In a car with my boyfriend and some of our friends, I was listening to the loud bass of the song “Gasolina” by the reggaeton artist Daddy Yankee, when I looked at my watch. It was already 10:03 p.m. and we were just heading to a movie theater. “I’m having second thoughts,” I said. “Remember, I have to be home early.”
“Damn, Jen, you’re 18,” one of my friends complained from the back seat. “Why do you have to be home so early?” But I decided to go home. The last time I had stayed out past my curfew, my mother punished me by taking away my phone, and forbidding me from going out, for a week.
Now, parents like my mother are not the only New Yorkers who think a curfew is a good idea . Some members of the New York City Council would like a citywide curfew for teenagers. The curfew would keep anyone under the age of 18 off the streets and out of public places between midnight and 6 a.m. During those hours, police could stop anyone who looked like a minor and ask for proof of age. It would affect the 24 percent of the city’s residents who are under 18.
In 2004, two Republican members of the New York City Council, Dennis Gallagher of Queens and James Oddo of Staten Island, proposed the curfew for the city, and while nothing has come of it yet, Gallagher said he is going to try to get the council to vote on the proposal this year.
“It’s about helping children,” said Gallagher. “There are those who may be out past curfew.” Under this proposed law, “you could send them home. A large number of them may be getting in trouble.”
Teens caught after midnight could be required to perform up to 25 hours of community service for their first offense. A second offense could result in 50 hours of community service.
Their parents could be held responsible, too. If they let their children out past midnight, they could be fined up to $75 for the first offense.
Business owners and their employees would be held liable under the law if they knowingly allowed kids to hang out at their businesses after midnight. They could get fined up to $250 for a first offense.
There would be several exceptions to the proposed law. Minors could be out after midnight if accompanied by a parent, guardian or an adult age 21 or older, or if they were working or traveling directly to or from their workplace.
Several parents I interviewed are in favor of the citywide curfew. They argue that the curfews are necessary to keep young people out of trouble. They also say that teenagers are more likely to get in trouble late than they would during daylight. With a curfew, police wouldn’t have to wait for teens to commit crimes before moving young people indoors.
By keeping young people off the streets at night, parents say curfews will protect teens from becoming victims of crime.
After curfews were implemented in San Diego, California, violent crime by juveniles dropped by 20 percent and violent crime against juveniles dropped by 40 percent. In Dallas, Texas, and New Orleans, Louisiana, juvenile arrests dropped by about 20 percent after curfews were put in place.
But teens and others who argue against curfews say that the public is misinformed about the number of crimes committed by teens. A five-year-old report entitled “Off Balance: Youth, Race and Crime in the News” demonstrated this: 1998 was a year in which violent crime by youth was at its lowest point in 25 years. Nevertheless, 62 percent of that people surveyed in that year believed that juvenile crime was on the rise.
The study also found that when youth appear in the news it is frequently connected with violence, even though youth do not commit the majority of violent crimes. A close look at 840 newspaper stories and 109 network news segments that appeared across the nation in 1993 found that 40 percent of newspaper stories and 48 percent of television stories about young people were about violence. When it came to children, there was more overall coverage of crime and violence than of all other policy issues combined, the study found.
Here in New York City, where juvenile arrests accounted for only four percent of the total arrests in 1999, the New York City Youth Media Watch found that New York Times articles published between January and March 2000 over-represented youth crime and school violence. Moreover, reporters most frequently quoted police about youth crime, as opposed to teens themselves or the adults in their lives.
It’s hard to tell which came first – the media’s associating youth with violence or the public’s fear of youth in general. Either way, "In an environment in which fear of youth crime and actual crime are so out of sync,” writers of the Off-Balance report found, policies affecting young people, like teen curfews, “are bound to be influenced."
Many parents, like my mother Arelis Morron, say they believe in curfews not because they think their kids are going to commit crime, but because they worry about their kids’ safety. “It’s very dangerous to be out in the streets so late at night, especially for young girls,” my mother told me. “There are many men out there who have perverted thoughts and will not let anything stand in their way to accomplish them.”
I worry about my safety too. Before I met my boyfriend who has a car, when I violated curfew in the past, I ended up walking the 15 minutes back home from public transportation by myself. I’d get scared and tried to watch for people who were walking behind me.
Even many teens I know understand that curfews might be a good idea, even if they don’t like them.
“Parents try to teach you good morals and they want everything that is best for you,” said my friend Michael Frankowski, 18, a recent graduate from Christ the King HS in Queens, who now attends Farmingdale University. “That’s why they give you curfews.”
But even many of the teens who do believe in curfews say that setting them is a parent’s or guardian’s job, not the government’s. And some believe that curfew laws can violate teenagers’ constitutional rights, like freedom of association and freedom of speech. (I’m pretty sure my boyfriend isn’t thinking about my constitutional rights, though, when he’s pressuring me to hang out and break my curfew.)
Me, I’ve had the same curfew since I was 16. Even though the proposed curfew would allow teens over 18 to stay out past midnight, I’d still have to be home by midnight at the latest. My friends think my mother is way too strict.
“I believe 18 is the age you should not have a curfew, because you know what is right from wrong and you are mature enough,” said my friend Jennifer Fernandez, 17, a recent graduate of Grover Cleveland HS, who now attends New York City College of Technology.
Of course my mother doesn’t agree, and I’m not so sure myself. Although I envy most of my girlfriends who do not have to be home until 2 or 3 a.m., I often think about them and wonder, “Do their parents realize that their daughters are out that late?”
Jennifer Morron, a freshman at LaGuardia Community College, is a writer for Youth Communication, publishers of New Youth Connections.
A dismal turnout and an undemocratic nominating process were not the most alarming aspects of the so-called Special Election on the last day of February, when voters in three State Assembly districts that represent roughly 375,000 people in New York City picked new legislators in what was nearly a foregone conclusion:
What is most alarming is that these new members, though technically elected for only the next six months, have become instant incumbents -- which means they are likely to remain in office for the next 20 years. Yes, they have to run for re-election this fall, but as incumbents they will have the full power of their office and the support of their political party. And being an incumbent in New York means never having to say goodbye.
State Senator John Marchi has been in office for 49 years. But more to the point, in the past 22 years, there have been only 30 instances when incumbents in the New York State legislature have been defeated in a general election, according to a report by the New York Public Interest Research Group. Since all 212 members are up for election every two years, this means there were only 30 incumbent defeats in more than 2,000 races.
In another survey, the National Conference of State Legislatures cited that in the 2002 elections only eight percent of the New York State Senate and 16 percent of the New York State Assembly were not returned to office -- one of the lowest turnover rates in the country.
As Gotham Gazette has explained before in the online game, “Donkey Con (Elephant Evasion),” politicians are re-elected at staggering rates because of the state’s incumbent protection racket:
Access to the ballot: Incumbents have an easier time both getting on the ballot and assuring that any potential challengers stay off of it. Ballot-bumping is New York’s bloodsport – the process by which politicians hire election lawyers conversant with the state’s arcane election law to comb their rival’s nominating petitions to find the slightest errors, so that they can be stricken from the ballot. Incumbents are not alone in engaging in this practice, but they have the resources – the backing of their political party, the troops, and the money – to be the strikers rather than the stricken.
Name recognition: An unquantifiable advantage of incumbency is the name recognition it provides. Voters frequently head to the polls on Election Day armed with selections for big ticket offices such as president, governor or mayor. Local races do not garner as much interest, so voters tend to vote for familiar names.
Political Parties And Campaign Cash Incumbents use their party organizations to reach out to more voters.
Both the Republican and Democratic organizations in New York have extensive funding mechanisms to re-elect members of the Senate and Assembly. In the most recent election cycle, the Center for Public Integrity reported that the Democratic Assembly Campaign Committee spent $5.6 million while the minority Republican Assembly Campaign Committee contributed $2.1 million to Republican candidates. In the Senate, the Senate Republican Campaign Committee spent $9.5 million to hold on to their slim majority and the Democrats spent $1.4 million to fund their State Senators in office.
Powers of incumbency: As elected officials, members have the power to secure funding through member items for special neighborhood projects and provide various constituent services. During campaign season, they can “call in their chits” for having provided these services. Those who have been the beneficiaries of the legislator’s favors might fear the closing of the tap if they were to publicly support a challenger.
Others benefits of incumbency include:
A permanent legislature doesn’t just hurt the cause of democracy, it goes directly against the interests of the voters. It deters qualified candidates from seeking office and thus stymies fresh ideas. Legislators are less accountable to the public, and more beholden to party leaders. It is no coincidence that the New York State legislature, with among the smallest turnovers in the nation, has been labeled the most dysfunctional in the nation, the legislators weak and non-responsive, deferring to the Assembly Speaker and the Senate Majority Leader.
For the voter, incumbency means there are no real choices on Election Day: In some races there are no challengers at all; in most, the results are a foregone conclusion. The lack of options diminishes voter participation and is reflected in turnout rates. No more than 30,000 voters participate in Assembly and State Senate races in each district where there is an incumbent, and it is often a lot less.
The lack of choices and the depressed voter turnout amount to voters rubberstamping party choices on Election Day – a kind of social promotion for elected officials.
One solution that obliterates the problems of incumbency is term limits. A recent survey conducted by Sienna College Research Institute found that 68 percent of respondents support term limits for state legislators. In New York City, voters established through referendum term limits for citywide office, barring incumbents from seeking more than two terms. On a statewide level, the legislature would have to pass measures to limit the amount of time they can serve in office.
There are other ways of promoting competitive elections – through reform of the process of redistricting and by public financing of campaigns in a system similar to that set up by the New York City Campaign Finance Board. The Sienna College survey found 74 percent favored redistricting done by an independent non-partisan commission. Currently there is a bill in the Assembly (A6287) that proposes such reform.
Amy Ngai is program associate for Citizens Union Foundation, which publishes Gotham Gazette.Â
Every two weeks the New York City Council meets for its Stated Meeting to introduce and pass legislation. As a regular feature, Searchlight covers these meetings and posts a summary of the bills passed.
QUOTE OF THE DAY:
"Do I believe that the behavior of Walmart is outrageous? Yes. Do I think that Walmart is beginning to feel the pressure? It is clear they are. Will they get to a place where we could call them a responsible member of the corporate community? I hope so, but they aren't there yet."
- Speaker Christine Quinn on the need for employers like Walmart to pay for health care benefits.
MEETING SUMMARY:
HEALTHCARE FOR GROCERY WORKERS
The New York City Council overrode its first mayoral veto under the leadership of Speaker Christine Quinn in an effort to require grocery and "big box" stores like Walmart to provide health care coverage for their employees.
The veto override relates to an amendment (Intro 758-A) to the Health Care Security Act, a previous bill passed last year that requires employers to contribute $2.50 for each hour an employee works, or $5,000 a year for a full-time employee toward the worker's health costs.
The amendment changes the act so that it applies to stores with more than 50 employees (the previous bill said 35 or more employees) and excluded temporary and seasonal workers. The bill also applies to large stores, like Walmart, which use a significant amount of their space to sell food.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg vetoed both measures, arguing that they violate federal law, which limits state and local government involvement in employee benefits.
The council overrode the mayor by a vote of 48 to 2; Republican Councilmember Andrew Lanza and Democrat Simcha Felder sided with the mayor. The council only needs a two-thirds majority to override the veto.
Still, it is unlikely that that the council's action will have much impact on the 27,000 workers it is intended to help. In February, New York's highest court ruled that the mayor does not have to enforce city laws that he deems to be illegal.
Quinn called the court ruling "a challenge, not a problem" and said it was important for the council to send a message that businesses should be expected to give their workers benefits.
"Do I think that Walmart is beginning to feel the pressure? It is clear they are," said Quinn.
The mayor and council will likely continue the battle over the legislation in court.
Despite their differences on the bill, Quinn said that she hoped there would be fewer mayoral vetoes and City Council overrides than in the previous council under Speaker Gifford Miller.
"Vetoes and overrides should be extraordinary acts," said Quinn. "I hope we have to do them infrequently."
TAX LIENS
The council also passed a measure that extends the Department of Finance's authority to sell tax liens for another six months, until August 31, 2006. The sale of tax liens allows the city to collect property taxes on buildings that are in foreclosure that would otherwise not be paid.
Over the next six months, the council also wants to review the program to ensure that senior citizens and disabled New Yorkers do not lose their homes.
"Seniors are having trouble paying their taxes because their properties are now more valuable [due to a rise in real estate prices]," said Councilmember David Yassky. "They should not be forced to move out of their homes because they can't pay those taxes."
The bill passed unanimously at the request of the Bloomberg administration.
CITY COUNCIL REFORM
Shortly after being elected as Speaker, Christine Quinn vowed to reform the internal rules that govern the City Council to make the legislative body more open and transparent.
One aspect of the promised reform is to set up a task force to review the current rules and work with good-government groups to come up with ways that they can be improved.
Quinn appointed Councilmembers David Yassky and Dan Garodnick to head up the task force, which will also include Gale Brewer, Leroy Comrie, Robert Jackson, Oliver Koppell, Michael McMahon, and Dominic Recchia.
FLATBUSH AVENUE BUSINESS IMPROVEMENT DISTRICT
The council passed a measure (Intro 92-A) that begins the process of establishing a Business Improvement District on the corner of Flatbush and Nostrand Avenues in Brooklyn.
Business improvement districts provide activities or amenities that promote business in a specific area, including maintenance and sanitation, and holiday decorations. They are funded by assessments on property owners within the area.
The next Stated Meeting is scheduled for March 22, 2006.
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Marjane Satrapi's drawing about a teenager's life in Iran
There are many ways of looking at what is being called the cartoon crisis, even in New York.
A dozen cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad –- one of them with the prophet in a turban shaped as a bomb with a burning fuse -- were first published last September in a newspaper in Denmark. It was not until January of this year, according to an account in The Washington Post, that the cartoons began sparking violent protests around the world, resulting so far (as of mid-February) in the deaths of at least 45 people, according to a count by the Associated Press.
There have been demonstrations in New York City as well: About 1,000 Muslims protested in front of the Danish Consulate on a Friday in February; there was an earlier demonstration at the United Nations.
Several European editors have lost their jobs for publishing the cartoons, and 11 Muslim journalists in five countries, including Jordan, Algeria and Yemen, were arrested for doing so.
In New York City, four members of the staff of the New York Press quit when the publisher yanked the cartoons right before publication. (The articles, and 12 cartoons, that were going to run have been published on a Web site called New Partisan) So far, no local newspapers have published the cartoons except the New York Sun.
While in Qatar, U.S. Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes said U.S. newspapers generally did not reprint the caricatures ''because they recognize they are deeply offensive, even blasphemous to the precious convictions of our Muslim friends and neighbors.'' Others say it is from fear.
When Daryl Cagle talks about a cartoon crisis, he is not only talking about the reaction to the Danish cartoons. A cartoonist himself for MSNBC, Cagle runs a popular Web site that offers both an index of political cartoons and news about cartooning. (It probably has the most comprehensive updates about the events surrounding the Danish cartoons).
It is clear from his site that he feels that political cartoonists are under siege in the United States as well, albeit for different reasons. The number of full-time staff editorial cartoonists has shrunk from more than 200 in the 1980's to under 80 today. Major newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and Baltimore Sun are now without a staff cartoonist, and even the newspaper cartoons that remain (as cartoonist Scott Santis observed on Cagle’s blog) “are more often jokes than commentary.” Recently, Cagle wrote: “A knowledgeable source tells me that the Village Voice, the New York alternative tabloid with a great tradition of editorial cartoonists going back for decades -- including Jules Feiffer and Ed Sorel -- will stop running editorial cartoons, and any future cartoons will be non-political.”
There are a half-dozen offensive cartoons –– not online, not from Denmark, but in a New York City museum. They are ugly caricatures of black New Yorkers, wearing ludicrous costumes, speaking in ignorant but pompous dialect, and generally putting on airs.
“Not a single image of black New Yorkers survives from their first 170 years in the city,” explains a wall label in “Slavery in New York,” an exhibition at the New-York Historical Society. Then, in the 1790s, “black people appear in the pictures of the city for the first time.” The first pictures are landscapes dotted with a couple of “hardworking if nameless blacks.”
It was not until slavery was abolished completely, in the 1820s, that caricatures of black New Yorkers started appearing in the local press. They were not the only group to be caricatured; immigrants too were a target. But “black New Yorkers came in for especially vicious lampooning” – and some half-dozen examples hang on the walls of the exhibition.
On the second floor of The Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial To The Holocaust, is a room with some half-dozen Nazi-era caricatures of Jews, most of them on the front page of a notorious German newspaper called Der Sturmer – a Jew accosting an innocent blonde in a train station, Jews collecting the blood of children, a Jew looking like a kind of bloody King Kong destroying a German town. There is also a children’s board game called Jews Out. “The objective of the game is to collect Jews, who â€mar’ a German town by their presence and their â€parasitic businesses,’ and deport them to Palestine.”
Elsewhere in the exhibition is a poster by American artist Ben Shahn, created in response to a Nazi massacre in the town of Lidice, Czechoslovakia: Under the title, “This is Nazi Brutality,” it shows a figure with a hood over his head, his hands chained (an image that in 2006 startlingly evokes a more recent event.) Although commissioned by the U.S. Office of War Information, the wall label notes, “it was deemed too violent for mass distribution.”
Nobody is calling the Danish cartoons works of art -- indeed, New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman called them “callous and feeble” provocations meant to “score cheap points about freedom of expression.”
Still, The Washington Post’s account explains that Flemming Rose, the editor for the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten who commissioned the cartoons, did so in part after having read “that museums in Sweden and London had removed artwork that their staff members deemed offensive to Muslims.”
Many non-Muslims looking at the cartoons see them as bland or unclear, and don’t understand what all the fuss is about; some of those offended reply that this lack of understanding is part of the problem.
The question of whether the religion of Islam deems any depictions of Muhammed to be offensive is reportedly one debated by Islamic scholars. In The New Yorker magazine, Jane Kramer writes: “The Koran says that there can be â€nothing like a likeness’ of God, but in fact it makes no reference to images of the prophet to whom the interdiction was revealed. (It is the Hadith, Islam’s early narrative, that forbids the faithful to represent him.) And, as Islam spread to Persia and India, civilizations with strong representational traditions, artists did paint him.”
It is worth noting that an analogous prohibition exists in the Judeo-Christian tradition, as expressed in the King James Bible translation of the Second Commandment: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image [in other words, an image sculpted, carved or engraved], or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”
A Web site called Religious Tolerance points out that “a strict interpretation of this verse would prohibit…erecting nativity scenes at Christmas, hanging religious art in churches, allowing wedding photographers into the sanctuary, installing stained glass windows…that include images of people and animals, using children’s Bibles which are decorated with pictures,” etc.
In his article on the Danish cartoons, “A Startling New Lesson in the Power of Imagery,” Kimmelman asked: “Have any modern works of art provoked as much chaos and violence?” He noted that the 1926 painting by Max Ernst, The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child before Three Witnesses, was recently shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art without protest. He brings up a handful of past controversies, such as the Sensation show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, which is best-known for inspiring then-Senatorial candidate Rudy Giuliani to create a Decency Commission and threaten to bankrupt the museum. But Kimmelman left out the long litany of battles in the culture wars taking place in New York -- including, mostly recently, the successful effort to chase the Drawing Center out of the World Trade Center site, and the attacks on The Last Supper also at the Brooklyn Museum, and on artwork by Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, Richard Serra, John Ahearn...
There is, in fact, a great deal of artwork in New York that one group of people or another have found offensive. Kimmelman attributes this to what he calls the "knee-jerk baiting of traditional authority" inherent in modernism, the efforts by modern artists to "pander to a like-minded audience by goading obvious targets hoping to incite reactions." We live in a society where it is considered a compliment to call something "irreverent."
Others say that the artist's role is to show a culture things about itself that people do not want to see, or are not ready for; "it's through art," Arthur Miller wrote, "that the generations converse with one another."
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has three portrayals of Muhammad in its collection, according to the Los Angeles Times.
“A spokeswoman said none of the Met's depictions of Muhammad -- one from 15th century Afghanistan, one from 16th century Uzbekistan, one from 16th century Turkey -- had been displayed for years. The Met's Islamic galleries are closed for renovation until 2009.”
At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which also has such work, Islamic art curator Linda Komaroff said: "We've always known about these images, and no one's ever had a problem, because they are respectful.... I wish this whole issue would go away because it's so incendiary."
"Speechless" by Shirin Neshat |
The label “Islamic Art” does not appear in a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art entitled “Without Boundary: 17 Ways Of Looking,” even though 15 of the 17 artists “came from the Islamic world but do not live there,” in the words of curator Fereshteh Daftari. The artists were born in Iran and Iraq, Pakistan and Egypt, Istanbul and Beirut. They live in London and Paris, Buenos Aires and (six of them) in New York. Some of their work takes the classic traditions of Islamic art as they are understood in the West –- calligraphy, carpets, miniatures -– and turns them on their head in some way. “The most Islamic-looking object,” Daftari points out, is by one of the two American-born artists, Mike Kelly, whose woven silk carpet replaces the traditional red with the green of his ancestral Ireland, and throws in a few shamrocks. “The purpose of this show,” the curator said, “is to prove how reductive â€us-them’ is.”
The most startling image may be “Speechless,” by Iranian-born New York artist Shirin Neshat’s, in which a woman is wearing a gun barrel as an earring, and her face is covered with calligraphy-like text, the writing (as the catalogue explains) “a eulogy to martyrdom in the name of Islam, quoted from the writings of the contemporary Iranian poet Tahereh Saffarzadeh.” It is part of a series she called “Women of Allah.”
The most ironic work in the show is surely Marjane Satrapi’s drawings, taken from a comic book she entitled “Persepolis,” named after a capital city of an ancient empire, that chronicles the life of a teenage girl in the post-revolutionary Iran of the 1980s who is drawn to Michael Jackson and denim jackets and Nikes sneakers. In a series of panels, the girl is stopped by “guardians of the revolution” who interrogate her about her sneakers, her jacket, and her Michael Jackson button, “that symbol of decadence.” (Remember, this takes place in the early 1980s, before he had become a symbol of decadence in the West as well.) It’s not Michael Jackson, she lies. “It’s Malcolm X, the leader of black Muslims in America.”
In the forward to her comic book, Satrapi (who now lives in Paris) laments that “this old and great civilization” where she grew up is being discussed entirely in connection with “fundamentalism, fanaticism and terrorism….I know this image is far from the truth.”
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In the month since she was selected as the new Speaker of the City Council, Christine Quinn has made an effort to define herself as a unique leader of the legislative body - announcing a series of reforms aimed at making the council more open and democratic and joining Mayor Michael Bloomberg in a crack-down on unscrupulous lobbyists at City Hall.
Then, Speaker Quinn made her mark in an even more tangible way: she fired 61 people.
The Friday before the Presidents Day holiday weekend, Quinn undertook what aides called a "significant restructuring" of the council; nearly a quarter of the staff were handed letters informing them that they had been fired and were told to leave by the end of the day.
The massive layoffs affected every level from receptionists to lawyers to the fiscal experts who are responsible for negotiating the city's $50 billion budget with the mayor's office. Larian Angelo, the longtime finance director, was fired along with 17 of her staff members in the budget office.
Recently, the council announced some of the new people being hired. Key members of Quinn's new appointments include:
- Michael Keogh, who worked in the mayor's Office of State Legislative Affairs, as the new finance director.
- Elizabeth Fine, who worked for President Bill Clinton, as general counsel.
- Kevin Wardally, a former advisor to Gifford Miller, as a deputy chief of staff.
- Maura Keaney, who worked for the Bloomberg campaign, as another deputy chief of staff.
- Ululy Martinez, a former aide to Bronx Democratic Party boss Jose Rivera, as another deputy chief of staff.
- Rob Newman, who has worked at the council since 1999, as legislative director.
- Lucy Mayo, who worked for the organization Demos and State Senator Tom Duane, as policy director.
- And Maria Alvarado, who worked for Gifford Miller, as press secretary.
Observers choose to see Quinn's house cleaning in different ways.
Some said it was expected; when Gifford Miller became speaker in 2001 he did a similar thing and let about 60 staffers go.
Some said the layoffs were Quinn's way of making a clean break from some of the scandals (like the Allan Jennings sexual harassment suit) that plagued the previous council.
Others worried that Quinn was merely making room to hire party loyalists from the Democratic organizations in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx whose leaders who helped her win the position.
Still others - including several members of the council's Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus - expressed concerns about the ethnic diversity of those let go and those filling the open positions.
Whatever the reasons behind the move, Quinn also wants the staff to take their jobs - or at least their appearance while they are on the job - more seriously.
Last week, the speaker also announced a new dress code and put an end to "casual Fridays." "All employees are expected to be in appropriate business attire during business hours, regardless of the day," a council memo reportedly stated.
For more on the council's changes, see the City Hall news section of Gotham Gazette.
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When a state representative leaves office in the middle of a term, the governor must decide whether or not to hold a Special Election to fill the vacant seat.
If the governor decides not to hold a Special Election, then the seat is open and the residents of the district have no representation until the next election.
If the governor does call for a Special Election, then each political party selects its nominee by its own party rules.
In the Democratic Party, the nominee is selected by the Democratic committee members, a slate of party loyalists who have few other duties than voting to fill a seat in the case of a vacancy.
Candidates who want to run present themselves to the local party – usually through the local Democratic clubs. The local leaders schedule a day to vote when delegates must show up in person.
Each delegate’s vote is weighted based on how many Democrats voted in that election district in the last gubernatorial election. This means that one delegate’s vote can be worth two or three times as much as another.
The delegate’s votes are not secret. Each person puts their vote in an envelope and signs it.
Many delegates vote the way the party leader tells them. Sometimes rival political clubs will back different candidates, but usually the party bosses make their decisions ahead of time about who the nominee will be.
Candidates who do not get the party’s nomination can also file their petitions independently with the Board of Elections. For a State Assembly race, each candidate must get 1,500 signatures to get on the ballot and then the candidate makes up their own party name.
In New York City, where Democrats outnumber Republicans 5 to 1, the Democratic nominee has a distinct advantage.
The candidate who wins the Special Election also has a good chance of getting reelected again in the fall. Last year, of the 212 representatives of the State Legislature, more than half had no opponent or an opponent who raised less than $1,000 for their campaign.
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Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced in the movies. Jerry Rice and Tatum O’Neil are dancing with the stars. But this year the New York City Council is trying to end the dance at City Hall.
Every year, the mayor and the City Council engage in a budget dance, a five-month battle. The mayor cuts programs in exactly the same way he had cut them at the beginning of budget negotiations the year before, and then the council restores those cuts in the same way that it had the year before. This maneuvering often arises from a lack of dialogue between the mayor and the council -- and contributes to it as well.
But it is not the best use of time or a particularly sound way to make budget policy. And so the Finance Committee, which I chair, is attempting to insure that funding for certain programs not be cut -- that the current year’s allocation serve as a “baseline” or “benchmark” for spending on those programs in the future. In other words, the funding for these programs could go up --- but not down. The hope is that this baseline will protect key programs and allow the council and the administration to avoid budget dances in the future.
This year’s preliminary budget contains over $320 million in hidden cuts to programs that were restored by the council last year. The slashing includes a cut of over $40 million from the city’s library systems, meaning library hours will again face possible reductions. Over $20 million has been cut from senior citizen programs, including $8 million from the home delivered meal program. There is a cut of over $20 million from the city’s cultural institutions, meaning programs, such as ballet, art, and theaters around the city will face reductions in funding. Finally, a cut of almost $26 million is slated for city education programs that provide worker education, computer training, and leadership education for our city’s youth. These are just some of the allocations that the council will attempt to ‒baseline’’ this year in an effort to avoid the same fight, for the same allocations, for the same programs next year.
One cut in the preliminary budget that the council will especially focus on restoring is the reduction in funding for school capital projects. Similarly, last year the mayor’s preliminary budget contains no allocations toward financing the hole left by the lack of the funding called for in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit. The governor in his state preliminary budget has again failed to allocate the funding mandated by court orders, and once again the city’s school children are left in overcrowded classrooms and without the tools necessary to learn.
The governor’s and, consequently, the mayor’s inadequate funding of our public school system has left the system $1.8 billion short of the funding needed to finish capital projects for fiscal 2006 (that’s this current fiscal year), and $1.7 billion short of the funding needed to complete school capital projects in fiscal 2007. The fiscal 2006 cut includes $849 million for new construction, which translates to 23 schools and 15,381 seats that will not be built. It also represents a loss of $238 million for repairs and $365 million for educational enhancements such as libraries, technology, and science labs. As a result, these projects will have to be pushed to fiscal 2007, 2008, 2009, or beyond.
When the mayor threatened to cut over $1 billion from last year’s education capital budget, the City Council refused to pass any budget that did not contain a full restoration of this money. As things stand now, the council and the mayor will dance the same dance again this year. At this point, the Finance Committee and speaker can follow one of two options: either force the administration to put back the full $3.5 billion, or accept the cuts. Since the latter option will leave 1.1 million New York City school children at an educational disadvantage, the council simply cannot accept it. Even though we are tired from dancing and our feet are getting sore, we will again kick off our shoes and fight a battle for the restoration of billions of dollars in capital funding for education.
Finally, the mayor announced $2 billion in surplus funds that will be allocated toward paying for the health benefits of retired city employees, a plan for addressing a financial cost that the city must face. This idea has some merit. Before committing to the proposal, however, the council will need to look into specifically where the funds are derived from to ensure that this does not disadvantage other programs.
As a team, the council Finance Committee and speaker will work to improve the fiscal process. Our long-term goal will be to modify the budget dance by working together to understand which programs and services need funding and then negotiating to baseline that funding. So while we can tap like Gregory Hines or shuffle like Dick Van Dyke, capture the imagination like Chita Rivera or spin like Baryshnikov, we hope that the mayor saved the last dance for last year’s council and last year’s budget. We hope that instituting budget baselines this year will allow the council and the mayor to sit the next one out and pass a responsible budget with ease.
Councilmember David I. Weprin is chair of the City Council Finance Committee and represents the 23rd District in Queens.
Less than a month after her selection by her colleagues as City Council Speaker, Christine Quinn convinced them to pass five small but significant reforms meant to make the legislative body more democratic. (see the Stated Meeting Report Of February 1). Some skeptics might find it ironic that the reforms passed with little discussion -- and that the vote was unanimous.
The relentlessly lopsided votes in the New York City Council are one of the things that make so many New Yorkers so skeptical about the council.
Some are more than skeptical; they are outraged. Preservationists certainly were outraged late last year, when the council voted 43 to 6 to overturn the decision by the Landmarks Preservation Commission to designate the 1913 Austin, Nichols warehouse (built by architect Cass Gilbert) as a landmark. Members of the council have since admitted that they did not know anything about the building before the meeting and were not prepared to weigh in; Councilmember Albert Vann, for example, recalls that he “did not come prepared for any deep thinking” on any issues that day. The council members subsequently overturned the mayor’s veto of their decision, saying they now understood the issue and did not think the building deserved landmark status. But this hasn’t made the skeptics any less skeptical.
Advocates for the disabled are outraged that a bill to make New York City’s taxi fleet accessible to those who use wheelchairs -– currently, less than one percent of the taxis are -- has not even made it to the floor for a vote.
Civic organizations and neighborhood groups that rely on the City Council to champion their causes, on everything from ensuring cleaner air in the Bronx to addressing patterns of housing segregation, long have been asking for a more open legislative process, so that they not only know the status of the bills that concern them, but can feel that their views are being taken into account.
Openness, transparency, accountability, greater participation, timeliness -– these are some of the principles that reformers believe need beefing up in the day-to-day procedures of the City Council, as laid out in a report (in pdf format) issued last month by Citizens Union that I co-authored.
And this is what new City Council Speaker Christine Quinn is promising to do. “We in the City Council have a responsibility to make our government responsive to our constituents’ needs,” Quinn declared at the news conference announcing her package of reforms. “By allowing for more transparency and by instituting these progressive changes we are making the City Council a stronger, better and more effective institution.”
To realize the significance of the reforms, it helps to understand how much of the council’s power has been concentrated in the hands of the Speaker. She has the ability to control the flow of legislation and even the level of debate in many different ways. The speaker not only has the power to set the agenda for full council meetings, she exercises control over the agenda of the committees as well, including making decisions on what bills they will vote on. As a further show of power, the Speaker (rather than the committee chairmen) hires and pays for the counsels to the committees, and the Speaker’s staff is often given the responsibility to draft a bill, translating it from an idea into the necessary legal language. While these counsel are often conflicted between allegiance to the committee and the Speaker, the Speaker ultimately pays their bills. All of this presents a hurdle to individual council members -- and their constituents -- from having more of an impact.
With the new rule changes, Christine Quinn is signaling that she is willing to do things at least a little differently.
The new reforms are meant to be the first steps in addressing the problems for which the council has been criticized:
1. Timeliness: The Speaker’s staff often delays drafting into legal language the bills that are proposed by individual members of the Council (as opposed to the Speaker herself). The new reforms include a requirement that the staff must write such draft legislation within 60 days after a request.
2. Transparency: The public and even most members of the City Council can only easily get ahold of the first version of a bill when it is introduced for consideration. It is much more difficult to learn of the various changes that the bill undergoes in committee, so that they can follow the progress of the bill and be more informed when it comes to a vote. The new reform calls for the most current version at any given time to be posted on the City Council Web site.
Active Participation: Two of the rules just passed are meant to encourage council members to play a more active role in the political process by making it easier for them to use two rarely-employed procedures to go around the power of the Speaker.
3. Many bills, after being considered in the appropriate council committee, never make it to the full council (called the floor) for a vote, because they lack support by the Speaker. Theoretically, if enough city council members feel strongly enough about a bill, they can insist that it be brought to the floor. But this almost never happens. The new rule, which says that a bill must have the support of only seven council members (reduced from the previous nine) to bring it to the floor over the objection of the Speaker, is meant to signal this Speaker’s willingness to have this procedure used on occasion.
4. Similarly, the fourth new rule encourages members of the City Council to offer amendments to a bill after it already has been passed. Offering amendments is commonly practiced around the country.
5. Openness. Committees are now required to post notice of their hearings -– and, perhaps more importantly, their proposed agendas -- 72 hours in advance of committee meetings, online, to the news media and in a public place at City Hall.
Will the new rules be effective?
Reformers on the council itself are optimistic. Reformers outside the council, such as Craig Gurian, executive director of the Anti-Discrimination Center of Metro New York, are hopeful. “A useful early test,” Gurian says, “will be to see if the council is able to enact some of the long-overdue legislation that has been sitting for years without getting to the floor for a vote.”
In addition to the rule changes, the Speaker has pledged to create a “working group” on reform to review and evaluate other proposals.
Councilmember Gale Brewer, chair of the technology committee, sees no great conspiracy to keep council members in the dark but believes the council has not done an adequate job informing council members of the issues that are being worked on. “Because the budget is so large and because many of the issues that come before us and that affect New York are so complex, it’s a challenge to get everyone up to speed,” Brewer said. What will help, she believes, will be “more council and staff briefings as part of the council process and better use of list serves and the Web.”
Proposals need not come just from the council – or at least not just from the New York City Council.
The Web site of the Columbus, Ohio City Council is available in eleven different languages, including Spanish, Chinese and Korean, all languages that are widely spoken in New York City.
The City Council of Los Angeles must post on its Web site a list of expenditures neighborhood by neighborhood.
In Detroit the City Clerk’s office is required to post introductions of laws not only at City Hall but in a daily newspaper, so that the public knows what’s going on as well. And any public hearing cannot be held sooner than five days after the publication of the notice.
Support has been growing for a number of other measures. One common peeve is the way that funds are distributed to council districts and “stipends” to council leadership. The amount of money added to their $90,000 annual salary –- for what is officially (but only rarely in actual practice) a part-time job –- ranges as high as an extra $28,500. That is for the Speaker herself, of course, but even those rewarded less handsomely have one person to thank -- the Speaker.
Doug Israel is policy director at Citizens Union Foundation, which publishes Gotham GazetteÂ
Every two weeks the New York City Council meets for its Stated Meeting to introduce and pass legislation. As a regular feature, Searchlight covers these meetings and posts a summary of the bills passed.
“I believe that these five changes will make the proceedings and business of the council more transparent, more democratic and more open and accessible to the public.” – City Council Speaker Christine Quinn
“It is history in the making.” — Joel Rivera, on Bronx Terminal Market
The New York City Council passed two packets of legislation. One, which aims to make local government more transparent, changed several of the operating rules of the city council. Another, reached after difficult negotiations between private developers and community groups, gave city council approval for the Bronx Terminal Market development to proceed.
With little fuss and no dissent, the city council members unanimously approved changes to the way they do some of their work. The set of resolutions is supposed to reform the council.
“I believe that these five changes will make the proceedings and business of the council more transparent, more democratic and more open and accessible to the public,” said Speaker Christine Quinn. She added that the council will establish a working group on rules reform to study and propose more rules changes throughout the year.
One major change, for instance, affects the way bills are drafted in the council. In the past, there were times when a member would submit a bill that never actually got drafted. Now, the speaker has to make sure that the “central staff provides legislative drafting services to all members on an equitable and confidential basis.” Instead of languishing, bills introduced by any member, popular or not, will be drafted on a first-come, first-served basis and within 60 days.
During the meeting, several members said they welcomed the changes as a way to make what they do more transparent to the public. Councilmember David Yassky said the new rules were “a meaningful set of changes” that would allow taxpayers ultimately to get a “better product” for their money.
Councilmember Albert Vann called the changes “progressive and member-friendly.” Even Charles Barron, perhaps the council member most likely to disagree with the rest of the legislative body, said the changes were “a step in the right direction.”
Another new rule requires council committees to be quicker about spreading the word when they hold meetings. Now, a committee must give at least 72 hours advanced notice, “where practical,” of a meeting by sending press releases to news media and by posting notices inside public areas of City Hall and on the internet.
Also, amendments to bills will be read off and voted on separately after debate on the floor of the city council chambers. And the entire process for amending legislation was clarified.
One new rule changes how laws are changed. The new regulation requires alterations to drafts of legislation that seeks to amend or repeal an existing law: now, the legislation must be stamped with time and date, any repealed text should be printed between brackets and any insertions of new material should be underlined.
Finally, the number of council members needed to bring a piece of stalled legislation out of committee to the full council was reduced from nine to seven.
For more explanation, go to Gotham Gazette's Voting topic page article, Five First Steps At The City Council, by Doug Israel.
More contentious than reforms to the council’s operating procedures were changes that will allow the Bronx Terminal Market development to keep pushing ahead. It was a big city thumbs up for the Related Companies’ $400 million mall – and a slap in the face for Walmart.
Technically, the council approved six uniform land use review procedure applications for 965,000 square feet of land in the Bronx. But because months of negotiating between developers, the city and community groups resulted in a “community benefits agreement” and the explicit banning of Walmart, the city council also set a precedent.
“It is history in the making,” said Joel Rivera, the council’s majority leader and strong Bronx councilmember, during the meeting.
The negotiations resulted in “a community benefits agreement that’s going to serve as a model, not just for the city but for our nation,” said Councilmember Maria del Carmen Arroyo, who represents District 17, where the market, which will be renamed Gateway Center when it becomes a mall, will be built. “Developers in the city, I hope you’re paying attention. Because it’s only going to get better.”
The retail project will raze and replace about two-dozen wholesale merchants, who together comprise what is reportedly the largest seller of ethnic and tropical food on the East Coast.
Some officials and community members have raised concerns about how the project originated – and indeed, about how often development projects in the city are spawned not by government or the public but by private developers.
But many praised the community benefits agreement. Some of its stipulations, as Arroyo noted during the stated meeting, are:
-$3 million from Related Companies for a referral system to coordinate job training and placement, with special emphasis
on local residents. The goal, Arroyo said, is to fill 75 percent of the jobs with Bronx residents. It is similar to a hiring plan devised to appease locals in the construction of the Time Warner Center.
-A preference toward local contractors. The
goal here, she said, is to get half of all contractor and development work going to local, Bronx-based firms (though published reports have said Related Companies only agreed to 30 percent).
-A promised “green roof” and affordable child care program
and facility.
-“No Walmart, of any kind,” said Arroyo. Any big box store that moves in must accept food stamps and WIC and must reduce or eliminate membership fees for those who cannot afford them. Related Companies agreed to pay 50 percent of
membership fees for 2,000 families from the community for five years.
While many members praised the community benefits agreement, as well as the Bronx delegation, community groups and Related Companies for persisting through difficult negotiations, some members raised concerns about the path the project has taken. “We can’t forget about process,” said Councilmember Charles Barron. “We can’t forget about displacement.” He was the only member to vote against the Bronx Terminal Market measures. Councilmember Hiram Monserrate abstained from voting for the same reasons.
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Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s State of the City speech focused on many of the issues that I seek to address and make a priority during my term in office. Chief among them are housing and health.
The neighborhoods in my district include El Barrio/East Harlem, part of the Upper West Side and part of the Mott Haven section of the South Bronx. In East Harlem alone we have 10 housing projects, including the large Wagner Houses complex. One section of the district reportedly contains the lowest-income census tract in the city.
Bloomberg talked about reducing poverty in his State of the City address. “This year, we’ll launch a public-private task force – modeled on our task force to end chronic homelessness – that will attack chronic unemployment and poverty in the homes and neighborhoods where the need is greatest,” he said. “We’ll launch our first pilot programs in three communities where the problems have long been entrenched – Bushwick, Melrose, and Bedford-Stuyvesant.” I welcome creative approaches to tackling our pressing issues. As legislators it is our responsibility to ensure that the public policies that guide this city address the systemic problems that contribute to such inequities. The Mayor has committed himself to seriously tackling these concerns in a non-partisan manner and I welcome that approach. I look forward to the work of this public-private task force as it seeks to determine the underlying causes of chronic unemployment and poverty and will join the dialogue as it progresses.
Despite the income disparity of many of my constituents with other parts of the city, we’re seeing property values rise as the area begins to gentrify. That creates an urgent need to maintain the affordable housing stock that already exists, as well as develop new units. I seek to address our affordable housing crisis by looking at innovative ways that we can safeguard Mitchell Lama housing units as well as looking at public policy and legislation that will facilitate the creation of new affordable units.
The mayor noted in his address that he would build or preserve 165,000 new units in the next seven years as part of his $7.5 billion housing plan. I welcome the challenge, but we must first address how we define affordability if we seek to tackle the issue effectively.
We’ve also got to address problems residents are facing in our public housing. After serving as council member for only several weeks, I am finding that the vast majority of constituent requests are related to public housing concerns. My district is home to ten percent of New York City’s public housing stock -- one of the highest concentrations in the city. The challenges that confront New York City’s public housing system will be a priority during my tenure and I will work alongside tenant leaders and New York City Housing Authority to ensure that we improve existing conditions.
On the health front, a recent New York Times article highlighted East Harlem as an epicenter of the diabetes epidemic in the city. The article pointed out that residents of this part of my district “die of diabetes at twice the rate of people in the city as a whole.” Bloomberg also recognized this crisis in his address, saying the city’s goal is now to “reduce the number of New Yorkers at the highest risk for diabetes complications by 20 percent by the end of 2008.” The first step will be reporting blood sugar test results to the Department of Health. I will seek to work with my district’s health facilities to raise greater awareness among all constituents and will work alongside the Department of Health to ensure that we are aggressive about reducing the number of individuals at high risk.
What’s more, district 8 also has one of the highest rates of asthma in the city, and the second highest HIV infection rate. We have to address these issues by allocating greater funds to prevention and engaging our communities in visible public educational campaigns as a means of raising awareness.
Between health and housing, my district desperately needs big-picture problem solving as well as help with every-day troubles.
Currently, we are still assessing how we will structure the constituent services division of our office. I see myself, and the work that I will engage in, as one that will facilitate change within the district. My office will work in partnership with the local stakeholders to fulfill our greater vision of community empowerment. There are many agencies providing great services to this district. It is my aim to build a strong, cohesive partnership with them that I believe can work in tandem with this office.
I will hold a series of service provider summits in order to develop a better sense of the work they are engaged in and to outline the ways we best can work together. It’s a critical role: working in partnership with the service organizations and also being able to hold them accountable for the work they’re directed to do. I will be looking at how to serve as that nexus for my constituents.
I have had instances where people have walked into our office seeking help filling out paperwork for a myriad of benefits. Ideally, my office would link that constituent up with a local service provider better suited to assist them. For example, we have constituents walking in with concerns about enrolling in Medicare’s Part D drug benefit. A senior center here already does exactly that kind of work. So from this office, we can call and make an appointment for the constituent and follow up afterwards, making sure he or she went to the senior center and that the visit ran smoothly. This kind of relationship will enable us as an office, and me as a city council member, to help my constituents while maximizing our time to tackle large-scale issues like public housing or the affordable housing crisis. It is my hope to serve as a strong voice for a community that has been greatly disenfranchised.
Melissa Mark Viverito represents district 8 in the New York City CouncilÂ