New York City Hall
What to watch for this week in New York politics:
The week begins with many eyes on the apparent death by suicide of Jeffrey Epstein in federal prison in Manhattan, news of which broke on Saturday morning. While conspiracy theories are swirling, Mayor Bill de Blasio and many others are calling for a full investigation. Federal prosecutors who were bringing a child prostitution case against Epstein said that the "conspiracy" case against Epstein's alleged co-conspirators would move ahead.
De Blasio was in Iowa over the weekend, as was Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and many other members of the Democratic presidential primary field -- it was the Iowa state fair, among other key events on the primary campaign schedule. De Blasio and many others also spoke at a "gun sense" candidate forum hosted by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the gun control organization he founded, Everytown for Gun Safety, and spinoff groups like Moms Demand, whose leader, Shannon Watts, co-moderated the event. De Blasio continues to draw small crowds for his own campaign stops, though he has been making the rounds on cable TV news, from this past week's appearance on Fox News' Sean Hannity to Sunday stops on CSPAN, CNN, and MSNBC.
The mayor has been pushing hard for $1 donations in his attempt to make the September debate stage based on rules set by the Democratic National Committee, calling in favors with allies -- from Orthodox Jewish leaders to labor unions -- to reach out to their community members to ask for donations to de Blasio, and noting that no endorsement or other commitment is involved.
As the Iowa forum indicated, this week will see continued attention on the issue of gun violence around the country and in New York City.
Also back in the city, we're awaiting more news on the fate of NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo, whom an NYPD administrative judge has said should be removed from the force for misconduct in the death of Eric Garner. The decision will lie with Commissioner James O'Neill, who may not yet have the full paperwork from the attorneys involved that will allow him to trigger his decision-making process. De Blasio has promised resolution this month.
Perhaps most pressingly this week, the Child Victims Act takes effect across New York, including a one-year "look back" window that allows child sex abuse survivors to bring civil lawsuits against their alleged perpetrators. A major push will begin this week from advocacy groups, service providers, legislators, attorneys, and others to make sure that New Yorkers know about the CVA and its provisions.
As usual in August, there are not that many specific political events on the calendar, though there are some -- see our day-by-day rundown below -- highlighted by a City Council Stated Meeting, where bills are passed and introduced, and by the annual City & State NY education summit.
***Do you have events or topics for us to include in an upcoming Week Ahead in New York Politics?
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The run of the week in detail:
Monday, August 12
Mayor de Blasio returns to New York City from Iowa on Monday. In the evening, he'll appear on NY1's Inside City Hall during the 7 and 11 p.m. hours.
Governor Cuomo has no events on his public schedule for Monday.
At 10 a.m. Monday, Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul will deliver remarks at the opening of Dunkirk Pier and Harbor.
At 10:30 a.m. Monday, City Council Speaker Corey Johnson will appear on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show.
At 1 p.m. Monday, there will be a “Harlem Mothers S.A.V.E. Rally to Stop the Flow of Illegal Guns” calling on federal officials to stop the flow of illegal guns into New York from other states, at the Javits federal building. Comptroller Scott Stringer, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, and Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer will be among those who participate.
At 5:30 p.m. Monday, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams will be on News12 for his monthly “Ask the Borough President” session.
At 7 p.m. Monday, the Manhattan Democratic Party will host its 2019 Judicial Convention, at which “the Judicial Delegates elected on June 25th will convene in order to elect the Democratic nominees for two New York Supreme Court seats that will appear on the November ballot.”
Tuesday, August 13
At the City Council on Tuesday:
-At 11 a.m., the Committee on Housing and Buildings will meet to discuss a new bill concerning relocation expenses incurred by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development.
-At 12 p.m., the Committee on General Welfare will meet to discuss eleven bills concerning accessibility and transparency at the Department of Social Services. A resolution calling on the state government to provide a grace period for SNAP benefits will also be introduced.
At 10 a.m. on Tuesday, the New York City Board of Standards and Appeals will hold a public hearing.
At 10 a.m. Tuesday in Times Square, “Safe Horizon - the largest victims service organization in the country - will unveil a wide ranging public awareness campaign in Times Square to educate adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse about their rights under the newly enacted Child Victims Act. The launch will debut a video and ad PSA campaign featuring survivors, including New York State lawmakers: Senator Alessandra Biaggi, Assemblymember Yuh-Line Niou, Assemblymember Catalina Cruz, and Assemblymember Rodneyse Bichotte. Clear Channel has generously donated digital billboard space. The launch will happen the day before a one year window opens, allowing survivors to sue their abusers or liable institutions, no matter how old they are or how long ago the abuse happened. The window closes on August 14th, 2020. Survivors who were 23 or older on the day the bill was signed (February 14th, 2019) must take advantage of the window if they want to seek justice in the courts...Safe Horizon has launched a comprehensive website on the new law that answers frequently asked questions and provides guidance for survivors seeking legal assistance.” Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul, Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal, and others -- including the aforementioned legislators and other survivors -- will also participate in Tuesday’s event.
At noon Tuesday, Comptroller Tom DiNapoli will attend the University of Albany School of Education Inaugural Summit, at the Albany Convention Center.
The latest episode of the What’s The [Data] Point? podcast from Gotham Gazette and Citizens Budget Commission will post on Tuesday afternoon and feature an interview with New York City Charter School Center CEO James Merriman about the charter school sector in the city, the sector’s relationships with Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo, and more.
At 6 p.m. Tuesday, Queens Borough President Melinda Katz will host an India Independence Day Celebration at Queens Borough Hall.
At 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Empire State Indivisible will hold a team meeting, joined by state Senator Julia Salazar and Assembly Member Yuh-Line Niou, “who will give us some inside info on how we can best prepare for 2020!”
Wednesday, August 14
At the City Council on Wednesday:
-At 10 a.m., the Committee on Finance will meet to discuss three land use applications, as well as a resolution concerning “changes in the designation of certain organizations to receive funding in the Expense Budget.”
-At 10:30 a.m., the Subcommittee on Zoning and Franchises will meet to discuss two land use applications in Brooklyn.
-At 10:45 a.m., the Committee on Women and Gender Equality will meet to discuss a resolution in support of the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2019.
-Also at 10:45 a.m., the Committee on Land Use will meet to discuss five land use applications.
-At 1:30 p.m. in the Council Chambers, the City Council will hold a stated meeting at which bills that have been voted through committee are passed by the full Council and new bills are introduced. It will be preceded, as usual, by a pre-stated press conference led by Council Speaker Corey Johnson.
At 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday, BetaNYC will host a bagel breakfast briefing with the NYC 311’s Open Data Team to “learn about 311 datasets available to the public, discuss impacts to the datasets from a recent system upgrade, talk about future work, and answer your questions.”
At 10 a.m. on Wednesday, the City Planning Commission will hold a public meeting.
At 11 a.m. Wednesday in Manhattan outside Supreme Court, “A rally will be held demanding that the Archdiocese of New York, Diocese of Brooklyn and Diocese of Rockville Centre help survivors of clergy sexual abuse in New York, consisting of several survivors, their attorneys, and supporters of survivors of clergy sexual abuse. Survivor Lexington Filipowski will speak after he files his lawsuit under the new New York Child Victims Act. Filipowski will be one of the very first survivors to file a lawsuit under the CVA. Participants will hold signs that describe how they have been hurt by child sexual abuse by a clergy member. Participants will also have the opportunity to speak if they wish. No one will be identified by name unless they wish to be identified.”
At 4 p.m. Wednesday, the Civilian Complaint Review Board will hold its August public board meeting. “Participants will have the opportunity to ask questions about police-community relations and learn about key Agency updates. Investigators will be available to receive complaints of misconduct.”
At 5 p.m. Wednesday, this week’s Max & Murphy show on WBAI radio will feature a long, in-depth interview with City Council Member Joe Borelli, a Staten Island Republican, about his campaign for Public Advocate, and the status and future of the New York GOP. Tune in at 99.5FM or wbai.org.
At 11 p.m. Wednesday, Mayor de Blasio will appear on The Daily Show on Comedy Central.
Thursday, August 15
From 9 a.m. until 4 p.m. Thursday, City & State NY will host its 2019 Education Summit, offering “industry executives, public sector leaders and academics the opportunity to share ideas and debate critical issues such as school choice, closing the achievement gap, and school safety.” Speakers will include DOE Chancellor Richard Carranza; state Senators John Liu, Shelley Mayer, and Toby Ann Stavisky; Council Members Donovan Richards and Mark Treyger; Assembly Member Michael Benedetto; and many others.
At 10 a.m. Thursday, the NYC Campaign Finance Board will hold a board meeting.
At 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Riders Alliance will hold a happy hour for better transit, with state Senator Michael Gianaris.
Friday, August 16
Mayor de Blasio may make his weekly appearance on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show at 10 a.m. Friday.
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Have events or topics for us to include in an upcoming Week Ahead in New York Politics? E-mail Gotham Gazette executive editor Ben Max any time: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (please use "For Week Ahead" as email subject).
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by Joey Fox and Ben Max
@GothamGazette
(photo: @arenasummit)
In last year’s state elections, several progressive first-time candidates emerged as Democratic primary challengers to members of the State Senate’s Independent Democratic Conference, an erstwhile bloc of more moderate Democrats who had long been seen as a roadblock to reform on many fronts. Most of the IDC challengers were successful and some of their campaigns were aided in part by Arena, a group that launched after the 2016 presidential election and now aims to train the next generation of Democratic campaign staff.
For three days this week, Arena -- a national group launched by veterans of the Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigns, among others -- will bring its training academy to New York City to impart lessons on everything from campaign management and communications to finance and candidate preparation. A sign of Arena’s growing clout and the value of the training it is offering, the session is drawing several likely mayoral candidates and other high-profile political figures.
“Arena was started right after Trump was elected, and our mission is to lower the barriers to entry in politics,” said Ravi Gupta, co-founder and managing partner. “So we want to make politics accessible for everyday people to get involved, whether that's running for office or working on campaigns or volunteering.”
Starting on Thursday, Arena will hold three days of training sessions in campaign management and communication at Convene, an event space in Downtown Manhattan.
The event will be headlined by former Secretary of State and Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, and attended by at least three likely 2021 mayoral candidates – Comptroller Scott Stringer, City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, and Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams. Arena has been talking with all three campaigns about possibly hiring its academy graduates and expects to send staffers to other potential mayoral contenders as well, not to mention campaigns for a variety of other races in the 2020 and 2021 election cycles.
Also in attendance on Thursday will be Emily’s List Vice President Christina Reynolds, Manhattan District Attorney candidate Alvin Bragg, recent Queens District Attorney candidate Tiffany Cabán, and VoteMama Founder and former NY-2 congressional candidate Liuba Grechen Shirley.
The organization, which is a 501c(4) and makes electoral endorsements, is also launching a New York-focused project called “Five Borough Future,” which aims to promote government reform and city autonomy through advocacy, grassroots movements, and electoral campaigns. The academy is one part of the initiative, along with a policy platform and a six-month fellowship program for activists, non-profit leaders and potential candidates. Arena has a slew of prominent Democratic operatives and former officials on its board, including veterans of the Obama, Clinton and Sanders campaigns, but also former Maryland Governor Martin O’ Malley, former Congressional candidate Suraj Patel, and DNC director of states Allison Zelman.
In 2018, the organization supported 37 candidates across the country – all but one were first-time contenders. Of those, 35 won their primaries and 21 won in the general election, according to Arena.
In New York, the group worked on nine campaigns, seven of which were successful, including the campaigns of now Congressional Reps. Antonio Delgado and Max Rose, State Assemblymember Catalina Cruz, and State Senators Alessandra Biaggi, Jessica Ramos, and Zellnor Myrie, all of whom defeated former IDC Senators. “We helped lead that coordinated effort with the Working Families Party, as well as we helped recruit some of them into the race like Alessandra Biaggi, for example,” Gupta said.
“At the end of 2018, we were encouraged by the results,” he continued, “But we also wanted to make sure we knew what obstacles our candidates face, whether they won or lost. And so we did a big debrief and found out that the vast majority of candidates, winning and losing, that we worked with named some form of talent issue as their number one challenge.”
That prompted Arena to launch an effort to recruit, train, and support campaign staffers through the Arena Academy. The group aims to train at least 1,000 people in 2019, and will target another 5,000 with the launch of its online academy at the end of the year. They’ve already held training sessions in Iowa and South Carolina and nearly 500 people participated between the two events, they said.
The latest one in New York will train around 70 people to work on campaigns, followed by an event in Houston, Texas and another at a location to be determined. In total, the entire effort is expected to cost around $4.4 million, Gupta said. The funds come from both the group’s membership, roughly 2,244 as of May, private donations, and an affiliated political action committee, The Arena PAC. They also launched a joint fundraising effort with Swing Left and Run for Something, groups with similar missions.
“There have been training programs out there in the Democratic Party over the years, I think what makes us different is that, number one, we make it very accessible. The majority of people will come to our trainings are people of color and women,” Gupta said. The group provides scholarships, waives attendance fees for underrepresented individuals, and also pays for flights and hotel rooms for applicants to attend its seminars, he said.
“If there's like a bunch of boot camps out there for progressives, we’re more like the West Point,” he added, noting that Arena looks to train staffers for leadership positions, like campaign manager, deputy campaign manager, communications director, and so on. This week’s training in New York City is geared mainly toward upper level positions in campaign management and communications, and will feature the two tracks, with sessions on emerging trends in media, the role of a communications director, effective delegation, budget and cashflow, and more.
The group also intends to work around the traditional gatekeeping in campaigns which, Gupta insists, doesn’t make being in progressive politics an appealing career option.
“There's no transparency in the hiring processes. So it's usually word of mouth, ad hoc, which is bad for campaigns, because it takes a lot of time and they don't get a breadth of applications and applicants in diversity,” he said. “There's not a quick process and a standard process for hiring people, there's very low-quality training, and almost no ongoing mentorship. And then when people come off campaigns, there's no place for them to go or system for them to connect to, to find the next job. And so our academy solves some of those problems.”
Besides training, Arena will also launch a career platform on August 12 to connect staffers with campaigns, simultaneously lowering costs for campaigns to hire from a broader set of applicants. They’ve already placed staffers in campaigns for many of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, Gupta said.
“We would view this as a failure if we just closed up after this election, whether we won or lost our critical races in 2020,” he said. “Because one of the problems we're trying to solve is building institutional memory, building a long term system so that people who roll off these campaigns in 2020 find taking campaign work appealing and transparent and predictable.”
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
Note - this article has been updated to note that Arena's career platform will launch on August 12. It has not been launched already.
Note- this article has been updated to note an appearance by Hillary Clinton at the first day of the event.
Senator Gianaris with activists (photo: @SenGianaris)
August 7, 2019 - Max & Murphy Podcast: Senate Deputy Leader Gianaris on Gun Control, Queens Politics & More
State Senate Deputy Majority Leader Michael Gianaris of Queens joined the show to discuss gun control laws that have been passed in New York, what is ahead for state government in the next legislative session, Queens political dynamics including the result of the District Attorney primary, 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
(photo: the governor's office)
August 7, 2019 - Max & Murphy Podcast: State Prison Policy, Parole and Reentry Programming
Liz Gaynes of the Osborne Association joined the show to discuss state prison policy, including the controversial planned closing of a Manhattan facility, reentry programming, and parole laws.
Listen to the conversation and let us know what you think -- we're on Twitter @TweetBenMax and @JarrettMurphy. You can listen to the show through the embedded audio below or download the episode wherever you get your podcasts, under "Max & Murphy," and listen to Max & Murphy live on Wednesdays at 5 p.m. on WBAI radio, 99.5FM or wbai.org
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by Ben Max, Gotham Gazette
@tweetBenMax @GothamGazette
Gay
Mayor de Blasio (photo: Rob Bennett/Mayor Bill de Blasio
This is the third and final part of a three-part series on New York City's antiquated and unfair property tax system, its complications and inequities, the underway task of reforming it, and prospects for the future.
Read part one - Taking on the Difficult Task - here.
Read part two - Deep and Complex Inequities - here.
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When Mayor Bill de Blasio and Council Speaker Corey Johnson announced the creation of an advisory commission to come up with reforms to the city’s antiquated property tax system (much of which is controlled by state law), they said their focus would be on fairness while maintaining the city’s largest revenue stream.
The revenue from New York City property taxes was a whopping $27.8 billion last year, roughly a third of the city budget, and it helps fund everything from basic government administration and social services to the mayor’s signature initiatives like universal pre-kindergarten, including the salaries and benefits of hundreds of thousands of municipal workers.
Property owners see their taxes rise every year, squeezing nearly everyone -- though not evenly or fairly. Elected officials across the board have expressed interest in changing the system. But to make a more rational property tax system and still fund extensive city services at or near their current levels, officials will have to navigate the murky waters between the public interest and that of each individual taxpayer.
How skillfully that is done will dictate the political consequences that follow, and whether promised soon-to-be-proposed reforms to the property tax system actually have a chance to pass through the New York City Council and State Legislature.
‘A Substantial Constraint’
“One of the hard things about the whole property tax system: changing things is always going to impact someone else. If you move things for one tax class -- because we’re trying to stay revenue neutral -- it inevitably means changes for a different tax class,” Marcy Miranda, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office, told Gotham Gazette.
Some experts have asked why, if the commission’s purpose is to create a more fair and equitable system, is it constrained by the mandate to leave the city’s revenue untouched?
“It is definitely a substantial constraint. And I think that is being driven more by city fiscal concerns than it is by questions of how to structure the tax and what is the best tax,” Ana Champeny of Citizens Budget Commission told Gotham Gazette.
Roughly two-thirds of the city’s revenue comes from taxes, a little under half of which is property taxes. During a panel discussion about economic growth in New York City in May, former Commissioner of City Planning Carl Weisbrod said the city’s vast provision of social services and recent changes in federal tax policy mean, “increasingly, we are dependent on our own ability to generate revenue.”
Mark Shaw, co-chair of the city’s property tax commission, the initial recommendations from which are expected soon, views the revenue mandate as a gesture to those anxious about the prospect of reforming a system so integral to private and public life in New York.
“The veil of revenue neutrality over the debates for the commission is actually a way of making it clear to any of the interested parties of the public that this is not a back door way of trying to increase property taxes,” Shaw told Gotham Gazette.
But the mayor’s executive order establishing the commission, which reflected an agreement with the City Council, does not mention revenue neutrality, exactly. It only says the commission’s recommendations “shall not result in a reduction of revenue.”
The Frozen Tax Rate
State law sets the property tax classes, along with the assessment standards and growth caps, but the city -- the City Council with the mayor’s approval -- controls the tax rate. Since fiscal year 2009, the mayor (Bloomberg, then de Blasio) and City Council have agreed to keep the overall tax rate frozen. Because of very strong growth in the city’s real estate market, however, property taxes have continued to rise and generate more and more revenue.
This has allowed the city budget to grow significantly over the past two decades. Spending under Mayor Michael Bloomberg reportedly rose 31.6 percent above inflation during his three terms in office. Since de Blasio took office, the city budget has grown by more than $20 billion overall, up to the $92.8 billion expense budget for the current fiscal year.
“If the tax commission came up with reforms that adjusted the assessed values, the Council and the mayor could set a tax rate that didn’t have a revenue implication for the city, but it might raise the rate,” said Champeny of CBC.
Given how sensitive the subject of taxation is in New York City, raising the tax rate could come with political fallout. “Obviously that would be pretty unpopular if someone were to come in and make that change,” said Miranda from the mayor’s office.
The rates the city sets on the assessed value of the property in each class, known as the “class shares,” are supposed to adjust each year to reflect changes in the market but growth caps set by the state limit how much a class share can increase, according to Champeny. The city has the discretion to redistribute any increases above the cap to other tax classes.
In most years recently, the City Council has requested lawmakers in Albany lower the cap for homeowners, shifting increases onto commercial and utility properties. “The class shares protect [homeowners] slightly but also there’s been sort of this political choice by elected officials in the Council and the state Legislature -- and the mayor to some extent because they don’t oppose it -- to make sure that the levy growth does not fall too much on Class 1,” Champeny said, referring to one- to three-family homes.
“Each annual adjustment doesn’t necessarily shift a lot, but over ten, twenty years, it does accumulate,” she added.
Balancing the Equation
The purpose of the Advisory Commission on Property Tax Reform is to weigh all of these factors -- equity, rationality, what the state controls and what the city can do, the unintended consequences for owners and renters, transparency in the system -- and come up with recommendations for improvement. The result could be the kind of fundamental, planned restructuring of New York taxation that some had hoped would happen following the Hellerstein case in 1975; or piece-meal, band-aide solutions like the ones New York ended up with in the years after.
“We're going to...go at the heart of the property tax problem and have a commission, working closely with the Council, to try and reform fundamentally the property tax to be more fair for everyone,” Mayor de Blasio said in April 2018 when he released the executive budget that year.
In 1975, Judge Solomon Wachtler, writing the majority opinion, was concerned with the “remarkable powers of endurance” of the practices that prompted the Hellerstein case. Their survival depended largely on the machinations of politicians and officials servicing particular constituencies, factors “none of which are particularly commendable,” he noted in his decision. Over the years, those factors have multiplied and become more interconnected. Any changes of substance now will implicate the entire system, and any balance struck toward making it “more fair for everyone,” as de Blasio said, may not be what everyone wants.
This is the third and final part of a three-part series on New York City's antiquated and unfair property tax system. Read part one - Taking on the Difficult Task - here. Read part two - Deep and Complex Inequities - here.
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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
@GeringerSameth @GothamGazette
New York City Hall
What to watch for this week in New York politics:
New York and the country begin the weekend dealing with the devastating mass shootings over the weekend in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, which came after mass shootings the weekend before in Gilroy, California and here in Brownsville, Brooklyn. There was a vigil on Saturday in Brownsville to mark one week since that incident, and there will be a vigil Monday night at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn to pay respects to the victims of all four shootings and to call for change.
The week also begins with the city continuing to respond to the Friday news that an NYPD administrative judge has recommended to NYPD Commissioner James O'Neill that Offier Daniel Pantaleo, whose chokehold led to the 2014 death of Eric Garner on Staten Island, be fired from the police force. It will still take some time before O'Neill can issue his decision based on the judge's recommendation. After receiving a great deal of criticism over the course of recent days and weeks (and years), Mayor Bill de Blasio on Friday called the news a step toward justice. He did not explicitly indicate that he supports the recommendation for Pantaleo to be fired, still apparently trying to toe the line where he does not 'interfere' with due process for a city employee. Pantaleo and his attorney, with the support of his union, appear set to challenge his dismissal if O'Neill follows the judge's recommendation.
De Blasio was on the presidential campaign trail throughout the weekend and into Monday -- he was in Nevada, California, and Washington, D.C. -- and is scheduled to return to the city from D.C. on Monday.
Tuesday evening will be the annual National Night Out Against Crime, where local NYPD precincts coordinate with community groups and elected officials to put on neighborhood events, denounce crime, improve public safety, and increase goodwill between police officers and residents. National Night Out comes not only just after developments in the Pantaleo/Garner matter, but also after recent incidences where New Yorkers threw water on NYPD officers, which raised questions about police-community relations.
As is often the case this time of year, there are fewer events on the political calendar as the week begins than there often are throughout the rest of the year, but there are some to be aware of -- see our day-by-day rundown below -- as well as other issues to watch, such as how the mayor and others continue to deal with recent news about the prevalence of lead paint in city schools, transitions at NYCHA and the MTA, and more. And, we're still waiting for the final word on the Queens District Attorney Democratic primary, where Melinda Katz has been certified as the winner of the recount by 60 votes, but the Tiffany Cabán campaign is challenging the dismissal of more than 100 affidavit ballots. A judge will begin looking at about 30 of those ballots on Tuesday in Queens.
***Do you have events or topics for us to include in an upcoming Week Ahead in New York Politics?
e-mail Gotham Gazette editor Ben Max: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.***
The run of the week in detail:
Monday, August 5
At about 7:45 a.m. Monday, "Governor Cuomo is a Guest on Long Island News Radio with Jay Oliver."
Mayor de Blasio will be on NY1's Inside City Hall in the 7 and 11 p.m. hours on Monday evening.
On Monday at 9 a.m. in Manhattan, “U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand will deliver brief remarks and participate in a roundtable discussion hosted by Community Voices Heard (CVH) about Follow Black Women: A Survey for the Frontlines, a recent survey conducted by CVH which highlights the issues thousands of Black women across New York State care about most, including affordable housing, education, and criminal justice reform. Senator Gillibrand will be joined at the event by CVH Executive Director Afua Atta-Mensah, members of Community Voices Heard, Black women survey participants, and advocates.”
At 10 a.m. Monday at Rockefeller Center, "Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul Visits AT&T's Girls Who Code Camp Highlighting Importance of Closing Gender and Diversity Gaps in STEM Education and Workforce." At 2 p.m., "Hochul Visits AT&T and East Flatbush Inc's STEAM Intensive Camp Highlighting Importance of Closing Gender and Diversity Gaps in STEM Education and Workforce" in Brooklyn.
At 11 a.m. Monday, Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer will be among those who speak at the “groundbreaking for the 14th Street Tech Training Center.”
At 6 p.m. Monday, the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce will host the 2019 Building Brooklyn Awards, recognizing “new construction and renovation projects that enrich Brooklyn’s neighborhoods, and honor[ing] individuals who have made significant contributions that enhance business conditions and the economic climate of our borough.”
At 7 p.m. Monday in Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, there will be a vigil for the victims of the recent mass shootings in Gilroy, California, Brownsville, Brooklyn, El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams and Public Advocate Jumaane Williams will be among those who participate, along with civil rights attorney Norman Siegel, New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, Youth Over Guns, Gays Against Guns, clergy leaders, and others.
At 8 p.m. Monday in Central Park, City Council Speaker Corey Johnson will deliver remarks at Shakespeare in the Park Performance of “Coriolanus.”
Tuesday, August 6
Tuesday is the annual National Night Out Against Crime, “an annual community-building campaign that promotes police-community partnerships to help make our neighborhoods safer, more caring places to live.” There will be local events around the city and state, with members of law enforcement, many elected officials, and community members enjoying activities, music, food, and remarks about reducing crime.
On Tuesday in Queens, a judge will begin examining some uncounted affidavit ballots from the recount of the Queens District Attorney Democratic primary election.
At 10 a.m. Tuesday, the NYC Board of Standards and Appeals will hold a review session to discuss appeals and hearings from all five boroughs.
At 1 p.m. Tuesday at the City Council, the Subcommittee on Landmarks, Public Siting and Maritime Uses will meet to discuss three land use applications in Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan.
Wednesday, August 7
On Wednesday and Thursday, City Council Member Ydanis Rodriguez, chair of the Council transportation committee, and Council Speaker Corey Johnson are hosting “the Third Annual Riders Respond Transit Tour...Throughout the tour, volunteers and elected officials will ride the subway from 6:00am. - 6:00pm! Each day we will be surveying riders and discussing concerns about the status of the stations and the rideability.”
At 11 a.m. on Wednesday, Assembly Member Latoya Joyner and Bronx Legal Services will hold a hope & healing town hall on “how Bronx schools can address childhood trauma.”
On Wednesday afternoon, the Financial Control Board will meet in New York City. State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli is among those who will attend.
At 5 p.m. Wednesday, this week’s Max & Murphy show will air on WBAI radio, 99.5 FM or wbai.org, and will feature discussion of Mayor de Blasio’s presidential campaign, his record as mayor, and more.
Thursday, August 8
At the City Council on Thursday:
-At 10:45 a.m., the Subcommittee on Zoning and Franchises will meet to discuss two land use applications in Brooklyn.
-At 11 a.m., the Committee on Land Use will meet.
At 12 p.m. Thursday, the Staten Island Chamber of Commerce and the Staten Island Advance will jointly host the 2019 Police Officer of the Year Luncheon, with keynote speaker Police Commissioner James O’Neill.
At 6 p.m. Thursday, U.S. Representative Carolyn Maloney will hold a live telephone town hall.
Also at 6 p.m. Thursday, Queens Borough President Melinda Katz will host a Pakistan Independence Day celebration at Queens Borough Hall.
At 6:30 p.m. Thursday, the Brooklyn Historical Society will host Nappy Roots: A History of Black Hair, an event “weaving the tousled history, politics and culture of black hair in America.”
At 6:45 p.m. Thursday, Be Social Change will host Public Advocate Jumaane Williams for a fireside chat to discuss “his work as the Public Advocate and how you too can leverage this unique public office to have your voice heard.”
Friday, August 9 & the weekend
Mayor de Blasio may make his weekly appearance on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show on Friday at 10 a.m.
At 10 a.m. on Friday, the New York State Senate Joint Senate Task Force on Opioids, Addiction and Overdose Prevention will hold a public hearing “to hear from stakeholders on strategies for reducing overdoses, improving individual and community health, and addressing the harmful consequences of drug use.”
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Have events or topics for us to include in an upcoming Week Ahead in New York Politics? E-mail Gotham Gazette executive editor Ben Max any time: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (please use "For Week Ahead" as email subject).
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by Joey Fox and Ben Max
@GothamGazette
(photo: Edwin J. Torres/ Mayor's Office)
This is part two of a three-part series. Read part one - Taking on the Difficult Task - here. (Skip to part three - The City's Bottom Line - here.)
Elected officials and their critics alike have decried the complexity and inequality of the state’s property tax system. They say it is layered and non-transparent, and produces disproportionate tax burdens for various populations because of technical factors that are difficult for taxpayers to understand. These can lead owners of similarly valued properties in different parts of the city to pay drastically different annual property taxes.
The rising value of a homeowner’s property can belie the struggle they may face to stay afloat and keep their homes when property tax payments also climb. For those who own rental property, when the tax burden goes up it is often passed on to renters in the form of higher rents and fees on apartments that are not rent-regulated.
The Advisory Commission on Property Tax Reform was emplaneled by Mayor Bill de Blasio and City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, both Democrats, in 2018 to examine these issues and develop recommendations to reform the system, which could implicate both city and state policy, without reducing the city’s largest revenue stream.
On the table are aspects like the way different properties are classified and assessed by the state, how statutory restrictions on tax rate growth interact with market forces, and how the city sets the tax rate. These factors have had consequences for communities of color, low-income New Yorkers, seniors, and residents in some, but not all, boroughs.
As it was in 1981, when the current system was wrought out of practices that extend to the early days of the American republic, the issue today is a political flashpoint. Property taxation affects every resident in the state, and members from nearly every interest group and political party have called for its overhaul. But some of the most outspoken critics of the system, especially certain homeowners who see their taxes go up every year, may end up responsible for an even greater share of the levy if changes are made.
Four decades ago, in Hellerstein v. Assessor, Islip, the courts found New York’s property value assessment methods, which had been in practice for roughly 200 years, to be in violation of state law. Homes were being assessed with great variability on a fraction of their sales price, while business owners were footing a much larger bill for their commercial properties. Rather than adjusting practices to assess the full value of homes, lawmakers in Albany changed the rules to allow government assessors to continue favoring certain types of property over others.
Reflecting the old order, the current system divides properties into four classes, each to be assessed and taxed differently. Statutory caps are in place to ensure property taxes payments remain stable even if market values jump. To help account for variables like income, location, and the condition of housing, tax abatements and rebates are available. As a result of the classification regime’s disparate assessment methods, discrepancies exist among residential properties, with cooperatives and condominiums greatly undervalued for tax purposes compared to other homes despite at times being worth far more.
One- to three-family homes are in Class 1 and are assessed based on comparable sales prices; in Class 2, apartment buildings, as well as co-ops and condos, are taxed based on a market value derived from the annual income earned in rent by similar, nearby units, which is usually lower than the market value based on sales price, according to property tax experts. Even within the classes, statutory caps on assessed value growth have led, more recently, to uneven tax burdens across the five boroughs because of the way the housing market has exploded in some neighborhoods more than others.
An Unfair System
Attempts have been made to address property tax inequities in New York City since the current system was adopted nearly 40 years ago, but they have failed to produce transformative results. The most notable review was led by Mayor David Dinkins in 1993.
Dinkins, a Democrat, empaneled a commission to study the issue, which released a report just days before his term ended. Its most salient recommendation was to bring the treatment of co-ops and condos closer to Class 1 properties, but years of negotiations under his Republican successor, Rudy Giuliani, led only to a temporary tax abatement for apartment owners, according to an Independent Budget Office report. (A piece in the New York Times from 1994 provides an alternative account in which the Dinkins commission made no recommendations because it could not come to a “consensus on objectives,” using the words of one of the commissioners.)
The issue has become a recurring political motif. De Blasio discussed it during his first campaign for mayor and a year later, in 2014, his Commissioner of Finance, Jacques Jiha, said he would undertake a comprehensive analysis before making recommendations to the state for change. Yet it appears the Advisory Commission empaneled in 2018 is conducting the first such review of the mayor’s tenure.
“Fairness” is at the core of the commission’s mission, largely a response to a number of related policy consequences that have become apparent over the years.
>>Property Tax Classes
Legislators in 1981 created a system that would benefit small home owners by placing them in Class 1, maintaining the relatively low assessment rates they had enjoyed for so long, while leaving commercial properties, including apartment buildings, in Class 2 with a larger share of the levy.
At the time, co-op conversions, which started in New York City in the 1920s, had begun to take place at a very rapid rate; between 1978 and 1988, roughly 242,000 rental apartments in more than 3,000 buildings had been turned into tenant-owned cooperatives, according to a New York Times report published in 1988. In order to prevent assessors from considering the value of apartments if they were to be converted, lawmakers placed co-ops and condos into Class 2 and inserted language into the state law requiring they be assessed on the net income they would earn as rentals, as opposed to their sales value.
More recently, however, in an era of acute gentrification and concentrated market value growth, the low rates on co-ops and condos has become a new variation on the unequal assessment theme that sparked the Hellerstein case. As the price of homes in booming neighborhoods has skyrocketed, taxes assessed on co-ops and condos have become an increasingly smaller proportion of their sales value.
Tax Equity Now New York, a coalition of homeowners, renters, and business groups, led by former city Department of Finance Commissioner Martha Stark, filed a lawsuit in 2017 challenging the state laws that lead to disproportionate rent burden. The group claims the neighborhoods with the greatest burdens are less affluent and more likely to be the home of large populations of people of color.
By state law, taxes for homes in Class 1 are assessed on 6 percent of what assessors believe to be their market value, while co-ops and condos in Class 2 are assessed at a rate of 45 percent of market value based on their potential rental income. But the way the city Department of Finance (which is responsible for calculating market value based on formulas set by the state) arrives at that value for the two property types is not consistent.
For Class 2, city finance officials compare co-op values to the income of nearby rental properties, vastly undervaluing what the property would be worth if sold. Because of the age and location of many co-ops, their taxes are often assessed based on comparisons to rent-regulated buildings, exacerbating the value discrepancy.
Ana Champeny of Citizens Budget Commission (CBC), the fiscal watchdog, gave an example: “You look at the value that [Department of Finance] determined based on state law and it’ll be something like...$600,000, but when you look at how much the person paid when they bought that unit, they would have paid something like $3 million.”
To help address this inequity, CBC argued when it testified before the Advisory Commission in November, simply put condos and co-ops in Class 1 where they belong, and assess them based on sales prices. This would also help New Yorkers understand the system’s complex arithmetic and the outcomes it produces. Because now-distant beginnings created the fractional assessment practices established by the property classification system, the particular tax-related burdens New Yorkers face often feel arbitrary.
“I think that creates a lot more mistrust, too, in the system. Which is why we said you really should put all these homes into one class and you should value them based on sales,” Champeny told Gotham Gazette.
There were a number of bills in the Legislature related to condos and co-ops that lawmakers were apprehensive about taking up because of uncertainty about changes to the classification system, according to Assemblymember Galef.
“We want to see where the commission comes out on that one so those bills won’t be addressed this year,” Galef told Gotham Gazette in May before the legislative session ended. (The Legislature passed, and the governor has yet to sign, a two-year extension of a property tax abatement program for co-ops and condos, but nothing to address the structure of the real property class system.)
When everyone is a stakeholder, though, upsetting the long held fractional assessments would mean some people will have to pay more, and that is likely to include the high value co-ops and condos now enjoying low rates. As in the past, this will inevitably be a difficult pill to swallow. In a letter to the Advisory Commission in May, City Council Members Steven Matteo, Joe Borelli, and Justin Brannan -- who represent parts of southern Brooklyn and Staten Island -- urged, “First, do no harm to Class 1 and 2 homeowners.”
Responding to a co-op owner who worries about rising taxes year after year, Mayor de Blasio said, “I want to be...really honest with everyone that we cannot end up with a system that reduces our revenue substantially, unless people want to see a change in the services provided by city.”
>>Renters
For residents, the weight of New York’s property classification system is harder to bear the further you are away from the mitigating effects of ownership, which can put serious pressure on renters who can’t cash in or pass on tax burdens to tenants. In a class-action lawsuit filed in 2014 on behalf of African-American and Hispanic renters, the real estate law firm Newman Ferrara claimed that the way the state classifies different types of property has resulted in a disproportionate tax burden being passed on to renters in large residential buildings.
According to a CBC analysis, as of December 2016 one- to three-family homes made up roughly 48 percent of the total market value of New York City property, but were taxed only about 15 percent of the total levy. By contrast, Class 2 properties -- apartment buildings, co-ops, and condos -- made up approximately 25 percent of the market, but were taxed significantly more: nearly 38 percent of the total.
Most of that burden falls on apartment buildings because owners of co-ops and condos often pay such a small percentage of their property value in taxes. To maintain their profit margin, landlords often redistribute the tax burden to tenants (the same is true for commercial tenants, which can put a strain on small business). The 2014 suit alleged, since large apartment buildings are predominantly occupied by African-American and Hispanic tenants, the uneven tax burden they experience is a violation of the Fair Housing Act.
The property tax burden on one- to three-family home owners can be mitigated by the lower share they pay on the property’s value; the tax burden on co-ops and condos is not great because they are assessed on a fraction of their sales price; and much of the tax burden of big landlords can be passed on to tenants. But renters, who make up two-thirds of all occupied units, according to 2017 U.S. Census data, have no outlet to spread their burden.
(Homeowners who pay a significant portion of their income in property taxes and cannot immediately benefit from the rising value of their homes without selling them, are also put in a precarious situation as taxes rise annually and the costs of maintaining aging housing stack up. The city’s Third Party Transfer program, which seizes buildings from landlords who are behind on taxes and other fees, has recently come under fire for taking the homes of lower-income, minority property owners.)
The 2014 Newman Ferrara suit was dismissed by a state Supreme Court, which rejected the notion that property taxes could be shared more equitably among the classes as “speculative.”
Short of revamping the city’s entire property tax system, the push to improve conditions for many tenants was a major point of contention in Albany this year, as state rent regulations affecting the city and surrounding suburbs approached their expiration date in June. A concerted push under the new Democratic governing reality resulted in a landmark package of tenant reforms aimed at strengthening protections and closing loopholes in rent regulations like reforming the major capital improvement program, ending vacancy decontrol, and eliminating the vacancy bonus, among others. These regulations affect roughly 2 million tenants in 1 million apartments.
“We made a commitment that the new Senate Democratic Majority would help pass the strongest tenant protections in history,” said Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins in a statement after the package passed both houses of the Legislature. “The legislation we passed today achieves that commitment and will help millions of New Yorkers throughout our state.”
>>Income
While statutory caps were put in place to keep homeowners’ property taxes from rising too quickly, they have still tended to outpace the growth in household incomes, creating a disparity in tax burden across income levels. A report by the city Comptroller’s Office from September found that between 2005 and 2016 annual property tax revenue grew an average of 6.4 percent a year, while the household incomes of small home, co-op and condo owners rose only 2 percent per year. As a result, the share of income that goes to pay property taxes on those types of homes has risen significantly and is most pronounced among the lowest earners.
The comptroller’s report shows that households making less than $50,000 -- largely retirees whose incomes had been higher when the homes were purchased -- had property tax payments increase from 6.6 percent of household income in 2005 to nearly 13 percent in 2016 (the study does not take into account social security earnings and other non-taxable income for seniors, meaning its findings for this group may be higher than seniors’ true property tax burdens).
“For households at this income level, where there is little or no discretionary income, these increases impose significant constraints and sacrifices on household budgets,” the report reads. By contrast, homeowners with income between $250,000 and $500,000 paid only 2.9 percent of their income in property taxes.
Some advocates have proposed what are known as “circuit breakers” to deal with property tax burdens on lower-income New Yorkers.
A circuit breaker essentially provides a tax rebate for lower-income property owners by reducing state income taxes if property taxes exceed a certain proportion of income, or simply by capping property taxes as a percentage of income. Hellerstein was a proponent of implementing circuit breakers, as was Governor Carey, who included them in his own 1981 proposal, which failed. In November, the CBC testified about the benefits of circuit breakers before the city’s Advisory Commission.
But mechanisms like circuit breakers, which create indirect relief through income tax reductions -- as well as various other kinds of exemptions, abatements, and rate limitations -- when piled on to triage the discrete consequences of New York’s property tax system (exacerbated by the city’s complex housing portfolio), also contribute to the opacity of the system -- one of the main problems the Commission aims to address.
“Homestead exemptions, or elderly or disabled or veterans exemptions...tax abatements and rate limitations and assessment limitations and assessment increase limitations -- it becomes a very complex system and ultimately non-transparent,” John Anderson of the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy noted before the Advisory Commission in February.
But exemptions and other forms of relief are popular among property owners in distress and are something that can be enacted by the city, making them attractive to local politicians trying to court voters. (Borelli introduced a bill to the City Council in 2018 that would give a tax exemption to veterans of Cold War conflicts.)
Disparities exist despite tax credits and other programs intended to ease the burden on lower-income New Yorkers, and they are likely to get worse.
The increase in tax burden identified in the Comptroller’s report was tempered by the rising value of property assets and declining interest rates over the past 20 years, which kept mortgage payments low, according to its authors. But the report notes interest and mortgage payments have begun to rise while property value growth has subsided in many neighborhoods, and phase-ins on co-ops and condos (like statutory caps on small homes) mean that property taxes can continue to rise even after the market stabilizes.
Changes in state and local tax deductions from Washington, D.C. last year mean taxpayers who itemize their deductions may no longer be able to deduct the amount of their property taxes from their federal taxes.
>>Geography
Last September, Citizens Budget Commission released an analysis showing that homeowners on Staten Island and in the Bronx have a higher effective tax rate than the rest of the city, meaning they pay a higher percentage of their property’s market value in taxes despite owning homes that are worth less.
This, the report notes, is the result of statutory caps set in state law on the rate by which assessed values can grow. There are different caps for different categories of property; for small homes the cap is set at 6 percent annually, or 20 percent over five years.
The growth rate cap, intended to insulate homeowners experiencing rapid market growth from dramatic property tax increases, has the effect of shifting the tax burden from booming neighborhoods to ones with more stable housing markets, regardless of the overall value of the homes. The CBC analysis finds only 5 percent of the city’s single-family homes are assessed at the 6 percent target ratio because the caps keep most assessments lower. But Staten Island and Bronx homeowners do not seem to be the beneficiaries of this dynamic.
Council Members Borelli and Matteo, who represent districts on Staten Island, in a 2016 press release said, “Staten Islander’s [sic] on average pay [property taxes on] 98.5% of their actual market values, while average Brooklyn and Manhattan class-1 homeowners pay 88.5% and 87.2% respectively.”
Politicians from Staten Island have been among the most vocal proponents of property tax reform. The borough has a large aging population on fixed income and roughly 70 percent of residents own their homes, according to Census data.
In 2016 Borelli and Matteo, both Republicans, called for a bipartisan commission to look at the economic burdens on one- and two-family homes, including the caps issue. They also called for the Department of Finance to use actual assessors, not statistical models, in order to account for a property’s actual condition (on Staten Island only a tenth of homes were built in the last 20 years). Assembly Member Nicole Malliotakis, also a Republican, joined Borelli in calling for a property tax commission when she ran for mayor against de Blasio in 2017. (Property tax reform and relief was also a central pillar of Republican gubernatorial candidate and Dutchess County Executive Marc Molinaro’s 2018 campaign against Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who this year pushed through a permanent 2 percent cap on annual property tax growth, which applies everywhere outside New York City.)
To address the tax burden inequities, Borelli has called for the Legislature to at least change the law so that caps reset when a house changes hands. Borelli was the prime sponsor of a resolution, co-sponsored by 13 others in the 51-seat Council, calling for the change in January 2018, but it has not been adopted.
He repeated the proposal to the Advisory Commission in September, saying, “The cap is attached to the property, not the owner, and the result creates vast disparities between the city’s wealthy and middle-class homeowners, and among wealthy homeowners themselves depending on when their homes were built and the characteristics of the market.”
>>Race
Tax Equity Now New York, the coalition led by former city finance commissioner Martha Stark, has highlighted some of these inequities in its lawsuit filed against the city and state in 2017. The lawsuit, filed after long-running frustration with elected officials’ apparent unwillingness to act on property tax reform, alleges New York’s property tax system has a disproportionate negative impact on homeowners and renters in less affluent neighborhoods with large populations of people of color.
In a study conducted by the group, higher tax burdens, especially those identified in the Citizens Budget Commission analysis, were shown to have a disproportionate impact on neighborhoods where racial minorities make up a majority of the population.
At the crux of the issue is the claim that property tax assessments have not reflected true market values, resulting in neighborhoods predominantly of color being assessed 19 percent more than predominantly white ones, the group alleges. Tax Equity Now is seeking changes to the law, not compensation, but has not specified what those changes should be. The suit survived the city’s motion to dismiss in September but is now stayed, pending appeal.
This is part two of a three-part series. Read part three - The City's Bottom Line - here. (Find part one - Taking on the Difficult Task - here.)
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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
@GeringerSameth @GothamGazette
Mayor de Blasio shovels snow outside one of his two Brooklyn houses (photo: Rob Bennett/Mayor's Office)
This is part one of a three-part series. Skip to part two - Deep and Complex Inequities - here.
In May 2018, after years of criticism that New York City’s property tax system lacks equity, Mayor Bill de Blasio and City Council Speaker Corey Johnson announced they would empanel a commission of “blue chip” experts to explore the issue. Its tasks are to examine everything from the way different property values are assessed to relief for vulnerable homeowners, solicit input from the public and specialists, and make recommendations for reform.
Because of the laws and practices governing New York property taxes, the recommendations will inevitably include some changes that can be enacted by the city and others that would require action in Albany, both of which would upset a longstanding and largely unchallenged system. Even coming up with recommendations has proven fraught.
The commission was tasked with an important constraint: make recommendations to overhaul a complicated, decades-old tax system without changing the city’s bottom line -- in other words, to make sure that a new property tax system would continue to provide city government with its single largest revenue stream, good for roughly $27.8 billion last fiscal year.
More than a year later, with the 2019 legislative session in Albany well over, the panel has conducted ten public hearings and meetings but has produced no report nor indicated what consensus is emerging on a path forward. Asked about it repeatedly, de Blasio, who was criticized for punting on the issue until his second and final term, has said he expects recommendations by the end of this year.
The property tax system impacts homeowners and renters, landlords and developers -- virtually every one of the city’s 8.5 million residents. Problems with the system are myriad in New York, where real estate dominates and nearly a third of the city’s annual revenue comes from real property levies.
Critics have contended that the property tax system is overly complex and opaque, that property assessments are not reflective of true market values, and that classifications and caps aimed at mitigating rapid property tax increases contribute to disproportionate tax burdens across many populations.
Twelve months before the commission was announced, a coalition led by a former city finance commissioner filed a lawsuit alleging the Byzantine tax structure creates vast inequities and that those disparities are felt most severely by low-income New Yorkers and people of color.
One of the central problems is the vast under-assessment of many owner-occupied cooperatives and condominiums, which have experienced sweeping growth in property values over the past two decades, but are taxed instead based not on their sales value but on the much lower income they would likely make if they were rentals. Homeowners, in general, pay a lower effective tax rate (taxes as a percent of sales prices) than commercial and residential rental property owners, according to the Citizens Budget Commission, a fiscal watchdog.
Another problem is the labyrinth of abatements, rebates, caps, and phase-ins that obscure the causes of rising property taxes, making them hard for residents to trace and understand.
As property values ratchet up in gentrifying neighborhoods, so do the taxes assessed on them, which can put a strain on lower-, middle-, and fixed-income homeowners struggling to keep up with bills and maintenance fees. At the same time, homeowners in places with slower real estate market growth, like Staten Island and the Bronx, see their taxes rise higher relative to home sales prices because of caps that keep tax hikes low when the housing market unexpectedly leaps.
The symptoms of unequal assessment and taxation land harder on different populations of New Yorkers. The coalition behind the lawsuit says these factors lead to higher tax assessments in communities of color than in majority-white neighborhoods. Others over the years have asserted that when landlords’ tax burdens increase, they may be passed on to tenants in the form of higher rent, especially in large apartment buildings with sizable black and Latino populations, critics say.
The most expensive home sold in United States history is a Midtown Manhattan condo that went for $238 million earlier this year to Ken Griffin, the hedge fund manager ranked the 45th richest American by Forbes. Griffin pays taxes on a property valuation of just $9.4 million, or .22 percent of the sales price, according to the Wall Street Journal. By contrast, the owner of a two-family home in the northeast Bronx that sold for $439,000 in the most recent fiscal year pays 1.16 percent of the price tag in property taxes, according to an Independent Budget Office analysis provided to Gotham Gazette.
Yet the owners of both these types of homes -- owned by some of the wealthiest New Yorkers, as well as lower- and middle-income residents -- often say they feel pressure from rising property taxes year after year and are seeking relief. One of the barriers to property tax reform is that virtually all homeowners, whether they are likely under-assessed or not, believe they are getting squeezed by property taxes, which for small homes rose an average of 7.7 percent annually between 2001 and 2017, according to a Citizens Budget Commission analysis. (New York City has been repeatedly exempted from a state cap of 2 percent on annual property tax growth that applies everywhere else.)
There is broad agreement that the New York City property tax system produces inequality, that it hurts a wide range of communities from senior homeowners to renters of color to (some) outer-borough residents. Democrats, Republicans, and others across the political spectrum have called for change. But while the debate over the city’s property taxes crosses partisan lines, efforts to make an unequal system more equal means upsetting some stakeholders.
The complexities in the system have cut out a difficult task for members of the commission launched by de Blasio and Johnson, commissioners who were originally given only a year to produce results. But, as with other attempts to rethink the city’s relationship to its most essential resources, the task of unpacking the property tax system reveals a tangle of practical and political factors that have led to the status quo and make change so challenging.
Hope quickly faded that the commission would put forth recommendations to be taken up before the June end of this year’s state legislative session. During a May interview, Marc V. Shaw, one of two commission co-chairs, told Gotham Gazette that for lawmakers to deal with complicated concepts at the end of the legislative session, “there just would not be time...even if we were prepared. But we haven’t reached the point of making even the recommendations. We’re still sort of in an analysis phase.”
A Difficult Task
“I think all of us that have been working on the commission, knew from the beginning that that was a time schedule that was going to be pretty...difficult to attain...so from our perspective we’re looking at trying to put together a series of recommendations to be available for discussion and debate in the next legislative session,” Shaw said in May. Legislators will return to Albany in January, but the mayor and City Council can evaluate the commission’s work throughout the rest of this year, pending a report.
Shaw, a former first deputy mayor under Michael Bloomberg, is the interim chief operating officer for CUNY. He has been the Advisory Commission’s single (co-)chair since its other, Vicki Been, stepped down when she was appointed Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development in April. The body is made up of fiscal policy experts, business leaders, and city planning specialists, almost all of whom have served in city government in the past.
Spokespeople for both the mayor and City Council told Gotham Gazette the Advisory Commission is now planning to release a preliminary report in the coming months and hold another round of public hearings in the fall to solicit feedback. In a July 19 WNYC radio interview, Mayor de Blasio said the commission would produce a final report by the end of the calendar year, in time to be taken up in the next state legislative session.
City Council Member Keith Powers, a Democrat who represents a Manhattan district with a mix of property, is concerned the timeline doesn’t allow for much flexibility to work in Albany’s tight calendar. The timeline “puts you rolling right into January’s legislative session,” and just before state budget negotiations begin, he told Gotham Gazette. “You just may lose a little steam if you don’t have a bill early next year, and you know agencies miss deadlines all the time.”
In the meantime, the Legislature is waiting to hear from the commission. “It just kept coming up where we may be modifying some bills, or not doing some bills, because of the commission and not knowing what their positions are going to be,” Sandy Galef, chair of the Assembly’s real property tax committee, told Gotham Gazette at the end of May. “So yes, I would say it’s holding back some ideas.”
It appears important that the city has its ducks in a row before the January to June state session begins, giving a report and decisions by the mayor and Council enough time to work their way through Albany’s political corridors. Complicating matters further is the fact that 2020 is an election year for the entire state Legislature. Albany lawmakers sometimes try to get around dealing with especially thorny issues in conspicuous ways by packing them into state budget bills, which are due by the April 1 start of the new fiscal year.
Many of the reforms will focus on the state Real Property Tax Law, which sets standards for property tax assessment, among other things, and will require the state Legislature and governor to act. Once the commission produces its final report and city leaders make their opinions known, proposals will have to be negotiated in Albany, which in the past has proven fatal to serious property tax reform.
“We’re involved but at this point I view it as local home rule,” Galef said in May before the legislative session ended. Much if not all of what the city will ask of the state will come through the City Council, even if some of it is through non-binding measures.
Some tax programs were set to expire this year, like tax relief for property owners who install green roofs, which the Legislature extended and the governor signed notwithstanding the city property tax commission’s progress. “Even if the commission does the report at the end of the year, by the time they get authority from the state, there may be a lot of time in between,” Galef said.
That prospect does not sit well with Powers. “I think that any commission or body that’s working on this needs to understand that there are real people who are waiting for this relief,” he said, noting he has heard from constituents who are anticipating the commission’s recommendations.
The Status Quo
The complexities the commission is now grappling with are the result of a system with antique origins, one which has not been comprehensively updated and seldom reviewed over the past four decades. New York State’s current property tax apparatus is the outcome of a judicial ruling that shook up the prior system in the mid-1970s, and subsequent legislative action that mostly put it back into place in the early ‘80s.
In 1975, the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest tribunal, sided in favor of Jerome Hellerstein, an Upper West Side lawyer representing his wife, Pauline, who had sued the Town of Islip for assessing the property value of the family’s Fire Island vacation home -- and every other property on its roll -- at only a fraction of its market value, in violation of state statute (and, apparently, in their own interests). The law, at the time section 306 of the Real Property Tax Law, stated, “All real property in each assessing unit shall be assessed at the full value thereof.”
The Hellerstein Fire Island home (image courtesy of Walter Hellerstein)
For nearly 200 years prior, however, property taxes for homeowners in New York State were assessed on only a fraction of the “full value,” based on what assessors “deemed proper,” “not ‘according to their best information and belief, of its value,’ ‘but according to the usual way of assessing,’” an 1852 Court of Appeals decision reads. The decision, in 1852, noted, “the usual method is to estimate property at less than half its value.”
The discretion given to assessors meant commercial and apartment building owners in 1975 paid taxes on a much larger fraction of the market value of their property than homeowners. According to an account published by the city’s Independent Budget Office, reports at the time of the Hellerstein court decision found even the tax burden from similar homes in different neighborhoods could vary, with homeowners in New York City’s lower-income communities paying more than homeowners in more affluent ones.
The Hellerstein decision upended centuries of property tax assessment practices and sent New York’s political world into a spin. For six years, officials in Albany battled over the implications of the decision with some, like Democratic Assembly Speaker Stanley Fink, arguing for the fractional assessment practice to be codified into law, fearing the effects homeowners would feel if their property taxes were to rise rapidly.
There was panic that “fiscal chaos” would ensue if wholesale changes were made to the way the properties of people and businesses were assessed across the board, according to Judge Solomon Wachtler who wrote the majority opinion in the Hellerstein case. A report from the New York Times during that period quotes Edwin Margolis, counsel to the Assembly majority, saying, “The goal is not to shift the burden from residential to industrial or commercial, but simply to keep the status quo.”
The Legislature achieved that goal in 1981 after overriding a veto by Governor Hugh Carey, a Democrat. Instead of meaningfully changing assessment practices, the new legislation removed the “full value” language from the law and established a system in New York City that separated properties into four different categories, each to be taxed on a different portion of the full market value, mirroring the de facto practices assessors had been using all along.
The system placed one- to three-family homes into Class 1; apartment buildings, co-ops, and condos into Class 2; utilities into Class 3; and commercial properties into Class 4.
“The law was set up in such a way that each class of property would continue to pay roughly the same share of the levy” as they did at the time the law was passed, according to Ana Champeny, a property tax expert at the Citizens Budget Commission.
This “is the property tax system that we essentially currently operate under,” said Shaw, the commission chair. “That just gives you a sense that it’s always been a complicated system from the beginning.”
Before the 1981 law codified the current system, a number of other proposals had been floated and a bipartisan commission was even set up, the Temporary State Commission on the Real Property Tax, to review the state’s practices. That commission suggested that as an alternative to moving toward assessment by class, the state could mitigate the shift in tax burden from businesses to homeowners by implementing homeowner assistance programs.
But the political might of homeowners won out over the interests of commercial property owners, as well as over the will of the governor and a sizable minority in the Assembly. As part of the 1981 legislation, lawmakers enacted caps on the amount assessments could increase annually and over a five-year period, further protecting homeowners against rapid rises in property taxes in the event they be more accurately assessed going forward.
The resulting system, in a nutshell, is one where one- to three-family homes, which are more often occupied by their owner, are assessed based on the comparable sales prices of the property, while commercial and rental properties are assessed based on the income those businesses could generate.
One catch to this, which has been a recurring sticking point in perennial calls for property tax equity, is that co-ops and condos like Griffin’s are assessed on the income that would be made if they were rental apartments, rather than the sales prices of owner-occupied homes most observers say they more closely resemble. Another has been the caps on how much the assessed value of a home can increase, which more recently has led to owners of homes in booming neighborhoods paying relatively low property taxes compared to other homeowners in more economically stagnant parts of the city.
“What we’re facing is looking at how to do a reset of the property tax, given all of those problems, to make it a fairer system now,” said Shaw.
This is part one of a three-part series on the property tax system in New York City and potential for changes to it that may be on the horizon. Read part two - Deep and Complex Inequities - here.
***
by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
@GeringerSameth @GothamGazette
Chirlane McCray on Rikers Island (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)
A rising number of 911 calls to report emotionally disturbed persons, several fatal encounters between police officers and people with serious mental illness, and an increasing percentage of seriously mentally ill people among those detained in city jails have all raised questions about how New York City and State provide care for those suffering from the most serious mental illnesses.
These questions and concerns don’t have easy answers. The city’s public hospital system, NYC Health + Hospitals; the mayor’s mental health care roadmap, ThriveNYC; services from the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene; treatment within the city Department of Correction; private clinics; mental health shelters; and more combine to create a complex and stratified framework for treating those with a serious mental illness (SMI).
For some, much of what is at times called a crisis of treatment for those with serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia can be traced to the trend whereby the state closed down psychiatric hospitals with many thousands of inpatient beds while requisite treatment systems were not put into place to help people who would no longer be institutionalized, many of them cycling through the criminal justice system and inappropriately receiving their best mental health care while in jail.
There is insufficient use of mandatory outpatient treatment, some critics of the city and state say, with significant recent criticism also aimed at Mayor Bill de Blasio and First Lady Chirlane McCray over how resources have been allocated in their signature ThriveNYC program. Meanwhile, others have focused on questioning that police officers with guns are often first responders to people experiencing a serious mental health crisis, and those critics have been successful to some extent in getting protocols changed, though they say there is clearly more to do.
Dr. Mitchell Katz, president and CEO of NYC Health + Hospitals, says he’s troubled by the gaps in treatment and looking for new answers that would require the city and state to work together.
“The problem with the current mental health system, from my point of view, is for people with serious mental illness, the people we most worry about, the people we sometimes see on the subway or sitting on the bench, that right now there is nothing in between acute hospitalization and traditional outpatient care,” he said in April during an appearance hosted by the Citizens Budget Commission (CBC), a nonprofit think tank.
During an interview after the CBC event on the What’s The [Data] Point? podcast from CBC and Gotham Gazette, Katz was asked for more on his view about how to fill that gap.
He said H+H is working with the state on fixing a system that “drops off too precipitously.” Katz said he was in discussions to create programming to increase services for those who don’t qualify or don’t want to be admitted for inpatient care at a hospital but don’t receive enough treatment or care in the current outpatient system.
“We know in New York City there is a group of people with very serious mental health and addiction problems who rotate between the acute hospital, the shelter, and the jail,” he said on the podcast. “They don’t need to be locked up but let’s provide them a positive residential program that they want to stay at because it’s better than shelter and it’s better than the jail when we know that there are people who get arrested in order to be taken care of in jail.”
Over the course of months since Katz’s April comments, Gotham Gazette reached out multiple times to New York City Health + Hospitals and the Mayor’s Office but didn’t receive any further details on Katz’s vision for the program or whether there are ongoing discussions to make it a reality. State law and the state Office of Mental Health (OMH) have near full authority over the types of mental health treatment options allowed throughout the state, and are essential to the discussion, as Katz indicated.
In a statement to Gotham Gazette, a spokesperson for the New York State Office of Mental Health said, “as New York State continues to transform its mental health system to serve more individuals in the least-restrictive setting possible, we are expanding our reach through community-based services. These treatment models allow people to stay in the communities where they are best supported.”
Serious mental illnesses are not the types of mental illnesses and mental health issues that plague a little under 50 million Americans; according to the National Institute of Mental Health, about 4.5% of American adults have a serious mental illness -- meaning roughly 239,000 New Yorkers based on population statistics.
The three most common SMIs are schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression – less severe depression and anxiety are not categorized as serious mental illnesses although both the National Institute of Mental Health and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) agree there is some ambiguity in the cut-off line for what’s considered a “serious” mental illness. It’s also important to note that there are complications with the term “serious mental illness”; it is not a diagnosis itself, but a level of disability or a threshold for having a particularly significant and debilitating mental illness.
In asking how New York treats those estimated 239,000 New Yorkers, there are the unavoidable questions of where they can and should be treated, as Katz indicated. Back in the early 20th century, many people with SMIs were admitted into state psychiatric centers, more commonly known as “insane asylums”; however, over the past 80 years there has been a major shift in placing those with serious mentally illness into inpatient treatment.
In the 1950s, New York began deinstitutionalization – a shift from inpatient care (a patient admitted into a hospital full-time) to community-based outpatient care. According to a 2018 report by Manhattan Institute senior fellow Stephen Eide, the process of deinstitutionalization continues to this day but may have gone too far. According to the report, the city’s public hospital and health care system, NYC Health + Hospitals, is the leading provider of inpatient psychiatric care in the city with only 1,218 beds dedicated to adult inpatient psychiatric care, representing 48% of adult inpatient beds in the city. State psychiatric centers in the city account for 1,058 adult inpatient beds.
ThriveNYC, led by McCray, has come under fire on multiple fronts, including general money mismanagement and lack of clear outcome-tracking, but also for how it helps -- or doesn’t help -- those with serious mental illnesses. During a City Council budget and oversight hearing on March 26, McCray was pressed on the issue several times, including pointed questions about how much of the ThriveNYC budget is dedicated toward treatment for those with SMIs.
At one point she said, “All of Thrive is really focused on the seriously mentally ill,” but she and others who testified about the program eventually offered more clarity.
Thrive, which is called a “roadmap” and spends around $200 million per year on programming and coordination, does include services solely focused on those with serious mental illness, but its main objective is to plug gaps of already existing services run by H+H and the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH), while reorienting health care to always include mental health care and extend awareness and treatment into all of the city’s communities.
“Thrive is dedicated to prevention when possible, early prevention, treating people in crisis, and making sure people are stabilized when they do reach a crisis point,” McCray said. In arguing that all of Thrive is aimed at serious mental illness, she argued that untreated lower-level mental health issues can spiral.
Thrive, in the context of treating those with SMIs, is criticized for focusing more on mental health rather than mental illness; most of its 54 initiatives are focused on combating stigma, the negative factors that can lead to mental illness, and encouraging people to spot mental health issues in others and themselves, and to seek help.
In a May op-ed in the New York Post, DJ Jaffe, the executive director of Mental Illness Policy Org, and Eide of the Manhattan Institute called for the reallocation of ThriveNYC’s entire budget to focus on those with serious mental illness. They offered specific ways in which to redirect funding into different programs, such as enhancing existing crisis intervention teams, creating an office to exclusively manage the use of Kendra’s Law in New York CIty, and promoting supportive housing for homeless people with serious mental illnesses.
“The most serious cases are the ones most likely to become homeless, arrested, incarcerated, hospitalized and violent if they go untreated,” they wrote. “Yet Thrive virtually ignores this group in favor of people with less severe illnesses.”
Susan Herman, the recently-appointed executive director of ThriveNYC, said during the March testimony, “we are filling strategic gaps and piloting innovative programs for the seriously mentally ill to be able to work with people so they can stay in community by connecting them to services, by helping them connect or reconnect to treatment. We’re helping people both before crisis and after crisis.”
For example, McCray said in an op-ed in New York Daily News that Thrive adds $30 million of funding (about 15% of its budget) to the $300 million the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene already spends directly to help people with SMIs.
“Thrive-supported programs are designed to enhance and complement these existing services, not compete with or replace them,” she wrote.
For someone who voluntarily requests care, they can go to a public hospital for informal short-term hospital care as well as traditional outpatient care. The average stay for someone hospitalized for mental illness is 11 days, according to the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
Outpatient care -- preferred by many for its community-based nature -- consists of things like meeting with a therapist or a psychiatrist and getting medication prescribed. Influential 1999 Supreme Court case Olmstead v. L.C. ruled public entities must provide community-based services to those with mental illness whenever possible.
“Lots of people have schizophrenia,” says Dr. Gary Belkin, Executive Deputy Commissioner for Health and Mental Hygiene in the city's Health Department and Chief of Policy and Strategy of ThriveNYC, in a phone interview. “The vast majority don’t end up on the street untreated and that’s because there are things that happen earlier, things that Thrive is working on – getting better care connections, having many points of contact, opportunities for family/friends to bring them mobile help."
Thrive has Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) teams dispatched around the city, often in mental health shelters, to treat people with serious mental illness. There are at least 50 ACT teams in New York with the capacity to serve 3,500 people at any time, according to Herman’s March 26 testimony. Thrive also created intensive mobile treatment teams that mostly go to shelters and provide treatment for homeless people. These outreach efforts mostly help people with outpatient care, but can lead to more intensive intervention, though it is very rare for judges to order people into inpatient hospitalization in New York.
Some of these efforts will now be part of ThriveNYC’s recently-announced outcome-tracking procedures, announced in late June.
The key questions, it seems, are whether Thrive’s efforts and the increased emphasis on outpatient programs on the state level -- perhaps including what Katz of H+H said he’d like to see -- can successfully fill gaps left by deinstitutionalization, while creating a more humane care system, and reduce threats posed by those with serious mental illness to themselves and others.
Deinstitutionalization in New York has been drastic. According to Eide’s report, as of November 2018, the average daily number of people in New York state adult psychiatric centers was 2,267. In 1955, there were over 93,000. Even in just the last four years, the number of state inpatient psychiatric beds -- in other words, the capacity for inpatient care -- has dropped by 19% statewide, from 2,866 in 2014 to 2,335 in 2018.
The drop in average daily patients and inpatient beds has coincided with an increase in the number of seriously mentally ill homeless people in New York and the proportion of inmates with a serious mental illness diagnosis in city jails.
According to Eide’s findings, there are more psychiatric beds in New York City mental health shelters than the number of psychiatric beds in state psychiatric centers and Health + Hospitals facilities combined.
Supportive housing, which provides housing and social services for those with serious mental illness, is also seen as a key tool. There are currently 52,000 units of supportive housing statewide, half of which are funded by the state Office of Mental Health (the other half don’t necessarily serve those with mental illness). Supportive housing, which is built and funded by both the city and state, sometimes in conjunction, is typically run by nonprofit providers who provide onsite mental health care, medication delivery systems, and more.
According to testimony given in a May City Council hearing by the Supportive Housing Network of New York, there are around 33,000 units of supportive housing in New York City. Amid calls for more units, both Mayor de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo have made pledges to develop more supportive housing.
In his NYC 15/15 Supportive Housing Initiative announced in November 2015, de Blasio said the city would develop 15,000 additional units of supportive housing over 15 years. Two months later, Governor Cuomo announced his plan to build 20,000 units over the same 15-year timespan. These announcements came after the two were unable to come to an agreement on what have been known for decades as “New York-New York” supportive housing deals whereby the city and state work together to develop thousands of units.
The New York State Senate and Assembly Democratic majorities see a need for more programming aimed at mental health care and housing, too. Earlier this year, the two bodies unanimously passed a bill creating a temporary commission to study what is seen as chronic underfunding for these housing programs. The commission would “provide policy guidance and recommendations relating to the adequacy of funding levels and need for sufficient staffing in all supportive housing under the auspices of the Office of Mental Health.”
According to a June 25 press release from supportive housing provider Bring It Home, “[t]he bill would prompt a study of current funding and staffing levels across the state and investigate ways the state can begin to remedy its years-long failure to adequately fund mental health housing programs.” Advocates are urging Cuomo to sign the bill so the commission can issue its report in time for the next state budget season.
Another discussion that has played out over many years, at the state level especially, is over how to treat individuals who are too sick to seek help.
Per New York State Law, the criteria to involuntarily admit someone due to mental health is fairly strict – the person can’t understand the need for care or presents a substantial harm to self and/or others, among other standards.
According to a 2015 New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene report, 40% of adult New Yorkers with serious mental illness didn’t receive medical treatment in the prior year.
Courts can and do order people to outpatient care: assisted outpatient treatment (AOT) is also known in New York as Kendra’s Law. Originally passed in 1999 in New York State (the first law of its kind and emulated in many other states since), Kendra’s Law allows select people close to a mentally ill person to petition the court to mandate a treatment plan for that person. According to OMH’s website, as of Monday (July 29) there were 3,109 people under active court order via Kendra’s Law, 1,377 of them in New York City.
Jaffe of Mental Health Policy Org, a staunch supporter of Kendra’s Law, estimates around 4,000 people should be in mandated treatment under the law. Critics of Kendra’s Law typically accept the principle but say it’s overly strict, such as the need to show an instance of seriously violent behavior in the last four years. Once a petition to mandate care is successfully filed, the chances of the courts granting the petition are extremely high: 90% of Kendra’s Law petitions were granted statewide from July 29, 2018 through Sunday (July 28, 2019), according to OMH’s website.
Kendra’s Law affects a very small population but has shown signs of working: the state Office of Mental Health says for someone who went through an assisted outpatient treatment program, psychiatric hospitalization was reduced by 64% after AOT, incarceration by 72%, and homelessness was reduced by 61%. Jaffe and Eide in their op-ed call for the creation (and funding) of a Kendra’s Law Office to deal solely with helping the city expand its efforts to get more people into Kendra’s Law.
Meanwhile, ThriveNYC offers NYC Well, a mental health helpline that has the ability to dispatch mobile crisis intervention teams to someone experiencing a mental health crisis. The phone line is something that de Blasio and McCray often cite in their public remarks about Thrive and the city’s efforts to improve mental health care.
Another big piece of the current picture of care for those with serious mental illnesses is correctional health services, which have been needed more and more. Although the daily inmate and detainee population in city jails is decreasing, the percentage of those diagnosed with a serious mental illness has gone from 10.2% in city fiscal year 2014 to 14.3% in fiscal year 2018, according to the Mayor’s Management Report.
Dr. Katz said on What’s the [DATA] Point? that “In the case of correctional health…we know in New York City there is a group of people with very serious mental health and addiction problems who rotate between the acute hospital, the shelter, and the jail.”
One goal of ThriveNYC is to limit the number of people going to jail due to serious mental illness. The city will open two health diversion centers later this year. Announced in late 2018, the diversion centers will provide somewhere for police officers to take someone who has committed a low-level, non-violent crime but they believe is exhibiting behavioral problems due to mental health. The centers will offer mental health treatment and have overnight beds but stays will be capped at five days.
Skeptics of the idea point out that there will only be two diversion centers, one in the Bronx and one in East Harlem, and each center will only serve its specific community. Plus, the centers will have a “no-refusal” policy that could edge out those with serious mental illness if the centers are at capacity. According to Herman at the March City Council hearing, Thrive plans to evaluate the success of the two programs and possibly create more centers next year.
“We want to catch [people] before entry into the criminal justice system,” said Dr. Belkin. “Nobody should enter the criminal justice system for something related to mental illness. We should be able to reach those people so that doesn’t happen, where they can be treated and managed in a health context before they get ensnared in the criminal justice system. I think everyone wants to avoid that path."
Critics argue, as alluded to by Katz and recently brought up during a Council hearing on recidivism of those with mental illness, that mental health services outside of the criminal justice system are less robust than those offered in city jails. According to Katz, “the fact that we make it necessary for some people to commit shoplifting in order to ensure they’re in a safe place, get their meds, get their food, get their house, when we could do that so much less expensively elsewhere is really a condemnation on us.”
Another option, proposed by Jaffe and Eide, is the expansion of mental health courts, which allows judges to divert those with serious mental illness and charged with crimes to treatment instead of jail. They say current mental health courts cannot offer housing to these people, which weakens its effectiveness.
City Council Speaker Corey Johnson is attempting to prevent those with mental illness from going to jail and to ensure they get better treatment instead. In a speech on criminal justice reform on May 16 at John Jay College, he announced the Council will create a program to house 100 people with SMI caught in the criminal justice system and emphasized the 100 beds are a start, but the program will need further investment and focus to add more beds.
Johnson also pointed out how targeting the legal system can keep people with SMI out of jail; he announced the Council will fund a program to connect social workers with defense attorneys to find alternatives to prison. He also previewed the Get Well & Get Out Act, which would require correctional services staff to keep attorneys informed of their clients’ mental health.
The bill was introduced on June 13 by Council Member Margaret Chin of Manhattan and six other Council sponsors, including Speaker Johnson. The Council quickly held a hearing on the bill that was combined with an oversight hearing on recidivism rates for those with mental illness. The bill has not yet received a committee vote.
How the city handles crisis situations including people with serious mental illness has come under increased scrutiny over the last few years. According to the NYPD and an investigation from THE CITY, calls to 911 involving EDP’s, or emotionally disturbed persons, have risen from around 97,000 in 2009 to 180,000 last year. Fourteen people who appeared to be suffering from acute mental illness have been killed by police officers in the past three years.
The extent to which the city’s roughly 37,000-member police force has been trained in crisis prevention is an ongoing issue. THE CITY estimated that only about 11,970 uniformed officers had undergone crisis prevention training at the time of its March reporting.
In April 2018, de Blasio and McCray launched the NYC Crisis Prevention and Response Task Force to create a strategy to better deal with mental health crises in the city. That report was due in January and has not been publicly released. The Task Force consists of leaders from the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, ThriveNYC, and the NYPD, among others.
McCray in her Daily News op-ed said serious mental illness and EDP calls aren’t as related as they appear.
“Unfortunately, too many people think of serious mental illness as ‘crazy people in the subway,’ or 911 calls involving emotionally disturbed persons. But not everyone sleeping in the subway or on the streets has an illness,” she wrote. “And emotional disturbance describes erratic behavior at a given time — not a chronic disease.”
In an attempt to treat EDPs, Thrive created what it calls co-response teams that proactively send a police officer with a clinician to people who have shown violent tendencies or behavioral problems in the past. The forensic ACT teams, the mobile intervention teams, and the co-response teams are all a part of Thrive’s NYC Safe program.
It’s possible that the program Dr. Katz spoke about in April -- creating a residential program for the seriously mentally ill to fill in the gaps of treatment between outpatient care, inpatient care, and prison -- is what’s called “Intensive Outpatient Treatment,” or IOT, which offers a much higher intensity of services but still in the patient’s community. Patients under IOT would visit a psychiatrist more often and for longer than traditional outpatient programs.
Already existing outpatient programs must apply for a waiver to the state Office of Mental Health for permission to offer an intensive outpatient treatment program. OMH has approved waivers for 35 clinics beginning in August 2017, according to OMH’s website (they are required by state law to publicly release waiver requests and decisions).
Otherwise, the most intensive treatment with the most consistent care can be found in hospitals, prisons, or homeless shelters.
***
by Truman Stephens, Gotham Gazette
@GothamGazette
New York City Hall
What to watch for this week in New York politics:
This week starts with Mayor Bill de Blasio and others reacting to a shooting that occured at a large annual block party in Brownsville, Brooklyn on Saturday night. De Blasio met with community leaders in Brownsville on Sunday, while other local officials including Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams also addressed the shooting, which killed at least one person and injured several others. While murders have been trending down again this year compared to last, shooting incidents have been up, particularly in certain pockets of the city that often see the most gun violence, though the number of shootings is still far below what it was years ago.
There was also news of another suicide among NYPD officers this weekend, the latest in a recent wave of such incidences (five in the last two months) that has many in the city on high alarm and officials from the mayor to NYPD Commissioner James O'Neill and many others encouraging any NYPD personnel struggling with mental health or other issues to seek help. “Tonight our city mourns at the news that we’ve lost another NYPD officer to suicide," de Blasio said in a Saturday statement. These tragedies cannot continue. We cannot lose any more of our officers...If you or a loved one is in need: ask. Your whole city stands in support of you ready to answer the call." His office also noted several outreach channels: NYPD Employee Assistance Unit 646-610-6730; NYPD Chaplains Unit 212-473-2363; POPPA (Police Organization Providing Peer Assistance) 888-267-7267; NYPD Crisis Text Line Text BLUE to 741741; NYC WELL 1-888-NYC-WELL.
De Blasio was in the city this weekend as opposed to the presidential campaign trail, apparently to prepare for this week's Democratic primary debate -- he'll appear during night two of the two-night debate from Detroit. De Blasio's wife and son, Chirlane McCray and Dante de Blasio, were campaigning for the mayor in South Carolina this weekend. Like many of the other 20-plus candidates in the Democratic field, de Blasio is in the midst of a push to make the third debate, set for September, which has significantly tougher qualifying criteria. There are about 10 candidates who appear set to make that debate, while more than 10 others including de Blasio are scrambling to reach the donor and polling thresholds.
For his part, Governor Andrew Cuomo was in Utah on Friday to attend a meeting of the Democratic Governors Association, at which he was named vice chair and he delivered public remarks about the inaction in Washington, D.C. and how governors must and do respond.
There are fewer political events on the calendar this week than many others, which is typical for this time of year. The City Council has no hearings this week, for example. But there are several events to be aware of -- see the day-by-day rundown below. And, the New York political world will continue discussing, among other things, the recently-passed MTA reorganization plan.
A high-profile issue on the table to kick off the week: the results of the Queens District Attorney Democratic primary are expected to be certified by the Board of Elections on Monday, with Borough President Melinda Katz being declared the winner by 60 votes over public defender Tiffany Cabán. But, it's not over yet -- Cabán already has a court date on Wednesday (moved up from August 6) to challenge over 100 affidavit ballots invalidated by the BOE that her campaign belives should be counted. While Katz is declaring victory and the BOE is likely to certify the results Monday, this race will continue for at least another week or so.
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The run of the week in detail:
Monday, July 29
Mayor de Blasio is in New York City with no public events scheduled for Monday; Governor Cuomo is in Albany with no public events scheduled for Monday.
At 1 p.m. Monday, New York City Board of Elections officials will meet in Manhattan to certify the results of the Queens District Attorney Democratic primary, though a court challenge to affidavit ballots will be heard on Wednesday.
At 1 p.m. Monday, the City Planning Commission will hold a review session.
At 6 p.m. Monday, State Senator Zellnor Myrie, Council Member Laurie Cumbo, and Assembly Members Walter Mosley and Diana Richardson will host a “Help for Homeowners” town hall in Brooklyn.
Also at 6 p.m. Monday, Assembly Member Yuh-Line Niou will hold a separate Housing and Rent Law town hall to discuss laws recently passed by the state legislature and “learn more about these changes from our housing lawyers and advocates.”
Also at 6 p.m. Monday, City Council Members Robert Cornegy, Jr. and Mark Levine, and state Senator Liz Krueger will participate in a discussion about how elected officials influence "the makeup of public buildings and infrastructure in New York City. Every process of building a public project is shaped by our elected representatives: funding, political support, design, procurement, and construction. This program allows audience members to hear directly from both City and State elected officials about their experiences with the construction of public buildings. Speakers will discuss specific examples in their legislative districts, as well as general trends throughout the City on a variety of different public building and infrastructure typologies." The event is hosted by Center for Architecture and AIANY.
Also at 6 p.m. Monday, the Manhattan Institute will host its Young Leaders Circle with retired General Stanley McChrystal. “At a time when escalating tensions in the Persian Gulf, especially between the U.S. and Iran, threaten to disrupt peace and commerce in the region—and the world—McChrystal brings both a business and a military perspective to a dangerous situation. What should be the next move for the U.S. in dealing with Iran?”
Comptroller Scott Stringer will appear on Monday evening's Inside City Hall on NY1, during the 7 and 11 p.m. hours.
Tuesday, July 30
On Tuesday at 3:30 p.m. at Boys & Girls Club of Metro Queens, "Assemblyman David I. Weprin and the Zero Abuse Project will host a free seminar entitled “Courageous Conversations, Critical Choices: What New York’s Child Victims Act Means for Queens” to inform community members about the changes to the statute of limitations requirements for child sexual abuse in New York under the recently enacted Child Victims Act (CVA)."
At 6 p.m. Tuesday, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest will host a panel discussion on the lack of adequate health care for those detained in immigration facilities. “Panelists – including Laura Redman, director or NYLPI’s health justice program, medical professionals Dr. Chanelle Diaz and Dr. Jasdeep Mangat, and an individual previously held in detention – will discuss this ongoing human rights crisis and efforts to address it. The panel is in conjunction with NYLPI’s social justice-focused pop-up art exhibit, All Access."
Tuesday night will be the first night of the two-night second Democratic presidential primary debate, airing on CNN from Detroit and again including 20 candidates in total. The first night will include Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, among others.
Wednesday, July 31
At 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, the Queens Chamber of Commerce will host “How NYC Building Owners Will Cash In on the New Environmental Standards,” an event discussing the positive impacts for property owners and managers of Local Law 97. Speakers will include City Council Member Costa Constantinides and Queens Chamber President Thomas Grech.
There will be a court hearing on Wednesday at the Tiffany Cabán campaign attempts to have "more than a hundred" affidavit ballots counted in the Queens District Attorney Democratic primary.
From 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Wednesday, City & State will host its 2019 Protecting New York Summit, offering “industry executives, public sector leaders and academics the opportunity to discuss all aspects of New York’s security strategy, from securing infrastructure, to cybersecurity and disaster management.” Speakers will include Police Commissioner James O’Neill, Assembly Member Jaime Williams, and City Council Members Joe Borelli, Justin Brannan, and Donovan Richards, among many others. (Gotham Gazette editor Ben Max will moderate a panel on the media, the internet, security, and free speech with Council Member Richards, the chair of the public safety committee, and NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence and Counterterrorism John Miller.)
At 10 a.m. on Wednesday, the City Planning Commission will hold a public meeting.
On Wednesday from 5-6 p.m., this week’s Max & Murphy show on WBAI radio -- listen at 99.5 FM or wbai.org -- will include a discussion with City Council Member Brad Lander about school and neighborhood segregation in New York City, among other topics.
At 6 p.m. on Wednesday, the New York City Panel for Educational Policy will hold its monthly meeting, discussing topics including culturally responsive-sustaining education and negotiations with custodial unions, before opening for general public comment.
Wednesday night is the second of the two-night second Democratic presidential debate on CNN. The second night will feature Mayor de Blasio, Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker, and Kamala Harris, former Vice President Joe Biden, former HUD Secretary Julian Castro, and others.
Thursday, August 1
At 8 a.m. on Thursday, the New York Building Congress will meet for a construction industry breakfast, with keynote speaker Vicki Been, Deputy Mayor for Housing and Development.
At 6 p.m. on Thursday, Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer will host a Dominican Day Parade 2019 launch reception.
At 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, BetaNYC will host a meetup on cycling and data collection. Included in the discussion will be “tools to analyze your ride, how to document your ride, how to best provide government better data on safety / infrastructure, cycling with cameras, & which laws are applicable in NYC vs NY State.”
Friday, August 2
Mayor de Blasio may make his weekly appearance on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show Friday at 10 a.m.
***
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by Joey Fox and Ben Max
@GothamGazette