“There is a clear link between the integrity of public officials and campaign finance law. Any time elected officials or candidates solicit or receive funds from private sources, the public perceives that there is the potential for corruption to contaminate the political process.”
So reads the newly released report (pdf) of New York City’s Campaign Finance Board. With a clarion call for engaging and educating ordinary citizens, holding candidates accountable, promoting competitive elections and – most importantly – enhancing the integrity of policy making, the report describes the largely positive record of New York City’s campaign finance system in 2009. The voluntary system of matching small campaign contributions for participating candidates (currently at a 6-1 ratio) while imposing strict limits on contribution size and disclosures was first enacted in 1988 and has been updated in recent years.
The New York Times’ Michael Barbaro reads the report as a refutation of the conventional wisdom about 2009 as a city election year characterized exclusively by Mayor Bloomberg’s outsize campaign spending:
changes enacted before the race encouraged 34,000 New Yorkers to make campaign donations for the first time; drastically curtailed the role of businesses, political committees and lobbyists in campaigns; and caused a major drop in donations from those doing business with the city.
Perhaps most intriguingly, the new data suggests that, in a year when voter turnout was historically low and pundits treated the mayoral election as a foregone conclusion, many New Yorkers of more modest means felt compelled to participate in the election process.
“While the program cannot guarantee a participating candidate will always overcome a high-spending non-participant,” the report itself notes, “the 2009 election shows that public funds can provide resources to communicate a message effectively.” New York City’s system promoted more competitive elections, helping to make challengers more competitive against incumbent officeholders and giving them the ability to make their voices heard. While New York City’s is not a full Fair Elections campaign system like the Arizona model highlighted by the Drum Major Institute in the past, it is a testament to the power of removing even a portion of the big money influence from the political process. New York’s successful city level policy should be an inspiration for other cities and for the federal and state campaign reform we urgently need.
As Immigration and Customs Enforcement continues to aggressively expand its newest local immigration enforcement program, some localities are looking to put on the brakes. Secure Communities is touted as a voluntary partnership between federal, state and local agencies that “supports public safety by strengthening efforts to remove the most dangerous criminal aliens from the United States.” When an individual is booked by a police officer in a participating agency, her fingerprints are automatically sent to federal immigration databases to check for violations; if there is a match, ICE agents then decide whether she will be targeted for deportation. Advocates have rightly raised a number of red flags about the program, chiefly that it has not effectively targeted criminal immigrants, but instead focuses on deporting immigrants who have committed minor offenses, or none at all.
City leaders in San Francisco and Washington have also spoken out against Secure Communities, arguing that city resources shouldn’t be used to implement federal immigration laws. What’s more, both cities have decades-oldpolicies that limit police involvement in immigration enforcement, policies that Secure Communities will certainly override. D.C. Councilman Jim Graham says : “In D.C. we have had a long-standing tradition of separation between what our police force does and what immigration agents do. We can’t have police behave like immigration officers. Our police have their hands full with local crime.” Back in May, the Council unanimously sponsored a bill that opposing participation in Secure Communities, and by July D.C. was the first in the country to formally withdraw from it.
But D.C. is a special case. ICE doesn’t typically negotiate agreements regulating Secure Communities with cities, but with each State Identification Bureau. So the District of Columbia had its own agreement to scrap—not so for San Francisco. Despite numerous efforts to opt out of this “voluntary” program, San Francisco officials found their hands tied. Once California signed a statewide Secure Communities document, all fingerprints sent from the city were also automatically sent by the state to ICE. Against the wishes of the Sheriff and several Supervisors, San Francisco was drafted into the program.
In July, Representative Zoe Lofgren sent a letter to the agency requested clarification about Secure Communities, noting that “significant confusion” surrounded the opt out process. Official statements from ICE on the issue were inconsistent at best. From a Salon article:
ICE spokesperson Mark Medvesky asserted that cities could not opt out of Secure Communities. But Medvesky was quoted in an Aug. 21, 2009, Philadelphia Inquirer article saying that Philadelphia could opt out, ‘but I can’t imagine why they would want to. It’s not a mandate.’
In an August document titled “Setting the Record Straight,” ICE seemed to deny that any ambiguity existed. Interestingly, for the first time, the agency vaguely outlined how a city or county could avoid joining. The agency held that if a jurisdiction wanted to opt out, various stakeholders would meet to “discuss any issues and come to a resolution, which may include…removing the jurisdiction from the deployment plan.” To date, no city has successfully been able to do this. San Francisco may be the first; this week, Sheriff Hennessey sent a letter to DHS officials reminding them of the city’s request to exit the program. We should all keep an eye on how this proceeds. What ICE decides to do with San Francisco will set an important precedent for other cities and counties that want to stay out of federal immigration enforcement.
It is arguably one of New York State’s biggest assets, but the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the mass transit system it controls has been chronically neglected in state budgets for decades. As a result we have the MTA’s enormous debt burden and annual debt payments of $1.4 billion a year. And the debt continues to grow; by 2013 the MTA will be making annual debt payments of over $2.4 billion.
But the candidates for governor—despite making “reform” part of their campaign pledges—have so far remained pretty silent about how they would fix the MTA’s long-term, structural budget problems.
Front-runner Cuomo only mentions the MTA once in his 252-page “policy book,” and then only in passing. Paladino has been completely silent on the MTA. As for Lazio, he has said that he would repeal the payroll taxes that are used to support the MTA, not exactly a solid plan to put the MTA on better financial footing.
The Port of Los Angeles’ innovative Clean Truck Program is legally in the clear: it’s time for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to follow their tire tracks.
On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Christina Snyder upheld the Port of Los Angeles’ right to fully implement a program replacing thousands of dirty diesel trucks with cleaner vehicles, aiming to reduce port-related air pollution by 80 percent. The Clean Truck Program had been impeded by a lawsuit from the American Trucking Associations, a trucking industry trade group that objected to the requirement that truckers servicing the port become employees of licensed trucking companies with concession agreements at the port. Yet, as the judge found, this provision is integral to the long-term functioning of the truck program, as well as the port’s need to protect its $57 million investment in clean trucks. Judge Snyder is expected to lift the injunction shortly. This is an ideal time for New York and New Jersey ports to implement an employee driver provision of their own.
The status quo of port trucking jobs at our ports is as dysfunctional as the Los Angeles situation that Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s Director of Economic Development Strategy, Sean Arian, described at a Drum Major Institute event in 2008:
Following New York’s Race to the Top win of $700 million over the next four years, Mayor Michael Bloomberg was eager to seize the issue as proof of the success of the city’s educational policies, saying that the victory was “a testament to what we’ve accomplished in our city schools over the last eight years.”
What accomplishments could he possibly be referring to? Only three weeks ago, New York raised the proficiency standards for its standardized math and reading examinations, and revealed that student grades had been inflated for years. Passing rates plummeted as much as 25 percent, and where New York was once heralded for making significant headway in closing the achievement gap, the new results painted a disheartening reality. Among third to eight graders, 75 percent of white students were deemed proficient in math, compared with only 40 percent of African American students. In English, 64 percent of white students met state standards, compared with only 33 percent of their black classmates.
Angry parents demonstrated at a meeting of a city Education Department panel last week, leading Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and other panel members to walk out. Meanwhile, Klein has now taken to highlighting the city’s graduation and college enrollment rates as evidence of the closing achievement gap.
A recent analysis by the Schott Foundation, however, argues otherwise. A nationwide study, the report examines the graduation rates for black males, and finds that New York’s achievement gap is greater than the national average. Almost one-third of black male fourth graders score below the basic level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress for math, and half of black male eighth graders score below the basic level for reading. At the high school level, only 28 percent of black male students in New York City graduated with their Regents diplomas in 2007/2008.
These statistics are nothing to boast about, and Race to the Top funding or not, our political leaders do our students no justice by understating the deep and persistent inequities in the education system.
Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) and Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) are well-known for their regressive positions on immigration. Just in the past few months, Smith has helped lead the right-wing campaign against birthright citizenship, while Brewer has gained national attention for signing one of the harshest immigration laws in recent memory. These lawmakers were rightly included in the Immigration Hall of Shame, a roster of “obstructionists to immigration reform” created by Immigrants’ List, a bipartisan political action committee.
The list of ten also highlights noted anti-immigrant crackpot Former Rep. Tom Tancredo (I-CO), Tea Party favorite Senate Candidate Sharron Angle (R-NV), along with several other immigration hawks like Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-CA) and Rep. Chuck Grassley (R-IA).
But according to several “honorees,” immigration reform is precisely what they’ve been calling for all along. In an interview with The Hill, a spokesman for Rep. Bilbray lists various workplace verification and border security legislative efforts as evidence of his pro-reform agenda. For his part, Rep. Smith claims that he is actually “pro-immigration and immigration reform, at least the right kind.” Obviously, this begs the question: What does Rep. Smith consider to be immigration reform? He says it means “enforcing our immigration laws, securing our border and cracking down on employers who hire illegal immigrants.” It’s curious that the Obama Administration has already been doing this work, aggressively deporting immigrants by the hundreds of thousands, increasing funds for border security, and punishing employers for hiring undocumented workers. No one should call this immigration reform. These measures alone aren’t enough to fix our unworkable immigration system. Nor do they deter undocumented immigration; long-term studies of migration patterns conclude that “tightened border enforcement since 1993 has not stopped or discouraged migrants from entering the United States.”
Despite having a veto-proof number of supporters in the City Council, a bill that would guarantee workers the right to earn paid sick leave is being stalled by the business community. This is not particularly surprising, given that businesses have generally fought against raising workplace standards throughout our history.
Not surprising, perhaps, but frustrating given the vast field of research that shows paid sick leave does not negatively impact businesses (in fact, there are concrete benefits for businesses). Even more frustrating is that New York City’s bill, which has the overwhelming support of city voters, has been effectively tabled by Council Speaker Christine Quinn, at least for the time being.
In an effort to show business leaders that they are being heard, Quinn has stated that she intends to wait for the results of a study on paid sick leave—commissioned by big-business advocate Partnership for New York City—before moving the bill forward for a vote.
But delaying this bill is unnecessary; paid sick leave is successful policy that has a proven record of success. The bill would require employers to allow workers to earn paid sick leave, one hour of leave for every thirty hours worked. Currently an estimated 1.65 million workers in New York, close to one-in-two workers, do not have any paid sick leave.
Laws like this are common around the globe. Around 145 countries require employers to provide paid sick leave and the U.S. is the only developed country not to do so. Recent research underscores that these laws have no negative impact on employment in the countries that adopt them.
While there is no federal law on paid sick leave here in the U.S., San Francisco became the first U.S. city to successfully implement paid sick leave requirements in 2006. And just like we’re hearing from businesses now in New York, business leaders in San Francisco predicted that the paid sick leave law would ruin small businesses and lead to unemployment.
These dire predictions never came true. By looking at employment data, I found that after the paid sick leave law went into effect, businesses in San Francisco weathered the recession better than in neighboring areas that have no paid sick leave law, including Silicon Valley.
Instead, workers in San Francisco no longer have to choose between recovering from illness and getting their paycheck. But delay in New York City means that workers are still forced to make this choice. As a result, seven-in-ten low-income workers without paid sick leave report that they have gone into work while sick, putting coworkers and customers at risk of infection.
Waiting for the results of a pro-business study on paid sick leave won’t tell us anything that we don’t already know. We’ll hear that businesses generally don’t want to improve workplace standards. But improving these standards is critical for New Yorkers without paid sick leave and will even benefit businesses by reducing employee turnover and increasing productivity. And based on the success of paid sick leave laws elsewhere, the City Council should have no qualms about passing this bill.
Last week’s chaotic scene in East Point, Georgia was a striking reminder of a government program stretched thin and of the dire effects of the recession on ordinary people’s lives. 30,000 lined up, some for nearly three days, some from cities up and down the East Coast, and sixty people were ultimately taken to the hospital as a result of injuries and heat exposure.
They were applying for Section 8 housing vouchers. To be accurate, they were merely applying to get on the waiting list to qualify—East Point only has 455 such housing vouchers, and all are currently taken. It could be up to 10 years before any of those who lined up last Wednesday will actually receive subsidized housing.
A federal program that ensures that low-income earners pay no more than 30 percent of their housing costs, the number of Section 8 vouchers has dropped over the past decade. Public housing units have been demolished (Atlanta will soon be the first to raze all of it public housing blocks), the recession has pushed many middle-class families into economic insecurity, and cities have cut the number of housing vouchers because they can no longer afford the costs.
The result is that at a time of increasing need, an expanding pool of people are fighting over a limited, and shrinking, number of resources. Cities across the nation have been hit with a surge in applications, and many have closed their waiting lists altogether.
This is alarming, clearly. It is also unproductive. In contrast to homeowners currently struggling with mortgages, Section 8 renters have the benefit of mobility, and could help fill the housing market. The program was designed precisely to avoid the segregating effects of urban public housing towers, and no matter where the vouchers are issued, tenants are free to live in whatever neighborhood or city they choose. This means that Section 8 renters have the potential to play a role in occupying many homes that now sit empty as a result of the housing bust. While the Housing and Urban Development says that the program has been buttressed by an additional $2 billion, the turmoil last week makes clear that much more will be needed.
The country’s stubbornly high unemployment rate is stalling economic recovery. The news emerged on Thursday that jobless claims increased unexpectedly this month, sending the markets nervously downward. Thus, lawmakers at every level of government, from City Hall to the White House, are faced with the enormous challenge of fostering the creation of new jobs.
But the real challenge will be creating good-paying jobs. As Richard Florida points out in the Atlantic, the decline of high-paying blue collar jobs is especially worrying, “The U.S. is losing an important source of good, family-supporting jobs, and… the American labor market is becoming more uneven and increasingly split between higher-paying knowledge work and lower-paying routine service work.”
Increasingly in cities like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, those without college educations have fewer and fewer job opportunities—at least in industries that pay good wages. Manufacturing jobs are being replaced by retail jobs and jobs in home-health care, which pay significantly less and offer fewer benefits.
The result is that simply having full-time employment is not enough for middle-class families to make it in metropolitan America. The Welfare to Work reforms of the 1990’s may have shrunk the public assistance rolls, but has not necessarily improved financial stability for low-income households. This becomes abundantly clear when looking at how much family income goes towards housing costs. In the ten largest metropolitan areas, one in four renter households pays more than half of their income in rent, and just under half of renter households are considered “rent burdened” by the federal government.
A cognitive dissonance animates the Right in America, and the New York Times nails it with today’s front page case study of Alaska. The state depends more than any other on public support, from its earliest days when “the federal government expended great amounts of money carving this young state out of the northern wilderness” to the present in which Alaska benefits from an outsize allocation of stimulus dollars and other government spending – not to mention tremendous public subsidies for the oil and gas industries that have driven the state’s economy. Yet Alaska is also a hotbed of anti-government sentiment, denouncing the very support that built it and keeps it functioning. “It just feels like the federal government intrudes everywhere,” complains a local GOP official, apparently heedless of the ways that this “intrusion” enables Alaskans to get by on a daily basis.
The same contradiction has lain at the heart of American conservatism from the birth of the New Right in 1960’s Southern California (see historian Lisa McGirr’s brilliant book on the topic) to the present day: the very people who denounce an interfering government most intensely are often among the greatest beneficiaries of our public institutions. How is the contradiction bearable? It helps if you don’t think too much about it, if the government’s role in one’s life can be made invisible, even forgotten. Dependence on public support must be made to look like rugged individualism; reliance on webs of regulation must appear to be the work of unconstrained free markets. Problems may not arise until the efforts to hack away at “big government” become too successful: the “invisible” public services we need to live our daily lives are most apparent when we begin to lose them. Alaska may still be cushioned by disproportionate federal largesse, but in communities across America, the loss of basic services is happening now. Reporter Michael Cooper recently summed up:
Children of undocumented immigrants seem to be the newest target in our ongoing immigration debate, as politicians and pundits rush to take sides on the merits of birthright citizenship. A leading argument against this practice centers on the costs to taxpayers of educating these U.S. citizen children. A recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-ed by the Pacific Research Institute’s Lance Izumi attempts to set the record straight on these costs; he pledges to present the unbiased facts, “in the interest of more informed discourse.” But instead we get a woefully one-sided treatment of the issue.
First, the title, “Educating illegal immigrants is costly,” is very (and perhaps intentionally) misleading. The article isn’t even about the education of undocumented immigrants, but the U.S. citizen children of undocumented immigrants. This is a key distinction. Second, the article presents accurate demographic figures from the Pew Hispanic Center, a respected source for immigration statistics, showing that in 2008, the U.S. was home to 5.5 million children of undocumented immigrants. (Today this figure measures 5.1 million.) But then we’re warned of the “staggering” costs of this schooling, $44 billion as calculated by multiplying per pupil spending averages and rough demographic estimates. The validity of the evidence Izumi presents to support this argument is less important than the thinking at its core. Of the students, he says: “Had their parents not entered the U.S. illegally these children likely wouldn’t be in U.S. public schools and wouldn’t require taxpayer funding.”
The Bloomberg administration laid out new plans to improve pedestrian safety this week after releasing a comprehensive study of pedestrian fatalities. Among the changes:
• 1,500 countdown pedestrian signals installed by 2011;
• Redesign 60 miles of street miles per year;
• Tame 20 two-way Manhattan crosstown intersections per year;
• Pilot a program for 20 mph neighborhood zones.
The 20 mph speed zones are of particular importance, since higher vehicle speeds result in higher rates of pedestrian fatality when there is a collision. Other cities, especially in Europe, have recognized this and have implemented speed limits of 20 mph or 30 kilometers per hour.
The results of dropping speeds have been spectacular. After London adopted the widespread use of 20 mph zones, road fatalities dropped 42 percent!
The immigration debate goes local this week, following our Legislative Scorecard examining the Suffolk County Legislature’s record on key middle class issues. The Scorecard, released by Long Island Wins and the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, analyzed nine bills passed during the 2008-9 session and graded legislators based on their support for the middle class position. We found that a majority of the legislators consistently voted against the middle class on immigration; as a result, eleven out of eighteen received C grades and four received D grades.
A recent editorial in Long Island’s Times Beacon Record questioned the utility of focusing on (and critiquing) the records of individual lawmakers as a means to move forward on immigration policy. “Assigning ranks and publicly highlighting deficiencies is not the best way to win friends and influence people en route to an immigration solution.” But we can only begin to advocate for common sense immigration solutions when we identify the policies working against this agenda, and hold accountable the elected officials who voted for them. We believe better policy can be created when citizens know how their legislators voted on what matters most to them, and when legislators know their constituents are watching.
The piece also remarked on our methods, stating that the report drew conclusions from a narrow subset of facts and left out efforts made by elected officials outside the legislature. We considered a broad range of policy measures, from affordable housing and the costs of home energy to environmentally sustainable building practices, which address some of the most critical concerns for Suffolk’s middle class. The Scorecard is not intended as an exhaustive review of the Legislature’s policy work, nor does it account for what legislators do outside the chamber. Suffolk residents should have a focused look at how their elected officials actually vote, and what these votes mean for the middle class.
Another Beacon Record article on the scorecard included a comment from a low-scoring legislator that illuminates the need for this analysis: “He couldn’t see how some selected issues, like his support for requiring those in Suffolk’s probation system to document their immigration status, impact the middle class at all.” Clearly, some legislators have yet to see that immigration policy matters for the US-born middle class, so we focus on amplifying the overlooked connections between immigration issues and the middle class. To the lawmaker’s point, we argue that using local resources to target immigrants in the probation system is a poor use of taxpayer resources, and further diverts the attention of local law enforcement agents away from their core mission to uphold public safety.
After evaluating the Legislature’s record on selected policy measures important to the middle class, it’s clear that there is room for improvement. On immigration, the Legislature can do much more to advance effective policies at the local level that benefit all residents. But this requires a tough but fair appraisal of the policies and policymakers holding Suffolk County back.
Between 2002 and 2006, 1,993 people were killed by automobiles in New York City. During the same time period, there were 1,811 homicides by firearm.
While the number of deaths are similar, the response by law enforcement and prosecutors to these different types of cases is strikingly different.
For example, this Tuesday one man was killed and six others injured—one woman had her lower leg amputated—by a livery cab driver while waiting at a bus stop in the Bronx. The livery cab had collided with a minivan that made an illegal U-turn midblock. The driver of the cab then lost control of his vehicle, which jumped the sidewalk and slammed into a bus shelter, killing and maiming those waiting at the shelter.
Witnesses said the sickening impact in Kingsbridge left sprawled pedestrians screaming in pain, with shattered glass embedded in their faces and limbs, and a maimed woman shouting, “Where’s my foot? Where’s my foot?”
But, as is common with traffic collisions that result in death and injury, the driver of the minivan was issued a traffic summons and released. The Bronx DA announced that no charges would be filed.
The fiscal relief bill signed into law by President Obama on Tuesday will unquestionably benefit New York City and other states and municipalities across the country. At a time of sluggish job growth and straight-jacketed local budgets, the bill will help cities and states to maintain critical public services, especially funding for education. By passing this legislation, Congress has acted to mitigate the impact of the crippling recession on America’s children and on our long-term economic prosperity, which relies on an educated workforce. Yet praise for the new law has been muted. The state and local support it provides will help to prevent the recession from getting worse – yet it is far from enough. Opposition from the right forced legislators to limit the size of the bill, hamstringing the nation’s economic recovery. Mayor Bloomberg and other city and state officials should continue to make the case for additional federal support.
First the good news: The new law will direct $200 million in education aid directly to New York City and will provide $400 million in additional support for the city’s Medicaid program. In New York State as a whole, the law will enable 8,200 teachers to stay on the job in our classrooms.
Had the legislation not passed, cities and states across the country would have laid off more workers, more services would be lost, and additional taxes would be raised to cope with budget shortfalls. Consider those services first: as Paul Krugman pointed out in his powerful recent column, the lights are already going out in America. Classroom are more crowded, over-stretched fire companies are responding more slowly to emergencies, dangerous bridges go unrepaired, smooth and efficient roads are turned back into gravel. In New York we already see transit cutbacks, shorter library hours and shuttered senior centers.
Pundits and politicians on the right have tried to portray fiscal relief as nothing more than a giveaway to teachers and the other public employees who work to keep our communities running, but the reality is that the loss of public services has a powerful immediate impact on our quality of life and the nation’s future. Thankfully, the law passed by Congress will soften some future impacts in New York and nationwide. Yet even as he hailed the new federal aid to the city, Mayor Bloomberg warned of continuing revenue shortfalls that may leave him calling for more cuts in the next year.
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