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City Council, De Blasio Administration Clash Over Comprehensive Planning Legislation


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New York City (photo: Benjamin Kanter/Mayoral Photo Office)


City Council members and officials from Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration clashed at a Tuesday hearing over proposed legislation to overhaul, consolidate, and in some ways expand the city’s planning processes into a singular ten-year procedure that would align budget, policy, and land use decisions.  

The proposal was released by City Council Speaker Corey Johnson in December and seeks to replace what he calls redundant, antiquated, inequitable, and ineffective existing planning procedures by taking a more holistic approach to planning. It would create a centralized process for examining and budgeting for the city’s long-term infrastructure and community needs, with an eye towards correcting long-standing racial and socio-economic disparities while also equitably meeting the city’s transit, housing, open space, school seats, shelters, and other needs.

The Council’s Committees on Governmental Operations and Land Use and Subcommittee on Capital Budget convened on Tuesday to hear from the de Blasio administration about its concerns and objections to the idea, while also pressing mayoral officials to answer for the many failures of the current siloed planning processes that are spread across various city agencies.

[City Council Speaker Unveils Comprehensive Planning Legislation]

“For decades, the city has relied on a piecemeal and ad hoc approach, muddling through its planning exercises one neighborhood, topic, and project at a time,” said Johnson, a Democrat, in his opening remarks. “That planning has largely neglected people of color, immigrants, people with disabilities, and low-income New Yorkers. That has also led to serious inefficiencies. Our budget documents often simply don't relate to our city's policy and land use priorities. And as we enter a period of fiscal stress, we have no rational system for prioritizing our community's most urgent budget needs to reduce disparities and combat climate change.”

Early on, Johnson sought to dispel “misinformation” about the bill, noting that it would not amend the city’s zoning laws, mandate any zoning requirements or specific zoning actions, or change the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP). Rather, he emphasized that it “requires the city to provide community boards and the public with new resources, new data and new analyses to support proactive community-based plans.” It would encourage proactive rather than reactive approaches to development and encourage the city to pursue new growth away from neighborhoods at risk of sea-level rise and other forces of displacement including gentrification and real estate speculation. 

Council Member Fernando Cabrera, a Bronx Democrat who chairs governmental operations, pointed out that the current planning process is enshrined in more than a dozen Charter-mandated documents that do not currently involve sufficient coordination between and among city agencies. “There's a fundamental disconnect here that cannot be overstated,” he said. “How can we as a city plan for our future when we only have fragments of the full picture of the city's current needs and assets?”

Testifying on behalf of the administration, City Planning Commissioner Marisa Lago sought to dissuade the Council from advancing the bill, opposing it because of concerns about “its feasibility, its costs, and its ultimate impact.”

She estimated that the bill’s requirement of a Generic Environmental Impact Statement (GEIS) for each community district would cost about $500 million over ten years. “We're concerned that the ultimate impact of that time and money would be counter to our shared goals,” she said. “That it would make it more difficult, not easier, to build affordable housing or to site essential city facilities.” 

Johnson had already countered that argument in his own statement. “That cost estimate is both inaccurate and absurd. It indicates that this administration is not engaging in this conversation with us seriously. There is nothing about this bill that will amount to that price tag,” he said, arguing that it could actually end up saving money for the city and for developers pursuing land use applications. 

Lago and Johnson had a fundamental disagreement about the language of the bill. Lago said it would create a “heavily top-down” planning process and give City Council members even greater influence in changing land use applications near the conclusion of ULURP. Instead of streamlining planning, she said it would add an additional layer of bureaucracy to an already lengthy land use procedure.

“The bill also underestimates the importance of focused topic-specific planning efforts,” Lago said, “such as those for the waterfront, greenhouse gas emissions reduction, environmental justice, food policy or resiliency.” She pointed to the city’s OneNYC strategic plan created every four years as a “better model” than the Council’s proposal and said the city’s ability to adapt to changing circumstances is necessary for long-term planning. She cited the city’s ten-year food plan released on Monday, a pending coastal resiliency zoning plan, and the proposed SoHo-NoHo rezoning as examples of how the current processes are working towards goals of equitable growth. 

In particular, she said the comprehensive planning bill would increase rather than limit the ability of affluent communities to forestall projects that are in the city’s interest, which has been a wrench in some of Mayor de Blasio’s agenda, though he has often done little to counteract those forces.

Later during the hearing, Johnson took exception to Lago’s interpretation of the bill. “It's not top-down. We're empowering local communities to actually engage in planning, instead of being reactive to [City Planning Commission’s] certifying of private applications and public applications,” he said. He said he was ”flabbergasted” at Lago’s “complete and total misrepresentation” of the bill. 

Lago also worried that a new planning process could place a “chill on development.” “That would be so unfortunate, at a time where the pandemic has made crystal clear the need to provide more housing and, in particular, affordable housing, the need to kickstart the economic recovery,” she said. 

Council Member Brad Lander showed frustration with the administration for critiquing the Council’s proposal without offering any solutions of its own to fix the city’s broken land use process. “We are the frog in the proverbial pot. We are watching the water boil, the temperatures are rising and the seas are rising, our affordable housing crisis is growing, our infrastructure is aging,” he said. “And it is clear that our land use process has become toxic and broken and unable to deliver thoughtful conversation about the very future of our city.”

If Lago was going to oppose the Council bill, what is the de Blasio administration’s plan to improve how the city does planning and growth, he asked. 

Lago struggled to give a straight answer, and instead pointed to what she sees as another deficiency with the bill. “The speaker himself noted that this proposal would not require any rezonings,” she said. “And there may be many communities who would anticipate having no growth and this bill does nothing to change that.”

Lander responded with frustration. Later on, Council Member Keith Powers asked Lago to name areas of the city with good transit options that could be home to significant housing growth. Lago only pointed to the Soho-Noho and Gowanus rezonings, which are currently in process, and declined to name any other neighborhoods. This, despite the fact that the de Blasio administration has not achieved rezonings in the neighborhoods it targeted early in the mayor’s first term, thus far only rezoning a series of lower-income communities of color. Lago instead again said that the city looks to work with Council members who want to work with the city. The exchange was one of several where the two sides appeared to point to each other as broken or talk in circles.

Lago repeatedly noted the Council’s informal policy of member deference, which allows Council members to veto land use projects that need Council approval and rezonings in their district. Because of that, she said, often the only projects that succeed are those that have active support and participation from local members. 

“So member deference is the problem?” Council Member Antonio Reynoso asked her. 

“I think that that is a challenge,” she said. She added, “I think, were the Council to adopt a citywide lens rather than looking exclusively to Council member deference that that could be tremendously helpful in achieving our shared goal of more equitable land use,” she said. 

“That's exactly what this legislation is trying to do,” Reynoso responded.

Several advocates and experts also testified in support of the bill, though some suggested that it could be improved. They included Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, Barika Williams, executive director of Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, which is part of the Thriving Communities coalition; Maulin Mehta, senior associate at Regional Plan Association; Spencer Williams, director of advocacy at the Municipal Arts Society; Adam Friedman, director of the Pratt Center for Community Development, among others.

The Citizens Budget Commission, a fiscal watchdog group, raised some concern about the legislation though it has long supported overhauling the city’s capital planning process. In testimony submitted to the Council, CBC Senior Research Associate Sean Campion said tying capital plan reforms to land use reforms is not necessary, that changing the structure and timing of regularly issued capital budget reports would make them less useful, and that capital budgeting power should remain in the hands of the mayor. “[A] strategic plan is only as good as its implementation design,” his testimony reads. “Extreme care should be taken when adding new processes, requirements and organizations since they could slow or thwart progress towards those outcomes or unnecessarily increase costs.”

Similarly, testimony from the Municipal Arts Society noted that the current proposal leaves land use decisions under the purview of the Mayor’s Office of Long Term Planning and Sustainability, which would be in charge of the ten-year comprehensive planning process. “MAS counters that a successful comprehensive plan for New York City must balance bottom-up and top-down planning through meaningful, ongoing community engagement strengthened by effective coordination and commitment from involved City agencies,” the testimony reads. “As written, Intro 2186 would reinforce the current structural imbalance in the City’s planning process.”

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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Maya Wiley Rallies Black Women to Make Her the First to Become Mayor of New York


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Painting a Black Lives Matter mural (photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)


“Black women get it done,” Maya Wiley, the former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio and 2021 mayoral candidate, declared in a January 22 video that featured a coalition of prominent Black women who are supporting her campaign. It was the launch of her formal effort to woo a core constituency in the Democratic base who time and again have turned out in higher rates in elections and could be a crucial factor for Wiley to become the first Black woman ever elected Mayor of New York City. 

It’s become a common refrain that Black women are at the heart of the Democratic Party and will reliably cast a vote for a Democrat, regardless of the candidate, rather than a Republican, which is why they’re also often taken for granted. But Black women are not a monolith and the Democratic primary in New York City is a far more complicated undertaking for any contender, particularly with ranked-choice voting at play for the first time in a citywide race. Candidates will have to cobble together different blocs of voters as they find themselves competing in the most diverse mayoral field in city history.

Wiley, a civil rights activist and attorney, is one of several Black women in the mayoral race but is by far the most prominent and best funded, and she is among the top tier of candidates overall. Since serving under the current mayor, who was powered to victory in 2013 by Black voters and white progressives, Wiley has led the Civilian Complaint Review Board, a police oversight agency, and was a professor at the New School. She also built a national following as an MSNBC commentator, giving her a fair share of name recognition, especially among white liberals, when she launched her bid for mayor. Prior to working for de Blasio, Wiley had an extensive career as a civil rights attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, among others, and, briefly, as a prosecutor in the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

She has sought to present herself as one of the more progressive candidates in this year’s mayoral race, with a heavy emphasis on police reform and accountability, but has often taken a measured, unspecific approach to issues, though her campaign has begun releasing more detailed policy plans, including on job-creation and the “care economy,” which Wiley has stressed is heavily reliant on Black women. If she wins, she would be the first woman, and only the second Black person to become the city’s top executive.

“I am unapologetically a Black woman,” Wiley said in a recent appearance before the Association for a Better New York, where she unveiled the “care economy” plan, when she was asked about her experiences in the several positions she has held. “I am unapologetically an activist. I'm unapologetically a partner, because I don't believe activism is about rolling over. I believe activism is about calling together. And so listen, learn, lead in partnership.”

Since its launch in January, the “Black Women for Maya” coalition has grown to more than 800 members, according to Wiley’s campaign. It includes accomplished actors such as Tichina Arnold, Gabrielle Union, and Yvette Nicole Brown, several established academics including Deborah Archer, Brittney Cooper, and Melissa Harris-Perry, political commentators like Heather McGhee, organizers, activists and more. Over the last few weeks, the coalition has been holding weekly volunteer events to continue building support and raise funds for Wiley. Earlier this month, Wiley hosted a fireside chat to take questions from potential voters and coalition members. Her campaign is also built with Black women in charge including her campaign manager, Maya Rupert, and her digital director, Tericka Lambert.

black women for maya zoom"Black women for Maya" Zoom

“I am honored to have received the support of so many of my fellow strong, Black women,” Wiley said in a statement to Gotham Gazette. “They see this campaign as one that can be transformative for this city and their lives, but one that also has the experience and understanding needed to lead us out of the crises we face, which also disproportionately hurt women, and women of color. As mayor, not only can I empathize with what our city’s women, and especially women of color are going through, I feel it too, because I’ve lived it.”

“Black women know that in every crisis, we are always the cavalry,” she continued. “We are the essential workers of this economy, the backbone of the Democratic party, the care-takers of our communities, and the creators of our country’s arts and culture. While this campaign is for the betterment of all New Yorkers, our strength and power is rooted in the many Black women that lead it, shape it, and support it. Our campaign is a growing movement, and I am running to be the next Mayor of New York City because I want every last Black woman and girl in this city to see themselves in the seat of power.”

In the last competitive Democratic primary in 2013, out of the 645,902 Democrats who cast a vote, 181,483 or 28% were Black voters, according to an analysis by the CUNY Mapping Service. Bill de Blasio won the largest share of Black voters, about 32.8% in that primary. In the 2021 Democratic primary, Black voters are again expected to be between a quarter and a third of the electorate, meaning Black women voters could account for at least 13% of primary voters, likely more, as Black women are typically well more than half of the Black Democratic vote.

On Friday, Wiley was endorsed by 1199 SEIU, the city’s largest labor union, which represents hundreds of thousands of health-care workers, many of whom are women of color. The union was instrumental in helping de Blasio win the primary in 2013. “This is what we mean when we say support Black women,” Gabby Seay, 1199’s political director, told the New York Times.

“1199ers make history because this is a union made up of the people who always have but rarely got credit - Black women,” Wiley tweeted about the endorsement, responding to a supportive tweet by Seay. “And Latinas too!” The candidate has added the “#WinwithBlackWomen” hashtag to her Twitter profile.

“For Black women who are strategic voters, they're looking at the candidate who can best articulate a vision for issues that affect them in their communities and, quite honestly, New York as a whole,” said Dr. Christina Greer, professor of political science at Fordham University.

This past week, Dr. Greer moderated a mayoral candidate forum hosted by Community Voices Heard Power that was focused on Black women. At the forum, Wiley and six other leading candidates -- including Dianne Morales, who identifies as Afro-Latina -- weighed in on issues of health care, vaccine access, housing, police reform, and the city’s recovery from the coronavirus pandemic. “Our communities are not a monolith. There is no one answer that is going to magically conjure the Black women vote,” said Afua Atta-Mensah, executive director of Community Voices Heard, at the start of the forum. 

In a phone interview on Wednesday, Atta-Mensah reiterated that the purpose of the forum was to change the narrative and urge candidates to take Black women’s voices more seriously.

“What Black women and our communities are looking for is that this renewal or revival of the city is not on our backs,” she told Gotham Gazette. “It's not this...performance of celebrating Black women in their leadership in word, but indeed wanting Black women to be the ones in communities of color that suffer the burden of how we come back…I think people are very keen to hear not just [candidates’] love for Black women and their belief in affordable housing but how that's going to happen, and how those policy priorities reflect the poetry.”

She also praised Wiley’s performance at the forum and said she was encouraged by her overt focus on Black women. “I think it's powerful,” Atta-Mensah said.

“Let me just start by saying I've been Black all my life,” Wiley said in her introductory remarks at the forum. “And that included when I was a little girl in a segregated, underfunded, overcrowded public school.” Wiley spoke of growing up as the child of civil rights activists and becoming an attorney to fight for those very rights. “I am running not just as a civil rights lawyer and a lifetime racial justice advocate. I am running because I believe that it is our dignity, and that means dignity in our communities,” she said.

Wiley is running with a focus on police reform and reconceiving public safety through community investment in a campaign that is unfolding in the wake of last year's resurgent Black Lives Matter movement, a response to the police killings of George Floyd and other unarmed Black people.

“The only thing I need to do besides stay Black and die,” Wiley said later during the forum, “is make sure that we do the hard work that needs getting done and not work at worrying about the politics of the usual but making sure it's a path for the people.”

In another virtual discussion on Thursday, hosted by Queens Assemblymember Alicia Hyndman for Black women running for office, Wiley refined her point. “One of the things we need right now, in a city in historic crisis, is to recognize that we aren't just the pack mules that carry the burden, but we're the precious cargo,” Wiley said. “And that means that it is our communities that deserve the attention, the support, the investment, and the recognition that we actually solve problems. We lead.”

But Wiley will still have to work hard to win Black women’s support broadly across the city and throughout the Democratic primary set to culminate in June and in all likelihood determinative of the next mayor in an overwhelmingly Democratic city. Wiley is trying to shrink campaign fundraising gaps with better-funded candidates including Comptroller Scott Stringer, who is white, and Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, who is Black, both of whom have been raising money for years ahead of this run. Former Wall Street executive Ray McGuire, who is Black, quickly catapulted himself into the top tier of fundraisers in the race by bringing in well over $5 million as he seeks to make up name-recognition ground.

Like Wiley, Adams and Stringer are participating in the city’s public matching funds program, which matches the first $250 of every contribution from a city resident at an 8-to-1 ratio. Both Adams and Stringer have already qualified for public funds and have received millions of dollars, while Wiley narrowly missed the threshold and will have to wait another month before the next round of payments. She is likely to receive at least $2 million in matching funds in mid-March. McGuire is not a participant in the program, allowing him to raise more from large donors. Other candidates including entrepreneur Andrew Yang, former Obama cabinet secretary Shaun Donovan, former city sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia, and Morales, a former nonprofit executive, have said they will also soon hit the matching funds threshold, but they would not receive the influx of public funds until mid-April.

The SEIU endorsement was a needed shot in the arm for Wiley’s campaign. “Maya’s priorities are our priorities – from investing in and fairly compensating our caregivers to rebuilding our economy through job creation and training,” said George Gresham, the union’s president, in a statement. “We believe that Maya is uniquely positioned to join the ranks of Shirley Chisholm, Stacey Abrams, and so many other women who have continued to serve as the backbone of our communities, and of political fights nationwide.”

It’s unclear how voters will view Wiley and her competition at this stage in the race, and most voters may not even be paying attention yet. “As we've seen, Black women tend to vote thinking of the group, not necessarily individually,” said Dr. Greer. “If that's the case, Scott Stringer and Eric Adams have been public servants for much longer than anyone else in the race and they have a different set of connections and relationships with community groups and organizations that the other candidates just don't have.”

Morales, who has also centered police and public safety reform in her mayoral bid, has been campaigning furthest to the left in the race and is eclipsing Wiley’s progressive positions, but Wiley may be eyeing a broader swath of the Democratic electorate. McGuire, Morales, and Adams all appear to be making concerted attempts to connect in Black communities — McGuire recently received the endorsement of Gwen Carr, mother of Eric Garner, the unarmed Black man killed by NYPD officers on a Staten Island street in 2014, while Adams has received endorsements from a long list of Black elected officials, clergy, and others. Stringer and Donovan have also made clear they are trying to appeal to Black voters and other voters of color, and Garcia held a digital event Sunday on “her agenda for Black women.” Garcia had been the only candidate of the eight mostly seen as in the top tier who did not participate in the “Follow Black Women” event hosted by Community Voices Heard Power. Multiple candidates have cited their ties to Vice President Kamala Harris, the first Black woman elected to one of the nation's two highest offices.

“I am totally sure that the next mayor is going to be determined by Black women voters here in New York City,” Yang said at the Follow Black Women forum.

George Arzt, a veteran Democratic consultant, said Wiley can appeal to a broad audience and that she should be able to build a coalition of Black women and white progressives. “On paper, you would say, yes,” he said. But he agreed that Adams and McGuire are her main competition for Black voters and said he is interested to see how she does when she speaks at Black churches and makes other campaign appearances beyond the Zoom forums, where he said she has at times struggled to stand out.

“She has competition on all sides,” said Neal Kwatra, founder of Metropolitan Public Strategies, a consulting firm, about Wiley. “She’s got Andrew Yang and Scott Stringer, who she's going to have to compete with for white liberal votes presumably. She's got Ray McGuire and Eric Adams and Dianne Morales, who she's going to have to compete with for a lot of African-American and Latino voters.”

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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Kathryn Garcia Continues Fleshing Out Mayoral Campaign Platform with Housing, Transit and Food Plans


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Kathryn Garcia (photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)


In recent weeks and months, former New York City Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia has further filled out her campaign platform as she runs for mayor, releasing plans for administering the COVID-19 vaccine and working with the federal government, building and maintaining housing, and improving the city’s transit and public spaces. Garcia, who has never run for elected office before but is a veteran of city government in several roles with major responsibilities, is running on her experience as a manager and her ideas for making city government work better for New Yorkers. 

During her career in city government, which ended (or at least paused) when she decided to step down from the de Blasio administration last year to pursue a run for mayor, Garcia has served as chief operating officer for the Department of Environmental Protection, the interim chair of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), lead-paint-abatement czar, commissioner of the Department of Sanitation, and covid emergency food czar as mass unemployment and shuttered schools led to a severe need for free meals throughout the city. 

Garcia is offering herself to voters as a crisis manager and no-nonsense doer, a liberal who is more moderate than several candidates running campaigns further to the left, who is most focused on delivering basic city services, improving government efficiency, and tackling core challenges facing New Yorkers. Throughout her policy plans, Garcia underscores the importance of making public officials accountable for solving problems and executing plans, some of which already exist but need someone like her to implement them, while also offering other new ideas. The latest batch of plans builds on her initial climate and resiliency plan, as well as an overview of her thoughts on the future of trash pickup and recycling that she gave Gotham Gazette in a December interview.

Housing
“We can’t keep trying to smush more and more New Yorkers into the same number of units, it just doesn’t work,” Garcia says in her campaign video on her housing plan. Her housing platform, titled “Housing That Heals,” argues that housing is intrinsically related to health, and that New Yorkers with insecure or unsafe housing are less healthy than those who can obtain that housing, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Garcia plans to center affordable housing development for extremely low-income New Yorkers, building 50,000 units for those making less than 30% of area median income. According to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, 30% of AMI in New York City as of 2020 is $34,110 for a family of four.

Citing the fact that the city has grown by 500,000 people over the last decade but has only constructed 100,000 units of new housing, Garcia’s housing plan is staked on rapid development. She seeks to accomplish this by carrying out rezoning for more affordable housing citywide and accelerating approvals for developers by streamlining city processes such as environmental reviews and permit applications.

In a December interview with advocacy group Open New York, Garcia said she supports the current rezoning proposals in SoHo/NoHo and Gowanus, both aimed add adding housing, including affordable housing, and the ability “to create an enormous amount of units.”

The other prong of Garcia’s approach to providing affordable housing is expanding what can be housing in the city. She would permit duplexes and triplexes in more areas by moving away from single-family zoning, as well as legalize basement apartments, accessory dwelling units, and single-room occupancy apartments.

Touting her experience as the interim chair of NYCHA in 2019, Garcia tries to position herself as the best candidate for the public housing authority’s future, saying that residents “don’t need another plan. We need to make sure to execute on the plan we have.” Her administration’s focus would be on improving the day-to-day living conditions at NYCHA, such as by installing new boilers, fixing broken elevators, and eliminating mold.

Garcia intends to fund these repairs by money from Section 8 and “other federal programs,” and the several other pieces of the current NYCHA rescue plan. One such federal program is rental assistance demonstration (RAD), which she has expressed support for at several candidate forums and is an Obama-era federal housing program that allows private entities to operate public housing buildings while leveraging vouchers so that the cash-strapped NYCHA can retain the subsidies it receives for housing low-income tenants while opening opportunities for private investment in building repairs and upgrades.

On homeless people living on the street, Garcia has said on Twitter, “We’ve got to move away from a shelter strategy and to a housing strategy. We spend ~3B/yr on shelters that fail to adequately serve NYC families. Of that, $400M goes to rent hotel rooms that are temporary.”

Garcia says as mayor she would build 10,000 units of supportive housing, some of it converted from empty or underused private properties, to provide permanent shelter and support services for those who need the combination.

In shelters, Garcia would provide “wraparound services” for families, women, and children, such as education, health care, and job readiness. Garcia would open 10 drop-in centers in strategically-chosen neighborhoods in order to provide services for homeless New Yorkers as well as begin the process for them to enter shelter.

And Garcia would streamline the city’s reporting of city agencies for homeless services, economic development, and housing to one deputy mayor, so that they can “be accountable to treating housing issues with one comprehensive approach.” The city currently has a deputy mayor for housing and economic development while homeless services falls under the deputy mayor for health and human services.

Pubic Space and Transportation
“A safe, reliable and efficient transportation system is critical to our recovery,” Garcia says. She would target delivery companies to reduce congestion, improve safety and protect workers, specifically naming Amazon as a deliverer she would regulate. 

The Garcia administration would “ensure that our public spaces serve the public first” by prioritizing pedestrian and micro-mobility options over vehicles. Garcia would make permanent the de Blasio administration Open Streets program, which in her transportation campaign video she called an “incredible success,” and place what she calls Complete Streets, which support street use for all users, regardless of the mode of transportation, in all five boroughs. 

Using sidewalk and street space, Garcia would place public amenities into curbside space, integrate sustainable drainage systems such as bluebells and rain gardens, and “create new opportunity for small businesses.” To make sidewalks cleaner and more passable, Garcia would expand the Clean Curbs program, which launched in initial pilot form after a covid delay when Garcia was still sanitation commissioner, and in which business improvement districts and other private entities can apply to place an on-street container for trash and recycling storage. 

Garcia would also seek to add more community-based amenities to curbside space, such as bike parking, seating, and arts and culture uses. She says she would accelerate Department of Transportation streets and sidewalk construction by “ensuring that the agency has blanket [city planning] approvals for bread and butter projects.”

Garcia says bike-riders must be better protected, including the city’s many delivery workers and commuters, among others. Her administration would enact “robust enforcement of bike lane violations” and install safety barriers for protected bike lanes. Garcia pledges more cleaning and plowing of the city’s bike lanes and says she would “align the agencies that play a role in traffic enforcement” in order to centralize management and accountability in one department.

Garcia’s plan calls for the addition of 250 new miles of protected lanes. As of December 2020, New York City has 545 miles of protected bike lanes. And Garcia would “better integrate CitiBike into the existing transit network,” as well as subsidize its expansion into neighborhoods that are underserved by the current system.

Garcia pledges to fully fund the MTA’s Fast Forward program for capital upgrades, “press for real reform at the MTA,” and make steps towards “a fully accessible public transit system.” Fast Forward, released in 2018 by former MTA New York City Transit President Andy Byford, who left amid a dispute with Governor Andrew Cuomo, would upgrade subway system signals, increase accessibility to the system, and much more. Much of it has been incorporated into the MTA capital plan, which New York City government contributes to significantly, but that plan has been derailed by the covid crisis.

Garcia says she would explore “Citibike and NYC Ferry fare integration and OMNY fare integration,” as well as creating a one-swipe in-city transportation network with LIRR and MetroNorth service. The Garcia administration would reallocate the de Blasio administration’s infamous NYC Ferry subsidy towards the city’s Fair Fares program for low-income New Yorkers. 

To improve the speed and efficiency of the city’s notoriously slow bus system, the Garcia administration would give buses priority at intersections, grow the Express Bus network and Select Bus Service, increase off-board payment and all-door boarding, and create more dedicated busways and bus lanes. 

Garcia offers several steps for greening New York City’s transportation infrastructure, where the former sanitation commissioner, who was moving ahead on electric garbage trucks during her tenure, would triple the availability of public electric car chargers and electrify more than 10,000 buses so that the MTA bus system is fully electric by 2040. She also intends to execute the de Blasio administration’s Commercial Waste Zones plan that she helped design and negotiate “to realize the benefit of removing 18 million miles of Sanitation truck traffic from NYC streets every year” and to join the push for implementing congestion pricing. 

In order to “ditch diesel and switch to electric vehicles,” Garcia seeks to provide zero-interest loans to help small businesses purchase “small-scale, electric, pedestrian-friendly delivery vehicles to replace diesel vans.”

To achieve Vision Zero, the city’s goal to eliminate traffic fatalities, Garcia’s transportation platform emphasizes “making changes to the built environment to physically prevent accidents” over singularly focusing on driver behavior change. She would increase the usage of automated enforcement mechanisms such as speed-safety, red-light, and failure-to-yield cameras. 

In order to “make on-street parking a privilege, not a right,” Garcia would issue residential parking permits for low-emissions vehicles, a major potential shift from New York City’s current largely free street parking. Garcia would support micro-mobility options for the first and last miles of trips to encourage the use of public transit.

Garcia’s plan would also “kickstart planning for new transit,” identifying opportunities such as new ferry terminals in East Harlem, Inwood, Hunts Point and northern Queens, as well as expanding the subway along Utica Avenue in Brooklyn and Second Avenue in Manhattan.

Food Insecurity
Drawing on her experience as de Blasio’s emergency food czar last year, Garcia’s plan to fight food insecurity heavily relies on expanding access to nutrition programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). She would make a major push to enroll all eligible New Yorkers in the program. As of 2019, the city’s SNAP program has seen decreased enrollment by non-citizens, which has been associated with fear of deportation under the Trump administration. Another group that has struggled with SNAP enrollment is students, many of whom have become newly-eligible following December’s federal COVID-19 relief package.

In her plan, Garcia would increase funding to food programs, highlighting older adults, families, undocumented New Yorkers, students, homeless people, and veterans as those in need of particular assistance. To further expand the reach of the SNAP program, Garcia would call on Congress to permanently expand SNAP by 15%, and to make prepared meals, delivery fees, and membership fees for bulk shopping programs eligible for use of SNAP benefits. New Yorkers ineligible for SNAP but still in need of food assistance would be supported with voucher programs such as Health Bucks, which Garcia vowed to expand. She also stresses the need for emergency food programs to provide culturally relevant food for New York City’s diverse populations.

To facilitate access to healthy food, Garcia would develop infrastructure to provide nutritious meals in underserved neighborhoods and subsidize healthy meals at community restaurants. “We can’t just send more food to the same pantries--we need more pantries in the right places,” she writes, adding that she would open more pantries and equip pantries with technology to make getting food “as easy as ordering it from Amazon.”

Garcia would seek to streamline and simplify applications for food benefit programs, writing, “Standing in line is not dignity. New Yorkers should be able to apply for benefits on a smartphone--or the process isn’t working.”

Garcia is also offering a series of proposals to support restaurants and restaurant workers, from capping third-party app commissions to supporting cash assistance funding programs for undocumented workers to making outdoor dining permanent. To make it easier for restaurants to operate, all licensing requirements and regulations governing restaurants and nightlife establishments would be streamlined, permit renewals would be automated, and in the face of the covid crisis, tax incentives for landlords would be provided to forgive restaurants’ back rent and renegotiate new leases.

In addition, Garcia says she would create grants for small businesses, expand off-premise alcohol sales, and “eliminate incentives that keep properties vacant.” While she has not specified what this would look like, Garcia said in a virtual mayoral forum held by the Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club that she would call for a commercial vacancy tax, while her economic recovery plan pledges to “work with Albany to reduce commercial vacancies.” 

Before they became eligible in New York, Garcia also said she would prioritize vaccines for restaurant workers.

She also says that she would “explore rent stabilization for commercial spaces”, suspend fines where possible, and work with insurers to maximize business interruption claim pay-outs. During the COVID-19 epidemic, frustration has grown with many in the restaurant industry as insurance companies have denied claims for business interruptions, citing exceptions for viral outbreaks.

Garcia also plans to support the growth of urban agriculture, identifying "green infrastructure, green jobs, stewardship and education” as potential benefits. Making a connection with her plan for climate resiliency, Garcia would push to construct the GrowNYC Regional Food Hub, a project announced by the Cuomo administration in 2016 but never built. Targeted for Hunts Point, the hub would include a wholesale farmers market, a food-processing center and a cold storage facility. Originally anticipated to finish construction in spring of 2021, the food distribution center remains unbuilt.

Garcia would also support the adoption of the Good Food Purchasing (GFP) program. Following the lead of cities such as Los Angeles and Boston, a GFP framework would direct New York City to make food purchasing decisions on local economies, environmental sustainability, animal welfare, nutrition, and valued workforce, establishing metrics and standards similar to LEED certifications for buildings. Currently, the proposal is in the exploratory stage among New York City agencies like the Department of Education and Department for the Aging, Garcia’s plan notes. Garcia would provide funding to use the New York State Farm to School Purchasing incentive, a state-wide program that gives state money for school districts that increase the amount of locally-grown food used in their school menus.

On the administrative side, Garcia would re-establish a team of varied backgrounds to “institutionalize addressing food access and insecurity,” bringing together what she sees as “disparate and uncoordinated programs” in agencies under various deputy mayors.

To mitigate in the future the types of immense pressures New York City’s food supply chain faced during the worst early days of the COVID-19 crisis, Garcia would seek to continuously monitor the food supply chain and build a “robust” emergency feeding operations plan that could be activated quickly. Businesses would be provided with technical assistance so that they could develop continuity of operations plans, and capacity would be built within nonprofits to receive federal funding in food emergencies.

Garcia also pledged to fight food waste by encouraging donation of extra food close to its expiration date. “Consumer expectations create a lot of waste we can’t afford in the food business,” her plan says. “We will incentivize donating unsold food—and levy fines for non-compliant businesses.” New York State’s regulation mandating that entities that produce over 2 tons of food waste a week donate their excess food currently exempts New York City.

Vaccines and Federal Agenda
Garcia is among a small group of mayoral candidates to put forth their own specific ideas on how to better implement COVID-19 vaccinations in New York. While the Biden administration hopes to have the country almost fully-vaccinated by the time that a new mayor will assume office at the start of 2022, Garcia released a plan for how she would direct vaccine rollout in New York City, which she first outlined in an op-ed for The New York Daily News, offering ideas that could be used by the current administration.

“This is the kind of chaos that results from poor planning and poor management skills,” she wrote of the slow early rollout of the vaccine in the city, before the challenge became more about supply than execution.

Garcia criticized the city’s appointment system as a disorganized free-for-all, writing that it “more resembles getting tickets to a Prince concert than making a healthcare visit.” Rather than a first-come, first-served system based on priority, the Garcia plan would reserve 25% of appointments for direct referrals from community healthcare providers and simplify the priority schedule to more quickly roll out the vaccine. In addition, she would train school nurses to administer the vaccine, open vaccine sites at every Department of Education building, repurpose city-owned vehicles to create “a mobile vaccine fleet” for deployment at NYCHA sites and improve the vaccine appointment process to make it simpler and to track doses.

In advance of the January inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, Garcia released her plans to work with the federal government. “With strong leadership in DC, we will finally have the chance to get the federal assistance New Yorkers need and the sweeping policy changes that will put our country back on the right track,” she wrote. Among her proposals, Garcia says she would work with the federal government to increase food availability for SNAP beneficiaries, increase funding for community centers, and “bring in green new deal and infrastructure dollars to pursue building upgrades for climate resiliency.” On education, Garcia’s federal agenda seeks the full federal funding of associate’s degrees and increased federal funding for public universities and colleges.

***
by Grace Getman for Gotham Gazette

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