(photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)
Mayor Bill de Blasio, now in his seventh year in office, unveiled his “blueprint to save our city” at his annual State of the City speech on Thursday.
Echoing a similar message from his State of the City speech last year, the mayor sought to highlight the anxiety and uncertainty among New Yorkers who feel the unending pressures of living here, whether it be the cost of doing business, providing a good life for children, worrying about the effects of climate change, or just simply paying the rent.
In a break from past speeches, de Blasio held court in a town hall-like format at the American Museum of Natural History’s Milstein Hall of Ocean Life, known for its iconic model of a blue whale suspended from the ceiling. De Blasio stood dead center surrounded by rows of white chairs, rather than speaking from a lectern, and though he did not field any audience questions, it was more of an interactive performance than prior speeches.
“I felt it was time for something different,” he said of the setup, which eschewed prepared remarks on a teleprompter but used a script projected on a screen as well as slides with bullet points and graphics. “It was time to be blunt. It was time for real talk.”
The mayor spoke of a sense of urgency he says he has for the remainder of his tenure, and of the fears of displacement that he encounters in New Yorkers across the city. “Every town hall meeting I go to, every conversation I have more and more turns to the same problem,” he said. “No one wants to leave but they are being forced out. Or if they haven’t been displaced yet, it’s a constant worry,” he said. “The challenge now is not crime, the challenge now is greed. Greed that is afflicting all of us.”
He pledged new ideas, tweaked existing plans, and additional resources to boost small business, create more affordable housing for lower-income New Yorkers, ensure higher quality schools and safer streets for kids, and limit city carbon emissions that hurt the environment and contribute to climate change.
“From making Pre-K universal, to creating the safest big city in America, we have accomplished so much together, but we need to go much farther," de Blasio said in a statement released just before he took the stage, where he was introduced by his wife, Chirlane McCray. "We must make New York City easier to afford, protect the mom-and-pop businesses that make New York, New York, and hand this city back to the people who make it so great.”
Seemingly taking stock of a storefront vacancy crisis, as small businesses close down in the city, de Blasio announced several measures that he said would aid about 28,000 businesses. He said the city would invest $500 million from the city’s $215.5 billion pension fund system into local businesses. He pledged to push for a Landlord Vacancy Tax before the state Legislature, to pressure landlords into renting their properties to small businesses rather than wait for tenants that can pay higher rents. And he announced that he would create a “Blue Ribbon Commercial Rent Control Commission,” tasked with crafting ways to shield businesses from exorbitant rent increases, with a deadline of delivering recommendations by the end of the year.
The mayor touted the success of his administration’s push to cut fines on small businesses, as much as 40% so far, he said, and promised to continue that effort to reach 50% by the end of his tenure. It will have put $26 million back into the pockets of business owners, he said.
He also promised a slew of measures to assist small businesses, including expanding small business navigators that can help with permits and licenses and providing free legal services and low-interest loans to low-income business owners.
The mayor has repeatedly touted the success of his housing plan – according to city data, the administration has created and preserved 147,933 units of rent-restricted housing through December 31, 2019 – but amid ongoing criticism that the housing is not affordable enough for low-income New Yorkers and after several resets and course corrections already, he announced yet another on Thursday. Calling it “Your Home NYC,” the mayor outlined several initiatives in the next phase of his housing program.
De Blasio said the city would help keep another 78,000 New Yorkers in their affordable homes, after having already done this for 255,000 people. He said half of all new homes built with city financing would be set aside for families with an annual income of less than $50,000, and that half of those would go to families with an annual income of less than $30,000. He estimated that would create 2,000 additional new units for low-income residents than previously outlined in his 12-year, 300,000-unit plan, though not adding to the sum total.
Exerting leverage over homes financed with city money, the mayor said the city would offer renters the choice to either pay security deposits up front or allow monthly installments through a renter security insurance program, which he said will start with 60,000 homes.
He also said he would push the state Legislature to expand tenant protections, including the security deposit measure, for the roughly 2.5 million New Yorkers that don’t live in rent-regulated apartments, building on the ground-breaking tenant-friendly legislative package approved last year in Albany.
De Blasio said his administration would further support Community Land Trusts to allow communities to invest in development and build wealth, and said he would push to legalize basement apartments to create 10,000 legal affordable housing units over ten years. He said the city would provide low-interest loans to homeowners choosing to convert their basements.
In a somewhat controversial move, the mayor’s new NYPD Commissioner, Dermot Shea, announced late last month that the department will deploy 300 Youth Coordination Officers across the city as a measure to prevent youth crime. De Blasio touted that initiative in his speech and said he would build on it with several youth safety measures including expanding opening hours at recreation centers and providing free membership to young people, reopening six closed community centers and building seven new ones. He also said the city would install new safe streets infrastructure around schools – 1,000 new stop lights, signs, and speed bumps in total.
He also announced the creation of a new 100-member NYPD Vision Zero unit to increase traffic enforcement and continue to reduce traffic-related fatalities amid an increase in pedestrian and cyclist deaths.
A signature early achievement of the mayor was his universal pre-kindergarten program, which he expanded on with a “3-K for All” plan to eventually provide early childhood education to all 3-year-olds. The mayor boasted of its success, as he noted that the 3-K program will roll out to another four school districts in September, which will mean coverage of half of all school districts.
De Blasio committed, or rather predicted, that the city’s school graduation rate would reach 86% by 2026, up from 77.3%, surpassing the nation’s average five years after he leaves office. He said the Department of Education would increase its focus on performance metrics to identify trends and send resources where they are required, in part through enhancing the use of the new EduStat program that the DOE has modeled after the NYPD’s CompStat that uses data analysis and accountability through the chain of command. And he announced a goal of placing 1,000 new men of color in teaching positions by 2022.
The mayor also spoke of another early childhood care initiative which was first announced by First Lady McCray on Wednesday – a new $43 million program to provide home visiting services to all first-time parents by 2024. The program is expected to launch in Brooklyn this year and next, before moving to other boroughs.
The speech contained an ambitious expansion of the de Blasio administration’s “Green New Deal” efforts, first launched by the mayor in April last year, to make the city carbon neutral.
The mayor unveiled several new plans. He said the city will create a new wind power hub at the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal in Sunset Park, for staging, installing and operating turbines. The hub will add 500 green jobs, the mayor said.
The city will also launch an initiative to increase the use of solar power, allowing homeowners to defray costs of installing solar panels by paying out of savings on their energy bills over the course of years. He said the city would help install panels on 50,000 homes, creating 5,000 green jobs.
Using the authority afforded by his office, de Blasio signed three executive orders on the spot – to end the purchase of single-use plastic bottles by city agencies and restrict the sale of those bottles on city property by next year; to mandate that all city vehicles be electric by 2040; and to codify the city’s policy of divesting from fossil fuel infrastructure and ensuring no new fossil fuel infrastructure projects are approved in the city.
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
Eric Adams, Susan Lerner, and Alicka Ampry-Samuel, right (photo: @AlickaASamuel41)
A push is now underway to ensure voters are educated about the new ranked choice voting system New York City will be adopting for some elections starting in 2021, and it is being driven by Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, a top contender in the mayoral race where the new format will first be tested.
At a press conference Wednesday in front of New York City Board of Elections headquarters in Lower Manhattan, Adams, along with Brooklyn City Council Member Alicka Ampry-Samuel and Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, urged the mayor and City Council to include $10 million in the next city budget toward public education ahead of the implementation of ranked-choice voting, which was approved by voters this past November. He said the allocation would be offset by the money saved in costly run-off elections, which tend to have extremely low turnout and are obsolete in a system using ranked-choice voting, and should be geared to engaging historically disenfranchised groups.
Ranked-choice voting will be a “major shift” in how elections are run and “it’s imperative that we get it right,” Adams said of the new voting method where voters can select up to five candidates in order of preference during special and primary elections (but not general elections) beginning in 2021, and votes are reapportioned as needed until a winner hits 50%. “That is why we’re asking the City Council, the Speaker, as well as the Mayor of the City of New York, to allocate the necessary funds so that we can have the proper education on the ground.”
In addition to the call for city funding, Adams announced he would be holding forums at Brooklyn Borough Hall and is encouraging his fellow borough presidents to do the same in their boroughs. The speakers at the press conference also called attention to the city Board of Election’s effort to use a new paperless touch-screen voting machine, which they say is less accurate and secure than the current hybrid system, which election experts consider a “gold standard.”
The push comes amid an unfolding fiasco in the Iowa Democratic caucuses, as a newly adopted and undertested app-based reporting mechanism has failed to report the full results of the state’s voting Monday. “The Iowa debacle should be a wake-up call for how we integrate new technologies into our election systems,” Adams said in a press release Wednesday.
Ranked-choice voting allows voters to rate candidates in order of preference rather than having to cast a vote for just one, at least for New York City special and primary elections beginning in 2021. If no candidate wins a majority of votes on the first counting, the last place candidate is eliminated and their ballots are redistributed to the remaining candidates based on those voters’ second choices. The process of elimination and reapportionment continues until one candidate receives a majority of support.
Advocates say the system has a number of benefits in addition to eliminating the need for run-off elections, which currently occur after a primary election in the city when no candidate garners more than 40 percent of the vote. Ranked-choice voting reduces the risk of so-called “spoiler” candidates -- candidates who have no chance of winning but still take votes that could otherwise advantage a more viable candidate -- by not forcing voters to choose between their top choice and another alternative other than in ranking them. Supporters also say it forces candidates to adopt a broader message and appeal to voters outside their base, and that winners are ultimately indicative of more widespread support.
Ranked-choice was approved by voters last fall as part of a referendum to amend the City Charter. It came after a coalition of election reformers pushed the 2019 Charter Revision Commission, tasked with proposing amendments to voters based on public input and an analysis of the city’s primary governing document. Barring unforeseen special elections, which are called when an elected official steps down mid-term, the first races using ranked-choice voting in New York City will be the June 2021 primaries for mayor, other citywide and boroughwide positions, and the entire City Council.
The implementation will come on the heels of a slew of election changes passed by state lawmakers in 2019, including early voting and electronic poll books, and primaries moved to June.
Adams and Ampry-Samuel, both Democrats, said the focus of educational outreach should be groups that have been politically marginalized in the past.
“We need to be proactive and invest now as a city in educating our most vulnerable communities and voters to avoid disastrous errors and potential disenfranchisement,” said Ampry-Samuel, who represents parts of Bed-Stuy, Brownsville, East Flatbush, and Crown Heights and will be up for reelection in 2021.
“Black voters have been loyal to the Democratic Party for decades. It is disrespectful and a failure to our communities when we neglect to prepare them for the changes. We are now introducing new technologies and systems that can also be confusing to our aging New Yorkers,” she said.
Asked whether she would be pushing legislation to support the effort to engage historically disenfranchised New Yorkers in conjunction with the push for funding, Ampry-Samuel said: “We are working with the Council now and our advocates to make sure that we have legislation in place to make sure that our voters are protected. But in addition to that, because right now we are in the budget season and we are negotiating that city funding, we are making sure we are putting enough funding -- $10 million -- in place to educate our voters.”
“This education must be on the ground,” and should occur through “door-to-door outreach, [at] train stops, in our school system,” and reaching “our new young people who are graduating from high school and will be voting for the first time,” Adams said.
Parallel to the funding push is Adams’ plan to hold forums about the RCV as part of an effort to boost civic engagement. “The details are still being determined but we look forward to rolling these forums out soon,” Jonah Allon, a spokesperson for Adams, told Gotham Gazette.
Adams is expected to be competing in the 2021 Democratic mayoral primary along with possible contenders such as Comptroller Scott Stringer, City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, former city and federal official Shaun Donovan, former city veterans affairs commissioner Loree Sutton, and Dianne Morales, recently-departed CEO of Bronx social services nonprofit Phipps Neighborhoods.
Lerner and Adams also raised concerns on Wednesday about the city BOE’s push to get a new voting machine, the ExpressVote XL, certified for use by the New York State Board of Elections. They said the system, which uses an electronic touch-screen with no accompanying paper record, is less reliable and accurate than the current system, and has been almost universally criticized by election security experts.
The city currently uses a system in which voters mark a paper ballot that is then scanned by an electronic machine. Lerner said switching to a new system, when the current system is considered a good model, is a waste of taxpayer money.
Another caveat is the potential conflicts of interest for New York City BOE Executive Director Michael Ryan, who is accused of receiving gifts from Election Systems & Software, the company that makes ExpressVote XL, and is pushing the state board to certify the technology. Lerner’s Common Cause New York last week asked the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board to investigate Ryan’s connection with ES&S, which they say includes being flown across the country to conferences and serving on an advisory board for the company (after reporting by NY1 he stepped down from the advisory board).
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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
@GeringerSameth @GothamGazette
Mayoral candidate Dianne Morales at a recent event (photo: Dianne.nyc)
February 5, 2020 - Max & Murphy Podcast: Mayoral Candidate Dianne Morales
Dianne Morales joined the show to discuss her candidacy for Mayor of New York City. Running in the 2021 Democratic primary, Morales recently stepped down from her long-time job as CEO of Phipps Neighborhoods in the Bronx to campaign full-time. On the show, she discussed the reasons she decided to run and what her campaign will focus on, among other things.
Listen to the conversation and let us know what you think -- we're on Twitter @TweetBenMax and @JarrettMurphy. You can listen to the show through the embedded audio below or download the episode wherever you get your podcasts, under "Max & Murphy," and listen to Max & Murphy live on Wednesdays at 5 p.m. on WBAI radio, 99.5FM or wbai.org.
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by Ben Max, Gotham Gazette
@tweetBenMax @GothamGazette