De Blasio rides the bus (photo: Edwin J. Torres/Mayor's Office)
As the coronavirus public health crisis waned and New York City headed toward entering the first phase of “reopening” its economy after the government-ordered near-shutdown, Mayor Bill de Blasio was under increasing pressure to develop transit plans to help New Yorkers returning to work get around by various and safe means. This was especially true regarding buses.
While the city’s subways and buses are run by the state-controlled MTA, de Blasio does have significant sway over the bus system given the city’s street-design power.
On June 8, the first day of the city’s phase one “reopening,” where hundreds of thousands of workers were allowed back to their workplaces, the mayor unveiled his intent to add 20 more miles of bus lanes throughout the city as part of a plan for “safer transit” to help maintain social distancing and get people where they need to go efficiently. He also announced that the 14th Street “busway” would be made permanent and that the city would be rolling out five other busways between July and October.
The new bus lanes will become permanent if successful after a yearlong trial. The mayor also announced that the Staten Island Ferry will increase rush hour service to run every twenty minutes.
But while de Blasio called the announcement “a major step,” many policymakers and transit advocates say the plan doesn’t go far enough, even if some are celebrating it as an important step. For example, the mayor’s 20 miles of new bus lanes is a third of what Sarah Feinberg, the interim president of MTA New York City Transit, requested in an open letter to the mayor four days before his announcement.
Previously, in May, four of the five borough presidents called on de Blasio to add 40 miles of new bus lanes to the city ahead of phase one. TransitCenter, a nonprofit think tank and advocacy organization, has also pushed for 40 new miles of bus lanes, while various advocates and elected officials have sought an expansion of the busway pilot.
Leading up to the start of the city’s economic reopening, there was widespread frustration that de Blasio had not put forward any plans to expand city transit options to better balance public health, commuting, and street congestion concerns.
“As New Yorkers head back to work, they’ll be relying on the bus more than ever – and I’m proud to offer them faster and more reliable options,” the mayor said during the June 8 announcement. The mayor himself last rode the bus in November of last year, when he rode the 14th Street busway for the first and only time, six weeks after it launched. Prior to that, the last time Mayor de Blasio rode a city bus was in 2017, according to public records. He did so twice that year, in September and October, while commemorating the start of Select Bus Service on the BX6 and M23 routes, respectively.
De Blasio’s plan includes five new busways and four new bus lanes, but only one busway and two bus lanes will be operational this month. Main Street in Queens will see the city’s second busway, launching later this month. Jamaica Avenue, also in Queens, and 5th Avenue, in Manhattan, will have busways launched in July. Brooklyn’s Jay Street will get a busway in August and 181st Street in Manhattan will get a busway four months from now, in October.
The bus lanes, with signage and street markings, will be added to East 14th Street in Manhattan and 149th Street in the Bronx this month, Hylan Boulevard on Staten Island in July, and Merrick Boulevard in Queens in August.
The mayor’s plan is far cry from Feinberg’s request, outlined in her letter to the mayor, which called for triple the new bus-lane mileage de Blasio announced. While some of Feinberg’s proposals were heeded, the letter’s request for busways on Archer Avenue in Queens and Livingston Street in Brooklyn went unanswered.
Feinberg also wanted to see several additional new bus lanes, including four more in the Bronx (E.L. Grant Highway, Tremont Avenue, Fordham Road, and University Avenue), one in Brooklyn (Flatbush Avenue), and two on Staten Island (Bay Street and Richmond Terrace).
Feinberg’s proposal would have represented a 42% increase in the miles of bus lanes in the city, while the mayor’s plan will increase the city’s miles of bus lanes by 14%.
Feinberg has noted that the bus system saw over 715,000 daily weekday riders during the week before her early June letter, compared to a mere 400,000 at the system’s lowpoint during the crisis. On the average weekday in 2018, by comparison, an estimated 1.8 million New Yorkers rode the bus. Bus ridership has jumped higher as the city entered phase one of reopening, with some indications that more people are returning to the buses than the subways, a trend de Blasio has acknowledged.
City Council Speaker Corey Johnson criticized both the timing and substance of the mayor’s bus plan in a statement to Gotham Gazette, calling the roll out “haphazard” and saying “the administration has had months to think about how to make it safe and easy for New Yorkers to return to work using mass transit, and now we’re reopening without a robust plan in place for increased bus service and protected bike lanes.”
“The administration needs to do better, quickly,” said Johnson.
According to a spokesperson, Johnson believes the mayor and MTA New York City Transit should have worked on proposals together instead of talking past each other.
In his own letter to de Blasio on May 29, Johnson outlined what he saw as the most-needed transportation fixes ahead of a reopening. He advocated for “a bold vision for rapidly expanding safe transportation alternatives, including dedicated bus lanes and increased service along the routes with highest ridership, the rapid expansion of the city’s protected bike lane network, and dramatically increased open space for pedestrians to ensure computers are not cramped together on the city’s narrow sidewalks.”
Danny Pearlstein, a spokesperson for Riders Alliance, called the mayor’s plan “an unprecedented and bold commitment to riders.” Pearlstein notes that “bus riders are overwhelmingly low-income people of color” and “nearly half of bus riders are essential workers.” He says “bus riders literally got us through the worst of Covid.”
According to Pearlstein, “with most people staying home, bus riders experienced major speed and reliability improvements. City policy must make every effort to cement those gains.”
When asked about the de Blasio proposal and his daily press conference on Monday, Governor Andrew Cuomo said “obviously, there’s a disparity between what the MTA asked for and what the mayor’s doing.”
He then deferred to Janno Lieber, the President of the MTA Construction and Development Corporation, who happened to be at the briefing that day. Lieber said that “from the MTA’s perspective, 20 miles of bus lanes is a step in the right direction, but we asked for 60 for a reason.” He cited the need to accelerate the speed and frequency of bus service for both economic and public health reasons.
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by Andrew Millman, Gotham Gazette
@millman_andrew @GothamGazette
Police in schools (photo: Edwin J. Torres/Mayor's Office)
As the City Council is pushing to cut $1 billion from the NYPD’s $6 billion budget for next fiscal year, City Council Members Mark Treyger and Donovan Richards have proposed revoking the police’s role in school safety and restoring it to the Department of Education. The proposal has been a top priority for some police reform and education activists for years and has taken on renewed urgency in the wake of the countrywide protests following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Though Mayor Bill de Blasio may be hesitant to support it, several candidates running for mayor in 2021 say it’s high time that the city remove police officers from schools.
Treyger, who chairs the education committee, and Richards, who chairs the public safety committee, are not among those mayoral candidates, though Richards is currently running for Queens Borough President in a primary this month. The Council members released their proposal on Monday, decrying “zero tolerance” discipline policies that have created a school-to-prison pipeline that disproportionately harms black and brown students and those receiving special education services. While most schools in the city don’t have “zero tolerance” policies, the presence of police officers in schools has led to many more arrests of students than would otherwise occur, reform advocates point out.
Though the Council has over the years sought to make changes to the NYPD’s role in schools, it has only so much power over the police department or education department. The Council has passed reporting bills requiring greater disclosure but the police department has always been reluctant to abide by those measures. The Treyger-Richards proposal constitutes a much broader move, removing the Division of School Safety from the NYPD’s purview and returning it to the Department of Education, where it was originally headquartered before being relocated by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in 1998.
“Enough is enough. Incremental reforms to a system that does not want to be reformed are futile. We need nothing short of structural change,” Treyger and Richards said in a joint statement.
They pointed out that the city spends more money on school safety agents than it does on counselors, social workers, and psychologists all together. But those roughly 5,000 school safety agents are not accountable to school principals.
“At a time when students are experiencing more trauma than ever, we need to make sure that our approach to school safety is aligned to meet the holistic needs of children. School Safety Agents, most of whom are doing their best to keep kids safe within a broken system, are too-often called upon to intervene in behavioral crises because the vestiges of Zero Tolerance prioritize punitive interventions over social emotional supports,” Treyger and Richards wrote.
“A seven-year-old having a bad day in a school without a social worker is not an NYPD issue,” they added.
The call for removing police from schools has been championed by groups like Dignity in Schools, which coordinates efforts by several local groups to advocate against the school-to-prison pipeline.
The NYPD’s budget allocates as much as $331 million to school safety, which would make up a significant chunk of the $1 billion that the Council wants to cut from the police department’s funding. The Council is also looking at reducing the overall headcount of the NYPD, cutting overtime costs and shifting other duties away from the department, among other measures.
Mayor de Blasio has pushed back against both removing school safety from the NYPD and cuts of that scope to the police department budget, though he did recently announce he is ready to move some NYPD funding to reinvest it in youth and social services. He has not offered a dollar amount, but said it would be part of negotiations with the Council as the two sides must craft a new city budget by July 1.
Council Speaker Corey Johnson, among the most prominent likely candidates in the 2021 mayoral race, is backing the contents of the Treyger-Richards letter.
“I’ve said repeatedly that we need to reimagine policing in New York City, and this is one way to do that,” Johnson said in a statement to Gotham Gazette, when asked about the letter from two of his members. “I’ve also said I will listen to communities most impacted by over policing, and this is one of their big concerns. I want to thank Council Members Treyger and Richards for their advocacy, and I look forward to working with them to convince the de Blasio administration that this is both urgent and necessary. We need big changes, and we need them now.”
[Read: ‘Defund the NYPD’? What’s Really in the New York City Police Department Budget]
Johnson is among the top contenders seeking the Democratic nomination for mayor in 2021, along with Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams and Comptroller Scott Stringer. Other candidates include Dianne Morales, a former nonprofit executive in the Bronx; Loree Sutton, former commissioner of the city’s Department of Veterans’ Services; and Shaun Donovan, a former aide to President Barack Obama and Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Though Adams and Stringer are not as intimately involved in the budget process as Johnson, both have also been vocal about the need for police reform, and Stringer released his own plan for shifting NYPD funds about eight days before Johnson and other Council leaders called for the $1 billion NYPD cut in the coming fiscal year.
On June 4, Stringer proposed a $1.1 billion cut to the NYPD over four years, largely through a headcount reduction by attrition, and cuts to overtime and ancillary expenses. On the issue of the NYPD handling school safety, Stringer called for ‘rethinking’ the paradigm, but did not make his position fully clear.
“As we reimagine policing in our city, we must rethink the role of NYPD in our schools,” he said in a statement to Gotham Gazette. “For too long, our city has over-invested in punitive policing - while systemically disinvesting in programs and services that can actually address the poverty, trauma and structural racism that impact Black and Brown communities and complicate the trajectories of children of color. It is not enough to shift the budgetary line item from one agency to another. Real school safety goes hand in hand with transformative investments in the social-emotional health of schools - including in social workers, school psychologists and other mental health professionals, guidance counselors, restorative justice coordinators, and regular training for all school staff to support a school climate that is welcoming and safe for all students.”
Borough President Adams, a former NYPD officer and captain, did not return a request for comment for this article and his position on the role of the NYPD in school safety.
In an op-ed on Monday in the Daily News, Morales called on the city to reprioritize how financial resources are distributed. “The next step in addressing the problem of policing should pursue a harm reduction approach that removes police from schools and disrupts the school-to-prison pipeline that criminalizes student’s behaviors and puts them into contact with law enforcement,” she wrote. “Those resources should instead be directed toward educational supports, mental health services and other needs that must be addressed in order for students to succeed in schools.”
Donovon, in a statement to Gotham Gazette, also said the city needs to end the school-to-prison pipeline and reevaluate whether certain roles of the police could be given to other agencies that are more suited to handle them “without the use of force and without overly punitive repercussions.”
“School safety is just one such area,” he said, applauding Treyger and Richards’ proposal. “An investment is urgently needed in intervention programs that are educationally oriented. We know that the consequences rendered by police enforcement are disproportionate relative to the severity of the infractions of young students, and disproportionately applied to Black students and students of color.”
Sutton was the outlier among the mayoral candidates who have made their positions at least somewhat clear, expressing wariness of the proposal to remove school safety from the NYPD’s domain.
“This proposal strikes me as a superficial hasty move which risks further polarization during this highly charged period marked by community distrust, civic unrest and pandemic-related public health concerns,” Sutton said in an email to Gotham Gazette. “The task of restoring trust and building community partnerships is paramount and will not be achieved through reactive proposals, however well-intended. Leadership is needed to engage all stakeholders -- families, neighborhoods, community-based organizations, schools, law enforcement, academic institutions, essential workers, small business and corporate leaders, as well as elected and civic officials. This thoughtful process should explore a variety of options, shared values, conflicting opinions, desired outcomes and potential unintended consequences as a vital means for informing and strengthening the decision-making process. All voices matter. What NYC needs is a new way of thinking about policing, not a rushed maneuver to move budgets.”
The proposal, and Johnson in particular, came under fire from Gregory Floyd, president of Teamsters Local 237, which represents 5,000 school safety agents, most of whom are black or Hispanic. “If this was a union with a white labor leader and with a mostly white membership, Speaker Corey Johnson would have called me to discuss his plan,” said Floyd, according to a New York Post report. Floyd singled out Johnson for the plan and called him “a racist” for supporting it. In a letter to Johnson and other Council leaders, Floyd said that "The inconvenient truth is that there are New York City school children who seek to harm their classmates and school staff. And is is the enormous responsibility of...school safety agents to protect New York City's 1.1 million school children and 135,000 school staff members from that harm."
In response to Floyd’s comments, the Urban Youth Collaborative, a coalition of youth-led organizations in the city, issued its own retort. “Let’s be serious: Maintaining a system designed to criminalize Black and Brown youth is racist. Finally heeding the calls of Black and Brown youth, clamoring to dismantle this system, is not,” the statement reads. “The evidence shows that no matter how interactions with police change, Black and Latinx students are disproportionately criminalized and harmed by School Safety Agents. We are sick and tired of Black and Latinx students being criminalized for being children and adolescents. We demand police-free schools.”
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
Mayor de Blasio at City Hall (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)
Brooklyn City Council Member Laurie Cumbo, a Democrat and the Council’s Majority Leader, wants to establish a new position in city government to oversee the reopening of city government after the coronavirus shutdown. Her bill (Intro. 1950) would create and require the position of “City Restart Officer” to coordinate safety measures taken by city agencies and require them to submit their policies and plans to the restart officer for review.
“Many New Yorkers are excited yet apprehensive about reopening and rightly so,” Cumbo said at a virtual hearing on the bill on Tuesday held by the Council Committee on Governmental Operations. “We want to make sure that we are putting forth the best practices to make sure that New York City opens safely.” Cumbo’s bill currently has 16 sponsors in the 51-seat City Council.
New York City is just over a week into phase 1 of its economic “reopening” that began when the COVID-19 public health crisis subsided to a significant degree, with the city hitting state-set metrics and some of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s own thresholds for allowing more travel and economic activity. The city could enter phase 2 of reopening on Monday, June 15, at the earliest, though de Blasio has said he believes it will be later than that.
The Tuesday hearing, led by Cuombo and Bronx Council Member Fernando Cabrera, who chairs the government operations committee, included an opportunity for the members to question de Blasio administration officials on the bill and the city’s reopening plans.
At the hearing, Lisette Camilo, the Commissioner of the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS), said that city government -- which employs hundreds of thousands of workers -- has taken the appropriate precautions to protect its workforce while maintaining necessary functions.
She estimated that two-thirds of the city’s workforce was able to transition to work from home, with only a fraction of those workers now returning to in-person work since phase 1 started. Most of the returning workers thus far have corresponded with industries that were allowed to restart in phase 1, such as Department of Buildings inspectors going to job sites again now that private construction is no longer largely halted.
Camilo also mentioned the “Core Four” precautions that all city workers should abide by, including staying home when sick, wearing face coverings, practicing good hygiene, and maintaining a social distance of six feet. She said the city is working towards making daily screenings available for workers.
At a Tuesday press conference, de Blasio said that the city now sponsors about 20,000 tests daily, with another 30,000 coming from other providers. The city’s tracing program is currently tracking 4,300 cases and the mayor said the program will have the capacity to trace 250,000 sometime this summer.
“That is the level we're going to reach, a quarter million people who will need help and support to help them through this disease, to keep all the rest of us safe as well,” de Blasio said.
Camilo says the city has divided its preparations for more workers returning to in-person work into four categories: preparing buildings, workspaces, workforce, and communication. The city is modifying its buildings and workspaces to allow workers to maintain social distance, training its workers to follow new protocols, and communicating these changes and resources to the public, according to Camilo.
Camilo and other agency leaders at the Council hearing did not voice support for Cumbo’s bill. The administration prefers an inter-agency approach instead, Camilo said. “We have been working across the agencies that have the expertise to inform the guidance,” she said, adding that agencies “are the best experts” at addressing their internal needs and that “it can’t be a cookie-cutter approach.”
When asked about planning for phase 2 by Cabrera, Camilo said “we don’t have finalized plans,” despite phase 2 potentially being days away. De Blasio said similarly at his Tuesday morning briefing.
According to Camilo, the Mayor’s Office has not yet received plans from all city agencies about their individual reopenings, adding, “I’d rather be conservative in the approach,” given this process has never been done before.
Camilo said that the city “do[es] not have an enforcement part of our guidance,” but that “I don’t think anyone will want to take a gamble on the health and safety of their workforce.” Cabrera and Cumbo both voiced concerns about agencies having enough lead time to comply with city protocols ahead of the next phases of reopenings.
During the public comment portion of the hearing, an employee with the Parks & Recreation Department expressed his concern about the city’s plans for reopening. When asked by Cumbo, he said that he wasn’t aware of any channel for reporting coronavirus-related safety concerns.
During the hearing, Cabrera mentioned several times that New York City could potentially move to phase 2 of reopening on Monday, June 22, which would mark two weeks after the city entered phase 1. However, there have been no official announcements regarding that as of now.
At his Tuesday press conference, de Blasio talked about trying to “keep expectations low” and that the city and state “may want and need a few more days to get more data beyond June 21 before moving to the next phase of reopening. The mayor also promised more city guidance would be publicized “over the next few days” and the city “will be ready for next week, if the indicators and the discussions with the state tell us that we’re ready to go next week.”
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by Andrew Millman, Gotham Gazette
@millman_andrew @GothamGazette