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.

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.”

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.

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."

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.
***

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.”

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.

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."

(photo: @CUNYedu)

A month into the City University of New York’s fall semester, the COVID-19 pandemic, budget cuts, a drop in student enrollment, and anxiety remain the hallmarks of an uncertain new period in the history of the nation’s largest public urban university system. CUNY has chosen to remain almost entirely virtual this semester, with fewer than 2 percent of the fall semester’s 50,000 classes occurring in person.  

Preliminary figures show CUNY’s enrollment dropping by roughly 4.4% since last fall, according to a CUNY spokesperson who confirmed numbers first reported by The New York Post. About 271,000 students attend CUNY schools across a system including four-year and community colleges, as well as graduate schools. The spokesperson said that final numbers and breakdowns are not yet available, but would become available as the semester progresses and class lists solidify. 

The hundreds of thousands of graduate and undergraduate students who remain enrolled across CUNY’s 25 campuses are now weeks into their courses. While distance learning is no longer the shock it was in March, bumps and pitfalls still remain, students said in interviews. 

“I think our transition back has been pretty smooth,” said Ethan Milich, the student government president of Brooklyn College. “But there are going to be a lot of challenges and struggles as we come back. There has been, and there’s going to be.”

Each campus has an individualized reopening plan for the semester, which generally includes limited access to student services like food pantries and child care centers, and varying access to the campus for staff depending on the school. Classes that are able to return to campus vary by school, but involve a vital hands-on component, such as labs or some theater classes. Schools like Hunter College in Manhattan allow certain campus functions to be accessed by appointment, such instrument practice rooms and art studios. 

Dormitories for students are reopened across the system, with social distancing measures and cleaning and quarantine procedures in place at each. According to reopening documents, interest in dorming varied by school, and not every school has a dormitory to begin with. The College of Staten Island, for example, was preparing for 200 to 300 students to return to its dormitories, while Hunter College found 400 students interested in returning. Even prior to the pandemic, interest in dorming at CUNY was relatively low compared to other colleges, as the majority of students are commuters. 

Schools like Baruch College in Manhattan and Brooklyn College lay out specific, phased timelines that state that campuses will not reach 100 percent capacity for staff and students until a COVID-19 vaccine is found, or the virus is otherwise contained. 

“This institution remains vital to the lifeblood of the region,” CUNY Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez said in a welcome message in mid-September. “We have spent months laying the groundwork to proceed in a manner that safeguards the health and wellbeing of the University community and does not in any way jeopardize or endanger the city’s ongoing recovery efforts.”

In a late-September interview with News 12, Matos Rodríguez said that for at least the beginning of the spring semester in 2021, classes would probably remain almost fully online. There would be an opportunity to start bringing students back into the classroom if the situation surrounding the virus improved, he continued, keeping CUNY on a more cautious schedule than New York City’s elementary and secondary public schools, which have now reopened to some students coming into school buildings each day. 

CUNY’s approach is similar to its local, private peer Columbia University, which announced earlier this summer that all of its classes will occur virtually. Meanwhile, New York University reconvened around half of its classes in-person this fall, with the option to take them remotely.

Remaining Economically Accessible 
The onset of COVID-19 pandemic triggered a complex series of questions for CUNY, and one of the most pressing remains the question of accessibility. The university serves an overwhelming number of low-income students, with 60 percent of undergraduates reporting in a 2016 survey that their annual household income is less than $30,000.

The pandemic only served to widen and deepen this economic instability for CUNY students. At a City Council oversight hearing in June, university polling revealed that nearly 40 percent of students lost their jobs since the pandemic began, and 55 percent were experiencing housing insecurity. 

The dawn of remote learning in March has only thrown these statistics into sharper relief. Soon after campuses shut down, CUNY again paused classes for a five-day “recalibration period” to frantically try to distribute 30,000 laptops and tablets to students in need across the system. For the fall semester, the university purchased thousands of WiFi hotspots to continue to help students attend class on time and in full capacity. 

Now, as CUNY faces down a pandemic-induced budget crisis that prompted the university to lay off almost 3,000 adjunct professors, some students worry that they and their cash-strapped classmates will be footing part of that bill.

“We don’t want the state to continue to balance their checkbooks on the backs of students,” said Timothy Hunter, the chairperson of the University Student Senate, a student-led governing body for the entire university system. Hunter is additionally the only student representation on CUNY’s board of trustees.

Full-time tuition costs can range from $4,800 to $18,600, but state residents who attend the four-year colleges full-time pay $6,930 per year. However, the majority of CUNY students qualify for state or federal financial aid grants, and more than 58 percent of full-time, undergraduate students attended the university tuition-free the last academic year. 

Students haven’t yet seen the tuition increase and new health and wellness fee that the board voted to implement last December, but the looming threat remains, and concerned Hunter. In a typical year, lobbying to freeze tuition is one of USS’ top priorities, but the pandemic has created a new sense of urgency.

“I think the biggest concern [for CUNY] moving forward is going to be affordability, as it's always been,” Hunter said. 

New Realities On And Off Campus
For now, CUNY is relying on health checks and remote learning to try and keep the coronavirus at bay. Students who need to enter campus must use an app to perform a wellness check survey, as well as wear masks and practice social distancing once on campus. 

“We go based on the honor system. We have to take accountability,” said Wilkins Cerda, the president of York College’s student government and a nursing student. Cerda said he has not yet been on the Queens-based campus, though he has heard from fellow nursing students who need to take lab classes that there is social distancing and extra personal protective equipment in those classes. He still attends his clinicals in person, however, at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. 

Though CUNY has worked to try and solve some of the glaring issues around virtual classes, like the need for devices, the typical struggles that plague technology — such as poor connections, and a lack of tech savviness in some users — persist. Some students have expressed concerns over privacy and security of tech platforms, said both Cerda and Milich, the student government president of Brooklyn College. Milich said that classes can also still have problems with “Zoom-bombing,” or when often unidentified individuals hijack and disrupt a video call. 

Student clubs and organizations have moved almost entirely to Zoom and other online meeting applications, students from across the system said. In a typical year, these clubs are important pathways for students to make friends and connect with the school, as the majority of students do not live in campus housing.  

Levels of activity vary by campus. Cerda said that York typically has around 40 active clubs, though that number has dropped into the single digits this semester as clubs struggle with the limitations of being solely virtual. CUNY colleges charge a “student activity fee” to maintain this programming, which can range from anywhere between $60 to $180 for full-time students and can pay for clubs, athletics, student centers, health programming, student media and other services on campus.  

“Right now, there’s not much that they would want to do, because a lot of them [host] events that are face-to-face,” Cerda said. 

Meanwhile, on Brooklyn College’s campus, clubs and the student government have been striving to maintain participation, trying new strategies to reach students such as social media groups and chat applications like Discord. 

“[There’s] almost more enthusiasm now, because students haven’t seen each other, they haven’t interacted, so now they’re really excited to get this kicked off,” Milich said. He found that participation in student government actually went up when it moved online. 

Marziya Hasan, a freshman at Baruch College, said that she won’t be joining clubs this year as she focuses on her classes. One of Hasan’s biggest challenges has been staying motivated and on top of her work while she’s been stuck at home.

“Baruch’s doing a lot to make freshmen feel that they’re getting the best experience out of this,” she said, though she wishes that she could have safely started her college experience in person, as she would have done in a more typical year. “It really doesn’t feel the same.”

 NYC BOE Executive Director Michael Ryan (photo: John McCarten/City Council)

The New York City Board of Elections has not submitted a state-mandated report on its staffing needs for this fall, blowing past a September 20 deadline set by Governor Andrew Cuomo and raising concerns about the city's preparedness for the consequential general election. It is the only jurisdiction in the state to miss the deadline, according to officials at the State Board of Elections, to which the reports are due.

The mandate and deadline, set in a late-August executive order, was intended to ensure election administrators were ready for a record number of votes, and ready to count them quickly, including a quantity of mailed-in ballots expected to dwarf what they faced in the chaotic June primaries. The report's delay comes when officials, including Cuomo, are questioning the competence of the city's election system, operating amid a pandemic, after a vendor mishap led to nearly 100,000 absentee ballots being mailed to the wrong voters in Brooklyn and Queens.

The order required local boards to submit to the State Board of Elections staffing plans and needs for early voting and Election Day, and for the counting of ballots after polls close. The deadline was intended "to provide adequate time for the state Board of Elections to assist as feasible," according to the order.

With President Trump repeatedly raising the spectre of voter fraud and questioning the validity of future election results, at times pointing to issues in New York as justification, a growing concern is the time it will take administrators to count ballots and certify a winner. As in the June primaries, the city BOE is expecting that process to take up to six weeks because of the large proportion of mailed-in ballots that must be counted by hand and cross-checked against votes cast throughout the state.

"I'm issuing today's executive order because we want boards of elections to count votes efficiently and we want them to get it right, but we want it done in a timely manner," Cuomo said in a statement on August 24.

"We don't want to hear after-the-fact excuses for why you couldn't do it," he told reporters the same day. "Tell us how you're going to do it before-the-fact, and your staffing plan from the board of elections that will actually do that."

"This election is going to be one of the most critical in modern history. It will be controversial," he added.

The New York City Board of Elections, which encompasses all five boroughs, is the only board in the state not to submit a report. "They still have failed to provide the required plan after numerous follow up requests," wrote State Board of Elections Co-Chair Douglas Kellner in an email to Gotham Gazette Tuesday.

The New York City Board of Elections did not provide a comment for this article. Cuomo's office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Good government group Reinvent Albany criticized the failure.

"Once again, the City BOE has failed to take the necessary steps to ensure New York is prepared for the next election," wrote Tom Speaker, the group's elections analyst, in an email. "No one will be surprised if November produces the same turmoil that New Yorkers saw in the June primary. We call on the City Council and State legislature to start taking steps to abolish the NYC BOE and replace it with a professional, nonpartisan agency."

The State Board has reviewed personnel surveys from the 57 county boards outside New York City and is closely monitoring 11 boards in particular, according to a spokesperson. The boards have benefited from a national poll worker recruitment effort on September 1, that grew the pool of election workers, clerks, and custodians available to administrators. Many boards reported scheduling additional inspector training sessions to manage the influx, the spokesperson said.

The city BOE has also missed another report deadline, this one on its implementation of a separate executive order requiring it to establish dropboxes for absentee ballots at BOE offices and poll sites. The Board has announced that it will have a dropbox at every early voting and Election Day poll site, and at each of its borough offices, fulfilling the requirement of the order.

"While it is very clear from Ms. Sandow's and Mr. Ryan's testimony that they do have the dropbox program licked, and I am pleased with their efforts on that, they have not provided the report, which is required by the governor," Kellner said Friday at an oversight hearing conducted by the City Council's governmental operations committee, referring to the city BOE's executive director and his deputy.

"It just raises another concern about the lack of attention to detail," he said.

Early voting at a poll site can be a breeze (photo: @BOENYC)

As election administrators across the state prepare themselves for a second, larger wave of mass absentee voting this fall, officials and voting advocates are encouraging as many voters as possible to take advantage of the state's in-person early voting option as an alternative to crowded Election Day poll sites and the uncertainty of casting a ballot by mail.

Early voting, first launched statewide in 2019, will be offered this fall from October 24 through November 1 and gives all voters the chance to vote in person at designated poll sites over nine days leading up to Election Day, which is November 3. This year, with all voters eligible to vote by absentee ballot, the New York City Board of Elections is expecting as many as 1 million mail-in ballots, which take longer to count and are prone to being rejected on minor grounds.

Roughly a fifth of all absentee ballots are thrown out each election due to technicalities like missing a signature on the outer envelope, or being partially unsealed. That was no trivial proportion in the June primaries. About 80,000 mailed ballots, out of the 400,000 cast citywide, were rejected on technicalities and the high volume meant officials couldn't deliver election results until six weeks after polls closed on June 23.

Only about 52,000 people across the five boroughs took advantage of the early voting period in June.

While state lawmakers have made some adjustments to election law to help reduce the risk that ballots are thrown out, a number of proposed fixes were never passed, errors in the fall process are already showing up, and timeliness remains a major concern. With another slew of absentee ballots expected this fall, Michael Ryan, the NYC BOE's executive director, recently said election results may not be available until the first or second week of December.

Absentee voting was expanded by executive order this spring and later by state law to ensure voters had an option that didn't require them to risk transmitting or contracting COVID-19 at a poll site. Early voting, which spreads the number of open poll site hours across more than a week, including some evenings and weekends, offers similar protection from often packed Election Day polling places but allows votes to be tallied the same day using ballot scanning machines. The option is looking increasingly attractive to voting advocates, given the stresses of the primaries and anxiety about how the results of the presidential election will be handled, particularly by President Trump.

"The key to protecting voting rights in this climate is ensuring voters are aware of their new options so they can make an informed voting plan, help loved ones do the same, and take early action well ahead of unforgiving deadlines," wrote Jarret Berg, an election lawyer and co-founder of the advocacy group Vote Early NY, by email.

“While voting remotely may be safer and more convenient for some New Yorkers, early voters will scan their marked ballots immediately, just like on Election Day, avoiding potential pitfalls that can jeopardize rights," Berg said, adding that ballots cast during early voting are tabulated in the unofficial results reported on election night.

Elections administrators are also emphasizing the early voting option, as are other public officials like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who recently tweeted that she would be voting early and in person, and encouraging others to plan to do the same.

"Early voting will be a critical part of managing the election, given the anticipated record turnout," wrote NYC BOE Commissioner Tiffany Townsend, in an email to Gotham Gazette. "There will be thousands of new absentee voters, but many more who will prefer to cast their votes in person."

"The additional nine days [of voting] - combined with our dropbox option - will help mitigate potential wait times both outside and inside poll sites. That’s a huge plus," Townsend wrote.

City and state agencies are rolling out a series of public awareness campaigns to educate voters on their options, leveraging partnerships with grassroots organizations and media companies.

All of the funding allocated to promote early voting comes from New York City government or private grants.

The New York City Board of Elections is spending a total of $1.5 million on advertising about the three voting options, according to Valerie Vazquez-Diaz, the board's director of communications and public affairs. That money will go toward advertising in citywide and hyper local newspapers, including non-English publications, as well as subway and bus ads, Vazquez-Diaz told Gotham Gazette. The funding, which comes from city government, includes $500,000 for subway and bus advertising, $600,000 for digital advertising, and $400,000 for print media. NYC & Company, the city's official marketing organization, is also donating ad space to the BOE in the LinkNYC digital kiosks that populate some city sidewalks, according to Vazquez-Diaz.

On top of paid advertising, the NYC BOE will be posting key information on its Twitter and Facebook accounts and has been working with local elected officials, organizations, and community boards to promote the BOE's messaging, using educational toolkits developed by the Board.

Perhaps the most direct messaging will be in the BOE's mailer, which it is sending to each registered voter. The mailer is part of a directive from Governor Andrew Cuomo to local election boards to inform New Yorkers of the three voting options (absentee voting, early voting, Election Day voting). Local boards must include information on how to request an absentee ballot online and the location of each voter’s early voting and Election Day polling places.

The BOE's notice, which it began mailing last week, includes the hours of early voting as well as a magnetic fob that allows for faster, contactless check-in for in-person voting.

Separate from the BOE's efforts, the de Blasio administration is spending roughly half a million dollars to promote early voting through the mayor's DemocracyNYC initiative and the city's Campaign Finance Board, which has a voting awareness initiative called NYC Votes.

DemocracyNYC, which the mayor launched in 2018 to bolster participation in elections, worked with the city's new Civic Engagement Commission to develop a PSA "to encourage as many New Yorkers as possible to vote early if they would rather vote in-person," according to mayoral spokesperson Jose Bayona. The city is promoting the announcement on streaming services and radio, and is also taking out ads in the LinkNYC kiosks and local media, "placing a greater emphasis on the voting early option to cast a ballot," he wrote in an email.

"DNYC is spending $100,000 on streaming and radio advertising, and $37,000 allocated towards spending for a vote by mail PSA in more than 10 languages," Bayona wrote.

With the city facing a massive tax revenue shortfall, DemocracyNYC is working with an informal coalition of voting rights advocates, good government groups, and government agencies dubbed the Elections Consortium, which came together shortly after the coronavirus state of emergency was declared to ensure participation in the 2020 elections, to get unpaid messaging out to key constituencies.

The consortium, which is co-led by DemocracyNYC and the Campaign Finance Board, has produced literature and graphics to address frequently asked questions and is partnering with the nonprofit “F.Y. Eye” PSA network to help disseminate the messaging for free, which Bayona says will help provide timely information to voters in multiple languages.

The Campaign Finance Board (CFB) is putting another $400,000 directly toward an early voting advertising campaign that will launch on October 8, according to spokesperson Matthew Sollars.

Streaming ads will target youth and first-time voters, as well as certain geographic areas, and language and professional demographics, he said. The CFB is also launching a digital campaign emphasizing the convenience of early voting with an eye toward multiple groups of New Yorkers who may require flexibility in voting for different reasons, like parents with child-care responsibilities or food service workers who have long hours and multiple jobs.

The CFB's advertising will appear in over 40 community publications in English, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, and Bengali. Television ads will target viewers in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, and mobile advertising and websites and cellphone apps will place geo-specific messaging to people within a half-mile radius of an early voting site, letting them know they can vote nearby.

Posters in English and Spanish are being delivered to over 300 local businesses in the CFB's target neighborhoods, identified because they have large numbers of naturalized citizens and historically low voter turnout, particularly in parts of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, and in many cases the areas hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic.

Outside of New York City, the State Board of Elections, the regulatory agency with oversight over the state's 62 county boards of elections, is promoting early voting this fall through social media and news releases, and is exploring the possibility of paid advertising through a $1.5 million grant from the Center for Election Innovation and Research, which it received last week, according to a spokesperson.

"That is the budget we working with to advertise the three voting options afforded to NYers (by absentee, early voting and election day) as well as promoting the safety precautions taken at poll sites during the pandemic (wear a mask, use sanitizer and expect to socially distance)." wrote Cheryl Couser, deputy director of public information at the State Board.

"We urge voters to make a plan to go vote!," she wrote in an email.

Spokespeople for Governor Cuomo and the state Division of the Budget did not comment on whether any state funds had been allocated to promote early voting. State agencies will be advertising the voting options on their social media platforms, according to a spokesperson for Cuomo.

"New York has to get this right," wrote Betsy Gotbaum, executive director of government reform group Citizens Union and former New York City Public Advocate, in an email. "We know that President Trump will not hesitate to highlight any confusion or delays to undermine the legitimacy of the election. The best way for New Yorkers to vote safely, avoid Election Day crowds, and ensure their vote is counted in a timely manner is to take advantage of Early Voting."

"We are pleased to see DemocracyNYC, the CFB and the NYCBOE in outreach to encourage early voting, and are glad they are targeting resources to young people and our city's diverse ethnic communities," Gotbaum wrote, adding: "It is unfortunate that the state has not allocated similar resources to this effort."

[See the early voting days and hours here; Find your early voting and Election Day poll sites here]