is the defining issue in the general election in Queens’ City Council District 22, where a rising leftist political star who wants to abolish prisons and the police is facing a Republican pitching a far more conserative approach and ‘common sense’ moderation in the overwhelmingly Democratic district.
The major party nominees are Tiffany Cabán, a democratic socialist and former public defender who won the Democratic primary in June by a wide margin with a far left agenda, and Republican Felicia Kalan, a legislative aide and social entrepreneur who calls Cabán a Marxist in campaign ads and wants to keep the Rikers Island jails open and the NYPD 'fully funded.'
Policing has long been a key topic in the rapidly changing Western Queens district, whose residents are 47.5% white, 26.3% Hispanic, 15.7% Asian, and 8% Black, according to 2020 Census data for Queens Community District 1, which largely encompasses the 22nd City Council District. The district, centered in Astoria, has seen significant development and gentrification in recent years, and a dramatic shift leftward in its voting. It is currently unrepresented in the Council after the most recent member, Costa Constantinides, resigned earlier this year to take a nonprofit executive job, several months shy of the end of his second four-year term.
Before Constantinides, who was a proponent of redirecting NYPD funds to social services and staked other progressive territory, especially on climate issues, the district was represented through 2013 by Peter Vallone, Jr., who is far more conservative on policing, among other issues (he published an op-ed in 2013 arguing “stop and frisk works,” for example).
Given the vacancy, the winner of this year’s general election will likely be able to take office in late November or early December, just ahead of the full class of Council members. Most of that class will be new due to term limits and sworn in come January, at which time the Council will elect a new Speaker from among its ranks.
In the June Democratic primary, Cabán won the nomination with 62.6% of the vote, around 9,088 total votes. She said during an August episode of the Max Politics podcast that the results gave her a clear mandate to fight for her community at City Hall based on an agenda of “budget justice” that moves funding from the criminal legal system to community resources. Kalan, who didn’t have a primary, snapped back in a recent phone interview with Gotham Gazette, arguing that 9,088 out of more than 65,000 total registered Democrats in the district is “not a mandate.”
But the Democratic voter registration imbalance in the district makes Cabán -- a leading figure in the city’s Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) branch, a political organizer with the Working Families Party, and a rising star of the city’s political left who almost pulled off an upset in the 2019 Queens District Attorney primary -- the likely winner against her Republican opponent.
Of the 101,328 enrolled voters in the district as of February 2021, according to the Board of Elections, 65,312 were registered Democrats, 9,763 were Republicans, and 22,609 were party-unaffiliated. With those numbers (about 65% registered voters in the district being Democrats and independents outnumbering Republicans), Kalan will have to pull from across the aisle and the middle in order to have any chance to win. While she is on the offensive painting Cabán as a radical, it is unclear if Kalan is crafting a message that can coalesce the requisite mix of Democrats, Republicans, and independents.
Cabán’s candidacy is a continuation of a trend as the area moves further left politically, at least in terms of outcomes at the ballot box. Elected officials representing this Queens district, which encompasses Astoria, parts of East Elmhurst, Jackson Heights, and Woodside, and all of Rikers Island, and nearby areas have been increasingly progressive, including several DSA members.
Along with the progressive Constantinides, in 2020 Astoria elected a DSA organizer, Zohran Mamdani, to the state Assembly, and before that, the area helped elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress. Across a number of other elections, voters there have backed the furthest left of the leading candidates, including in the aforementioned district attorney race, as well as recent gubernatorial, public advocate, and other elections. In this year’s Democratic mayoral primary, almost all of the election districts in the Council district went for Maya Wiley, who was running on police reform and the furthest left of the top candidates.
Kalan argues that many Democratic voters were not aware of Cabán’s extreme policing policies when they voted for her in the primary, though public safety has been Cabán’s central issue over two campaigns. This debate is unfolding after gun violence in the city spiked over the course of a year-and-a-half amid the pandemic, though recent months have seen decreases.
Kalan is confident that she will be able to overcome daunting odds in the general election with her pro-police position that she believes will hit home with many of the district’s older, more conservative Democrats “who do not align with radical socialist policies,” she said in the phone interview.
Aspiring to “transcend political party,” Kalan said she looked at what the community needs first to drive her campaign. Bolstering public safety is at the top of the list, she said. Kalan also pointed to homeowners and a large contingent of Greek voters in more conservative parts of the district as constituencies she says will help her get elected. Cabán has also argued that public safety is a top issue for voters, but the two major party nominees have divergent visions for what actually makes communities safer.
Meanwhile, 24-year-old Edwin DeJesus is also running in the general election, as the Green Party nominee. He is running on his support for progressive initiatives like Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and Universal Basic Income.
As of September 8 numbers on the Campaign Finance Board website, Cabán had a lot more money in the bank than either of her opponents. She had a balance of $166,348 for the general election, thanks in part to the public matching funds she’s qualified for, after having raised $116,913 in private funding, getting $329,332 in public funds, and spending about $280,000 on her primary. Kalan has raised the second most funds, bringing in $34,210 in private funds and $122,435 in matched public funds, with $82,823 left in the bank as of September 8. And DeJesus has raised $8,461 in private funds as well as $46,264 in public matching dollars.
Tiffany Cabán
A public defender for seven years at the time, Cabán nearly upset Queens Borough President Melinda Katz in the 2019 Queens District Attorney race, losing in a recount after having been heavily buoyed by increasingly-progressive areas of Western Queens. Cabán ran on a radical de-carceral platform, arguing for dismantling much of the district attorney’s office and criminal justice system that she argues arrests and locks up far too many people.
Hoping to build off that momentum, Cabán set her eyes on Astoria’s City Council seat, which was due to open up because of term-limits even before Constantinides resigned for his new job. Her candidacy convinced several people in the race to drop out and she then went on to defeat five other Democrats to win the party nomination in June by a wide margin.
On the Max Politics podcast, Cabán described herself as a long-term police “abolitionist,” meaning that she is promoting steps to move away from the current criminal legal system and embrace “systems of accountability” that support community members in seeking and receiving restorative justice.
In the short term, Cabán hopes to cut “upwards of $2 or $3 billion” from the police department and halt all construction of new jails, she told host Ben Max of Gotham Gazette.
“I think that every penny we put into our prison industrial complex is one that absolutely should be spent on providing care and support in our community,” Cabán said, adding, “the more that we allow this system to catch all of our societal problems and ills, the less reason or room there is to create real, long-lasting solutions.”
Cabán pledges to work to ensure that the NYPD’s plainclothes anti-crime unit remains disbanded and that there is no return of widespread stop-and-frisk policing. Instead, Cabán said she supports investing in violence interruption programs like Cure Violence and 696 Build Queensbridge to combat violent crime without police.
“If you don’t really support defunding the police,” said Cabán, “but you do believe that mental health issues shouldn’t be criminalized, that we need to expand Health + Hospitals, that we have to have more clinics that can provide comprehensive care, all those things, that’s part of my public safety plan, right? In my mind, we are successful if the order, or the trajectory of progress, is that we build up those systems of support.”
Cabán says climate change is her other top priority, and details a Green New Deal for the city that includes climate reparations paid by the city to “communities affected by environmental injustice,” city-led green job training, implementing Renewable Rikers that was championed by Constantinides, planting shade trees in every city neighborhood, and making Open Streets permanent, among many other projects listed in her plan.
In response to the Queens Community Board 1 annual statement of need this year, which identified affordable housing as a top issue for the district, Cabán called for more social housing in her citywide “Homes Guarantee” plan, which would have the city buy land and sell it to private developers contingent on agreement to certain design and price codes, like income-based rent caps.
Felicia Kalan
Hoping to offer Queens voters an alternative to her “socialist opponent,” Kalan, a mother of two, is running on a public safety platform to keep the NYPD funded as is and restore its plainclothes “anti-crime” unit, positions she thinks are popular among “old-style” Democrats who live in the district.
Building positive community relations with the NYPD, Kalan said in the interview with Gotham Gazette, is paramount to an effective police force. And while she thinks it’s important for mental health professionals trained in de-escalation tactics to respond to certain public safety issues, “you would also have to send a police officer to make sure that the person doesn’t harm themselves or the mental health officer,” Kalan said, in a break from Cabán, who believes in removing the NYPD from mental health calls.
In addition to supporting the NYPD, Kalan wants to focus on crime prevention by disrupting “the youth to prison pipeline” with expanded youth job training and apprenticeship opportunities, good quality education, and after school sports and activities. She also wants to reject the city’s plan to build community jails -- a point of agreement with Cabán, though Kalan wants to keep the Rikers jails open -- and invest more in rehabilitation. That includes, according to her website, education and job skills.
On the state level, Kalan hopes to work with the state Legislature to allow judges more discretion to impose bail on defendants and not continue the reform policy that “releases criminals right back onto the streets,” as she put it.
After public safety, Kalan’s greatest concern is public health, she said. She wants to build a new hospital in Queens, expand mental health and addiction services, and enhance public sanitation like getting trash off the streets. In a recent tweet, Kalan said she sees COVID-19 vaccination as a “personal health choice,” positioning herself against government vaccine mandates.
Additionally, Kalan said she wants to focus efforts on supporting small businesses and economic growth after the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic. With over a third of small businesses projected to close due to the pandemic, Kalan said, permitting and licensing for small businesses must be streamlined to ensure that owning a small business in the city is easy. Investing city money into minority and women entrepreneurs is also part of Kalan’s economic revitalization plan.
As a mother, Kalan said she is running to represent children and families at City Hall in order to make it easier to raise children in the city and improve public education. On her website, she details an education plan that ensures students’ internet access, invests in smaller class sizes, expands gifted and talented programs and access to SHSAT prep, and increases mental health support for students.
Edwin DeJesus
DeJesus works as a freelance film production assistant after having graduated from Columbia University while there on full scholarship, according to his campaign website. He was a lead organizer for March for Medicare for All in Manhattan on July 24, according to the Astoria Post.
In a Patch interview, he said his reason for running for City Council is “to win and build a rainbow coalition of ordinary people from all backgrounds,” and explained how his work on the 2020 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign influenced his view on the corruption of party politics.
Like Cabán and Kalan, DeJesus says public safety is his number one issue. On his website, he says that NYPD funding “naturally decreases” when “low-income residents have the ability to put food on the table,” which he proposes to achieve with a $600 a week UBI paid for by a 25% wealth tax.
Teachers, healthcare workers, MTA operators, and other city workers also must be paid better to foster more financial stability that will help reduce crime rates, he argues. DeJesus is against building new jails and wants to “end the War on Drugs by decriminalizing all acive ingredients in psilocybin mushrooms, including psilocin.”
Consistent with his Sanders influence, DeJesus wants single-payer health care for all, rent stabilization for all residential and small business properties, and to fully “decarbonize the economy” by 2030. DeJesus told Patch he differs from Cabán in his support for a “real” Green New Deal that is much stronger and does not support “corporate-friendly neoliberals.”
The Astoria Post reported that both Cabán and Kalan had opened campaign offices in the district, but as of August 23, DeJesus had yet to do so. He says he is finding other ways to engage the community.
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by Carmen Vintro
@GothamGazette
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