New York Democrats in 2016 (photo: New York Democratic Party)
October 28, 2020 - Max & Murphy Podcast: State Democratic Party Chair Jay Jacobs
Jay Jacobs, chair of the New York State Democratic Party, joined the show to discuss key races for the House of Representatives and State Senate, as well as other issues related to the 2020 elections in New York.
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
Lou Puliafito & Rebecca Seawright
Last time she faced a Republican challenger, in 2016, Assemblymember Rebecca Seawright won by a margin of nearly 50 points. Her Assembly district, which includes the Upper East Side, Yorkville, and Roosevelt Island, has a solid Republican presence but is generally considered a firmly Democratic stronghold. Yet due to a series of ballot controversies, Seawright’s reelection bid has been thrust into some uncertainty this year.
The trouble started for the Assembly member this Spring, when her campaign failed to include a cover page for her petition filings for the June Democratic primary, in which she was to have run unopposed. She then attempted to run in the general election on the Working Families Party ballot line, but the courts determined that the deadline had already passed. This left open the possibility that the Republican nominee, Lou Puliatifo, would be the only candidate on the ballot for voters of the 76th Assembly District.
But Seawright got the required signatures to run on the self-created “Rise and Unite” ballot line, with the backing of much of the Democratic establishment but some reason to be nervous about how voters in her district may react to seeing no name on the Democratic Party line for Assembly. Given what’s unfolded her campaign has brought in some of the party’s biggest names, both locally and nationally, to help make sure Democratic voters know she’ll be on the ballot -- somewhere. The party’s two most recent presidential candidates, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former Vice President Joe Biden, have announced endorsements of Seawright, with Clinton even Zoom-ing in for a virtual event.
The Assembly member’s path to reelection has also been complicated by progressive activist Patrick Bobilin, who ran against City Council Member Ben Kallos in 2017 and jumped into the Assembly race on his own “Blue Wave” independent ballot line. Sensing a threat, Seawright’s campaign sought to have Bobilin kicked off the ballot, and in late September the Appellate Division ruled that Bobilin did not meet the residency requirement for the office, after the State Supreme Court initially concluded that he did meet the requirement.
Bobilin decried the court’s ruling, saying it “portends a negative impact on young people who want to run for office if they were ever outside of the state for any reason,” but has since decided to suspend his campaign. Given the timing of the ruling, Bobilin’s name appeared on a small batch of absentee ballots that went out.
He has said that he will be running again in 2022.
But it’s unclear who the incumbent will be.
Puliafito, who works as a doorman, garnered 3.5% of the vote as the Reform Party candidate for the seat in 2018, with no Republican nominee that year, to Seawright’s 96%. He has received significant attention from the media and Republicans given the incumbent’s ballot challenges and the outside chance for the GOP to pick up a seat -- there are currently no Manhattan Republicans elected to New York City or State government.
Seawright has significant advantages despite the ballot snafu, particularly the district’s Democratic voter enrollment advantage, her name recognition as an Assembly member since 2015, endorsements including big name politicians as well as labor unions, and fundraising. Seawright is one of more than 100 Democrats in the majority in the Assembly, which has 150 seats across the state.
As of the 11-day pre-general election financial disclosures, Seawright had raised $133,961 in the latest period, including $60,000 from the Democratic Assembly Campaign Committee in October alone, and had $120,608 in cash-on-hand while continuing to raise more funds. Comparatively, Puliafito raised $1,426 in his last filing and had a balance of $1,483. (In that filing, Bobilin reported $11,384 in donations and had $10,802 in balance.)
According to Census Reporter, The 76th Assembly District is predominantly white (72% of residents are white compared to 56% of New York State as a whole) and significantly wealthier than the rest of the state (the median household income is more than 50% higher in the district than the rest of the state). As of February 2020, there were 58,748 Democrats in the district compared to 15,690 Republicans, out of 101,185 registered voters, in the district, according to data from the state Board of Elections.
Rebecca Seawright
In an interview, Assemblymember Seawright emphasized what she sees as her top legislative accomplishments and leadership positions. She serves as secretary of the Assembly’s majority Democratic Conference and sits on the judiciary, education, and consumer affairs committees. She cites a “proven track record of passing legislation” that includes cosponsoring the codification of Roe v. Wade into New York state law and sponsoring legislation requiring health insurance providers to cover mammograms.
She also cosponsored the recent repeal of section 50-A of the Civil Rights law, which is providing greater transparency regarding police disciplinary records.
“I’ve given over $12 million to our local public schools, libraries, and parks and will continue to fight for additional funding, especially during this pandemic,” Seawright said, referring to government funding she’s secured for the district. She said that she would support legislation to “cancel rent” as a result of the pandemic and related economic catastrophe “until after January.”
Asked about the state’s looming budget deficit, Seawright said, “I think we need to look at new ways to raise revenue and we need to continue to push for federal relief money out of Washington.” She supports a “millionaires’ tax” to raise revenue, she said, likely meaning raising taxes on those earning above $1 million annually on top of the higher rates they already pay.
“I think it’s very important that we keep our buses clean, accessible, and on time,” said Seawright, when asked about other top priorities for her constituents.
Seawright’s district office was the target of anti-Semitic vandalism in August and she said that she is currently sponosirng legislation in Albany “to strengthen our hate crime law.”
“I’m running on my record,” Seawright said. “I treat each problem as if it were my own and I take it very seriously.” She also said that election reform will be a top priority for her in the next session, after nearly failing to make the ballot herself, so as to provide “more access to people to run for office and for people to understand the election process.”
Lou Puliafito
“I don’t like either party,” Puliafito said in an interview, but added that “when you have a one-party town, there’s no accountability” and that he is “fed up with party politics and pointing at each other.” He notes that he is also on the Liberal Party ballot line, for any voters in the district squeamish about voting for a Republican.
Puliafito, a former IT professional who became a part-time doorman in retirement, was quick to emphasize that he’s not a typical Republican candidate and at times distanced himself from the national party, saying, “This is a local election. It has nothing to do with Washington.”
Puliafito voiced support for further increases to the minimum wage, saying, “I’m a union guy. I know it’s $15, but I think it needs to be more.”
On affordable housing, he said, “I don’t have the patent on what’s the right thing to do” and that he would bring stakeholders together to compromise if elected. However, he decried recent new developments in the district as “creeping gentrification” and voiced concerns about the cost of living in the district. He has also stressed what he sees as a lack of safety on the streets of the district and the need for stronger law enforcement while criticizing bail reforms that the state passed in 2019.
Puliafito criticized the current state of governing on Roosevelt Island, calling for the board of the Roosevelt Island Operation Cooperation (RIOC) to be elected by the island’s residents so that it is “accountable and transparent.” The RIOC board is currently appointed by the Governor.
Election day is Tuesday, November 3. Early voting is already underway and all registered voters are eligible to vote by absentee ballot.
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by Andrew Millman, Gotham Gazette
@millman_andrew @GothamGazette
Note: this article has been corrected to reflect that Puliafito will be on the Liberal Party line, not the Conservative Party line.
Make sure to sign your ballot (photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)
Among a package of changes to New York state election law passed since the chaotic June primaries is a provision that requires the Board of Elections to notify voters when their absentee ballots are on the verge of being thrown out and give them a chance to correct certain potential disqualifications. Designed to ensure possibly tens of thousands of intended votes are actually counted, the “curing” mandate applies to a handful of often disenfranchising technicalities, but the newborn steps may add a challenging addition to the already heavy load election administrators are facing as they contend with huge turnout by mail and at the polls.
Roughly 80,000 mail-in ballots were rejected by the New York City Board of Elections (BOE) in June, a vast majority due to issues with the signature on the inner "oath" envelope. Twenty-three percent of absentee ballots were rejected, roughly the same as in the 2016 presidential primary election, but with a twelve-fold increase in the total number of such ballots this year, according to the BOE. With so many people voting by mail due to the coronavirus and related expansion of absentee balloting, lawmakers attempted to mitigate widespread disenfranchisement.
Over 1 million voters had already requested absentee ballots for the general election as of October 20, according to the city BOE, which said at the time it had processed almost all of them. The deadline to request an absentee ballot is October 27. There were roughly 5,320,000 registered voters in New York City as of February 20, per State Board of Elections numbers.
Mail-in voting, like check-in at a poll site, requires the voter to provide a signature that can be compared against the one on their registration. The new law, passed by the State Legislature in July and signed by Governor Andrew Cuomo in August, applies to oath envelopes with missing or incorrect signatures, or to ballots returned without the inner envelope altogether.
If an error is found, county boards of elections must now notify the voter, explain why their ballot was rejected, and provide a form through which they may "cure" the mistake. The BOE must send the form through all possible channels, including by post and email, and must begin the process almost immediately after catching the error. Cuomo signed an executive order in August allowing administrators to begin examining ballot envelopes for possible defects "as soon as possible" (though state law requires the inner oath envelopes remain sealed and uncounted until seven days after Election Day to ensure all votes are received).
"We are encouraging the voters to return [absentee ballots] to us as quickly as possible," said BOE executive director Michael Ryan at a City Council oversight hearing in September. "It will provide the maximum period of time to engage in the newly created cure process," he told lawmakers.
"Clearly the sooner that happens the better. If it happens a day before Election Day it's going to be very difficult for the process to be completed," Ryan said. The BOE must accept absentee ballots mailed by or on Election Day (November 3). If administrators determine a ballot is eligible for remedy by the voter, the BOE must begin trying to tell the voter within a day, or the same day if the determination happened on or after Election Day.
The cure form must be completed and returned within seven days of notification if the absentee ballot was received by the city BOE before Election Day, and -- for the 2020 general election only -- within five days if it is received on or after November 3.
The statutory deadline to certify election results is November 28.
The provision may add to an already sizable headache for the BOE which has been attempting to control damage caused by a printing error that resulted in as many as 100,000 Brooklyn voters receiving an oath envelope with another voter's name. The board sent out guidance to impacted voters, instructing them to destroy old ballot materials and providing new ones.
But thousands of unsuspecting voters may have submitted the incorrect envelope with a mismatched signature. It is unclear how the ballot cure law will impact them and whether registered voters whose envelopes were mistakenly signed by someone else will be given an opportunity to cure the defects on another voter's ballot. The new curing law was not specifically designed to account for such a mistake.
An aide to State Senator Zellnor Myrie, a Brooklyn Democrat who chairs the elections committee and sponsored the cure bill, said the BOE may have no way of knowing who the incorrect signature belongs to. Administrators will be able to inform a voter whose ballot was incorrectly "used" but the person who accidentally cast the ballot -- voted, signed, and returned an envelope -- may not know that their attempted vote was not counted, unless they catch the mailing or track the status of their ballot online (a new feature in New York City this election).
The New York City Board of Elections did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
An "overwhelming number" of invalidated absentee ballots in June were the result of completely missing signatures, Ryan said in September. To help avoid this problem, the state has placed a large, red 'X'red 'X' on the inner envelope to indicate where a signature is required.
The cure form asks the voter to attest "to the same information required by the affirmation envelope" and "that the signer of the affirmation is the same person who submitted such absentee ballot," according to guidelines issued by the State Board of Elections to county boards.
The new requirements entail brand new procedures in an already tumultuous election cycle for administrators that is expected to see enormous voter turnout for the presidential election.
Above all is the new requirement to notify voters, and state guidelines say that message must be conveyed through virtually every channel available to the BOE. When an absentee ballot is received, evaluated, and put in line for rejection before Election Day, the BOE must attempt to contact the voter at the address on their registration and the address indicated on their absentee ballot application. If the board has any email addresses or phone numbers on file, it must make attempts on all of them.
"What might be seen as the greatest departure from the normal process is the notification. Having to notify a voter that there is some defect, either by phone or email, is the introduction of a step that wasn't there before," Myrie told Gotham Gazette. In the high-turnout 2020 elections, he acknowledged that is a big lift, but one that would help "restore credibility to the [voting] process."
Some additional provisions have been set out by executive order that partially ease the burden on administrators for cures to ballots received on or after Election Day. When Cuomo signed the bill into law, he included a memorandum saying it would apply for the 2020 general election but would be revisited to determine its permanence.
For ballots received on or after Election Day, which is November 3, the guidelines allow administrators to forgo a physical mailing unless both no email is available and no contact is made by phone. The leeway applies only to the 2020 general election.
The guidelines also say county boards must notify voters even when their ballots are rejected for reasons that are not curable. If the cure itself is rejected before Election Day, administrators are required "to the extent practicable" to inform voters and give information of alternative ways to vote.
"There is an entire process set up by which they examine absentee ballots...what this bill does requires them to then make a notification," Myrie said. In doing so, it also adds a new document that will need to be processed on a large scale.
All of this takes time and resources. The BOE estimates the total canvassing process -- the time it takes to review all the votes cast -- will take 21 days from Election Day, placing final official results somewhere around November 24.
Part of the extended timeline is because envelope signatures for mail-in ballots are examined by hand by bipartisan teams -- one Democrat and one Republican -- as are many functions carried out by election administrators. If the BOE team makes a preliminary ruling of a mismatched signature, a team of managers reviews the decision. State guidelines advise boards that signatures are variable and may not always match the one on file, even if they are correct. The state BOE has instructed local administrators to "presume that the documents were signed by the same person."
The BOE expects a high number of ballot cures but a report on the city's staffing needs, submitted to the state Board, omits information on the status of personnel hired to carry out the process.
"Given the anticipated volume of individual cures and to ensure the timely processing of same, the final stages of automation to assist in processing is being completed. Upon completion, the Board will finalize the number of staff assigned to this task," reads the report. As of October 14, the city BOE had not provided those figures to the state.
A spokesperson for the state Board said they believed recently purchased vote-sorting machines have the ability to file ballots based on missing envelope information.
Other issues don't require a cure according to guidance from the state BOE. That includes wrongly placed signature, incorrect date, use of pencil or pen, extra paper when it is material provided by the BOE, random marks or tears on the envelope that look like the result of mailing.
When voting by mail and hoping to avoid the curing process altogether, voters should ensure both the return envelope and inner "oath" envelope are fully sealed, and that the inner one is signed and correctly dated.
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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
@GeringerSameth @GothamGazette
CUNY Chancellor Matos Rodriguez and students, pre-pandemic (photo: City University of New York)
College seniors who graduated this June faced a very different economic landscape from the one they saw at the beginning of the school year. A global pandemic shattered the job market, and many industries — including the performing arts, entertainment, restaurants, and hospitality and tourism — were in complete freefall after government-mandated closures.
The widespread financial strain that saw unemployment in New York City skyrocket from 4% to well over 20% was felt acutely among the 271,000 students of the City University of New York. CUNY educates some of the city’s most vulnerable residents: almost half of CUNY students come from households that bring in less than $20,000 in annual income. Nearly 40% of students had lost their jobs since the pandemic began and over half had experienced housing insecurity, a university official said at a June City Council hearing.
The CUNY community, including students and their families, faculty, and staff, is a microcosm of the devastation that has already been wrought by the pandemic — especially in communities of color that have been disproportionately impacted by the coronavirus — and of the immense challenges facing New York City. The city is staring down a catastrophic fiscal crisis, losing billions of dollars in tax revenue and hundreds of thousands of jobs. And as the city feels for handholds to pull itself out of this deep hole, CUNY could be a major boost.
“CUNY is the educational, social mobility driver for the City of New York. We take that role very seriously,” CUNY Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez said in an interview.
Uniquely, the majority of CUNY students are New York City residents — around 75 percent — and the majority of students will stay in the city after graduation. In an economy where jobs that don’t require a college degree, like many in hospitality, restaurants, and retail, have been devastated, maintaining an accessible pathway to earning a degree like CUNY offers — and ensuring that New Yorkers enroll and graduate — may be one key to getting New Yorkers back to work.
Experts and stakeholders interviewed by Gotham Gazette say that New York City and CUNY could, and should, recover together, but warn that CUNY and its students could be left behind if smart steps are not taken.
“We’re clearly an indispensable partner moving forward in the efforts to bring back the city and the economy, and its social and civic life,” Matos Rodríguez said. “We’ve been working very hard with different sectors — the business community, with elected officials, with some of the other civic society groups who are framing an agenda about what needs to be done, so we can be an integral part of all those conversations.”
The Road to Recovery
CUNY students have been disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, said Cathy Davidson, the founding director of the Futures Initiative, a CUNY-supported program that seeks to advance equity in higher education.
“CUNY students were and are the city’s essential workers,” she said, noting that many students who work at CUNY hold jobs that stayed in operation during the COVID-19 shutdown, such as in pharmacies, grocery stores, delivery services, and health care. Over half of CUNY students work a minimum of 20 hours a week while going to school, which for CUNY includes 11 senior colleges, seven community colleges, and seven graduate, honors and professional schools.
Prior to the pandemic, New York City already had a “bifurcated” economy, according to Jonathan Bowles, executive director of the New York policy think tank Center for an Urban Future. There was a lot of low-wage job growth, in industries like home health care, restaurants, nail salons, and child care, as well as high-wage growth in areas like technology and creative industries, he explained.
Now, some of New York City’s most important low-wage industries are among the most deeply impacted by COVID-19. A July report by Center for an Urban Future found that the restaurant, retail, and the personal care industries suffered some of the greatest job losses in the early months of the pandemic, alongside the entertainment industry, the hospitality industry, and transportation. Meanwhile, jobs in tech, finance, legal services, and some creative industries, like streaming and publishing, saw comparatively minimal job losses, alongside industries like grocery stores and healthcare.
After a methodical, limited reopening of the economy, the unemployment rate in New York City was at roughly 14% in September, up from 3.5% the same month in 2019.
“If anything, the pandemic has further polarized New York’s economy. The data that I’m seeing suggests that the industries that have been hurt the most are also the ones that were most accessible for people without a college degree,” Bowles said.
As it currently stands, when Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the broad strokes of his “recovery agenda” in late September, he did not mention CUNY. The agenda, which de Blasio said sets a “framework” for a series of more specific plans to come, focuses primarily on public health, public health research, “high quality jobs,” and social justice. “New York City is about to enter a transformational era,” de Blasio said in a statement at the time, outlining pillars to connect economic and public health, in part through a “highly trained workforce” and academic research.
Asked about how the mayor sees CUNY in relation to the city's recovery from the coronavirus recession, the mayor's office did not respond for this story.
As New York City tries to recover, CUNY could be the springboard that many current students and potential ones need to secure jobs and bounce into a higher income bracket. In a normal year, CUNY is already a social-mobility booster: a recent Brookings Institution report ranked 12 CUNY senior colleges and community colleges as showing some of the greatest results in being able to move students into the middle class in the nation.
The colleges themselves also are economic generators. Economic studies on the City College of New York and Queens College released early this year, for instance, found that both colleges added billions to the New York economy through alumni earnings, as well as millions of dollars through college operations, student, construction, and research spending.
Most students will stay in the state after graduation, and for a while: according to CUNY data released in 2014, 81% of students who graduated across CUNY degree levels in 2008 stayed in New York, while 66% from 1999 stayed in the state, and 72% stayed from the class of 1981.
And most will hold jobs soon after they graduate: 79% of students who earned a bachelor’s degree were employed in New York within a year of graduation, according to the most recent data from CUNY. Graduates work across a litany of professions, with business and finance, architecture and engineering, and education being some of the major fields of employment for CUNY alums, a 2009-2010 CUNY survey reported. Of graduates in the survey, 30% worked in the public sector.
“I think more than ever New York needs to develop its own talent and to give its own residents a chance to access the good jobs that are being created. And I don’t think there’s any other institution that plays a more important role in grooming local residents [than CUNY], particularly those from low-income backgrounds, into the good jobs of today, and into the middle class,” Bowles said.
The Past and the New Future
The financial crisis that New York faces rivals what the city faced in the 1970s, according to Greg David, the director of the Business & Economics Reporting Program at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.
“There is no doubt that this crisis is far worse than the last three,” David said. Somewhat recent financial crises for the city include the 2008 Great Recession, the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, and the recession of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The city’s near-bankruptcy in the 1970s marked a particularly dark time for CUNY: as part of drastic cuts, the colleges began charging students after almost 130 years of remaining tuition-free. This decision remains controversial, and City Council members and state legislators still periodically suggest reverting CUNY back to its tuition-free state, while student and activist groups like Free CUNY push them with that goal.
City Comptroller Scott Stringer recently picked up on the theme when he proposed making CUNY community colleges free in a much larger plan to develop New York City’s workforce for a post-pandemic world. Facets of the plan include expanding CUNY ASAP, a highly successful financial assistance and academic support program, creating a paid internship program for CUNY students, and expanding technical career education and early-college education in public schools. The plan additionally focuses on helping New Yorkers between jobs to develop the skills they need to reenter the workforce, suggesting “micro-credentialing” and other training.
“My plan overhauls and modernizes our approach to job training, job placement, and education to reflect the evolution of work and aims to break down systemic barriers that have historically excluded women, people of color, immigrants and young people from higher-wage industries,” Stringer, a Democrat running for mayor in 2021, said in a statement.
CUNY’s population is composed largely of students of color. Across all campuses and degree levels, the student population is made up of roughly 23% Black students, 26% Hispanic students, 23% students who identify as Asian or Pacific Islander, and 27% white students, according to the most recent figures. The same data shows that CUNY also serves a majority of female students, coming in at over 60%.
Matos Rodríguez sees city and state government investment in CUNY as a “two-way street,” which will be part of a longer-term strategy to economically reinvigorate New York.
He referenced partnerships including a Governor Andrew Cuomo-backed workforce development initiative that includes CUNY, as well as more support for paid internships. For instance, in addition to his community college plan, Stringer announced paid fellowships to CUNY graduates in the Comptroller’s Office.
“I think those kinds of two-way partnerships will be crucial to make sure we can do our part in the economic recovery of the city,” Matos Rodríguez said. One essential question is scale. Stringer’s fellowship program, for example, is for only 20 students per year, but is part of a larger constellation of similar programs, such as the CUNY Cultural Corps internship program, that could become part of a broader universe.
Beyond the city and state, CUNY has leveraged partnerships with private companies, such as those involved in the new New York Jobs CEO Council. Supported by Cuomo and de Blasio and announced in August amid the pandemic, the council seeks to hire 100,000 New Yorkers, including 25,000 CUNY students, at major New York City-based companies by 2030. The council includes industry titans like Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.
The Budget Conundrum
Despite assertions that CUNY can be a key part of the pandemic recovery, the public university system is not immune to the pandemic-driven budget woes plaguing the city and state.
“CUNY is facing tremendous cuts, I’m afraid to say,” State Senator Toby Ann Stavisky, a Queens Democrat who chairs the Senate’s Committee on Higher Education.
“CUNY is in desperate need of federal stimulus money, as other agencies are, obviously,” Stavisky added. “I think we’re all waiting to see what will happen with the stimulus money. And that will be probably right after the election, is my guess.”
Just like the city and the state, CUNY has called on the federal government in public statements to provide it with an infusion of federal dollars, or else it may need to make drastic reductions in spending. In May, Cuomo called on Congress to provide $60 billion in federal aid to shore up New York, from state government through localities, the MTA, and other governmental entities. The state government projects a $14.5 billion decline in revenue this year to its coffers alone.
“CUNY has long played an important role as an underpinning of the economy, and there’s not question it’ll have a role to play as we work to revive the economy from the damage done by the pandemic,” said Freeman Klopott, spokesperson with the New York State Division of the Budget, which is part of the governor's administration. “To fully leverage CUNY, and all of the state’s resources, we need federal funding to offset the state’s devastating revenue losses that are due entirely to the pandemic. With federal funding, New York State can lead the national recovery as the producer of 8% of national GDP, and without it, the national recovery will be slowed.”
The Professional Staff Congress, CUNY’s faculty and staff union, has also been pushing for a federal stimulus. CUNY already laid off thousands of adjuncts over the summer, and as cuts continue to roll in, professors and staff are concerned not only about job security, but that the university system could be hindered by problems like slashed course offerings and increased class sizes.
“We feel that CUNY could play a key role, an essential role in recovery,” said Barbara Bowen, a Queens College professor and the president of PSC. “Our position is that CUNY should be expanded now,” Bowen continued, arguing that funding was key to providing students with the necessary tools to succeed.
Likely due to the pandemic, CUNY’s student enrollment and enrollment revenue have both also taken hits: there has been a roughly 4.4% enrollment decline since the same time last fall, though official, final figures have not yet been tabulated, according to CUNY.
“We’re trying to stay in touch with students,” Matos Rodríguez said of students who had dropped out in spring when the pandemic first hit and had not returned in the fall. “At some point, hopefully in the not so distant future, we’ll be back to normal, we’ll have a lot more of our face-to-face courses, and then we’ll be able to reconnect to those students.” CUNY has begun the semester almost exclusively via online courses, with a few exceptions.
City Council Member Inez Barron, chair of the Council’s Committee on Higher Education, said she would like to see the city and state take on more financial responsibility for CUNY, after years of routine underfunding.
“Whereas decades ago, a high school diploma was sufficient, and more recently, a college degree would give you some kind of guarantees, we now know that we need to make sure that high school students are prepared to function in today’s society, and that requires post-secondary training,” Barron said in an interview. “And I think it’s incumbent on the city and the state to provide a minimum of two years of course offerings beyond 12th grade so that students are prepared to function in today’s society.”
While she doesn’t yet know what role CUNY will play in the larger New York recovery, Barron believes that CUNY needs to hire and promote more Black faculty and upper level management to address the needs of a diverse student population. According to the most recent figures, only about 12% of the 7,280 members of CUNY’s full-time faculty are Black.
“I question how CUNY can in fact step up and be that system that will help correct what has been historic injustices over the years, and play a significant part in addressing that. So, that remains to be seen,” she said.
Despite clouds of uncertainty surrounding the budget, experts, officials, professors, and students agree that CUNY can and must be part of the New York recovery from the coronavirus recession.
“CUNY is going to be a vehicle of social upward mobility no matter what,” said Timothy Hunter, the recently-departed chair of the CUNY University Student Senate and a recent graduate, in a September interview. He highlighted the impact that CUNY and its graduates have already had on the state for decades, noting that many elected officials themselves graduated from CUNY.
“I think our elected officials know that CUNY is important, and the numbers and the data is there, I just think that all they need now is just the funding,” he said. “And if we don’t get that, then we won’t be able to have the impact that we’re destined to have on New York City and New York state as a whole.”
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by Victoria Merlino, Gotham Gazette
@GothamGazette @victoriamerlin0
Phara Souffrant Forrest (photo: Phara for Assembly)
October 21, 2020 - Max & Murphy Podcast: Phara Souffrant Forrest on Her Campaign for Assembly
Phara Souffrant Forrest, a candidate for State Assembly in Brooklyn, joined the show to discuss her Democratic primary win over incumbent Walter Mosley, her platform, why the general election is being contested, the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America in New York City, and more.
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
CUNY counseling services (photo: City University of New York (CUNY))
When Anna Compton transferred to CUNY Hunter College, she often felt extremely anxious during her first semester. As a student with a disability who receives personalized accommodations, known as an Individualized Education Program, and with a history of depression and anxiety, Compton decided to reach out to the college’s Counseling and Wellness Services office, but like many other CUNY students, she was placed on a four-to-six-week waitlist to meet with a mental health professional.
Compton’s story is not unique. She was among several students who shared similar experiences at a joint hearing on Friday of the New York City Council’s Committee on Higher Education and Committee on Mental Health, Disabilities, and Addiction, chaired by City Council Members Inez Barron and Diana Ayala, respectively. The hearing was focused on the issues and concerns surrounding mental health resources available to CUNY students during this particularly tumultuous year.
CUNY serves a majority of low-income, racial and ethnic minority students, from the same communities that have been disproportionately impacted by the coronavirus. The COVID-19 pandemic has been linked to many stressors that college students are facing like the loss of loved ones, fear of contracting the virus, financial burdens, the switch to remote instruction and other factors. These stressors have brought attention to the dire need for college mental health services, especially at a time when students are transitioning into adulthood and are more likely to develop mental illnesses, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.
In her testimony, Compton detailed the frustrating hurdles she faced in receiving care including insurance issues, no callbacks and long waitlists for intake appointments which didn’t guarantee regular sessions. After a limited number of counseling sessions, Compton was referred to therapists off-campus. Compton returned to the campus counseling services office three times for guidance but was met with the same list of references that had yet to respond to her. “When the pandemic hit in March, I was at a point of desperation. Distance learning as a student with a learning disability was my biggest nightmare and I just wanted someone to listen,” she said at the hearing. “It took me eight months to find a therapist through these references. Eight months!”
Compton’s experiences navigating mental health resources are common at CUNY, where waitlists are long and counseling sessions are limited to about six visits. With the switch to remote learning amid the pandemic, the counseling centers operate fully online through Zoom with one-on-one and group sessions. “We need more mental health counselors to work with students with disabilities, students who are food or housing insecure, students of color and LGBTQ students,” Compton said. “We needed this before the pandemic and we certainly need it now.”
Deficiencies in the mental health services offered CUNY students appeared to be well-known, but not dealt with until the City Council was set to call CUNY leadership in for the public oversight hearing several weeks into the new, almost exclusively online, off-campus semester.
Minutes before the hearing began, CUNY announced that the university plans to spend $5 million by January 2021 on expanding mental health services. CUNY’s 18 senior and community colleges will receive $278,000 each with options to hire more staff, train current staff, or use a variety of digital platforms. The university also plans to roll out a crisis texting service that connects students with crisis counselors. About 10% of the allocation will be used to train and certify 120 clinical counselors on online counseling.
At the hearing, City Council members heard testimony from students, CUNY officials, and advocacy groups about CUNY’s counseling services. Students criticized the long waitlists, limited sessions, lack of outreach from counseling services, and referrals to off-campus counselors, and stressed the critical need for resources for the wellbeing and academic success of students. Officials from the university provided clarity surrounding services and counselors while acknowledging problems with them.
Council Member Barron, a Brooklyn Democrat who chairs the Council's higher education committee and is a Hunter alumna, emphasized the racial disparities that exist in higher education and how they can exacerbate mental health issues. Students of color, she said, have to deal with issues such as poverty, increased violence, and being in a new and unfamiliar setting without guidance. “These stresses, which often crop up at an age when mental illness is known to develop at a higher rate, are a perfect storm for the developments of anxiety disorder, depression and other mental illnesses,” Barron said in her opening remarks.
Even before the pandemic, there was a large need for mental health services at CUNY, according to a 2018 Healthy CUNY survey. The survey examined a representative sample of CUNY community college and four-year college students, and estimated that 40,000 undergraduate students reported symptoms of depression, about 48,000 reported symptoms of anxiety disorders, and about 41,000 reported symptoms associated with moderate or severe psychological distress. Over half of all those students reported that their mental health symptoms negatively impact their school work. Low-income students with household incomes under $30,000 a year reported higher levels of depression, anxiety, and psychological distress than their peers.
According to the report, in 2019 there were 21 campuses with a mental health counseling center, which employed 116 full-time mental health professionals in sum. Currently, there are 108 full-time mental health professionals employed throughout 23 of the 25 campuses, with the remaining two campuses sharing other CUNY counseling centers, according to Ryan Camire, director of Mental Health & Wellness at CUNY, who testified at the hearing. All 108 professionals are licensed mental health providers in the fields of social work, psychology, creative arts therapy, or mental health counseling with over six years of experience and a few are nurse practitioners and psychiatrists.
The 2018 report also found that staffing levels are inadequate across the system. “Staffing levels range from one to ten professionals per campus, with several campuses and the university as a whole falling short of the professional to student ratio recommended by college mental health professional organizations,” the report stated. CUNY’s student to mental health counselor ratio is 2,400:1 which is higher than the recommended 1,500:1 ratio by mental health experts. At one CUNY college, the ratio goes up to 6,009:1, said Denise Maybank, interim vice president for student affairs and services, at the hearing. “That is not where we want to be. We can’t afford to be at 1 to 6,009 under any set of circumstances in order to meet the needs of our students. Additional resources are necessary,” she said.
Barbara Bowen, President of the Professional Staff Congress at CUNY, the faculty and staff union, told the City Council that the underlying issue is that the structure and staffing of mental health services at CUNY are simply not adequate. “No matter how wonderful and dedicated those counselors are, if they are working at three times the number of students they should be seeing, that means they cannot serve students as well as they want to and as they are trained to do,” she said.
At John Jay College of Criminal Justice, there is no waitlist to speak with a counselor, according to the Director of Counseling Services Dr. Gerard Bryant. “Currently, no John Jay student is ever turned away,” he said. There are seven full-time professionals and five part-time professionals at the center, with a majority being people of color. According to fall 2019 enrollment data, John Jay had 16,000 students and 12 counselors, making the ratio 1,300:1 which is lower than the recommended minimum 1,500:1. However, that is not the case at every CUNY college, specifically those with more admitted students like Hunter, Queens, Baruch, and City Tech.
Wait times vary at different counseling centers and the staffing at individual campuses and the amount of admitted students affects those times, according to Camire. “No student will get turned away if they are in an emergency or urgent situation,” he insisted. He also said that centers distribute emergency service contacts and refer students to NYCWell, the city’s free and confidential crisis intervention, information and referral service for those seeking mental health help as well as other outside providers. However, when Hunter senior Compton was asked by Council Member Ayala whether Hunter’s center referred her to NYCWell, city government's mental health helpline spearheaded by the de Blasio administration and especially First Lady Chirlane McCray, she said no.
The center also did not check-in or follow-up with Compton after referring her to outside therapists, whereas at John Jay, Dr. Bryant said their counseling center does keep in contact with those students. Council Member Ayala suggested the university should track where those students go and follow-up with them after referral. “There is no such thing as a perfect system but we have to be open to the idea of reevaluating those systems to ensure efficiency,” she said.
Like Compton, Diana Valenzuela, a student at Bronx Community College currently attending on-campus counseling services, also faced issues accessing care. Although she did not have issues securing an appointment, “the sessions at times felt like it was going more through like a scripted dialogue,” she said, “instead of addressing my stressors one by one so that I may effectively eliminate them. These counseling sessions are failing to address the circumstances.”
Levels of depression and anxiety symptoms are much higher among CUNY students compared to last year due to COVID-19, a study by the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies found. About 50% of all CUNY students surveyed reported depression and 41% reported anxiety this April, during the height of the pandemic. The impact is greater in urban settings like the city, the study states, where “racial and ethnic minorities and immigrant populations have significantly less access to stable housing, livable wages, and physical and mental health resources compared to majority groups, putting them at a higher risk for adverse mental health consequences in the wake of traumatic experiences.”
About 53% of all students reported COVID-19 as a high stressor, and 31% reported it as a medium stressor. Virus related experiences, “such as unemployment, the death of a family member or close friend, receiving a positive COVID‐19 diagnosis, increased problems with friend(s) and/or family, and difficulty paying monthly rent, all of which are more likely to occur within the context of income insecurity and societal marginalization, increased the odds of both depression and anxiety symptoms among respondents,” the study states.
During the hearing, Juvanie Piquant, the newly-appointed chairperson of the University Student Senate at CUNY, said investing in CUNY is crucial. “This did not begin when the COVID-19 pandemic began, but this has been years of systemic disinvestment,” she said.
Piquant also pointed to the recent Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality and racism that rocked the nation this summer. “I definitely would be remiss if I didn't mention what is going on socially in our society here today,” Piquant said during her closing remarks. “We see the injustices of what is occurring in our communities and everyday lives. Students are on the front lines, fighting for justice and equality for everyday people. The majority of the students we serve are students of color. It is important that there is attention being brought to that.”
Valenzuela, from Bronx Community College, urged CUNY to increase diversity in counseling services. “Through research, [we] found out that lack of equal representation discourages students from seeking help,” she said.
City Council members, who shared those concerns, emphasized the need for culturally-competent counselors. But Camire, when asked by Council Member Barron, could not provide a racial and ethnic breakdown of faculty for counseling centers across the CUNY system.
Accessing services for mental health is also challenging at Brooklyn College where Neha Syeda is a student. “Students are often unaware of mental health services and how to access them because of the lack of communication, marketing, and outreach,” Syeda said at the hearing. About a quarter of students are estimated to utilize counseling services, according to CUNY data.
According to a 2016 student experience survey at CUNY, only about 5% of community college students and 9% of senior college students were dissatisfied with student health services. About 43% of the university as a whole were neutral regarding the services, “which indicates that these students may not have sought on-campus student health services,” said Council Member Barron.
Barron pressed Camire on CUNY’s outreach plan for students that may be unaware that counseling programs exist. Camire detailed CUNY’s efforts – advertising resources on screens and boards throughout campuses, through email blasts, on CUNY’s wellness site as well as individual campus sites, student orientations and on social media. But Baron remained skeptical. “It appears that they’re not effective, and it appears that we need to add some other kinds of outreach that can be more effective in letting students know,” she said.
One way CUNY plans to get the word out is through publishing a student-written ‘Guide to Surviving and Thriving at CUNY’ in November. It will highlight CUNY and community resources, “with a focus on providing the emotional support for getting help when it is needed,” according to the CUNY announcement from earlier in the day. “We are committed to expanding and strengthening the mental health services available to our students during this uncertain and isolating time,” Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez said in a statement accompanying the announcement.
At Friday's hearing, panelists mentioned the importance of providing all students, including those enrolled in evening classes, out-of-state and international students with access to available services. With the new $5 million allocation, the university expects campuses will be able to deliver more face-to-face therapy and “expand online services such as health and wellness assessments, referrals and monitoring of patients’ progress. The technological advances will further assist in providing services to CUNY students who live outside the state,” the announcement states.
Towards the end of the hearing, PSC President Bowen spoke about how CUNY needs to demand more funding through Albany. “$5 million is a one-time amount and it’s not going to solve the problem,” she said. “It’s an issue of investment and issue of political priority, does the mental health of CUNY students matter? If it does, it needs to be invested in.”
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By Afia Eama, Gotham Gazette
@afia_eam @GothamGazette
Council Member Laurie Cumbo at an election promotion event (photo: John McCarten/City Council)
An October 5 staffing report from the New York City Board of Elections (BOE) to state regulators shows a scramble to prepare for the general election less than a month before Election Day.
The BOE was over a month late to submit the plan, which was required by Governor Andrew Cuomo through executive order to ensure local election administrators had the necessary personnel to manage the expected surge in both in-person and absentee voting. The plan, which was obtained by Gotham Gazette, reveals continuing operational unknowns and tens of thousands of poll workers yet to be trained.
The board stated it was aiming to train over 51,000 employees to work the polls on Election Day, a 150% increase from the number who ended up working during the 2016 general election. Some of those positions are a response to the new reality of voting in a pandemic -- specifically dedicated to managing lines, ensuring social distancing, and receiving absentee ballot drop-offs.
The city Board of Elections is anticipating over a million absentee ballots, which voters may mail or hand deliver to poll sites, and as many as 5 million total votes.
The BOE is planning to open 88 early voting sites and 1,201 Election Day poll sites citywide to receive the flood of voters.
But two-thirds of Election Day poll workers, roughly 33,500 people, had not gone through the city board's training as of the October 5 release of the report. The New York City Board of Elections did not provide more up-to-date information when asked by Gotham Gazette.
"No comment. With 9 days left before early voting, we do not have the staff to look into this data request," wrote Valerie Vazquez-Diaz, a BOE spokesperson, by email. The BOE has been conducting a series of trainings for those who will work the polls.
John Kaehny, executive director of the good government group Reinvent Albany, criticized the BOE for an apparent lack of preparedness. "The NYC BOE's staffing report shows that once again, the Board is struggling to keep up: It has a month to train 33,000 poll workers. That's a big number, and it's inevitable that this last minute catch-up is going to cause problems," he wrote in an email to Gotham Gazette after reviewing the report.
He blamed the board's explicitly bi-partisan make-up for inefficiencies and mismanagement: "In the best of times, the NYC Board of Elections is behind and barely able to meet its responsibility to voters. This is because the Board is a political patronage mill controlled by county political bosses and much less competent than a non-partisan city agency staffed and run by civil servants."
On top of Election Day poll workers, who make up a bulk of the administrative staff, the board is hiring approximately 3,000 early voting workers to staff the 88 sites. The report says training for that cohort would take place from October 5 through 19. Early voting begins on October 24 and runs through November 1. Election Day is November 3.
Poll workers are needed to check voters in, verify their signatures, and provide their ballot. They must make sure lines move and voters know how to feed their ballots into the voting machines. This year they will have the additional task of accepting absentee ballots that have been dropped off on top of the anxiety of maintaining public safety protocols at poll sites amid a pandemic.
About 4,800 workers have been hired specifically for line management, to reduce waiting, and help maintain social distancing. Their training is taking place virtually, according to the report. The BOE said it was deploying additional supplies to poll sites to "optimize voter flow," but did not provide specifics in the report. In response to questions from the State Board of Elections about whether it had changed the spatial layout of poll sites to facilitate traffic, the BOE stated: "Yes (wherever possible)."
The BOE also predicted it would need 165 workers before Election Day to process absentee ballots, which includes receiving absentee applications, distributing requested ballots, and securing returned ones.
Training this year is a combination of in-person and virtual instruction. The BOE has secured some larger venues, on top of its traditional training locations, "to maintain social distancing and to simultaneously conduct multiple classes at individual facilities," according to the report.
"From what I understand, they do it in a relatively efficient way," said Sarah Steiner, an election lawyer and expert of New York election law and administration, by phone. "A lot of poll workers are not first-timers."
In 2016, between a fifth and a quarter of the poll workers in each borough were first-time employees. It is not clear how many of the roughly 18,000 additional positions the BOE is looking to fill with new personnel.
"I'm hoping that there are enough poll workers. Many of their poll workers are older people and even though I saw them working the polls in June, a lot of them weren't there too," Steiner said, referring to the heightened health risks seniors face in the pandemic.
"And you have to remember that when you send these people to training, you'll have a certain amount of attrition," she added.
The report says the election will take 21 days to canvass, or finish counting -- a high number correlated with the high volume of expected mailed-in ballots. State law requires each absentee ballot to be hand-tabulated by bi-partisan teams of two. The BOE estimated it needs 380 workers to canvass the ballots (of which 300 had been hired by October 5) and about 440 for the legally-mandated "recanvass" to confirm the count. The canvassing process must be completed before the official results are published.
The 21-day projection, despite being far longer than in a typical election, would land the BOE four days before the November 28 statutory deadline to certify results, and would be significantly shorter than the six weeks it took in the primaries. It is also two to three weeks shorter than the mid-December estimate BOE executive director Michael Ryan told lawmakers at a New York City Council oversight hearing last month.
Another new and mammoth task for the BOE has to do with a law passed by the State Legislature and signed by Cuomo after the chaotic June primaries, which requires election administrators to notify voters when their absentee ballot has a disqualifying error and give them an opportunity to "cure" the mistake. The provision tracks (to an extent) the due process rights afforded by affidavit ballots available at poll sites, but it also adds a voluminous administrative burden during pandemic voting.
One of the deficiencies that triggers the curing process is a missing or mismatched signature on the ballot's outer envelope. Already, vendor errors that resulted in close to 100,000 voters in Brooklyn receiving someone else's outer envelope could lead to tens of thousands of incorrectly signed votes being sent in, all of which by law are entitled to a review by the voter. The BOE has contacted the impacted voters and provided them new envelopes and ballots. It is unclear how administrators will interpret the new law's impact on any erroneous signatures caused by administrative blunders.
According to its report to the State Board, the BOE does not yet have a grasp on how the new mechanism will impact its operations, but infrastructure must be established and the city BOE's report hints that it is a daunting requirement.
"Given the anticipated volume of individual cures and to ensure the timely processing of same, the final stages of automation to assist in processing is being completed. Upon completion, the Board will finalize the number of staff assigned to this task. The Board will update this information no later than October 9, 2020," the city BOE report reads.
On Wednesday, Douglas Kellner, the Democratic co-chair of the State Board of Elections, told Gotham Gazette the city BOE had still not provided the promised update.
The Governor's Office did not respond to requests for comment about the content of the report or the BOE's preparedness to implement the curing provision. Mayor de Blasio this week has reiterated his calls for a total overhaul of the Board of Elections to make it a nonpartisan, fully professionalized entity.
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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
@GeringerSameth @GothamGazette
A Census march (photo: John McCarten/City Council)
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to shut down counting of the 2020 Census ahead of the previously-scheduled October 31 conclusion. After several shifts in the deadline, it now appears final that New Yorkers have until Friday morning at 6 a.m. to complete the questionnaire that is required by the U.S. Constitution for counting all residents of the United States every ten years.
As of Wednesday, officials reported the Census completion rate in New York City at 61.4% of households.
The move to shorten the count is likely to significantly impact the counting of communities of color, including undocumented immigrants, and other hard-to-count populations, and will likely have a negative impact on New York’s share of federal funding for the coming decade and, possibly, the number of seats in the House of Representatives allotted to the state.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many door-to-door census outreach operations in New York City were discontinued, primarily from March to May. This, non-governmental organizations and the New York City Census 2020 team said at a Wednesday City Council hearing, may have significantly impeded the process of counting communities of color, including undocumented immigrants, who President Trump has sought to either dissuade from participating or simply not count. Wednesday’s Council hearing on the 2020 Census by tits Committee on Governmental Operations was scheduled before the Supreme Court’s decision, but was part of new last-minute urgency about the final hours of the count.
The de Blasio administration has put together a massive census operation that has helped boost the city’s self-response rate from 2010 levels and close the important city-national gap despite New York being the city worst-hit by the pandemic and a lack of investment by Governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration, which had promised robust efforts but did not follow through.
As of Wednesday, Staten Island topped the city in self-response rate at 66.1%, Manhattan at 62.5%, Queens at 62.3%, and The Bronx at 62% - all an improvement from 2010, Census officials said. Meanwhile, Brooklyn, the city’s most populous borough, had its lowest response rate at 57%.
Julie Menin, Director of NYC Census 2020, noted Wednesday that New York State beat the U.S. Census Bureau’s pre-COVID estimates by 3.4 points. New York City also beat Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Philadelphia, Boston, Dallas, and Baltimore and cut the gap between the city and the country to 5 points from 14 in 2010.
Census efforts faced a challenge when it came to Manhattan, given officials said many had left the borough in March as the coronavirus outbreak took hold, and had not come back since or had not filled out the census. Last-minute efforts by the city census office are focused on getting more responses from Manhattan and upping the overall count.
“We had heard anecdotally that they had filled it in second locations and not in Manhattan, so we mailed them to correct their location and phone banked and texted them. Manhattan numbers moved as a result but it was and still is a very stubborn problem,” Menin said. Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer said at the hearing that the hours till the deadline will be crucial in terms of counting and advised looking at schools, synagogues, and churches to reach out.
Other outreach efforts included contacting people who had requested absentee ballots. “The Board of Elections gave out information on everyone who had asked for an absentee ballot, who had asked for ballots for the June primary to be sent outside the five boroughs. So we simply contacted people who got those ballots,” said Menin.
Corona, Queens was at the bottom of the list among New York City neighbourhoods in terms of self-response rates, according to Amit Bagga, Deputy Director of NYC Census 2020. Much of this was attributed to the pandemic, which hit the area hardest, and efforts focused on immigrant communities turned to reaching out at food and mask distribution events, and phone banking in multiple languages, including Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Punjabi, Hindi, Nepali, Russian, Bangla, and Urdu. Hustle, WhatsApp, and WeChat platforms were also used to text message information about the census.
City Council Member Carlos Menchaca, co-chair of the Council’s census task force, questioned if there were any outreach efforts that didn’t particularly work, noting that ICE raids have been frequent in neighborhoods like Sunset Park, which made communicating census enrollment harder. Menin responded that the biggest problem was misinformation around the census that could have been easily dealt with if in-person canvassing was an option, but phone-banking wasn’t completely effective at dealing with.
On the question of difficult-to-reach populations, Bagga pointed to Doubled Up, a multilingual campaign by the city census office around the thousands of New Yorkers who live in largely illegal basement units, and outreach included landlords who often discourage their tenants from participating in the count. The Orthodox Jewish community, Menin noted, were the toughest to get to participate in the census, but community leaders and local media, particularly radio, were the major movers of the needle. The focus for the final hours will be on phone-banking and door-to-door canvassing.
“This could be a day of celebration of all the work we’ve done, but unfortunately we are talking about another attack by the Trump administration, and yesterday’s announcement was a loss of democracy in this country,” said Antonio Alarcon, census coordinator for Make the Road NY, an advocacy group, during an emergency press conference before the Council hearing. “Any attempt to shortchange the census count is an attempt to shortchange our communities. We are disappointed by the decision for it to be stopped two weeks earlier, and this is once again a direct attack on communities of color.”
“Losing two weeks is critical,” Menin said, adding, “it’s so much we could have done with that time we have now lost. We are going to look at every single legal option if the count is inaccurate or it emerges that New York was undercounted.”
“The money we get for hospitals, affordable housing, Medicaid, school funding, mass transit - every area of life in our city has a federal component, so when we ask for appropriations we need to have the appropriate count,” said Derek Perkinson, NYC Field director at the National Action Network. “That’s the critical threat, apart from losing congressional seats.”
Cuomo put out a press release on Wednesday afternoon urging New Yorkers to fill out the Census before the Friday morning deadline, and reminding them that it can be done online, by phone at 1-844-330-2020, or via the paper form, including with the help of a census worker.
The press release from Cuomo’s office stressed that “The Census asks how many people are living in your household as of April 1, 2020. The Census asks just 10 basic questions: name; number of people living or staying in the home on April 1, 2020; whether the residence is owned or rented; telephone number (only to be used if needed for official Census Bureau business); sex; age; date of birth; Hispanic origin; race; and relationship with other household members.”
It does not ask about citizenship status, political party, or any other characteristics beyond the above.
"The Census only happens once every 10 years and it's one of the most important ways New Yorkers can help ensure the state gets the representation and funding we need in Washington. This process profoundly affects our state's future, and I strongly urge every New Yorker to participate and do it now," Cuomo said in a statement. "As New York continues the fight for aid from the federal government to help us respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, the time is now for New Yorkers to complete the Census."
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by Divya Karthikeyan, Gotham Gazette
@GothamGazette @divya_krthk
Gov. Cuomo at the New York Stock Exchange (photo: Darren McGee/Governor's Office)
> >This story was published in partnership with New York Focus, an independent, investigative news publication covering New York state and city politics, as part of its launch.
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As the pandemic roiled markets in the spring, New York recorded surging revenue from an obscure tax on Wall Street stock trading. From April to June of this year, according to state tax department data, it collected $2.9 billion—more than double the amount it notched over the same period last year.
But that money never made it to state coffers: New York does not actually keep the tax revenue. Instead, since 1981, it has rebated the money to investors, meaning that, in practice, the stock transfer tax is little more than an administrative hurdle for brokers’ legal teams.
A proposal to start collecting the dormant tax has seen growing support in the state Legislature, following a staggering pandemic-spurred drop in tax revenue and state funding cuts to localities, which could deepen without an infusion of funds. The bill, which is one plank in a campaign led by progressive labor groups and activists, would end the rebate, allowing tax authorities to begin collecting the revenue again.
Opponents of the legislation center their argument on the threat of capital flight. If New York imposed the tax, they say, firms would move their residency or trading activities to another state to escape it—a notion that may be keeping even some progressives spooked.
Neither the Assembly nor the State Senate, both led by Democrats, has moved the relevant legislation. While the Assembly majority has long-favored several revenue-raising measures, Senate leadership recently formed a working group to examine possible strategies for filling the state's multi-billion-dollar budget gap in lieu of federal aid. Governor Andrew Cuomo, a third-term Democrat, has resisted calls for new taxes, and argues that the stock transfer tax proposal would undermine New York’s position as a global financial hub.
“In the digital age it would be even easier for transactions to simply be moved out of state to avoid the tax,” Freeman Klopott, Cuomo’s budget spokesperson, said in a statement to New York Focus.
The reasoning echoes a recent memo circulated by lobbyists for the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), reviewed by New York Focus, which argues that the tax would place heavy operational burdens on brokerage firms. “To avoid these additional costs, trading activity will naturally migrate to areas outside New York,” the memo reads.
But tax experts say that most frequently threatened avoidance strategies are unlikely to succeed. Traders would struggle to evade the tax, even if they moved out of state, those experts say. The New York Stock Exchange is unlikely to pack up and leave, since it doesn’t pay the tax itself but passes it on to investors. And investors are unlikely to stop trading on the exchange anytime soon, economists say, since New York’s trading hub far outstrips its closest rivals in high liquidity and low transactions costs—and would even after reinstituting a small tax on stock sales.
What transactions are in New York’s jurisdiction?
In order to impose a tax, the state needs “nexus”: it needs to show that the transaction occurred within New York’s jurisdiction.
But when most trading is electronic, what does nexus mean, anyway? The financial services industry is heavily concentrated in New York, but many operations—especially data storage and communication technologies—are housed in New Jersey and Illinois. Both of those states are currently seeing fierce pushback against similar efforts to impose a financial transaction tax.
Lawmakers seeking to tax finance say lobbyists’ arguments can seem like a game of whack-a-mole. Depending on which state is attempting to impose a tax, the securities industry may contend that what really confers tax jurisdiction is the location of trading firms, the location of exchanges, or the location of data centers. Failing those arguments, lobbyists argue that the industry is largely conducted beyond state borders, in the global financial cloud.
The stock transfer tax currently in place—the one that is immediately rebated—is levied on nearly all stock sales that occur “within New York State.” On paper, it imposes a tax of 1.25 cents on a sale of stock worth $5 or less a share, rising with the price of shares. Under the bill to begin collecting that tax again, a transaction would be subject to the tax “if any activity in furtherance of the transaction occurs within the state or if a party involved in the transaction satisfies a nexus with New York state which shall be defined as broadly as is permitted under the United States Constitution.”
Could New York’s tax department really collect taxes under that ultra-broad definition?
The short answer, experts say, is: probably.
The United States has not seen a new financial transactions tax imposed in decades, meaning there is a lack of litigation on the issue—so it’s not clear which way courts would rule, if the STT were implemented and challenged. Even so, legal experts think a recent Supreme Court ruling means investors lack attractive options that put them beyond the long arm of New York’s tax authority.
What if trading firms moved out of state?
If a firm moved to New Jersey but continued trading on the New York Stock Exchange, New York would likely still have substantial enough connection to impose a tax, attorneys familiar with state residency requirements say.
Before the rise of online commerce, state tax authorities imposed sales tax on businesses with a brick-and-mortar presence in that state. In the 2018 decision South Dakota v. Wayfair, the Supreme Court relaxed the older “physical presence” requirement, noting that states are “confronting the complexities of defining physical presence in the Cyber Age.” Explaining that out-of-state tax exemptions had become “a judicially created tax shelter,” the Court expanded states’ ability to impose taxes remotely.
Timothy Noonan, a partner at Hodgson Russ LLC who specializes in litigation on tax residency in New York City and State, said Wayfair appears to give New York broad authority to tax trades that are requested in other parts of the country.
An investment firm seeking to avoid the tax might try to argue that it is unconstitutional for New York to tax an out-of-state firm, Noonan said. But the case would be hard to make.
“I think the government would point to the Wayfair case—point to the trend indicating that nexus, in 2020, is a lot easier to establish,” he said. “And that an economic presence, such as trading over the New York Stock Exchange, is enough to create that taxable nexus.”
The current trend, Noonan said, points toward more decisions like the one in Wayfair.
Darien Shanske, a tax professor at UC Davis Law School, told New York Focus that firms would probably not be able to escape the tax by leaving the state.
“If everything is the same, except that instead of yelling into your phone on the New York Stock Exchange [floor], you’re yelling into your phone in New Jersey—but all the other machinery is the same—then that still looks like New York has a good claim to tax that transaction,” he said.
Furthermore, Shanske said, New York’s tax department “is notorious for being persnickety.” The Department of Taxation and Finance has aggressively brought cases seeking to tax financiers who work from second homes in Connecticut or Vermont—and won them.
“The idea that the New York revenue authority is just going to be like, ‘Yeah, you moved to New Jersey, I guess we can’t tax you anymore’—that’s just not how it’s gonna go,” Shanske said.
Alternatively, an investor seeking to avoid the stock transfer tax might point out that trading is conducted through the New York Stock Exchange’s out-of-state servers.
But here, too, tax attorneys say it would be tricky to skirt New York’s jurisdiction. Since Wayfair, courts appear to care less about where sales transactions take place—whether in New Jersey, Panama, or cyberspace.
“Even if the servers are in the cloud,” Noonan told New York Focus, “if you follow the sales tax issue in the Wayfair case, an economic presence is enough to create that nexus. And the economic nexus here, the nexus of the transaction, would be, ‘We don’t care where the servers are, we don’t care where the traders are. It’s happening on the New York Stock Exchange. That gives us the nexus—the jurisdiction—to tax it.’”
What if the New York Stock Exchange left altogether?
What if the entire New York Stock Exchange relocated? (Many—though not all—of the equity purchases under the stock transfer tax are conducted on the NYSE.)
If the New York Stock Exchange moved to another state, Shanske said, this could pose a more serious threat to transfer tax collections, making it harder for the revenue authority to argue that NYSE’s stock trades remained within their tax nexus. Still, it would be a matter of degree.
“How much of the New York Stock Exchange has to move, or shift its business, before the connection is too slight? I’m not sure,” Shanske said. “It’s something of an unknown.”
Historians have cast doubt on the suggestion that the Exchange would pick up and move, pointing out that the NYSE threatened to move to New Jersey immediately after New York initially adopted the tax in 1905, but never followed through. Others point out that the Exchange already pays a premium to maintain its operations in high-rent Manhattan.
James Parrott, a tax policy expert and economist at The New School, said the battle is more a matter of political negotiation than about the marginal costs of algorithm-driven trading. If the stock tax is enacted without the acquiescence of industry, he said, brokers might retaliate.
“Whatever the relocation costs are involved in moving the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ and all of the trading floors out of New York,” Parrott said, firms might be prepared to pay “whatever it takes to evade this.”
To avoid this scenario, Parrott said, stock tax proponents should focus on building public pressure—so that a major undertaking like moving the stock exchange during a lopsided recession, to avoid a tax, would look too politically risky.
What if firms leave the New York Stock Exchange?
Another strategy the securities industry suggests might help investors skirt the tax: why not simply delist from the New York Stock Exchange, and conduct trades over cheaper platforms?
The trouble here, say economists who study stock trading, is that there are few good alternatives.
There’s the London Stock Exchange (LSE), but that floor has had an analogous transfer tax in place since 1694, despite continuous grumbling from traders. The LSE’s levy is frequently cited as a success story for transfer taxes, since it has not stopped the Exchange from consistently ranking among the world’s top exchanges by market capitalization.
Within the United States, economists who have studied stock levies say, investors in search of highly-liquid, low-cost trading platforms have few alternatives to the New York Stock Exchange.
“Even with the reinstatement of the STT, overall transaction costs for firms trading on the New York exchanges would almost definitely still be well below those of alternative trading platforms,” the economists Robert Pollin and James Heintz found.
“One of the advantages of the New York [Stock] Exchange is, with the high volume of trading, your transaction costs tend to be low. So, when you add in the stock transfer tax, it makes less of a difference,” said Assemblymember Phil Steck, a Democrat representing Schenectady and the longtime champion of legislation to revive the STT. State Senator James Sanders, Jr., a Queens Democrat, sponsors the bill in the Senate.
Stephany Griffith-Jones, an economist at Columbia University who studies financial markets, said moving off the New York Stock Exchange would carry other costs, like higher capital adequacy requirements—the amount of capital a financial institution is required to keep on hand—and increased legal risk.
Plus, she said, new markets do not spring up overnight.
“You’re going to want to sell in New York, because that’s where the big markets are,” Griffith-Jones said. “You’re not going to find, in Oklahoma, a lot of people wanting to trade very sophisticated securities.”
‘A backdoor to federal relief’
Far from worrying that the stock tax would push firms to flee to other states, proponents tout the tax as a convenient way to capture new out-of-state revenue. Advocates contrast the STT’s potential to raise revenue from trades in New York and beyond with Cuomo’s escalating pleas for federal funding to replace lost tax revenue, which have so far failed to draw concessions from a gridlocked Congress.
Patrick Nelson, a Democratic Committeeman from Saratoga Springs, said the STT is one in a bundle of measures that could help New York capture a greater share of economic activity.
“We’re simply asking for some of the money back that we use, as New Yorkers, to bail out Kentucky and Mississippi and Florida and Texas and Georgia, and all these other states that take more from the federal government than they pay in,” said Nelson, who is the Democratic and Working Families Party nominee for State Senate in New York’s 43rd district. “It’s a means for us to access some of the money that we pay out to the other states.”
“You could almost think of it as a backdoor to that federal relief, as well,” Nelson added.
‘Salami tactics’
Multilateral financial taxes—designed to span multiple states or governments—are more effective than unilateral ones, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has found. Intuitively, this makes sense: scaled-up taxes offer fewer opportunities for escape.
Although local taxes are more vulnerable to evasion, several existing examples work fine. The same IMF study noted the success of the UK, Hong Kong, and Singapore in imposing STTs without international cooperation. “Unilateral STTs, even if levied on fairly narrow bases, are certainly feasible as witnessed by their use in numerous developed countries,” the study found—especially when imposed in “established financial centers.”
Local financial taxes can also be forerunners to national or international versions. In Europe, individual member states’ existing levies could soon be knitted together into an European Union-wide tax. Likewise, advocates for a state-level STT say it could be a forerunner to the national financial tax supported by senators such as Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY).
Griffith-Jones, who has advised efforts to implement a European financial transaction tax, said the securities industry’s lobbying campaigns follow a predictable, divide-and-conquer pattern.
“It’s salami tactics,” she said. “They always do this. When the UK wanted to expand its financial transaction tax, even people on the right of the Labor Party would say, ‘Oh yes, we’ll do it, but only if the U.S. does it. For it to work, it has to be internationally coordinated.’”
While an international tax would be harder to evade than a national one, and a national tax would be harder to evade than a state tax, the question is just how much evasion would occur with a state tax. And many tax attorneys think that at the current level, most firms wouldn’t take on the hassle and cost of evasion.
“There’s clearly some level of stock transfer tax that is sufficiently low that nobody’s going to change their business structure to avoid it,” Shanske said. “And the rate on this tax is pretty low.”
Although debates have centered on the risk of tax flight, there are other considerations for and against reviving the tax. Governor Hugh Carey signed legislation phasing out the tax in 1978, citing concerns that it put New York at a competitive disadvantage.
Opponents say it will cause job losses in the securities industry—which could have ripple effects—and that it will increase stock volatility. Proponents say it will reduce dangerous high-frequency trading by the same firms that have seen record profits amid coronavirus-driven market pandemonium. Still others say that it should be expanded beyond stocks to a broader tax on all financial transactions.
Michael Kink, director of the labor-backed progressive coalition Strong Economy for All, which is helping lead the push for several revenue-raising measures, said advocates would like to see more debate about tax initiatives outside annual hearings on the governor’s budget proposal. Typically, he said, there are too few occasions for on-the-record testimony by stakeholders.
“I would love public hearings as an opportunity to help lawmakers and the public understand the mechanics of all these bills.” Kink said. “Talking about proposals, digging into the details, forcing SIFMA to say in public under oath what they like to whisper and sleaze about in private.”
No 'Urban Neo-Marxists' Here
The stock transfer tax’s putative strength is its political feasibility: it is already on the books. Since the collection infrastructure is already in place, it has been popular among legislators looking for relatively painless ways to raise revenue without authorizing brand-new taxes, and unlike some other revenue-raising proposals being debated, it could immediately help fill state coffers devastated by the pandemic’s impact on existing taxes.
A federal financial tax has also gained popularity. Jared Bernstein, a top economic advisor to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, is a vocal booster of the idea, as is Biden running mate Kamala Harris.
The California senator is no crusader against Wall Street. Her selection for the Democratic ticket drew praise from “titans of industry,” as one banking attorney, who specializes in distressed debt, recently gushed to the Financial Times. Harris is so unthreatening to the securities industry, according to the Wall Street Journal, that traders attributed a recent stock market rally to her selection for the coveted VP slot.
And even Michael Bloomberg, who shot down a proposal to reinstate New York’s STT as mayor, supported a federal equivalent during his 2020 presidential bid.
New York City Mayor Ed Koch supported reinstating the STT as part of an aid package to the city and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, as the city struggled to close a $1.3 billion budget gap in 1982. Koch’s deputy mayor for finance Kenneth Lipper—a Wall Street insider recruited from Salomon Brothers bank—reportedly opened discussions with brokerage houses about reinstating the tax.
“This is not a tax being proposed by left-wing radicals to pillage the coffers of the gentry,” New York Times columnist Sydney Schanberg wrote at the time. “Edward Koch and Kenneth Lipper hardly qualify as urban neo-Marxists.”
Yet the proposal to reinstate New York’s stock transfer tax has been stuck in the same news cycle for two decades: it is perpetually an idea whose time has finally come.
This past summer, as ebullient markets seemed to come unstuck from an underlying economy wracked by the COVID-19 recession, the business press once again reported that lawmakers were considering resurrecting the dormant tax. It’s a familiar pattern: proposals to bring back the STT have routinely surfaced during periods of fiscal strain, and then fizzled.
Now, momentum is building again for a spate of tax-the-rich proposals. Steck told New York Focus that his bill’s revenue-raising potential dwarfs alternatives.
“You’ll hear about the pied-a-terre tax, scaffolding tax,” Assemblymember Steck said. “You’re not going to get anywhere near those numbers.” Meanwhile, he adds, “the governor is an obstacle, because the governor is stuck in 1980.”
“We have this budget hole to plug, and the governor and the [Assembly] speaker [Carl Heastie] want to wait and see if Joe Biden becomes president,” Steck said. “If that happens, they may decide to go with some of the lesser revenue-raisers.”
But eyeing the upcoming legislative session in 2021, Steck is optimistic. With New York facing the most staggering fiscal hole since the 1970s, he said, “there might be no alternative.”
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by Lee Harris
@leee_harris - @nysfocus
@GothamGazette
> >This story was published in partnership with New York Focus, an independent, investigative news publication covering New York state and city politics, as part of its launch. Sign up for its newsletter here.
State Senator Andrew Gounardes (photo: @Sen_Gounardes)
October 7, 2020 - Max & Murphy Podcast: State Senator Andrew Gounardes on His Case for Reelection
State Senator Andrew Gounardes joined the show to discuss his reelection bid.
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
Mayor de Blasio gets tested (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography)
As New York City public health officials try to get a handle on a series of COVID-19 “hot spots,” they lack the tools to know exactly how the voluntary testing data they collect skews the true prevalence of the virus, both in communities of concern and city-wide. In the absence of randomized testing, public health officials rely on the results of voluntary testing, an especially challenging process given new evidence some New Yorkers are organizing to game the system against that weakness.
New York's covid positivity rate has been ticking upward in recent weeks, driven largely by surging rates in so-called "hot spots," which has led Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo to shut down schools and potentially non-essential businesses in impacted parts of Brooklyn and Queens, many of which are home to Orthodox Jewish communities and where the reported rate of confirmed cases outpaces the citywide rate fourfold.
The neighborhoods home to covid uptick “clusters” cover nine zip codes across the two boroughs where the seven-day average Covid positivity rate has exceeded 3% for more than seven straight days, while another 13 zip codes are now labeled “areas of concern” by city health officials. Cuomo announced Monday the state is taking control over local enforcement of covid guidelines like mask-wearing and limited gatherings, and the governor promised hard conversations with religious leaders and the possibility of closure of religious institutions. On Tuesday, he released a plan for tiered, localized shutdowns with the greatest restrictions closer to cluster epicenters and easing as the radius widens.
Despite tens of thousands of tests every day, the city and state have no widely applied randomized testing program and few ways to gauge what members of the population they are missing in their survey of the virus. Health + Hospitals, the city's public hospital network that is in charge of New York's test and trace corps, says testing protocols do not include a questionnaire about motivation for seeking a test, which in lieu of a random sample, could itself hint at gaps in the data. Getting a percentage of those seeking tests who are symptomatic, may have been exposed to a covid-positive person in close proximity, or are just being careful and getting a test based on public health guidelines can reveal finer contours in the official picture of the viral spread.
While key decisions during the city's precarious reopening are pegged to the positivity rate, dictating the opening and closure of schools and businesses, scientists question how well the city and state data captures the spread of the virus among those who haven't been tested.
In the lead up to the announcement about closures in the cluster areas, some residents in Hasidic neighborhoods in New York City received messages not to have their children tested if they have symptoms or to get tested if they are believed to be negative in order to drive the positivity rates down, Gothamist reported. Heavily Orthodox Jewish areas are not the only places seeing covid increases -- the map of recent outbreaks overlaps with areas of the city home to greater numbers of Trump supporters, as reported by Bklyner, including many Orthodox neighborhoods.
The positivity rate is a ratio of the number of positive cases out of the number of people who choose to get tested. Assumptions about that population of test-takers factor into the official assessment and response. In reality much is unknown about who is getting tested -- and who is not -- a variable that can downplay the extent of the virus, which is believed not to manifest symptoms at all in as much as 40 percent of cases.
Some form of randomized sampling, which is being advocated by epidemiologists and set to soon be used on a limited scale in New York City schools, could get at these missing figures and provide a better overall assessment of the virus’ spread.
"Any community anywhere where we're looking at test positivity, you have to ask, 'well, who's determining who's getting tested,'" said Irwin Redlener, a health policy expert and director of Columbia University's Pandemic Resource and Response Initiative, on WNYC radio’s The Brian Lehrer Show on Friday. "Are they just sick people? Are we doing a scientifically randomized study where we're taking a number of people whether they are symptomatic or not and doing testing?"
"If you don't have a good basis for collecting the samples and doing the testing in a randomized, scientific way it's not unexpected that we're going to have problems interpreting the outcome and making policies [inaudible] determining the outcome," Redlener continued.
One of the graphs the mayor uses at his daily press briefings is a product of this. The graph of the citywide seven-day average positivity rate, considered the most stable existing metric for measuring the spread and one that potential closures are pegged to, looks like a backward ski jump, a relatively smooth slope that fell from a peak of 68% in early April to about 1% in June and has remained mostly flat since. But in April, far fewer people were being tested and the criteria limited testing to people who were likely to test positive.
"There is something deceptive, a bit, about any number that we're talking about," Redlener said, because of the lack of randomization.
On September 29, the city's positivity rate was over 3%, the highest it has been since June, but was back below 1% the next day. Officials viewed the one-day spike as an anomaly and cautioned members of the public to focus on the seven-day average, which rose to about 1.65% as of this Monday’s test results, but it spotlighted questions about how the city is accumulating data and assessing spread in the midst of a targeted testing "blitz."
"It is imperative that community leaders, community institutions, and everyday New Yorkers heed the call and go out and get tested and send the message of how important it is to get tested," de Blasio said at a press briefing on October 1.
De Blasio has for days discussed the possibility of local shutdowns in areas seeing upticks in positivity, especially those deemed clusters, and on Sunday called for the closures of schools and non-essential businesses in the nine zip codes. The city has ramped up testing, mask distribution, and public awareness efforts in parts of Brooklyn and Queens, particularly in Orthodox Jewish communities where mask-wearing has reportedly lagged and social distancing rules often ignored. Last week, the mayor announced six "block parties" for mass testing, which they hope will conduct 3,000 tests per day when fully operational, on top of 11 mobile testing sites in covid cluster sites.
Governor Cuomo has attributed the upticks to a lack of compliance with social distancing protocols and has blamed local authorities for failing to enforce his ordinances. On Friday, he issued a directive to local governments to step up enforcement or face penalties of up to $10,000 per day in an effort to tamp down the outbreaks. On Monday, he said the state would take over enforcement of the relevant local law enforcement, though he said he would need local personnel.
The state is also deploying rapid testing in hot spots and coordinating resources with local health departments, and in some cases providing staff, according to Gareth Rhodes, an attorney at the state Department of Financial Services and a member of Cuomo's COVID-19 Response Task Force. The state conducts about 500,000 tests per week, a large portion of which are rapid, where the results are back within a day, allowing officials to monitor the virus in closer to real time. Of the 120,000 tests reported Friday, roughly one-third were completed within 24 hours, Rhodes told Gotham Gazette.
New York's approach to mapping the spread has been to provide opportunities for and in some places heavily encourage testing in the hopes of casting as wide a net as possible, and with it a more representative sampling. Short of a complete census, all testing models simply capture a snapshot that public health officials try to extrapolate to say something about the entire population and set policies to address it.
Officials are looking out for places where testing may be too low. "What is the testing per capita in that zip code?," Rhodes said by phone Friday. "Is it where we think it should be?"
But some testing strategies can have the effect of distorting the positivity rate, even as they are intended to more closely monitor key groups. At various moments during the pandemic, for example, the state has required certain populations to get tested, like health care workers, nursing home residents, or salon employees.
At this point, the best example of randomized testing could be the Department of Education's plan to randomly test 10 to 20 percent of the in-person student body at each school on a monthly basis. A team of NYU researchers recently released a report showing that the city may need many times that rate of testing, a sentiment Cuomo echoed Monday.
"I understand daily, I understand weekly, I don't understand random monthly," he said in response to questions about whether he wanted to see a more robust testing strategy in schools. "If you're saying it could possibly be a month between tests, that doesn't work for me. I would not accept that plan for my school."
The state has been testing wastewater in some state university (SUNY) dorms for COVID-19, as one way to get a random sample, and officials say they are working to expand that testing to other areas.
Randomized testing is difficult to perform. Even with the city's school testing program, parents must consent to their children being tested at random once a month. The children of parents who miss the notice among the flood of novel back-to-school instructions or who object on philosophical grounds will be left in the shadows.
Rhodes says the ideal testing environment would be one of rapid, on-the-spot results, that are affordable, widely available, and accurate.
"Obviously we are not there yet," he said. "I think the scientists and the people on the innovation side will say that's where we will get to eventually, but the question is are we all vaccinated before then?"
In July, Cuomo penned an op-ed to the New York Times, calling for federal funding for "broad community screening" to account for asymptomatic carriers. Rhodes echoed that call in a recent post to Twitter, responding to Gotham Gazette’s reporting about the city’s and state’s lack of randomized testing.
The state is looking at one testing model -- the BinaxNow, by the multinational medical device company Abbott -- that checks some of those boxes: it is quick, relatively cheap (about $5 per test), and does not need to be sent to a lab for results. Rhodes said state officials expect the Trump administration to distribute the new tests in the near future. But the BinaxNow is an antigen test, which is less effective for testing in people who are asymptomatic. The current cost of a rapid PCR test, which is better at detecting the virus in asymptomatic people, is $100 per test, which is "prohibitively expensive," Rhodes said.
Another metric officials rely on to track the spread of COVID-19 independent of testing is the hospitalization rate.
"If covid is spreading, it will result in people going to the hospital from that community," said Rhodes. "I'm looking at what addresses are hospitalizations coming from...It very closely tracks where we are seeing new cases."
If hospitalizations in a region are up, but the positivity rate doesn't reflect an uptick, the state would set up rapid testing there, Rhodes said.
"It obviously is not ideal because you want to catch this long before people go to the hospital," he added.
But even this measurement isn't really randomized. Access (and admission) to an emergency room is not uniform across the population, and multiple factors influence whether a person receives treatment, especially during the pandemic's so-called "apex" in New York, and especially in predominantly Black and Latino communities.
The city's covid testing does not include a questionnaire about why a person is seeking testing -- because of potential exposure, proximity to testing sites, or being referred by a doctor or an advertisement -- questions that could give officials a sense of the profile of individuals who are getting tested and reveal potential blindspots in virus surveillance.
"We do not ask why they are getting a test," wrote Karla Griffith, a spokesperson for Health + Hospitals, the city’s public hospital system, in an email.
Individuals are asked some questions before receiving a test, like whether they've had COVID-19 previously, if they have symptoms, if they have upcoming surgery, if they are pregnant, and where they work. "These questions are for reporting purpose to the NYS Department of Health and to assist with contact tracing efforts should someone test positive," Griffith wrote.
In Borough Park and Williamsburg, two areas with large Hasidic populations, parents received robocalls urging them not to test their children and to remove them from school without getting tested if they are showing symptoms, as Gothamist reported. One religious leader urged members of his congregation who have already gotten the virus, and are believed to be less likely to still have it, to get tested in order to drive the official positive rate down. And some medical centers in the communities have refused to share test results with officials, according to Gothamist.
The city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene did not say how or whether it was assessing the impact of this behavior.
Asked how the state accounts for potential distortions like the ones reportedly being machinated in certain Hasidic clusters, Rhodes said, "Let's say you don't test in certain areas, or test less. If covid is spreading, you're going to see an uptick in hospitalizations."
"In these areas we haven't seen what I would consider to be a testing desert," he added. "The message we've been saying is urging everyone to get tested."
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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
@GeringerSameth @GothamGazette