City & State August 10, 2015

August 10, 2015

Does

NEW YORK

S t i l l L E A D t h e W AY ?

By JON LENTZ

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@CIT YANDSTATENY

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FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK

August 10, 2015

CONTENTS

Michael Gareth Johnson Executive Editor

A

CITY

22.......

Landlords say the rent freeze will force Bratton says advocates confuse policing terms on purpose

By Sarina Trangle

16.......

Nonprofits fear progressive initiatives could have harmful consequences

By Jeff Stein from New York Nonprofit

18.......

FORUM: NY MOVES

38.......

SPOTLIGHT: TECHNOLOGY

48.......

PERSPECTIVES

50.......

BACK & FORTH

ENERGY

Environmentalists aren’t convinced by fracking alternative

By Ashley Hupfl

August 10, 2015

Does

NEW YORK

S t i l l L E A D t h e W AY ?

By JON LENTZ

CIT YANDSTATENY.COM

@CIT YANDSTATENY

cit yandstateny.com

Cover: Illustration

by Guillaume Federighi

Does New York still lead the way?

30.......

By Justin Sondel

20.......

FOLLOWING THE LEADER

By Jon Lentz

BUFFALO

Erie county hopes microbead ban sparks a statewide trend

New York City to update the way it calculates classroom sizes

By Patrick Wall from Chalkbeat New York

24.......

STATE

EDUCATION

Transportation experts weigh in on the future of New York transit

E-hail companies look to expand upstate … the push for high-speed Internet in rural areas and city housing … telecom laws left behind by an evolving world … the City Council’s quest for data … Q&As with Rachel Haot, Joseph Griffo, Chris Collins, Maya Wiley and James Vacca

Eric Schneiderman on solving Puerto Rico’s woes … Minerva Tantoco on technology’s power to transform …

Reshma Saujani and Richard Kahan on encouraging coding … and Bertha Lewis on life after Trump

A Q&A with author and professor Philip Plotch

3

city & state — August 10, 2015

14.......

s Americans, we love to win. We love competition. Some of us love it more than others, but in many ways we are wired to compete more than citizens of other nations. We see this with our states. Governors sometimes trip over themselves to beat their counterparts to passing legislation or implementing policies. Being first translates to leadership—one of the most appreciated qualities among voters, whether they want to admit it or not.

This mentality has driven policy throughout United States history. Oftentimes it has led to great achievements. Sometimes it has led to colossal failures. Throughout it all, the idea of being first has never lost its luster, which is why New York politicians love to speak about the glory days, when the state led the way on policy and was a laboratory for democracy, while pledging to help New York lead again.

Our Senior Correspondent Jon Lentz set out to examine this concept. He explored the validity of the claims of New York’s past greatness, which historians mostly felt is an accurate portrayal. He also looked at recent history to see if the state has indeed been on the forefront of today’s large social and economic movements. Historians seemed to shrug their shoulders at this claim, suggesting the rhetoric of the Empire State as a leader far exceeds its actions.

But I find it hard to blame our political leaders for what some may consider intellectual dishonesty. The truth is that they are punished by the public if they express pessimism, so it has become politics 101 to try and sell your successes—even if they don’t live up to the golden age of the past. The cover for this issue highlights this contrast: A foam finger may be colorful and new, but I think we can all agree that the Statue of Liberty is a greater accomplishment than a shaped piece of open-celled foam. Newer, shinier things do catch your eye though—much like politicians claiming that the state and New York City are leading the way on salient issues of the today.

In the issue we also have a great story about “gel fracking,” the new way the natural gas industry plans to extricate the precious resource from the ground.

The industry says the technique is not covered by the high-volume hydraulic fracturing ban in New York, causing many environmentalists to ramp up their efforts once again. Reporter Ashley Hupfl previews the looming fight.

Letters to the

Editor July 30, 2015

July 28, 2015

61 Broadway, Suite 2235 New York, NY 10006 Editorial (212) 894-5417 General (646) 517-2740 Advertising (212) 894-5422 info@cityandstateny.com

CITY AND STATE, LLC Chairman Steve Farbman President/CEO Tom Allon tallon@cityandstateny.com

PUBLISHING CIT YANDSTATENY.COM

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Publisher Andrew A. Holt aholt@cityandstateny.com Vice President of Advertising Jim Katocin jkatocin@cityandstateny.com

city & state — August 10, 2015

4

City & State’s July 28 Brooklyn Special Issue featured Senior Correspondent Jon Lentz’s in-depth profile of Brooklyn Democratic Party Leader Frank Seddio and how he has transformed the party in recent years.

In City & State’s July 30 issue, “Above and Beyond: Honoring Those Who Serve,” Frank Runyeon’s report “Courtroom Compassion” highlighted veterans treatment courts, which divert veterans into rehabilitative programs.

Jon Lentz’s fine article on Brooklyn Democratic Party Chair Frank Seddio and the borough’s political landscape gives a well-deserved mention to former Assembly Speaker Stanley Fink. I worked for Fink as his special counsel and directed the Assembly’s Washington, D.C., office.

Fink, a Brooklynite like Seddio, who served as speaker from 1979 through 1986, represented the best in state government. He was tough, hard-nosed, brilliant and determined. At the same time that down-stater Fink facilitated tremendous advances for Democrats as a majority party in membership and policy initiatives, he forged a partnership with upstater Republican Senate Majority Leader Warren Anderson that produced legislative enactments that often went beyond the agendas of two governors.

Fink’s tenure marked a positive period for legislative policy. He built a staff of top-notch individuals and gave them room to bring to life innovative solutions to help address New York’s problems. Assembly members, many elected after the 1974 Watergate scandal, also brought new life to the Legislature, making the Assembly a true incubator for ideas.

Fink helped lay the groundwork for New York to blossom in recent decades. For example, much of the rebirth in the subway and mass transit system is due to Fink’s efforts. Working with then-MTA Chairman Richard Ravitch, Fink found funding for an $8 billion plan for subways, buses and commuter railroad rebuilding.

After Fink’s untimely death in 1997, the late Gov. Mario Cuomo was quoted in The New York Times saying, “He was one of the best public officials I ever knew,” adding, “I think the consensus is he was one of the best speakers this century.”

Indeed, Fink set a standard for excellence that is well worth remembering and learning from as New York seeks to make further progress now and in the future.

This article, although well-meaning, is stereotypical in its portrayal of veterans and PTSD in a way that only propagates the narrative of the troubled, crazy veteran.

I served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, I am a law-abiding citizen, I do not have PTSD, and I have reintegrated well into society like the vast majority of U.S. military veterans. Of course, I know that not all of my peers have been so lucky but it is important in articles like this that you very clearly explain that New Yorkers aren’t suddenly going to be inundated with criminals when the battalions return, even those suffering from PTSD. For most PTSD sufferers, symptoms are often manageable through adequate treatment and dissipate over time. Given that City & State, like many periodicals, seldom covers veteran issues, it would behoove you to provide a more complex and far-reaching analysis that highlights both the strengths and weaknesses within the community when you do.

—Jeffrey M. Wice, Long Beach, NY

Events Director Jasmin Freeman jfreeman@cityandstateny.com Director of Marketing Samantha Diliberti sdiliberti@cityandstateny.com Business Development Scott Augustine saugustine@cityandstateny.com

EDITORIAL Executive Editor Michael Johnson mjohnson@cityandstateny.com Associate Editor / Senior Correspondent Jon Lentz jlentz@cityandstateny.com Web Editor/Reporter Wilder Fleming wfleming@cityandstateny.com Albany Reporter Ashley Hupfl ahupfl@cityandstateny.com Buffalo Reporter Justin Sondel jsondel@cityandstateny.com Staff Reporter Sarina Trangle strangle@cityandstateny.com

—Timothy Kudo, www.cityandstateny.com

Editor-at-Large Gerson Borrero gborrero@cityandstateny.com

Response from Executive Editor Michael Johnson:

Copy Editor Ryan Somers rsomers@cityandstateny.com

Mr. Kudo makes a commendable point. Our intent with the magazine was to highlight many of the great things veterans are doing for the community, while also highlighting the challenges they face when they return from war. The magazine profiled 10 extraordinary individuals who went on to thrive following their service and made a positive impact in New York. While their stories are uplifting, the stories of many vets are not so happy, and we felt it important to inform our audience of government programs that are helping those in need.

We thank Mr. Kudo for his service and welcome his perspective. Those who have served in the theater of war are in the best place to inform those who have not served of all the positive or negative impacts of war, as well as the intricacies and nuance of reintegrating into society.

Editorial Assistant Jeremy Unger junger@cityandstateny.com

PRODUCTION Art Director Guillaume Federighi gfederighi@cityandstateny.com Senior Designer Michelle Yang myang@cityandstateny.com Marketing Graphic Designer Charles Flores cflores@cityandstateny.com Illustrator Danilo Agutoli

City & State is published twice monthly. Copyright ©2015, City and State NY, LLC

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Letters to the

Editor

6

Note from Michael Johnson, executive editor of City & State: In the July 17 issue of our magazine we ran an article examining the career of Regina Calcaterra. The piece was reported and edited by The Accountability Project, whom we entered into an agreement with to run the piece in November 2014. After publication of this piece Ms. Calcaterra reached out to City & State. She informed us that she was not contacted by The Accountability Project in the months leading up to publication, and informed us that she would have been willing to participate in the story. A review by City & State determined that this was indeed the case, even though C&S was under the impression that TAP had been attempting to contact Ms. Calcaterra.

Our magazine currently has several editorial partnerships of differing levels of commitment. The goal of these partnerships is to provide our readers with more interesting and informative content. This was the goal with our agreement with TAP. Unfortunately, there was miscommunication between our two organizations in regards to the specific issue of reaching out to Ms. Calcaterra and City & State takes responsibility for our role in that process. If we had been aware of the lack of outreach we would have held off on running this piece.

Because of this we have given extended space in this magazine for Ms. Calcaterra to respond to the story.

before the crisis hits or story breaks at politically convenient times. We believe that the fewer bad actors in leadership positions, the healthier the political culture becomes, thereby improving our civic culture.”

If the Accountability Project’s work is not based on hard facts, then it ceases to be journalism and becomes about destroying careers based upon the likes and dislikes of the Accountability Project. That’s not journalism; it is career destruction. This venom has no business masquerading as fair journalism.

In the Accountability Project’s hunt for scalps of “bad actors,” apparently, I was first up.

The article is riddled with falsehoods and errors Given that I was never provided the chance to respond, the article didn’t seem to go through any fact-checking process.

Virtually every assertion is based on incorrect information. Most of the errors are significant and present a fact pattern that doesn’t exist. Others are just silly, such as my throwing out the first pitch at a Yankees game, which never happened.

The most blatant falsehood is that I was supposedly in close connection with former State and City Comptroller Alan Hevesi throughout much of my career describing Mr. Hevesi as“my political lodestar for nearly two decades,” and therefore, somehow connected to his fraud conviction.

First, the article has the dates of my employment with Mr. Hevesi all wrong.

The article implies that I worked for Mr. Hevesi when he committed fraud in 2006 in its opening paragraph, “Calcaterra might have made an impression on Cuomo and his staff when he was serving as the state’s attorney general and prosecuting Hevesi.” It also states, “despite Calcaterra…. having served under the man convicted of perhaps the most prominent corruption scheme in Albany in recent decades.”

Facts: I left my job with Mr. Hevesi in July 1998. He served as NYC Comptroller until December 2001 and then later served as NYS Comptroller until his plea bargain in late 2006. I never worked for him when he was State Comptroller, when the fraud occurred. I did not work for him for at least eight years leading up to his plea bargain. How can my job that ended in 1998 from the Office of the City Comptroller be connected to fraud committed in 2006 in the Office of the State Comptroller where I was never employed?

The article states “There was one major change at BR&B around the time Hevesi was elected in 2002, though: They hired Calcaterra, even though she had never worked as a litigator.”

Facts: Wrong Date of Hire: I was hired in January 2004, not 2002.

Lead Litigator Fallacy: The article states I was hired by Barrack, Rodos & Bacine (BR&B) to lead the US securities class action against WorldCom on behalf of the state pension fund although I had no litigation experience. I was not hired to be the “lead litigator,” just as part of the team and many other litigation teams.

It was well publicized that the co-lead litigators were Sean Coffey (former 2010 NYS Attorney General candidate) of Bernstein, Litowitz, Berger & Grossman and Jeff Golan from BR&B. A quick review of the court briefs and transcripts could have verified the actual co-lead litigators.

How the Job Offer Arose: The article states I used Mr. Hevesi’s contacts to go round and round the revolving door. My position at BR&B is inferred to be one of those “contacts.” Mr. Hevesi had nothing to do with my hiring; in fact a woman who had worked for BR&B recommended me for the position. This opportunity provided me a salary of $150,000. Not the $175,000 the article states. Another inaccuracy.

city & state — August 10, 2015

As someone who has spent a fair amount of time as a public sector appointee, I know what it means to reporters, I’m fair game. It’s a trade off that I was willing to make. Last month’s six-page story purportedly detailing my career is an exception. I always believed City & State (“C&S) was better than publishing a story with falsehood after falsehood for the purpose of trying to destroy someone for sport. Nor do I believe that C&S would permit one of its own reporters to publish a piece so

permeated with fiction and innuendo.

I have four primary concerns about this article: First, I was never provided the basic opportunity to respond to the allegations in the article in any way. In fact, I didn’t even know that C&S planned to go ahead and publish the article.

Second, the article was farmed out to an advocacy group, whose stated agenda is to destroy the careers of up-and-coming public officials they deem dangerous.

Third, the article is riddled with falsehoods and errors throughout.

Fourth, the article is accompanied by lewd graphics that reinforce sexist innuendos and includes distortions of my family history.

Let me, finally, respond to the article’s completely unfounded allegations.

Never provided the opportunity to respond The writer, Catrinel Bartolomeu, who produced this article for The Accountancy Project, first called me last Oct. 27. She told me that she had spent “months” researching the story, and asked for an interview. I stated clearly that I wanted to respond and contribute to the story. We had several more exchanges over the next couple weeks, and I indicated every time that I wanted the opportunity to respond to the article. That never happened.

Then in July --- more than eight months after my last contact with Ms. Bartolomeu, the story appeared out of nowhere. Again, I received no advance notice, and no chance to respond. This was not journalism. This was a mugging.

The article was farmed out to an advocacy group, whose stated agenda is to destroy the careers of up-and-coming public officials The article was actually written by an advocacy group called the Accountancy Project, not C&S. The Accountability Project has as its stated objective on its website dedicating “its resources to informing the public of these bad actors

cit yandstateny.com

Letters to the

Editor

firm was handling. Part of my job, for those few weeks only, was to keep Mr. Hevesi’s office up-to-date on a daily basis, which I did.

No New Business: When significant securities litigation matters arose, it was Mr. Golan who would speak to the office.

Not me. During my eight year tenure at BR&B the firm did not get any new cases through Mr. Hevesi’s office.

State employment: As mentioned earlier, the article states that I “had used connections made while under his employ to earn money as a lobbyist and attorney, gaining prestige to do so as an employee of the state.” Again, I never worked for Mr. Hevesi while he was State Comptroller.

With one exception for a few weeks in 2005 described above, I was not regularly corresponding with Mr. Hevesi after I left his employ in 1998. Again, facts the Accountability Project were not interested in since they did not serve the article’s premise.

Eastern Paralyzed Veterans Association (EPVA): The article states that I was a lobbyist for Eastern Paralyzed Veterans Association. I never worked as a lobbyist for the EPVA. I served as a community advocate for paralyzed veterans for $17,000 a year. How that can be twisted into a negative is beyond me.

Another falsehood.

Lobbying Firm Factual Inaccuracy: The article states that while I worked at the lobbying firm of Figliola and Calcaterra, I was joined by Hevesi top staffer Jack Chartier and Catherine Giuliani. This is false.

Fact: My business with Carl Figliola ended on September 10, 2001. After I left, Mr. Figliola recruited Jack Chartier and Catherine Giuliani in 2002 – after the Hevesi and Giuliani administrations ended in late 2001, where they were both respectively employed.

New Lobbying Firm Factual Inaccuracy: The article states that after I dissolved Figliola and Calcaterra, I

opened another lobbying firm.

Fact: Wrong. After 2001 I did not create another lobbying firm. I formed a small consulting firm called Apple Advisors and still had my sole proprietor law practice intact. I was not registered as a lobbyist, and neither my law firm nor my consulting firm was a lobbying firm. Another falsehood in pursuit of an inaccurate narrative.

Hevesi Influence on my being hired by NYCERS: The “revolving door” and “connections” statement imply that Mr. Hevesi was somehow involved in my hire by NYCERS. Fact: NYCERS posted a job opening publicly for an Associate Attorney; I applied for it and got it on the merits.

Thereafter, I was promoted to serve as Deputy General Counsel on the merits.

Again, I was not in any contact with Mr. Hevesi at the time of my being hired.

But one more falsehood in pursuit of an inaccurate narrative.

The articles quotes from unnamed sources that I was “shockingly underqualified” for my second Moreland Commission appointment.

Facts: “Shockingly Underqualified” Inaccuracy: Having just run one Moreland Commission successfully and without complaint the accusation that I was “shockingly underqualified” is absurd. I had an understanding of how to run a high-profile commission having just headed the prior commission while serving ten engaged and knowledgeable commissioners. During that commission I was responsible for overseeing multiple parallel investigations that included issuing subpoenas, depositions, discovery, document review and of course document retention. I also managed all of the high profile hearings that were held statewide and was responsible for issuing two substantive reports within six months which resulted in new laws and regulations to further secure utility storm

response and preparation throughout the state.

Lewd graphics, sexist innuendo and distortions of my family history As a woman, a female professional, and an author of a best-selling book trying to give hope to foster children and other children in need fighting deplorable odds, this is the most upsetting aspect to the article.

First, the article includes graphics that portray a distorted, sexualized view of women. The illustrations of my going through a revolving door and pictured with former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani are truly the most lewd, degrading and cringe worthy of them all. If I were a man, what would these illustrations have looked like?

Second, the article implies that I built my career based on the help of older men.

If I were a man, these older men would be called “mentors.”

Finally, the article takes what I wrote about my very challenged childhood and implies that I have brought behaviors that were forced upon me as a child into my adult life. Yes, as the article states, I “learned to lie out of necessity” – to keep my siblings together so that we could defend ourselves, rather than being separated and sent to abusive foster homes. Yes, my “mother [got] close to men for money and shelter.” Was I shaped by my childhood? Of course, we all are.

Did I use such desperate means to get ahead in my professional life? Absolutely not. Furthermore, the suggestions that I did are not only vulgar, but cruel.

I have always had respect for City & State and the quality of your reporting.

In this case, however, by outsourcing the reporting process to an activist advocacy group, while allowing the inclusion of lewd, vulgar, degrading and sexist graphics, and most importantly not verifying that I had the opportunity to respond to allegations that are untrue, you deviated from your normally high standards.

To have your letter to the editor considered for publication, leave a comment at www.cityandstateny.com, tweet us @CityAndStateNY, email editor@cityandstateny.com or write to 61 Broadway, Suite 2825, New York, NY 10006.

Letters may be edited for clarity or length.

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7

city & state — August 10, 2015

The article states that I “became the point person for handling BR&B’s relationship with the state Comptroller’s office and would speak with Hevesi and those in his office “several times a day.”

With a similar premise as the quote above, the article also states “In years to come the relationship between Hevesi, BR&B and Calcaterra remained a close one.”

The article also states that Mr. Hevesi was “my political lodestar for nearly two decades,” that my relationship continued with him “as long as he was in power” and that I “learned the art of politics and governance from a state official convicted of fraud, and had used connections made while under his employ to earn money as a lobbyist and attorney, gaining prestige to do so as an employee of the state – a perfect illustration of the revolving door in New York politics.”

Facts: Minimal contact with Mr. Hevesi: I left Mr. Hevesi’s office in the summer of 1998. Other than saying hello at occasional public events, I was not in contact with him after I left with one minor exception, as described below.

Another falsehood that forms the basis for much of the story.

Point of Contact for BR&B to Mr. Hevesi: I was not the point of contact with state Comptroller’s office during Mr. Hevesi’s administration, in fact it was BR&B’s well-seasoned lead litigators, Jeff Golan and Rick Komins.

Mr. Golan and Mr. Komins served as the lead litigations in the In re WorldCom Securities Litigation and In re McKesson Securities Litigation matters. They reported into Mr. Hevesi’s General Counsel, not me. The only time I was in regular contact with Mr. Hevesi and/or his office after I stopped working for him in 1998 was for a brief period of time – a few weeks in 2005 - as my referenced testimony clearly states– during a high profile securities litigation trial in the Southern District of New York that my

Harlem Vet Center’s Walter Bridgers, second from right

Mayor’s Office of Veterans’ Affairs Commissioner Loree Sutton, left, during the job fair

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city & state — August 10, 2015

Sutton speaks at the event

UWVC’s Dan McSweeney

Capalino+Company’s Tom Gray

Orange County Exec Steven Neuhaus

At its Above & Beyond awards ceremony, City & State was proud to honor 10 veterans who chose to continue serving their communities after they left the military. The event at Pace University featured a career and education fair for veterans, as well as keynote remarks from the Mayor’s Office of Veterans’ Affairs Commissioner Loree Sutton and remarks by Assemblyman Michael DenDekker. cit yandstateny.com

Wednesday, September 23rd • BNY Mellon, 101 Barclay Street BRIEF: On Wednesday, September 23rd, City & State hosts its 4th annual Diversity forum featuring leaders in government, business and advocacy to discuss the social and economic advantages of promoting diversity in both public and private sectors.

AGENDA: 8:00am Registration & Breakfast 9:00am Keynote: Patricia Gatling, Deputy Secretary for Civil Rights (confirmed) 9:15am PANEL 1: Diversity Recruitment that Works New York City is famous for its diversity, representing virtually every nation on earth. It’s one thing to acknowledge that diversity adds value to doing business in New York. It’s another thing to make it a reality.

City & State convenes a panel of experts to discuss workforce diversity and best practices that will help organizations reach new markets.

10:00am PANEL 2: Contracting with New York State to Build your Business New York State’s 30% MWBE goal is one of the highest in the nation but has yet to be achieved. Opportunities still exist for MWBEs to build and expand their business in New York. Which market sectors have the most opportunity for MWBE participation? How are state agencies promoting new contracting opportunities?

11:00am PANEL 3: How to get the Grade

BRIEF: In a recent report, Comptroller Stringer gave New York a “D’ for city agencies working with minority and women-owned business enterprises. Only 4% of the city’s procurement comes from MWBEs. City & State and NYS and NYC administration leaders discuss how more MWBEs can gain access to contracts with city agencies.

12:00pm MWBE SERVICES EXHIBITION

For more information on programming and sponsorship opportunities, please contact Jasmin Freeman at jfreeman@cityandstateny.com or call 646-442-1662.

city & state — August 10, 2015

ARMAN DZIDZOVIC

10

Elected officials, business leaders and members of the community packed BLDG 92 at the Brooklyn Navy Yard to help City & State celebrate its second annual Brooklyn Special Issue.

The launch party featured remarks by Borough President Eric Adams and appearances by Public Advocate Letitia James, City Councilman Jumaane Williams, Assemblyman Joseph Lentol, state Sen. Simcha Felder, ABNY Chairman Bill Rudin and many others.

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CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY AWARDS

City & State Reports honored outstanding professionals from New York’s technology, telecommunications and new media sectors July 29 at Hunter College. Honorees included industry leaders like AOL Chairman Tim Armstrong, Sabey Data Centers President John Sabey and IBM Vice President of Corporate Citizenship and Corporate Affairs Stanley Litow. The keynote speaker was New York City’s Chief Technology Officer Minerva Tantoco.

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city & state — August 10, 2015

ARMAN DZIDZOVIC

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MAPPING MEDICAL MARIJUANA M

ore than 40 organizations submitted applications (plus a $10,000 application fee and $200,000 in collateral) for licenses to produce and distribute medical marijuana in New York. At the end of July, the state Department of Health released its list of five lucky winners: Bloomfield Industries Inc., Columbia Care NY LLC, Empire State Health Solutions, Etain LLC and PharmaCann LLC. The state’s medical marijuana law will be one of the strictest in the nation. Patients will not be allowed to smoke the drug, and the law currently covers a very short list of 10 conditions, including Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis and epilepsy. In announcing the winners, state Health Commissioner Howard Zucker said that the five organizations “showed, through a rigorous and comprehensive evaluation process, they are best suited to produce and provide quality medical marijuana to eligible New Yorkers in need, and to comply with New York’s strict program requirements.”

Each organization will be allowed one manufacturing location and four additional dispensary locations, to be scattered across the state. Here’s a look at where they’ll be located:

ORGANIZATION NAME

12 Bloomfield Industries Inc.

Columbia Care NY LLC

Empire State Health Solutions

city & state — August 10, 2015

Etain, LLC

PharmaCann LLC

FACILITY TYPE

MONROE

COUNTY

Manufacturing

Queens

Dispensing

Nassau

Dispensing

New York

Dispensing

Onondaga

Dispensing

Erie

Manufacturing

Monroe

Dispensing

New York

Dispensing

Suffolk

Dispensing

Clinton

Dispensing

Monroe

Manufacturing

Fulton

Dispensing

Broome

Dispensing

Albany

Dispensing

Westchester

Dispensing

Queens

Manufacturing

Warren

Dispensing

Albany

Dispensing

Ulster

Dispensing

Westchester

Dispensing

Onondaga

Manufacturing

Orange

Dispensing

Erie

Dispensing

Onondaga

Dispensing

Albany

Dispensing

Bronx

ERIE

KEY: = Manufacturing location = Dispensary location

cit yandstateny.com

CLINTON

WARREN

ONONDAGA

FULTON

13 ALBANY

ULSTER BROOME

ORANGE

MANHATTAN

BRONX QUEENS NASSAU

cit yandstateny.com

SUFFOLK

city & state — August 10, 2015

WESTCHESTER

CIT Y

WAR ON WORDS

BRATTON SAYS ADVOCATES CONFUSE POLICING TERMS ON PURPOSE

By SARINA TRANGLE

city & state — August 10, 2015

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conducive to more serious crime.

This spring, City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito proposed decriminalizing a handful of minor quality-of-life offenses.

Bratton, however, detailed the difference between the NYPD’s use of stop and frisk and officers enforcing laws against low-level offenses.

“Stop, question and frisk, under the law, is based on what is called reasonable suspicion—an officer suspects that a person may be or is about to commit a crime,” Bratton said. “Quality-of-life enforcement is based on a totally different legal phenomenon. It is based on probable

cause, a higher standard of proof. The higher standard of proof is usually the officer witnesses the offense, which is a criminal offense, or he has a witness.”

The New York Civil Liberties Union and others endorsing the decriminalization push have argued that the “sheer volume” of summonses issued strains the court system’s ability to adjudicate justly and that “a significant percentage” of summonses are thrown out, sometimes for insufficient evidence or lack of complete information.

But Bratton said police are just one part of the criminal justice system and should not be conflated with

a process that gives court officials and prosecutors discretion when it comes to upgrading and downgrading offenses or making plea deals.

“It’s not just a matter of the officer issuing the summons. It’s what happens subsequent to it,” he said.

“I’m quite comfortable that we’re doing pretty good. Does it need to be reformed? It certainly does. We’re working on it. I’m not fighting that.

I’m working in many respects to keep it criminal, so my officers have the power to basically start the process, but then give them a lot of discretionary tools so it doesn’t necessarily have to end up in a summons or in an arrest.”

ARMAN DZIDZOVIC

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YPD Commissioner William Bratton included U.S. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries and the Rev. Calvin Butts among a group of advocates obscuring the difference between stop-and-frisk policing and enforcing quality-of-life violations.

“They’re part of the group ... that are, unfortunately, misrepresenting— either out of lack of knowledge or appreciation or for political purposes—the importance of qualityof-life (enforcement),” Bratton said.

“There is an intended confusion being created. The same advocates that sought to reduce stop, question and frisk are now trying to equate that as the same thing as quality of life—‘There’s too much quality-oflife enforcement.’ However, there is a distinct difference between the two.”

Jeffries has said he does not have any interest in running for mayor, though he has reportedly been fielding requests to do so from Butts and others. Despite pointing out potential de Blasio challengers and dissidents, Bratton suggested he does not plan to remain commissioner through the entirety of a second term under de Blasio—or another executive.

“I will not be the commissioner for six and a half years. … I’ll be 70 some-odd, 75 years old,” he said.

Speaking at City & State’s Newsmaker forum last month, Bratton responded to the recent push to reduce the punishment for qualityof-life offenses. Some New York City Council members and criminal justice advocates argue the NYPD’s enforcement of these offenses, such as urinating in public or drinking on a stoop, is overzealous and points to larger problems with the broken windows theory of law enforcement.

That theory contends that tolerating minor offenses—such as vandalism and graffiti—creates an environment

NYPD Commissioner William Bratton was featured at City & State’s Newsmaker forum. cit yandstateny.com

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HANDLING HOMELESSNESS

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t City & State’s event, Bratton spoke extensively about New York City’s growing homeless population, and how the NYPD can’t simply arrest its way out of the problem.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

City & State: The New York Post has recently tried to portray the city as sliding back to the bad old days in the ’70s and ’80s. They’re depicting more aggressive panhandling, parks full of homeless people, the return of squeegee men. How do you respond to those who fear that the city might be backsliding?

William Bratton: Well, the Post actually in some respects is doing me a favor at this particular time, because it’s reinforcing that this is an issue. It is calling public attention to it. We do have aggressive panhandlers. We do have the acts that they are depicting. There is an increased homeless population. The city counts document that. I don’t think that’s a secret.

What we are attempting to do is act within the law, because I don’t intend to

repeat the same mistakes of stop, question and frisk, where the court determined we were acting outside the law. I just had a session with all my precinct commanders for three hours, reinforcing what our powers are in the parks, in the streets, in the subway. Because so much of what the public is concerned with, unfortunately, we cannot do anything about under the law.

I’m not—under any circumstances— going to encourage my officers to break the law in order to enforce it. So there are two things necessary: better training of my officers about the tools they have available.

The second is something that the mayor is fully committed to and for the last couple of months has been incredibly engaged in, which you’ll see in the next couple of weeks: a citywide comprehensive effort to deal with the issue of homelessness on the streets, in particularly that population that is significantly emotionally disturbed.

EDPs, as we call them.

You cannot arrest your way out of that problem; it’s going to require (the Department of) Homeless Services, Health and Hospitals, a whole range of entities to deal with this issue. It can be

dealt with. We’ve been looking all over the country at who’s been having success with what initiatives. Once again, I have a very good budget to work with. I’ll be able to, over the next year or so, train 10,000 of my officers (for) four days of intensive training, the best training available in the country, to deal with the emotionally disturbed among the homeless population.

If you Google the term “homeless,” you’re probably not going to find it until the late 1970s, when it became commonplace to refer to a population effectively living in the streets, who are service-resistant in many respects, alcoholics, drug-addicted.

We emptied out the mental institutions in the ’70s, the unintended consequences of which we are dealing with 40 years later.

We have no place to put them. They need to get help. They need to be put someplace where they can get that help.

The city government and the mayor are committed to, in fact, dealing with it more forcefully than we have. We’ve almost kind of neglected it for 30 or 40 years. The good news is that there are resources in the budget; there’s $40 million specifically focused for this. I have quite a few millions of dollars for the

training efforts. Hopefully, you’ll start seeing some changes.

There are also certain street behaviors that are protected by the First Amendment. It drives me crazy in Times Square when you see naked people covered in body paint, and it’s (considered) an expression of art. We have researched that top to bottom, and we cannot find a law that allows us to interfere with that freedom of expression reflected through an art form. There are certain things that we can enforce. There are other things we cannot enforce. So, there’s an education of my cops that needs to be done. There’s an education of the public. And quite frankly, there’s an education necessary for the media. The media, whether they know it or not— sometimes I’m sure they know it but it doesn’t sell papers as much—present (issues) that they know we really don’t have the power to deal with.

To watch the full interview with Commissioner William Bratton, visit www. cityandstateny.com.

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PBA LEFT BEHIND

CITY LABOR DEAL WITH FIREFIGHTERS DOESN’T INCLUDE POLICE PARTNERS

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or almost a year the Uniformed Firefighters Association of Greater New York and the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association of New York City have been unified in their lobbying effort to fix a pension disability loophole that went into effect when then-Gov. David Paterson vetoed a bill in 2009. That loophole has left first-year officers and firefighters with a permanent disability pension of as little as $27 dollars a day—a prospect unions argue makes their members less likely to take the risks necessary to do their job well.

This month, the firefighters got their deal to restore this pension disability gap, but the police union is

cit yandstateny.com

still waiting.

The UFA reached a deal with the city of New York a new contract that will increase salaries by 11 percent through July 31, 2017, for roughly 8,000 firefighters and FDNY personnel. The contract agreement would take effect retroactively, starting on Aug. 1, 2010, when the UFA’s old contract expired.

“The labor agreement recognizes and respects the hard work and sacrifice and the dedication of the members of this union, and at the same time, does what we’ve said all along over the last year and a half is our mantra—respect the workforce while protecting the taxpayers,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a press conference

with the UFA. He added that, when ratified, the city will have negotiated contracts with 83 percent of municipal employees since he took office.

Included in this deal was an agreement that the city would support the pension disability reforms, working with the City Council to pass a home rule amendment that will clear the way for the state Legislature to implement a fix to the 2009 loophole. To offset the costs of the disability deal, some new firefighters will pay 3 percent more for their benefits, increasing their total contribution to 6 percent.

Assemblyman Peter Abbate Jr. told City & State that he expects the deal on pension disability will easily pass

the Legislature. A vote is not expected until session resumes in January.

The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association though, still has an outstanding contract with the city and will have to negotiate its own deal with the mayor’s office.

City Director of Labor Relations Bob Linn hinted that the city would be willing to cut a deal with the police union too.

“Our hope is that others will come in and we will make a similar deal with all of them as well,” Linn said.

The PBA issued a brief statement about the deal, saying they are awaiting the outcome of binding arbitration.

The statement didn’t directly address the pension disability agreement.

city & state — August 10, 2015

By MICHAEL GARETH JOHNSON

STATE

FIGHTING $15

NONPROFITS FEAR PROGRESSIVE INITIATIVES COULD HAVE HARMFUL UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

By JEFF STEIN from NEW YORK NONPROFIT

T

city & state — A u g u s t 10, 2015

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the Fast Food Wage Board’s recommendation to raise the minimum wage for fast food workers to $15 an hour, some nonprofits are describing it as one of several wellintentioned progressive initiatives that may end up hurting those on the front lines of social work.

Charles Houston, executive director of the Queens Center for Progress, a nonprofit that provides a host of services to adults and children with developmental disabilities, fears that without government intervention, the wage board’s decision will greatly impact nonprofits’ ability to retain workers who provide essential services to some of New York’s neediest individuals.

“What differentiates nonprofits is that we have a very limited ability to increase revenue,” Houston said. “A commercial firm can raise the price of a service, or they have a profit margin and can fund a salary increase without raising prices. Neither apply to nonprofits. We’re a break-even operation.”

Houston worries that his organization’s inability to keep up with the new fast food industry wages will present hard choices for his employees. He says QCP offers a starting wage of just under $11 an hour for direct service professionals, the employees who work directly with disabled clients, providing educational, health and transportation services.

One such employee, Keshia Butler, a day service professional at QCP who leads instruction and provides supervision and transportation for disabled individuals, says the wage board’s decision will impact many nonprofit employees who love working with clients but desperately need increased income.

“Yes, we’re passionate about what we do, but we don’t get paid,” Butler said. “Two of my girlfriends who work at agencies have multiple jobs just to make

A KATZ/SHUTTERSTOCK

hough many are celebrating

Fast food workers, organized labor and elected officials celebrate the wage board’s recommendation for a $15 an hour minimum wage. ends meet. Honestly, I would work two jobs if I could, but I have a young child at home, so my significant other is the one with two jobs right now.”

Given the harsh reality of supporting herself and her family, Butler says the fast food wage increase offers a choice she would rather not make.

“When I see stuff like this on the news, I think that maybe I should work fast food,” Butler said. “I’ll be less stressed, and it’ll be easier for me to pay all of these costs that keep adding up, like my son’s tuition and my MetroCard. Everything is going up.”

Some economists also share Butler’s concerns. Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington, D.C., think tank, agrees that the decision could apply significant pressure to the nonprofit sector.

“It could certainly present a difficult situation, where people will have to leave jobs where they are doing much more socially productive work

simply because they need to put bread on the table,” Baker said.

However, Baker also noted the lack of historical precedence for such an isolated minimum wage increase.

“Unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of data on the impact a localized wage increase will have on the entire market,” Baker said. “The closest thing that we can point to is the Los Angeles hotel workers increase, and that was very recent. This is really uncharted territory.”

Despite these calls for concern, other nonprofit experts contend that wages are just a symptom of a larger problem—low levels of government funding for nonprofit services—and that the community would be better served by focusing on this root cause.

“Low starting wages for nonprofit workers are a manifestation of the larger issue of inadequate payment for nonprofit services,” said Jack Krauskopf, director of the Center for Nonprofit Strategy and Management at Baruch College.

“I think that it’s generally a good idea to raise wages for low-income workers,” Krauskopf continued. “If it has to be done incrementally, then it’s better than it not being done at all.”

But Houston maintains that the fast food wage increase represents an immediate threat to his organization.

“We offer better benefits than fast food employers, but I’m not convinced that will be enough to keep people,” Houston said. “Thousands of people will be affected by this. Our staff members create incredible relationships with clients who are nonverbal and have multiple disabilities. To disrupt those relationships is horrible.”

At the same time that nonprofits face substantial changes in the labor market, organizations also cite an ever-mounting list of regulatory requirements as unfairly shackling the sector.

The latest so-called unfunded mandate comes in the form of a bill that passed both the state Senate and the Assembly at the end of this cit yandstateny.com

cit yandstateny.com

burdensome. Anyone who claims that this is a real burden is simply looking for an excuse.”

But industry consultants say that while creation of workplace violence prevention programs will not be novel, it will require thousands of organizations to devote time and resources to paperwork and training for their employees.

“Compliance will necessarily include internal and external risk evaluations, which will vary dramatically based on the type of

work the organization does,” said Joseph Carello, an associate at the law firm Nixon Peabody, whose practice includes compliance matters.

Carello also questioned the motives and timing of the legislation.

“The change in the law was very hastily passed at the end of the legislative session,” Carello said.

“There does not seem to be a lot of rationale in the legislative history for this specific expansion of the law.

Honestly, this seems like something that could be done, so it was done.”

STATE

important issue, and it is incumbent upon us to encourage those who do business with the state to maintain certain standards,” Martins said.

Martins underscored that templates for workplace violence prevention programs are readily available online, and that many larger nonprofits already have such programs in place.

“I think we need to measure our statements carefully,” Martins said.

“To ask someone to adopt a policy for which there exists many templates on the Internet, I think, is not

Enough is Enough

Bad mental health policies harm people and run down our communities.

by Danny Donohue Last week, a 72 year old man was attacked with correctional facilities have some form of mental scissors by an emotionally disturbed homeless illness. Many of these individuals wouldn’t be woman in the West Village. Just a day later, a tourist incarcerated if they could get the help and care they from China was also hit in need in their community. the face by a homeless man in Riker’s Island already has midtown. And just days ago, more mentally ill than all state a 68 year old restaurant owner hospitals combined. County was pummeled by another sheriff ’s across this state will man living in a shelter tell you they are constantly for mentally ill people in filling their jail cells with Washington Heights. people in desperate need of IS AFFECTED BY MENTAL mental health services because Public incidents like these they have nowhere to send ILLNESS. TWO THIRDS involving individuals suffering these individuals for help.

OF THOSE IN NEED OF from mental illness have TREATMENT ARE NOT become too common in recent For taxpayers, the cost of weeks. It’s not just Manhattan. providing mental health RECEIVING IT. The problem is real in nearly services in jails is a wasteful every part of the state because and unnecessary expense. of years of bad state policies that aren’t getting better.

ONE OUT OF FIVE FAMILIES

Consider the fact that the state continues to downsize state psychiatric centers, including those that serve the five boroughs of New York City, without developing adequate community care. This means seriously sick people are too often left to fend for themselves on the streets or end up in local jails and state prisons. It’s not a new circumstance but State officials repeatedly fail to address it.

One out of five families is affected by mental illness.

Two thirds of those in need of treatment are not receiving it. Yet, New York continues to renege on promises for community care and diminish mental health services.

Many of those with severe mental illness need treatment in a hospital setting. By some estimates, more than half of the inmates in county jails and

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Enough is enough. It’s time for a comprehensive mental health plan for New York, which fully uses existing state resources including our mental health hospitals.

DA N N Y D O N O H U E , P R E S I D E N T

Danny Donohue is president of the nearly 300,000 member CSEA – New York’s Leading Union – representing workers doing every kind of job, in every part of New York.

city & state — A u g u s t 10, 2015

year’s session. The legislation expands on an existing mandate for publicsector employees, requiring nonprofit organizations that receive 50 percent or more of their funding from the state or federal government to institute a workplace violence prevention program.

Buffalo Assemblywoman Crystal Peoples-Stokes, who introduced the bill in the state Assembly, says the legislation was inspired by the realities of modern society, not specific events.

“I think the need for this mandate arises from the days and times that we live in,” Peoples-Stokes said. “People show up to work and take their anger out on others. Unfortunately, our society has become less and less civil.”

However, some nonprofit advocates have expressed concern that lawmakers are flippantly increasing organizations’ regulatory burden.

“It’s not a question of whether workplace violence prevention is good or bad,” said Michael Clark, executive director of the Nonprofit Coordinating Committee of New York, which represents approximately 1,500 member nonprofit organizations in government relations. “If you require an ever-growing list of things for nonprofit employers, then you’re taking time and resources away from mission-related work and placing it in compliance work.”

“There is a great impulse to regulate in the legislative world,” Clark continued. “We’re not antiregulation. We understand that nonprofits have a role to play that is related to government work, often parallel to government work. What we’re saying is that one should be very careful about introducing new regulatory requirements into a sector that is already highly regulated.”

Peoples-Stokes says she has heard concerns from members of the nonprofit community but does not feel that the legislation represents an unreasonable regulation.

“We have gotten pushback from nonprofits that think it’s unfair,” she said. “There isn’t a requirement for for-profit employers who get the same level of government funding to have a program, and maybe that’s something that we should look at. But what this legislation is asking for is not to reinvent the wheel.”

State Sen. Jack Martins, who introduced the bill in the Senate, agrees with Peoples-Stokes that the requirement is not overly burdensome and is in line with larger policy goals.

“Workplace violence is an

BUFFALO

STARTING SMALL ERIE COUNTY HOPES MICROBEAD BAN SPARKS A STATEWIDE TREND

By JUSTIN SONDEL

city & state — August 10, 2015

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JUSTIN SONDEL

E

rie County has become the first municipality in the state to pass legislation banning plastic microbeads in cosmetic products while bills at the state and federal levels linger.

The legislation, which passed the Erie County Legislature in a unanimous vote, will prohibit retailers from selling products that contain the tiny plastic beads, which are not screened out by most water treatment plants and account for an estimated 90 percent of new plastic pollution in Lake Erie.

Legislator Patrick Burke, a Buffalo Democrat, sponsored the bill and pushed to get the law enacted with the help of the Legislature’s chairman, Republican John Mills.

Burke said that while the ban can’t stop people from ordering products with microbeads online or retailers in other Great Lakes counties or states from continuing to sell them, the ban will lessen the amount of the damaging plastic entering the waterways. He hopes the ban will act as a catalyst for other counties, or even the state or federal governments, to act.

“Certainly there are other issues at play, but if we hadn’t taken this lead and taken this role we wouldn’t be able to bring the issue back up and we wouldn’t be able to set the standard of what an effective ban would be,” Burke said.

The county law will require all retailers to stop selling the products within six months, and fines will be issued to those continuing to stock the products after the grace period.

The freshman lawmaker has called the Erie County ban the most comprehensive in the nation, noting that some laws, like the ban in Illinois, allow for biodegradable plastic microbeads, though research on the safety of those products is inconclusive.

Erie County Legislator Patrick Burke sponsored the countywide bill banning plastic microbeads in cosmetic products.

“On all those levels it sets a standard and it puts the county of Erie in a position of leadership,” Burke said.

On the federal level, U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand also reintroduced a bill banning the plastic pellets for the second year in a row, but it has not been voted on in Congress.

On the state level, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has been pushing the issue for two years. The bill has faltered in the state Senate after passing in the Assembly for two consecutive sessions.

This past session, Republican state Sen. Tom O’Mara of Big Flats introduced two separate microbead bills but neither managed to make it out of committee.

Nick Benson, a Schneiderman spokesman, said the attorney general plans to push the legislation again next year.

“An estimated 19 tons of plastic microbeads enter New York’s wastewater systems each and every year,” Benson said. “These microbeads are a threat to our environment, our wildlife, and to public health.”

Saima Anjam, environmental health director at Environmental Advocates of New York, said she hopes Erie County’s leadership on the matter will pressure Senate Republicans to help ban the beads.

“Despite industry marketing (microbeads) don’t make anyone cleaner or more beautiful,” Anjam

said, “but they do wreak havoc on our sewer systems, waterways and wildlife.”

Two members of the Legislature’s majority caucus, Republican Lynne Dixon and Conservative Joe Lorigo, voiced concerns about the county’s ability to enforce the ban before voting in favor of the measure.

Dixon said she hopes that other levels of government will enact bans so that the lakes will not continue to be susceptible to the pollutants entering the water from other counties.

“I do think long term it’s important that the state do what is necessary,” she said, “so that we’re not worried about county borders in terms of enforcement.” cit yandstateny.com

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FRACKING: ROUND TWO

ENVIRONMENTALISTS AREN’T CONVINCED BY GEL-BASED ALTERNATIVE

By ASHLEY HUPFL

I

20

n June, New York state put to rest a nearly seven-year-long debate about high-volume hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” when it banned the controversial process of drilling horizontally into the gas-rich Marcellus Shale formation, located largely in the state’s Southern Tier.

Now, a recent submission of two applications to the state Department of Environmental Conservation to drill a well using gelled propane instead of water could revive the fracking debate in New York.

Tioga Energy Partners LLC has proposed drilling a single well to first look at the geology of both the Marcellus and Utica formations.

Once that is completed, that well will be closed and the drill will be turned sideways to drill through the Marcellus Shale to produce natural gas.

“It’s basically known as waterless fracking,” said Karen Moreau, executive director of the state Petroleum Council. “The whole study that was done in New York was a study of fracking using water and there’s certain issues that go along with using water. People don’t realize that fracking in general was not banned.

The high-volume hydraulic fracturing requires the use of higher volumes of water than had done in the past.”

Adam Schultz, Tioga Energy Partners’ legal counsel in this case,

argues gelled propane fracking falls under the 1992 Generic Environmental Impact Statement on the Oil, Gas and Solution Mining Regulatory Program, which is the state DEC’s program for regulating oil, gas, underground gas storage and solution mining wells of any depth, and brine disposal, stratigraphic and geothermal wells deeper than 500 feet.

“We’ve proposed to use gelled propane as the fracturing fluid and that technology, that completion method, is evaluated under the 1992 GEIS that the (state) DEC completed and is not subject to the 2015 GEIS that was recently completed (that banned high-volume hydraulic fracking),”

Schultz told City & State. “This project is entirely consistent with the 2015 study. Some people have talked about going around the ban or that it’s a loophole—it’s not.”

The alternative method has not appeased opponents of high-volume hydraulic fracturing.

“We’ve learned through the emerging science on hydraulic fracturing over the last number of years—so much about the dangers and the risks it poses to people and communities,” said John Armstrong, statewide grass-roots coordinator at Frack Action. “While not hydraulic fracturing, propane fracking shares many of those same dangers and harms

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Tioga Energy Partners LLC is proposing drilling in New York with gelled propane.

DEC has no time frame to make its preliminary decision.

“There may be one or two issues that the state wants to look at and we have addressed those issues in the application, but what they need to figure out, is that sufficient or if there’s other relevant material that they’d like to consider,” Schultz said. “We believe we’ve addressed it, but it’s always good to have another set of eyes on these

things.”

Iwanowicz also said a full environmental impact study should be conducted before the state makes a decision.

“One thing that is certainly clear is that if someone is proposing something like this it should go through a full environmental impact review, it shouldn’t be allowed to exist under generic drilling environmental

impact,” he said. “This is a new technology and a new way of doing things. I think people need to know the full range of issues and how it stacks up against water-based fracturing, which is clearly banned.”

Although the two sides disagree about the use of fracking in New York, even opponents of gelled propane fracking agree it does not fall under the 2015 study that banned high-volume hydraulic fracturing.

“It appears the (state) DEC needs to undergo a further review, which if they consider all of the same science that would apply to many of the shared impacts for propane and hydraulic fracturing, certainly must conclude this form of fracking should be banned as well,” Armstrong said.

It remains to be seen how the state DEC will resolve the gelled propane fracking debate, but the state’s natural gas industry remains hopeful.

“This is an alternative method that has been used in over 800 wells in the country successfully and it’s not subject to the ban in New York,” Moreau said. “The decision here in New York was a political one and it remains to be seen whether or not this will be a political decision or not.”

21

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city & state — August 10, 2015

CLAFFRA/SHUTTERSTOCK

to people in those communities.”

Environmentalists argue gelled propane fracking still causes air pollution and increases the risk of earthquakes and water pollution.

“Fracking in general has been determined unsafe. It’s not just the water issue,” said Peter Iwanowicz, executive director for Environmental Advocates of New York. “Our concern would be across a panoply of issues that the governor and the health commissioner looked at when they deemed this unsafe for New York.”

Now that the permit applications have been submitted, Schultz outlined two likely possibilities for what will happen next.

One possibility is that the state DEC could determine that, based on the application’s compliance with the 1992 GEIS and the additional information that was submitted with the permit application, no further environmental review is necessary and gelled propane fracking is allowed.

The second possibility would be that the state DEC determines there are issues with the new process they’d like to see more closely examined, which would be done through an environmental impact statement. The

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ew York City has agreed to tweak how it calculates the amount of available space in school buildings, which are often shared by multiple schools, Education Department officials said last month.

It has also agreed to consider bigger adjustments to the city’s school-space tally, known as the Blue Book, like factoring in how many special-needs students a school serves when calculating how much space it requires. The long-awaited changes are based on the recommendations of an advisory group formed last year to review how the city makes those space estimates, which guide decisions about whether buildings have enough room to house multiple schools and where new buildings are needed.

“These important recommendations will help us better use space in our schools,” said Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña.

But the city rejected one of the group’s key proposals: to lower classsize targets for every grade. Doing so would have altered the city’s availablespace formula, which could have resulted in more schools being labeled overcrowded and the city appearing to need more school space.

The decision dismayed some advocates who consider the Blue Book’s calculations key to reducing class sizes and curbing co-locations, the contentious policy where multiple schools are housed in the same building.

“You have to incorporate smaller classes into the formula or else the city will continue to co-locate and cram more students into these buildings,” said Leonie Haimson, executive director of the advocacy group Class

Size Matters. She called the decision “hugely disappointing.”

The matter of school space has bedeviled Mayor Bill de Blasio, who campaigned on the promise of smaller class sizes and a temporary halt to new co-locations, but as mayor has faced new demands for space caused by his prekindergarten expansion and a growing charter-school sector. When he decided it was necessary early last year to allow some new co-locations, he assembled the Blue Book advisory group partly to appease critics of that space-sharing policy.

Those critics say the current formula can underestimate the actual space schools require and overestimate how much they have available, paving the way for unworkable co-locations.

The advisory group, which includes advocates, parents, principals and the head of the city agency in charge of school construction, sought ways to make the Blue Book “a more accurate reflection of the current state of our school buildings,” the recommendations say.

The city already implemented some of the group’s initial suggestions. Last year, the city included students who attend classes in outdoor trailers in the enrollment count of their main school buildings. That change was expected to highlight how crowded school buildings will become once students are moved from the trailers back into the main buildings, which the city has called a priority.

Now, the city says its space estimates will take into account whether certain schools have teacher workrooms and private rooms for students to meet with counselors.

Principals will also now be asked to cit yandstateny.com

“Timing was very important,” he said. “I think some of the dust needed to settle on those other issues first.”

The rejected recommendation would have reduced the standard class size for middle schools and high schools in the Blue Book’s formula for calculating a school’s capacity.

For instance, the standard for middle schools would have shrunk from 28 students to 23 students per class. Since the average middle school class had nearly 27 students last year, such a change would have shown many more schools to be over capacity.

The de Blasio administration has made plans to create 40,000 new school seats to help alleviate overcrowding, but critics say that is not nearly enough in a city where one-third of elementary schools were over capacity in 2014, according to a city report.

Officials said the group will continue to meet. Education Department spokesman Jason Fink said the city shares parents’ and advocates’ desire for smaller class sizes, and that the Blue Book changes will help with that.

“This is a step forward,” Fink said, “and we will continue to work towards this critical goal.”

Chalkbeat New York is a nonprofit news organization covering educational change efforts in the communities where improvement matters most. Visit ny.chalkbeat.org.

Explore Brooklyn!

The Borough’s Leading Tourism Site

By Carlo Scissura Visiting “The People’s Playground,” “The Hippest Neighborhood on Earth” and the Caribbean in one day doesn’t have to be hard or cost a fortune – just come to Brooklyn.

Whether your holiday lasts a day or a week, there’s no reason to head to downtown Manhattan or Paris when you could stroll through Williamsburg or DUMBO or take a trip to Long Island or California instead of having a blast at Coney Island’s amusement parks, boardwalk and beach.

Want to experience a myriad of cultures without hopping from country to country? Brooklyn is home to the Caribbean Capital of America in Flatbush, Chinatown in Sunset Park, a sizeable Latino population in Bushwick, the traditional Greek and Italian enclaves in Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights, and a substantial Polish community in Greenpoint.

The world is here, and with Explore Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Chamber has put it right in the palm of your hand.

Explore Brooklyn is the borough’s leading tourism website – a complete resource for Brooklyn dining, events, shopping, attractions, and more.

The website (Explorebk.com) is designed to help both New Yorkers and visitors of all ages find the very best of Brooklyn, discover its neighborhoods and give local businesses and attractions an easy-touse tool to promote themselves in a seamless social environment.

Brooklyn is a tourist destination that definitely stands on its own.

Roughly 20 percent of all tourists to New York City already visit Brooklyn, and that number is growing by the minute. With more than 30 hotels and over 3,500 rooms already available in the borough – and another 20 projects in the pipeline – there are more than enough options to satisfy anyone’s preference. Soon, you’ll even be able to book your stay and purchase Brooklyn-themed tours through Explore Brooklyn.

JESSICA GLAZER

Brooklyn-made products provide shopping options of the highest quality, and are in demand in markets across the planet. Visitors have access to numerous first-class attractions – sporting events and shows at the Barclays Center, the Cyclones at MCU Park, performances at the Kings Theatre and Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Brooklyn Museum, Prospect Park, Brooklyn Bridge Park and the New York Aquarium, to name just a few – and an abundance of premier restaurants specializing in countless international cuisines.

With Explore Brooklyn, you can find all the best shops for locally made goods, view lists of restaurants categorized by community and culture, and scroll through all the coolest events happening in the borough during your stay.

So if you need a break and want to travel the world, there’s no need to traverse the globe – the County of Kings already has it all and it’s at your fingertips with Explore Brooklyn.

Critics say the city’s current guidelines lead to crowded classrooms and co-locations.

cit yandstateny.com

23

Carlo Scissura is the President + CEO of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce

city & state — August 10, 2015

list how many students they serve who have disabilities or are learning English on the annual space surveys they complete. The city said it will consider a related recommendation: using those enrollment figures to determine how much space each school requires for special-needs students.

Isaac Carmignani, a Queens parent and advisory group member, said some of the group’s suggestions arose from school visits. At one school, they found a large closet without windows or full ventilation being used for counseling; at another, teachers had installed a bench and lamp in the stairwell landing where they were forced to work with special-needs students.

He said collecting more information about schools’ needs is the first step in making sure they are met.

“The Blue Book is only good as the data that’s put into it,” said Carmignani, who is also a member of the city’s education policy board.

Group members said they had finalized their recommendations

by March, which is when an Education Department official told City Council members that the final report would be released “soon.”

Carmignani said the delay was partly because City Hall wanted to prepare different constituencies for the recommendations, but also because it did not want the recommendations to play a part in budget negotiations this spring or the debate over mayoral control of the school system.

FOLLOWING

The LEADER

By JON LENTZ

city & state — August 10, 2015

24

NEW YORK ONCE HAD A TOWERING REPUTATION AS AN INNOVATOR. BUT IS THE STATE STILL LEADING THE WAY? cit yandstateny.com

NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION

cit yandstateny.com

programs under Franklin Roosevelt when he was governor, a number of other things you can point to in New York state,” said Joshua Freeman, a history professor at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. “I think you have a harder case to make for the current situation.”

T

hat hasn’t stopped Cuomo from trying. He has a habit of describing new laws and initiatives as “historic.” At the 2012 Democratic National Convention, Cuomo addressed the crowd under a banner emblazoned with the words “NEW YORK STATE: PROGRESSIVE CAPITAL OF THE NATION.” During his second inaugural address earlier this year, he invoked the Erie Canal, the women’s suffrage movement and the Stonewall riots—a pivotal moment for gay rights—as well as his samesex marriage and gun-control laws.

“We have always taken on the big challenges,” Cuomo said, “taken them on first, gotten them done, and then created an example for the rest of the nation.”

New York’s lead.

By contrast, the 2013 SAFE Act was, in fact, the first of a number of tough new state gun laws enacted after the elementary school shootings in Connecticut. The law, which limited large capacity magazines and mandated the registration of assault weapons, among other measures, made New York one of the strictest states on gun control. But a ban on assault weapons, which was strengthened as a key component in the New York law, was enacted by California back in 1989.

New York was “leading the way once again” this year, the governor said, with the passage of the state’s “Enough is Enough” legislation. The law cracks down on sexual assault on college campuses by requiring students to express “affirmative consent” during intimate physical encounters.

But California and Virginia had already enacted similar measures.

New York was also a runner-up when it came to banning hydrofracking, a decision Cuomo announced shortly after his re-election that followed years of study and lengthy delays.

Vermont implemented the first state-

We have always taken on the big challenges, taken them on first, gotten them done, and then created an example for the rest of the nation.”

25

- Gov. Andrew Cuomo

On closer review, the state’s recent track record as an innovator is much more muddled. Despite Cuomo’s repeated claims that New York led the way on same-sex marriage, the first state to legalize it was actually Massachusetts in 2003, when its highest court ruled that gay and lesbian couples could wed. Courts in Connecticut and Iowa issued similar rulings, and New Hampshire and Vermont approved same-sex marriage legislatively well before New York in 2011. And at times, mindful of those historical footnotes, Cuomo has more accurately described New York as the first “big state” to allow same-sex marriage. The administration has also touted the bill’s unprecedented passage in a Republican-majority chamber, the state Senate—although no other GOP state legislative body ever followed

level ban, but New York’s is far more consequential, given that it actually sits above shale deposits. Some experts also say the state’s Reforming Energy Vision plan, aimed at revamping the production, pricing and distribution of energy, could one day become a national model, but it has yet to be successfully implemented.

Another hallmark of Cuomo’s tenure is transportation infrastructure, but his efforts pale in comparison to the far-reaching public works projects built decades ago in New York by Robert Moses. Cuomo’s administration has started to construct a replacement for the Tappan Zee Bridge, and he recently announced additional funding for the MTA’s capital plan and an overhaul of LaGuardia Airport. Yet much of the money has yet to be budgeted, and concerns have been raised about

city & state — August 10, 2015

W

hen Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced a $15 minimum wage for New York’s fast food workers, he portrayed it as a groundbreaking achievement.

Flanked by elected officials and union leaders at a rally in Manhattan last month, Cuomo said the wage hike would help hundreds of thousands of workers. What’s more, he said, it would spur other states to follow in New York’s footsteps.

“That is the New York way,” Cuomo told the cheering crowd.

“We’ve always been different, we’ve always been first, we’ve always been the most progressive. And this statement today is going to radiate all across the country, and SEIU and the community organizations can go all across the country and say, ‘If New York can do it, why can’t you do it?’

And if it’s right in New York, it’s right in California and it’s right in Michigan and it’s right in Florida.”

It’s a bold claim, albeit not an especially uncommon one. Cuomo has made similar assertions about his signature gun-control law, the samesex marriage legislation he championed and the ongoing construction of a replacement for the Tappan Zee Bridge. And he has sought to burnish his record by linking his own accomplishments to the state’s storied past, from the digging of the Erie Canal and the erection of the Empire State Building to the history of activism in the state on behalf of workers, women and the LGBT population.

But while New York once was widely considered a national leader, it has lost its reputation as the state that does things first. New York was the sixth state—not the first—to legalize same-sex marriage. The SAFE Act was the first state gun-control law enacted after the tragic shootings at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, but bans on assault weapons had long been on the books elsewhere. Today, cities like San Francisco, Seattle and Chicago are often out ahead of New York City, and states like California, Washington and Massachusetts are the places that come to mind as the nation’s Brandeisian laboratories of democracy.

“Historically, New York often did lead, and particularly if you go back to the 1920s and ’30s, New York state was a leader in social legislation and social programs during the Progressive Era, and many of these programs later became national through the New Deal—so factory regulation under Al Smith’s administration, relief

LEADING THE NATION

SENECA FALLS

HOUSING CONDITIONS

In 1848, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton held the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, a pivotal event in the women’s rights movement.

In 1901, New York passed its Tenement House Act to improve New York City’s building codes.

WORKER SAFETY

SUBWAYS

26

In 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in New York killed nearly 150 workers. The incident prompted a state commission to study workplace safety and paved the way for stronger worker protections, including workers’ compensation.

1ST: BOSTON (1897) 2ND: NEW YORK CITY (1904)

city & state — August 10, 2015

MINIMUM WAGE

1ST: MASSACHUSETTS (1912) NEW YORK (1933)

CASINOS

1ST: NEVADA (1931) NEW YORK (2013)

ROCKEFELLER DRUG LAWS

In 1973, New York passed legislation creating mandatory minimum sentences for possession of narcotics. Signed by Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, the so-called Rockefeller Drug Laws paved the way for similar legislation in other states and in Congress. cit yandstateny.com

TALLEST BUILDING

WOOLWORTH BUILDING (1913-1930)

CHRYSLER BUILDING (1930-31)

UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE

EMPIRE STATE BUILDING (1931-1972)

LEGALIZING ABORTION

WORLD TRADE CENTER (1972-1974)

BURJ KHALIFA, DUBAI (2010-PRESENT)

STONEWALL RIOTS

27 1ST: HAWAII (1970) 2ND: NEW YORK (1970)

MEDICAL MARIJUANA

Gay customers at New York City’s Stonewall Inn rioted against police harassment in 1969, a turning point for the LGBT rights movement.

ASSAULT RIFLES

California was the first state to ban assault rifles, in 1989. In 2013, New York was the first to strengthen its assault weapons ban after a shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.

THE DEATH PENALTY

SAME-SEX MARRIAGE

Wisconsin has the nation’s oldest death penalty ban, dating back to 1853. New York’s highest court in 2004 ruled that part of the state death penalty law was unconstitutional, and in 2007 applied the ruling to the last person still on death row.

Massachusetts was the first state to legalize same-sex marriage thanks to a 2003 court ruling. New Hampshire and Vermont were the first states to approve same-sex marriage legislatively, in 2009. In 2011 New York followed suit, the sixth state to do so.

1ST: CALIFORNIA (1996) NEW YORK (2014)

BANNING HYDROFRACKING

BANNING SLAVERY

1ST: VERMONT (1777) NEW YORK (1799) cit yandstateny.com

1ST: VERMONT (2012) 2ND: NEW YORK (2014)

city & state — August 10, 2015

Wisconsin was the first state to pass an unemployment insurance law, in 1932. Six additional states, including New York, followed suit before Congress passed the 1935 Social Security Act, which included unemployment insurance.

Frances Perkins, left, with President Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt in 1935.

city & state — August 10, 2015

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the lack of substantial added capacity.

In addition, several years have passed since New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie canceled the ARC Tunnel under the Hudson River, and only now is the Gateway Tunnel, a similar proposal to add needed trans-Hudson rail capacity into Manhattan, gaining traction.

“Even on transportation, California is building high-speed rail,” Freeman said, “and New York is debating fixing these ancient tunnels.”

Critics say the governor is lagging on other fronts as well. Despite an effort by state legislators to change the law, New York is still one of two states that treat 16- and 17-year-olds as adults in the courtroom. An effort to codify the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision on abortion in state law fell by the wayside. And the state has done little to improve voter access and address dwindling election turnout.

Oregon, meanwhile, just became the first state to automatically register as a voter anyone who gets a driver’s license.

“Those kind of voting reforms, if you will, have come from elsewhere,” said Doug Muzzio, a political scientist at Baruch College’s School of Public Affairs. “John McCain characterized New York as Stalinist because of our absolutely arcane and oppressive laws and our election board incompetence.

And that’s not true of other jurisdictions at all.”

In addition to being the first place to allow same-sex marriage, Massachusetts also broke ground by implementing universal health care and served as a model for President Barack Obama’s health care reform law. Colorado and Washington were the first of a handful of states to allow the recreational use of marijuana.

California was the first state to allow medical marijuana, all the way back in 1996, while New York last year became the 23rd state to decide to take that limited step.

Indeed, California has long stood out as a front-runner. The state passed trailblazing farmworker legislation in the 1970s, and is known for its direct democracy measures, including the use of petition to put legislation on the ballot, popular referendums on laws passed by the state Legislature and recall elections. While New York’s DREAM Act languishes in Albany, California and Illinois have passed their own versions of the immigrantfriendly legislation.

On the municipal level, New York City has made its mark as a leader on public health, from its public smoking bans to the outlawing of transfats and posting of calorie counts in restaurants. But while the New York City Council has been an early adopter of participatory budgeting, the practice started in the U.S. in Chicago. Chicago

O

f course, New York—and its elected officials—still have plenty of firsts to boast of, at least historically. The state hosted the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls in 1848, and state lawmakers that year allowed women to keep any property they owned before marriage. In the 20th century, New York City Mayor John Lindsay created the nation’s first environmental protection agency. The state legalized abortion before the U.S. Supreme Court’s controversial Roe v. Wade decision— and before every other state except Hawaii. Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, who had supported a treatment and rehabilitation approach to combating drug abuse, changed course and passed legislation instituting mandatory minimum prison sentences for possessing even small amounts of drugs. The Rockefeller Drug Laws, as they came to be known, were adopted in other states and by Congress, although they have largely fallen out of favor.

As any professor of New York history will tell you, however, the state’s pinnacle as a policy leader came during the first few decades of the 20th century. Gov. Al Smith and his successor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, led the way in enacting and launching an impressive array of progressive programs and reforms, with figures like Frances Perkins, Fiorello La Guardia and Robert Moses

playing influential roles.

“During that period you’ve got the progressive movement, so it’s a great time to look at reforms, and they’re coming out of New York, they’re coming out of Illinois and they’re coming out of the great industrial cities, with New York at the forefront for a number of reasons,” said Robert Slayton, a history professor at Chapman University and the author of “Empire Statesman,” a biography of Al Smith. “You had the ’20s, which is somewhat moribund, but New York under Smith is still doing a lot of stuff through his leadership.

And then obviously the ’30s with the New Deal and Roosevelt, Roosevelt’s gubernatorial experience is very critical here in drawing from the New York ideas and the New York personnel.”

A major impetus for reform was the 1911 fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in Manhattan, which killed nearly 150 people, mostly female workers unable to escape because of illegally blocked exits. New York responded by setting up an unprecedented state commission with a broad mandate to investigate working conditions across a range of industries.

Perkins, who witnessed the fire, had joined a growing worker safety movement and persuaded Smith, then a local assemblyman, to join the cause. Smith became vice chairman of the commission, which exposed dangerous and unsanitary factory conditions.

The commission’s voluminous findings paved the way for dozens of new state laws aimed at protecting workers, including stronger safety codes. “The Triangle fire was a torch that lighted up the whole industrial scene,” Perkins said at the time.

The workers’ rights movement was bolstered by labor unions, a rising force in the rapidly industrializing city. “New York had a strong labor movement, and there was a lot of pressure from organized labor, and also from radical movements, a strong socialist movement, so that a lot of the factory legislation, for example, that came in the aftermath of the Triangle fire was pushed forward by unions,” Freeman said. “The Democratic Party in New York state early on allied with the labor movements, saw it as a constituency they wanted to work with, so that was a big factor.”

The reform effort continued after Smith was elected governor in 1918.

With the help of Perkins, who joined cit yandstateny.com

HARRIS & EWING, FOR LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

also launched its 311 help line in 1999, well before New York City.

San Francisco, California’s epicenter of progressivism, became the first city to pass paid sick leave legislation in 2006, followed by the District of Columbia in 2008 and Connecticut and Seattle in 2011.

New York City passed its paid sick leave law in 2013. California’s paid sick leave legislation took effect last month, while New York has taken no similar statewide action. San Francisco also launched a municipal identification card program in 2009, modeled on a similar one in New Haven, Connecticut. New York City’s ID program began earlier this year.

“There are other states, particularly on the West Coast, that have been more innovative in policy concerning labor, concerning the environment, concerning transportation, and other kinds of issues,” Freeman said. “I think that Gov. Cuomo is a little selfaggrandizing about the state when he claims that we’re in the lead.”

cit yandstateny.com

activist government,” Benjamin said. “But it is less unique or less unusual in that regard in contemporary American governance.”

A

t the rally celebrating New York’s minimum wage for fast food workers, Cuomo noted that it was Roosevelt who instituted the first national minimum wage, one of a battery of laws and programs that made up his New Deal program. “He said it is a wage that doesn’t just allow you to subsist, but to live a decent life,” Cuomo said. “You cannot live and support a family on $18,000 per year in the state of New York, period. That’s why we have to raise the minimum wage.”

But, once again, New York doesn’t have a particularly impressive record when it comes to minimum wages.

Massachusetts was the first state to have a minimum wage, starting in 1912.

New York’s first minimum wage wasn’t passed until 1933. Nor will the state’s fast food minimum wage be the first in the nation. San Francisco, Seattle and Los Angeles have already increased the wages of fast food workers to $15.

Cuomo also acknowledged, if indirectly, that the wage hike would not benefit the many state workers with

skills other than flipping burgers and selling shakes, and he pledged to push for a wage hike for all workers. Indeed, New York’s broader minimum wage, which is set to rise from $8.75 to $9 at the end of the year, lags behind the District of Columbia’s $10.50, Washington’s $9.47 and Oregon’s $9.25. California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Vermont also have a higher minimum wage than New York, while Alaska’s, at $8.75, is the same.

To be fair, New York City played an important role as a springboard for the advocates and fast food workers driving the Fight for $15 campaign. That kind of activism is still a vibrant force, even if other state or local governments actually pass legislation or start new programs first. Sarah Seidman, the curator of the “Activist New York” exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York, said that New York activists have spurred transformational changes, even if the transformation doesn’t happen right away in their own backyard.

New York women played a key role during the suffrage movement, for example, even though the state was not the first to ratify the 19th Amendment that gave women the right to vote.

More than 50 municipalities had

Gov. Andrew Cuomo marches in the annual New York City Pride Parade in 2012.

already passed a gay-rights law by the time the New York City Council finally got one approved in 1986, but that doesn’t diminish the role New York played in the national LGBT movement. And other observers have commented on the lasting impact of Zuccotti Park’s Occupy Wall Street protesters, who were ultimately forced out but refocused the national debate on income inequality.

“The fast food walkouts and strikes and activism did start here, or this latest round was really based here,” Seidman noted. “So looking at those paths of starting through grass-roots activism and how it manifests into legislation is really important.”

But when it comes to whether New York is actually leading legislatively, many experts are quick to dismiss Cuomo’s historical claims as little more than hyperbole.

“It’s true that the fast food demonstrations started here in New York, but the legal embrace of $15 an hour started on the West Coast—not statewide, but in SeaTac and in Seattle and then in Los Angeles,” Freeman said. “New York no longer has such a clear role as the national innovator in these kinds of public policies.”

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city & state — August 10, 2015

OFFICE OF THE GOVERNOR

his administration, Smith strengthened the workers’ compensation law and signed additional legislation protecting women and children workers. Robert Moses, a Smith protégé, created the first state park system in the country.

Roosevelt succeeded Smith as governor in 1929 and continued the push for stronger labor laws and other progressive reforms. Responding to the stock market crash and the devastation of the Great Depression, Roosevelt launched relief and jobs programs for the swelling ranks of the unemployed in New York. When he became president in 1933, the lessons he learned as governor guided his battle to revive the battered economy.

When Roosevelt moved to the White House, Perkins came along as his labor secretary, becoming the first woman ever appointed to the cabinet.

New York City under Mayor La Guardia was a testing ground for many of the president’s New Deal programs.

Meanwhile, Moses reshaped the landscape of the city and the state, spearheading massive public works projects, building an extensive network of bridges and freeways and building acres and acres of new housing developments.

“Whatever you think of Robert Moses, you could look at infrastructure and transportation development in New York with La Guardia,” Muzzio said. “They are the model, and in fact Moses’ model is the dominant development in housing until it gets challenged intellectually by Jane Jacobs and then Rockefeller.”

There are several explanations for why New York’s status has eroded since that time. Some experts point to the changing economy. The state had been dominated by workers and unions in the early 1900s, but the resurgent banking and finance sector may have altered the political power structure—and what kinds of reforms are possible. Other changes came outside of New York, said Gerald Benjamin, an associate vice president at SUNY New Paltz. Beginning in the 1960s, other states became more activist. Governors began serving longer terms, giving them more time to lead. A reform movement among state legislatures took hold in the 1970s and ’80s, and good-government groups prodded lawmakers to be more responsive.

“New York government tends to be progressive and activist, even under Republicans or Democrats. It’s a center-left polity, so it’s a more

NY MOVES

ARMAN DZIDZOVIC

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city & state — August 10, 2015

N

ew York City’s growth has its transportation infrastructure bursting at the seams. Big plans to alleviate the mass transit system take years to come to fruition, and building those large projects takes money that, at present, doesn’t appear to be available. All this creates fear about the future of getting around America’s largest city, while opening the door to innovative ideas that are rapidly shifting from novel to necessary.

At City & State’s NY Moves forum at New York University’s Eisner & Lubin Auditorium and sponsored by HAKS, Parsons and IonFleets, some of the brightest minds on transportation gathered for a series of panels about the issues facing transportation infrastructure in New York, from the need for alternative options, to the big ideas that could transform entire sections of the city, to the ever-present question of how to pay for it all.

cit yandstateny.com

MTA Canarsie Line CBTC New York, New York

Brooklyn Bridge Brooklyn to Manhattan, New York

Peace Bridge Buffalo, New York

Building on a reputation for excellence. www.parsons.com www.parsons.com

NY MOVES

BIG IDEAS, SMALL BUDGET FUNDING IS SCARCE FOR INNOVATIVE TRANSIT SOLUTIONS

By ALICE POPOVICI

city & state — August 10, 2015

32

enough money to fund replacements for wheels and electrical circuits in the existing subway system.

Palumbo, New York operations manager for IonFleets, said his company is working to improve driver safety as part of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Vision Zero plan, which is designed to end traffic-related deaths in the city by 2020. The company, along with the city’s Taxi & Limousine Commission, is testing a pilot project designed to track drivers’ behavior and alert them when they are making unsafe decisions.

“We’re looking at improving driver behavior,” Palumbo said. “Staying too close, creeping in on the car in

front of them, drifting into the lane, opening the door and hitting a guy on a bicycle.”

Wright said New York City transit authorities should push for technology improvements as a way to improve their customers’ experience.

“I tend to think that part of reason the MTA was really slow to get the countdown clocks in the subway systems is because the countdown clock does not move anybody from point A to point B any faster,” he said. “But the experience of the users of the system is dramatically changed by knowing that the next train is four minutes away as opposed to having no idea.”

Rodriguez agreed more funding was necessary. But he called for that funding to be tied to more community feedback. He said his constituents want to be involved in the decisionmaking process to make sure their money is going to projects that will help their daily lives.

“There has to be a mechanism for the community who will be more affected,” Rodriguez said. He referred to plans for the East Side Access project, which is designed to free up subway capacity by bringing the Long Island Rail Road to Grand Central Terminal. “How much from that project will be reinvested in the local community?”

ARMAN DZIDZOVIC

E

ighteen billion dollars— that’s the estimated cost benefit of the Gateway Program rail project that would link Penn Station to Newark, New Jersey, via a new tunnel through the Hudson River. The problem is finding the $12 billion in funds to build it in the first place.

“Every minute you knock off the commute from a station into midtown Manhattan adds about $3,000 to the value of a home within a half-mile,” Tom Wright, president of the Regional Plan Association, said during a panel discussion on innovative transportation at City & State’s NY Moves event at New York University. “I believe that many of these investments really pay for themselves.”

That was a recurring theme during the panel, hosted by Jonathan Bowles of the Center for an Urban Future: big ideas, but budgets too small to pay for them. Despite universal agreement on the need to replace infrastructure that’s more than 100 years old in many places, funding remains a challenge.

Joining Wright on the panel was Guy Palumbo of IonFleets and New York City Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez, and all agreed that with funding tight, stakeholders have to be very careful prioritizing projects.

Wright said one project worth exploring is a rail system connecting Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, which lead the New York City area in new development and job growth.

“Travel between those boroughs is growing at roughly twice the rate of travel in and out of Manhattan,” Wright said. “And what this would do is provide a (way) for people to get between those boroughs much, much more rapidly.”

But right now, Wright said, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s capital plan barely has

At the NY Moves event, City Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez said transportation funding should be tied to community feedback. cit yandstateny.com

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NY MOVES

FUNDING IT ALL

THE EXPERTS WEIGH IN ON CAPITAL PLANNING

By ALICE POPOVICI

city & state — August 10, 2015

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What role does politics play in transportation infrastructure?

“It may be helpful to show what happens if you don’t repair roads and bridges, but as we’ve seen, bridges have fallen down and there have been catastrophes in the country, and still there’s no movement to give us money for state of good repair. It’s a tough dilemma. We’d like to show the public and the elected officials that the work can get done and restore some confidence, perhaps, in our ability to deliver these projects faster. Unfortunately, politics is getting in the way as well. The state legislation we need for design-build was actually held up because of politics and so it’s hard to deal with the politics.”

- Joseph Jarrin, deputy commissioner, New York City Department of Transportation

Has the Port Authority started any initial planning on the proposed Gateway project, which would add rail tunnels connecting New York City and New Jersey under the Hudson River?

“We are continuing to work holistically trans-Hudson in evaluating what’s the best solution for both the ultimate replacement of the (Port Authority) bus terminal as well as balancing that with the right answer and the right solution with respect to the incremental capacity trans-Hudson.”

- Elizabeth McCarthy, chief financial officer, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey

How do you deal with the uncertainty in planning and funding major capital projects, such as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s cancellation of the ARC tunnel, which would have increased rail capacity under the Hudson River?

“With the ARC project, our firm was involved with it. We had a lot of commitment put into it. And when that got killed, it definitely affected the business side of it. That makes it difficult, because engineers are not interchangeable and you lose that knowledge base as well when that goes away. Now Gateway may come back, but those people have scattered. That’s a loss to everybody when things like that happen.”

- Tanvi Pandya, project manager, Parsons

What has been the response to your Move NY plan, which would add tolls on the East River bridges, reduce tolls elsewhere and raise funds for mass transit?

“There’s really only one group out there that’s been opposed so far to the Move NY plan, which is quite a testament in itself, and that’s Melinda Katz, the borough president of Queens, and a number of Queens elected officials. If you look carefully at the statement they made, they were actually embracing or supporting the idea of the Move NY plan.

What they were essentially saying is we just don’t believe the money is actually going to be spent on improving transit in Queens. I think there is a lack of confidence among elected officials and their constituents that the MTA capital plan as written will provide the kind of benefits that they need. So the message in that is we have to go beyond a little bit what the MTA capital plan offers and see if we can do some targeted improvements to transit service in south Brooklyn, Staten Island, eastern and southeastern Queens, the eastern part of the Bronx if we want to develop the kind of support we need politically to get something like this Move NY plan passed.”

- Alex Matthiessen, director and founder, Move NY cit yandstateny.com

U.S. TRANSPORTATION SECRETARY TALKS TRANSIT IN THE 21ST CENTURY

By ALICE POPOVICI

U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx at City & State’s NY Moves forum.

A

s New York officials prepare to build the transit system of the 21st century, U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx offers one cautionary note: Don’t repeat the mistakes of the past.

“Historically, we valued throughput in our transportation system while paying far less attention to places in between,” Foxx said last month at City & State’s NY Moves forum. Quoting a story in The New York Times, Foxx added that one such place, the Staten Island neighborhood of Tompkinsville, has been isolated by the Staten Island Expressway to the point where it resembles its own island.

“There are many such islands that are isolated by highways and railroad tracks all across America. … How can we revitalize and connect communities and (how) can we lift people up who are struggling to get into the middle class?” Foxx asked. “We’re trying to get back in the business of building again, and building in an inclusive, 21st-century way.”

One way to ensure all cit yandstateny.com

neighborhoods flourish is to invest in bus lines that will connect residents to needed services, Foxx said.

Building an inclusive transportation network is one of the main priorities of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Grow America Act, a $478 billion plan that would fund infrastructure improvements for six years, upgrading bridges and railways.

Another priority is improving street design and safety for motorists and pedestrians.

“New York City is leading the way on this issue,” Foxx said, noting that the federal department supports Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Vision Zero Action Plan, which aims to end trafficrelated deaths in the city by 2020.

“You’ve worked hard to achieve significant reductions in the number of people getting struck and killed by vehicles in the city.”

Last year, Foxx said, the Department of Transportation contributed $25 million to help New York fulfill Vision Zero. Yet there is much more to be done, he said.

Foxx said the Gateway Project, which would connect downtown Manhattan to New Jersey through a new Hudson River tunnel, is perhaps one of the most important projects in the country—yet it has never gotten off the ground. Foxx said Washington, D.C., is a big part of the problem.

“If we want America to think big, if we want America to go big, if we want to connect communities in the city, in the state, across this country, we’re going to need Washington to stop undershooting the target,” Foxx said, “to really make a dramatic move forward with long-term sustainable funding that moves this country forward.”

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city & state — August 10, 2015

FOXX ON THE FUTURE

NY MOVES

BETTER WITH BUSES

EXPERTS SAY BUS RAPID TRANSIT CAN MAKE A CLEANER, SAFER CITY

O

city & state — August 10, 2015

36

nboard payment would go the way of subway tokens if New York City Councilman Brad Lander gets his way.

“We should have off-board payment for every bus in the system,” he said. “I’d love to see Mayor de Blasio step up and be the bus mayor!”

Improvements and innovations to New York City’s system of buses was the main topic of discussion at the alternate transit panel at City & State’s NY Moves Conference.

Lander was joined on the panel by Joan Byron of the Pratt Center for Community Development and Seth Myers, executive vice president of the city Economic Development Corp. The panel was moderated by frequent City & State contributor Nicole Gelinas of the Manhattan Institute. The three all agreed on the importance of buses.

Byron even balked at the inclusion of buses in that particular panel.

“Alternate transportation?” Byron exclaimed. “Buses are integral!”

The decision-makers at New York City Transit seem to agree. Bus rapid transit, branded Select Bus Service in New York City, is quickly expanding in the five boroughs. With the recent addition of the M86 line, there are now nine SBS routes in the city, with at least two more planned to start this year: the Q44 connecting the Bronx and Queens, and the B46 in Eastern Brooklyn. In this year’s State of the City address, de Blasio said he hoped to create more than a dozen new SBS lines in his first term.

Select Bus Service routes are currently the only ones in the city that follow Lander’s dream of off-board payment. This, along with dedicated lanes and fewer stops, gives SBS riders speed and reliability comparable to subways for a fraction of the investment in infrastructure—at least that’s what its champions will tell you. Critics of

City Councilman Brad Lander speaks during a panel on alternative transportation.

SBS say it eliminates valuable parking spaces and only adds to congestion by taking up a whole lane.

But Byron disagrees with that assumption. “It isn’t a given that creating bus lanes or creating physical bike infrastructure will slow traffic,” she said. She said bad traffic management causes a lot of congestion in the city, and new SBS routes are an opportunity to fix that.

“Look at a graphic,” she added, “how much space 100 people take up

Manhattan’s central business district,” Myers said. He called for new solutions, like increasing ferry service along the city’s waterways for the 500,000 residents who live within a half-mile of currently used ferry landings.

Whether by ferries, buses or something else entirely, Byron noted that alternate transportation is about more than just getting people from place to place quickly; it can help the de Blasio administration’s goal of zero traffic deaths.

“Anything that diminishes our reliance on cars, especially singleoccupancy vehicles, is going to help achieve the goals of Vision Zero,” she said.

on a bus versus how much space they take up in cars.”

Lander has sponsored legislation to have the mayor’s office conduct a citywide study determining which areas could benefit most from SBS, how the city would pay for it and how it would be integrated with other forms of transportation, like ferries and bikeshare programs.

The panelists all acknowledged that New York City is changing. “Job growth is continuing in places outside

cit yandstateny.com

ARMAN DZIDZOVIC

By JEFF COLTIN

Kick the can down the road often enough, and sooner or later you’ll reach the end of the line.

For once, we’ve got a plan to slash tolls in the outer boroughs, keep transit fares down and solve the congestion crisis. Let’s not waste it.

There’s fifinally nally aa plan plan to to fund fund the the MTA’s Capital Budget.

There’s But itit doesn’t doesn’t solve solve the the big big problems problems our region’s But commuters still still face: face: congestion…unfair congestion…unfair tolls…transit commuters deserts. Solutions Solutions for for those those problems problems are in danger deserts. of being being kicked kicked down down the the road, road, yet again. of

But it does much more. It slashes tolls where they are too high, reduces gridlock, provides for more transit options in underserved neighborhoods and creates 30,000 new jobs. No wonder it’s won broad support across the region.

There’s aa way way out out of of this this mess. mess. Only Move NY has There’s comprehensive plan plan that that provides provides sustainable aa comprehensive revenue to to maintain maintain and and improve improve our vital revenue transportation network. transportation network.

Let’s stop kicking the can and get to work now on improving New York’s subways, buses, commuter trains, roads and bridges—and the lives of all of us who use them.

Move NY NY is is the the only only comprehensive transportation plan that will fill transit gaps, ease congestion, and bring toll equity to Move the region’s region’s drivers. drivers. That’s why Move NY has received the support of these editorial boards, civic organizations, the business and labor groups, political leaders and individuals across the region, including: business Editorial Editorial Endorsements: Endorsements: NewYork YorkTimes Times New NewYork York Daily Daily News News New NewYork York Post Post New Newsday Newsday Crain’s Crain’s Staten Island IslandAdvance Advance Staten Fox 55 News News Fox Borough President: President: Borough Gale Brewer Brewer Gale NYC Council Council NYC Members: Members: Margaret Chin Chin Margaret Laurie Cumbo Cumbo Laurie Corey Johnson Johnson Corey Brad Lander Lander Brad Stephen Levin Levin Stephen Mark Levine Levine Mark Carlos Menchaca* Antonio Reynoso Antonio Reynoso Donovan Richards Donovan Richards Ydanis Rodriguez Ydanis Rodriguez Deborah Rose Deborah Rose Ritchie Torres*

RitchieVacca Torres* James James Vacca NYS Senators: NYS Senators: Adriano Espaillat Adriano Espaillat Brad Hoylman Brad Peralta Hoylman José Kevin Parker* Daniel Squadron JoséAssembly Peralta NYS Daniel Squadron Members: NYS Assembly Thomas J. Abinanti Members: Didi Barrett Thomas J. Abinanti** Jim Brennan Didi Barrett** David Buchwald Jim Brennan Kevin A. Cahill David Buchwald** Michael J. Fitzpatrick Kevin A. Cahill** Sandy Galef MichaelGottfried J. Fitzpatrick Richard SandyD.Galef** Todd Kaminsky Richard Gottfried Brian Kavanagh* Todd D. D. Kaminsky Charles Lavine Brian G. Kavanagh* David McDonough CharlesMeyer D. Lavine Shelley David G. McDonough Walter Mosley Shelley Meyer** Felix Ortiz* Walter Otis Mosley Steven

Felix Paulin Ortiz* Amy Steven Otis** Dan Quart Amy Paulin** Linda Rosenthal Dan Quart James Skoufis Linda Rosenthal Michelle Schimel James Skoufis** Luis R. Sepúlveda Michelle Schimel Jo Anne Simon Luis W. R. Sepúlveda Fred Thiele, Jr. Jo Anne Simon Matthew Titone Fred W. Thiele, Funders and Jr. Matthew Titone Foundations Funders Alan Bell and Foundations Chris and Sharon Davis Alan Bell Sense Fund Common ChrisFoundation and Sharon Davis Ford Common Sense Fund Lily Auchincloss Ford York Foundation New Community Lily Auchincloss Fund Trust New York Community Nurture Nature Trust Foundation Nurture Nature Oram Foundation Foundation Overbrook Foundation Oram Foundation Robert Sterling Clark Overbrook FoundationFoundation

Robert Sterling Clark Rockefeller Foundation Foundation RockefellerFoundation Foundation Scherman Scherman Foundation Eric Schwartz and Eric Schwartz Debby Fram and DebbyFoundation Fram Surdna SurdnaCenter Foundation Transit Transit Center Coalition Members: Coalition Members: Amalgamated Transit Amalgamated Transit Union Union Council American American Council of Engineering of Engineering Companies Companies Bike New York Bike NewBrewery York Brooklyn BrooklynHill Brewery Boerum Boerum Hill Association Association Brooklyn Movement Movement Brooklyn Center Center Bronx Chamber Chamber of of Bronx Commerce Commerce Bucks Business Business Bucks Network Network BX Arts Arts Factory Factory BX

Carroll Gardens Carroll Neighborhood Association Center for an Urban Center Future CDM Smith CDM Citizens Budget Citizens Commission City Island Civic City Association Cobble Hill Association Cobble Community Voices Community Heard El Puente El Environmental Defense Environmental Fund Environmental Environmental Entrepreneurs Greenpoint Church Greenpoint HNTB HNTB Jackson Heights Green Jackson Alliance Jonathan Rose Jonathan Companies

Manhattan Chamber of Commerce Manhattan Young Democrats Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance Mothers on the Move Municipal Art Society Natural Resources Defense Council Neighbors Allied for Good Growth New York Building Congress New York City Environmental Justice Alliance New York Metropolitan Trucking Association New York State Motor Truck Association North Brooklyn

Have endorsed endorsed and and are are planning planning aa public public statement statement soon. soon. ** Have sent a letter to Governor Cuomo asking him to consider Move NY as a funding option to fill MTA’s funding gap. **Have

Development Corp.

Corporation Nos Quedamos Nos Quedamos NYPIRG Straphangers NYPIRG Straphangers Campaign Campaign Pratt Center for Pratt Center for Community Community Development Development Regional Plan Assoc.

Regional Plan Assoc.

Riders Alliance RidersofAlliance Right Way RightSlope of WayNeighbors Park Park Slope Neighbors Permanent Citizens Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee Advisory Committee to the MTA

to the MTA Prospect Heights Prospect Heights Neighborhood NeighborhoodCouncil Development Development Sam Schwartz Council Sam SchwartzD.P.C. Engineering Engineering SEIU 32/BJ D.P.C. SEIU 32/BJ Shorewalkers Shorewalkers Staten Island Chamber Staten Island Chamber of Commerce of Commerce Streetsblog Streetsblog StreetsPAC StreetsPAC South Bronx Sustainable Sustainable South Bronx Transportation Transportation Alternatives

Alternatives Workers Transportation Transportation Workers Union, Local 100 Union, Local 100 Transportation Workers Transportation Workers Union, Local 106 Union, Local 106 Tri-State Transportation Tri-State Transportation Campaign Campaign UPROSE UPROSEGroup of Waves Waves Group of Companies Companies WEACT WEACT Associates Weidlinger Weidlinger Associates Youth Ministries for Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice Peace and Justice

iHeartMoveNY.org

T E C H

city & state — August 10, 2015

38

T

he recent flare-up over regulating Uber in New York City was yet another example of a trend throughout the history of the world. As technology advances, it disrupts old systems and structures, creating confusion and fear. Unfettered, technology can have horrible consequences, as we have often seen in war. But if technology is strangled, civilizations can fall behind.

Striking the balance between the marvels and menace of technology falls to government, where the process is deliberate. Advocates for innovation say government slows progress. Those on the flip side say caution is necessary to protect the people.

In this spotlight section, City & State explores how that debate is playing out in the technology and telecommunications industries throughout the state. We also look at ways lawmakers are hoping to utilize technology to provide better services for the public, or improve their constituents’ quality of life. And we take a look at the outdated laws that govern the rapidly changing telecommunications industry and why lawmakers are slow to adapt—kind of like engineers refusing to give up Linux. > startup.sh: spotlight

CONTENTS: 40...

Roadblocks keep e-hail companies from expanding upstate

By Ashley Hupfl

42...

Counties push for high-speed Internet in rural areas

By Justin Sondel

43...

The cost of de Blasio’s broadband plan is an open question

By Wilder Fleming

44...

Old telecom laws haven’t kept pace with an evolving world

By Jeremy Unger

46...

Does New York City’s quest for data actually offer any insight?

By Sarina Trangle cit yandstateny.com

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UPSTATE UBER

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ROADBLOCKS KEEP E-HAIL COMPANIES FROM EXPANDING

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city & state — August 10, 2015

40

By ASHLEY HUPFL

S

ince its inception in 2009, Uber’s e-hail services have exploded throughout the country. The ride-hailing company now operates in more than 200 cities worldwide and is available in more than 20 different states in the U.S. State legislatures around the country have struggled to keep up with the rapid growth and the new “sharing economy” business model that states frequently fail to regulate. Currently, Uber is allowed to operate within New York City, but is not available anywhere else in New York.

Uber in recent weeks won a major publicity war when New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio backed off his proposal to limit the number of new Uber cars on the road.

The standoff caught the attention of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who on a radio show July 23 said there should be a “statewide regulatory framework” for e-hail companies.

“If they’re going to be operating statewide, I want to make sure we have a regulatory structure: insurance, taxes, vehicles, they want access to the airports, you know,” Cuomo said.

Proponents of e-hail services in the state Legislature hope the governor’s comments and recent publicity around the issue will give the push needed to pass legislation that would allow the companies to operate statewide next year.

Last year, Lyft, another e-hailing company, received an order to stop

offering services in Buffalo and Rochester from the state Department of Financial Services and Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who alleged the company was violating the state’s insurance laws by failing to require its drivers to hold commercial licenses, carry adequate insurance and comply with local for-hire licensing rules.

Lyft and Uber drivers operate as independent contractors who use their personal vehicles to transport passengers. Unlike taxi and livery services, the companies do not own the vehicles. Under the state’s insurance laws, personal vehicles cannot be used for a business purpose.

“In current law, there would be a gap in insurance coverage if someone just started using their personal vehicle to transport passengers. I’d like to change that,” said state Sen. Jim Seward, chairman of the Senate Insurance Committee. “My legislation would basically double the minimum insurance coverage as soon as the driver puts on their app and they come available for hire. That would double their usual minimum insurance and while the vehicle is engaged in a ride that coverage would increase to $1 million. (Uber and Lyft) provide that insurance coverage.”

Schneiderman and the DFS also alleged Lyft was violating local livery and taxi laws. Companies like Uber and Lyft in the past have maintained

they are technology companies and not livery or taxi companies.

“There’s a question of how these operations are going to be regulated in the balance of the state,” Seward said, “whether we do it through state statute or have the (transportation network companies) go city by city to deal with local taxi and livery commissions. In those cases they have a local governing or a regulating body that regulates the customary taxi and livery services that may operate in those communities.”

E-hail companies also face opposition from transportation businesses. The Limousine, Bus, Taxi Operators of Upstate New York released a memo of opposition against Seward and Assembly Insurance Committee Chairman Kevin Cahill’s bill to change the insurance law to allow e-hail companies upstate. The bill failed to pass before the end of the 2015 legislative session.

“We believe that all companies should operate under the same standards and not act, as this bill does, to codify unfair advantages for businesses or allow for lower standards of public safety,” LBTOUNY President Kevin Barwell wrote in the memo.

LBTOUNY did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Despite the legal and political obstacles the e-hail companies face, several upstate mayors are excited about the possibility of these companies being made available in their cities.

Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown says he is open to the idea of e-hail companies returning to his city.

“We don’t necessarily see controversy, because it’s not a traditional taxi company,” Brown said. “It is an application, so it’s a technology company. We think those issues here could be worked out.”

Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner says she is excited by the possibility of e-hail services in her city.

“I’m in favor of competition,” she said. “I think they could help bring competition to the marketplace in

terms of price competition and also quality competition.”

If Uber were allowed in Syracuse, Miner said she would like to see some regulations that confront issues like price-gouging and passenger safety.

“I want that issue to be looked at and addressed and communicated in the decision that is made, so that when there are 37 people leaving the Carrier Dome in Syracuse and they go to call an Uber or a Lyft, that those rides that were $30 don’t turn into $300,” Miner said.

Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan says e-hail companies could help boost economic development and tourism in the Capital Region.

“It’s no secret that we have a lot of challenges with taxis here in the city of Albany and the region,” she said. “I understand the concerns taxi and livery services have expressed, but if they’re not delivering the level of service that we need in our community, I just think that keeping out competition to prevent that level of service from occurring is hurting all of us economically. I think there is a place for everyone.”

State legislators this fall will host a series of hearings and roundtables to discuss the legal and political obstacles e-hail companies face as they move their on-demand ride services into markets in upstate New York.

Changes to state law to allow the e-hail companies upstate will have to wait until the 2016 legislative session begins in January. Lawmakers remain hopeful the legislation will pass next year.

“I don’t see how we can continue to indefinitely stand in the way of this (legislation passing),” Seward said.

“It’s just the wave of the future and I think that’s the way many people live today, conduct business today and I think it is inevitable, because the consumer demand is only going to increase as they experience it in other locations. I think that pressure to do something is only going to increase.” cit yandstateny.com

T

State Chief Digital Officer City & State: What can the state do to help bridge the digital divide?

Rachel Haot: The most critical step that New York state government can take to end the digital divide and ensure that all New Yorkers have equal opportunity in the new economy is to invest in broadband Internet access. Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been an unequivocal leader on this issue, investing more to date than any other state in the nation. In January, the governor set the bar even higher, committing to universal broadband across New York state, the largest investment in American history. M ​ ore than visionary, investing in broadband is common sense—we cannot afford to fall behind.

C&S: What is the state doing to modernize government?

RH: Needlessly and for far too long, citizens have felt frustration when they interact with government. Services can seem bureaucratic, slow or irrational.

Today, New York state is using technology to completely transform the citizen experience of government services—across every digital device and tool. Our guiding principle is to put people first, and redesign each process to provide the fastest, easiest, most accessible customer service to every New Yorker. The state’s largest milestone in this digital service transformation was the overhaul of official NY.gov website for the first time in 15 years. NY.gov relaunched in November and is now fully responsive—allowing New Yorkers to use it seamlessly on any size screen, from smartphone to desktop computer—and offers customized local services, real-time emergency alerts, and a newly designed Services feature that makes it easier to interact with the state.

Since the relaunch of NY.gov, the results have been extremely positive: Unique visitors have nearly tripled, overall traffic has quadrupled and mobile traffic has more than tripled compared with the year prior. We have also seen strong growth in the state’s use of social media thanks to increased professional development, cit yandstateny.com

C&S: What can New York do to help bring women into the STEM fields?

RH: The measures of the Women’s Equality Act passed into law strengthen opportunities for all women by strengthening equal-pay laws and preventing workplace discrimination against pregnant women and parents.

We also support diverse entrepreneurs by requiring that 30 percent of state contracts go to women- and minority-owned business—the largest commitment in the nation.

There is so much more that we can do. More women in STEM means job growth, sector growth and economic growth for the state. We also know that it is critical to increase all kinds of diversity in the tech sector, including women and underrepresented minorities. The state can act as a great convener on this issue, and our roundtable on computer science was strong evidence of the shared interest and commitment to this important challenge.

JOSEPH GRIFFO Chairman, State Senate Energy and Telecommunications Committee City & State: Although the Public Service Commission recently released an assessment of the telecom industry, advocates say it fails to answer important questions, such as the condition of the state’s telecom infrastructure.

What is your perspective?

Joseph Griffo: My perspective is that the state of New York’s telecom infrastructure is directly related to the health, education, economic potential, quality of life and overall well-being of our citizens. Our challenge is to ensure that reliable, affordable and up-to-date communications services are available to everyone, and that people know how to use and benefit from this technology regardless of where they live and their income level.

The Staff Assessment of Telecom Services recently released by the PSC is a good start in understanding the history and evolution of the telecom industry. However, we need better mapping and pricing data in order to truly understand the current landscape of the telecommunications industry in New York and to make good decisions on how to improve our telecom infrastructure going forward. To that end, I plan to continue participating in a meaningful and transparent public dialogue with my colleagues, industry experts and regulators at both the state and federal levels and various other stakeholders as we work to determine the best way to successfully navigate this challenge.

C&S: Citizens in Broome County in the Southern Tier, for example, recently lodged complaints with the PSC, saying Time Warner Cable and Verizon hold virtual monopolies in the region and have allowed their infrastructure to deteriorate while refusing to expand their FiOS network. Do you think these companies provide adequate services to New Yorkers, or could there be a better way to distribute Internet service going forward?

JG: I think companies that enter

into franchise agreements to provide adequate services should be held to those agreements. The reality is that the cost to bring broadband technology to remote and sparsely populated areas is much higher than building infrastructure for this technology in more urban and suburban communities, especially for the most up-to-date, high-speed broadband. Significant federal and state funds have already been deployed to establish middle-mile access to most rural areas of the state, so the objective now, as I see it, is to incentivize broadband providers to invest in “last-mile access” in unserved and underserved areas across the state.

But this is easier said than done, as the estimated cost of bringing highspeed broadband to every household in the state is enormous and providers that consider this build-out may not see the value or return on investment in expanding service. As such, the market dictates that regions of the state where the economy is slow will receive infrastructure and services much later than other more economically robust regions, or not at all, yet these very services are essential to grow the economy in depressed areas of the state. I believe there is justification for spending public dollars, if we find the right balance, to incentivize broadband providers to use their expertise to build reliable and affordable broadband access for last-mile applications where this build-out would otherwise be uneconomic.

C&S: Nine months ago, Gov. Andrew Cuomo promised to invest $500 million to match private companies to expand broadband in un-networked parts of the state.

Can and should the Legislature do anything regarding the need to expand broadband access to rural areas?

JG: The Legislature has already acted to expand broadband access during this year’s budget negotiations, when we supported the $500 million investment in public dollars to match private companies’ investments to expand broadband to un-networked parts of upstate. The details of how this money will be allocated are still being refined and we are following discussions carefully with an eye toward ensuring that unserved and underserved communities receive the greatest bang for their buck.

We are also looking at whether statutory or regulatory changes are necessary to keep pace with this rapidly changing telecommunications landscape. However, we do not want to stifle the incredible ingenuity, resourcefulness and creativity of the telecommunications industry. Stay tuned!

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city & state — August 10, 2015

RACHEL HAOT

productivity tools like Hootsuite and an annual social media summit for state employees.

But we know that for the website to continue to be a success it has to constantly evolve. This is why we measure and analyze key performance indicators monthly, continue to improve on design and technology, and are building out our Services tools in response to public demand. We are also beginning the process to expand the NY.gov redesign and technology framework to all state agencies, which is very exciting.​

C&S: As the state’s chief digital officer, what is your next big project or priority you’d like to undertake?

RH: Building on the governor’s landmark broadband initiative, the next step in New York state’s digital roadmap is to invest in technology education. Already Gov. Cuomo has established scholarships that cover all remaining costs of college education at any SUNY school for any student that studies STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects and commits to work for five years in New York following graduation.

But we know there is much more that we can do to support technology education, and we hear every day from the technology sector that talent is their top need and they can’t hire engineers fast enough. That is why we convened our first Computer Science Education Roundtable earlier this year, bringing together leaders like CSNYC, Code.org, Girls Who Code, Access Code, Flatiron School and many others dedicated to the future of computer science in New York.

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HOME(PAGE) ON THE RANGE COUNTIES PUSH FOR HIGH-SPEED INTERNET IN RURAL AREAS

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By JUSTIN SONDEL

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city & state — August 10, 2015

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hen Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced his Opportunity Agenda in January, he highlighted the lack of access to high-speed Internet in many parts of the state, particularly in rural areas. He said he wants to bring broadband to every corner of New York by 2018 and pledged to match private companies’ investments up to $500 million to make it happen.

Several areas of New York jumped to take advantage of the initiative, and a number of projects were announced at Cuomo’s June broadband summit.

In the North Country, the region’s development agency and Slic Network Solutions have partnered to expand existing systems to more homes and businesses.

Niagara and Orleans counties have partnered to undertake a similar project and will look to make high-speed Internet available in every part of the largely rural region. They announced this week that the companies Seneca Solutions and Resolute Partners would be handling the build-out, which will cost upwards of $5 million.

Other nearby counties are also positioning themselves to take advantage of funding from the state or other entities. Allegany County, another sparsely populated county southeast of Buffalo, voted to establish a not-for-profit to manage a universal system in an effort to expand access in late July.

In Erie County, Legislator Patrick Burke and some of his colleagues, with the help of Erie’s Environment and Planning Department, have been working to position the county for eventual broadband upgrades.

As Burke sees it, broadband will only become more necessary and continue to require infrastructure improvements. He says preparation is key to reducing future costs and taking advantage of funding opportunities that will make the county more

appealing to potential backers.

“Whichever municipalities or governments, or even private entities, are prepared and are in line to be competitive with this, they’re the ones who are likely to see the funds that are available,” Burke said.

To that end, the county Legislature’s broadband committee has been working to be as ready as possible for any such opportunities.

They put together a white paper earlier this year with the help of industry experts, something Burke says helped him sell the importance of universal broadband to Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz and other county legislators.

“We will have to do new infrastructure, there’s no doubt about it, and it will probably be significant,” Burke said. “But we do have a significant amount of assets already in place.”

The Legislature also approved a resolution to fund a study that will outline the best way to implement such a system. The study will include the creation of an “assets map”—an inventory of existing broadband fiber

networks and other infrastructure that could be used in the expansion of the system.

In addition, the county submitted a letter of intent and a consolidated funding application to Empire State Development.

“At some point this has to happen,” Burke said. “There’s no doubt that it’s going to happen. I think the longer we wait the more it’s going to cost us in the future.”

Meanwhile, the county can continue to lay the groundwork— literally—for universal broadband.

County crews plan to install conduits for fiber-optic cable whenever there is roadwork or other projects that require digging, Burke said.

“Say it’s going to take three years to build up the scope and start the project,” Burke said. “That’s three years of digging and laying conduit that we can do right away to save an incredible amount of money.”

Poloncarz included the push as one of the tenets of his Initiatives for a Stronger Community, the plan he unveiled earlier this year to combat poverty.

He said that so long as upstate lags behind in Internet access, its citizens will find it harder to climb out of poverty, as they have a harder time accessing information and businesses are less likely to locate in a place that can’t support their information needs.

“It’s a problem, because if you’re a business leader and you want to expand, but you know you don’t have access to high-speed Internet, broadband, in particular areas of the community you’re never going to go there,” Poloncarz said. “You’re never going to look at those as options to put your business.”

And access is most limited in places where poverty is high.

“If you do not have access to highspeed broadband Internet you’re going to be behind the eight ball in many different ways, including education,” Poloncarz said. “It basically relegates certain parts of our community into second-class status.”

The push for the expansion of broadband systems has found bipartisan support at every level of government.

U.S. Rep. Chris Collins, a Western New York Republican who sits on the congressional Communications and Technology Subcommittee, also believes the expansion of the broadband system is a wise investment.

“The (need for) expansion of rural broadband is substantial, especially when the businesses and homes are spread out as much as they are,” Collins said. “You don’t have the density out in the farmlands and the rural areas. There, frankly, has to be a government role.”

The expansion of broadband not only makes information more readily available to citizens, Collins said, but it makes the state more business friendly.

“I certainly support pretty much any and all activities to actually bring broadband out into our rural communities,” he said. cit yandstateny.com

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BROADBAND ON THE BLOCK WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO HOOK UP THE WHOLE CITY?

By WILDER FLEMING

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ayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to make high-speed Internet universally accessible in New York City by 2025 has been taking shape over the past several months, first with the allocation of $70 million in the executive budget to bring affordable broadband to more city residents over 10 years, then with the July announcement of a $10 million program to make free Internet available to some 16,000 NYCHA residents in five housing projects starting next year.

From his first days in office, the mayor has stressed that affordable Internet should be fundamental to an equitable society—like running water or electricity. It should not be a privilege, as it is now, he said, with those who cannot access it placed at a serious disadvantage when it comes to seeking education and employment.

But de Blasio’s goal is extremely ambitious; even though his sizeable monetary commitments go a long way toward giving his plan teeth, the fact remains that nearly 22 percent of New York City households—over 674,000 by the city’s own calculus— do not currently have Internet access, according to the mayor’s Center for Economic Opportunity. (Many have the option, but either cannot afford it or choose not to subscribe.) So while bringing free broadband to 16,000 people at a cost of $10 million is admirable, the question is: what will it take to hook up the entire city?

“Improving broadband access and speeds is a worthy goal, and these initiatives raise questions about the most cost-effective ways to achieve those goals,” said Maria Doulis, director of city studies at the Citizens Budget Commission, which has yet to delve into the potential cost of the mayor’s broadband aspirations.

The plan to bring free broadband to 16,000 NYCHA residents, which is being executed in conjunction with a broader Obama administration initiative to bring affordable Internet to federally assisted housing developments around the nation, is

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43 just the beginning, according to Maya Wiley, legal counsel to de Blasio.

“The first NYCHA wireless corridors are being done as ‘demonstration projects,’ which is a way for the city to inform future policy and procurement decisions,” Wiley said. “The mayor’s office, NYCHA and the residents of these developments will work together to evaluate the projects to inform subsequent investments.”

The city has yet to choose a vendor to provide Internet for the five developments, the first of which will be the Queensbridge North and Queensbridge South houses in Long Island City.

Some have questioned whether investing in broadband at NYCHA should even be the first priority, given the immense backlog of repairs for the authority’s crumbling housing stock—a point Doulis thinks should be considered.

“Given the apparent costeffectiveness of this spending, are there other capital investments that would produce more bang for the buck?” Doulis asked. “At NYCHA, for example, are capital resources best devoted to fixing critical issues long in

need of repair?”

As for the $70 million in the mayor’s executive budget, nearly half is slated to be spent in the next two or three years to construct free or low-cost wireless corridors in underserved parts of the city, and to upgrade existing wireless networks, with an eye to expanding service to some 20,000 low-income households (40,000 to 50,000 residents). A few such networks already exist: A Wi-Fi corridor in Harlem, for example, brings “increased digital access” to nearly 80,000 residents, according to the city. Additionally, $1.6 million will go to extending broadband to at least 500 businesses in industrial zones.

“The city expects to partner with a wide range of organizations in the public and private sectors to create a network of networks that brings broadband within reach of more New Yorkers, whether in their homes or in public spaces,” Wiley said. “The method of procurement and vendors for all of these capital expenditures have not yet been determined.”

One thing that’s certain is that the city is making a concerted effort to broaden the options in New York,

which has long been limited to the services of a handful of giant cable companies. Earlier this year, the administration called out for innovative ideas to expand broadband access, and the response was enthusiastic, with the city receiving 69 proposals from 52 sources between April and June, according to Jeff Merritt, director of innovation in the Mayor’s Office of Tech and Innovation.

“Submissions came from small and large companies, academic institutions, individuals and nonprofits, spanning six countries and a dozen states,” Merritt said. “The largest number ... came from small companies with under 50 employees, most of whom had not previously worked with the city of New York.”

“The Mayor’s Office of Technology and Innovation is currently reviewing these proposals and gathering more information,” Merritt continued.

“In addition to ideas related to the expansion of fiber-optic networks, the city received a range of promising proposals related to new or underutilized technologies such as mesh networking, point-topoint wireless, and leveraging new spectrum.”

city & state — August 10, 2015

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NEW TECH, OLD RULES

ANCIENT TELECOM LAWS HAVEN’T KEPT PACE WITH AN EVOLVING WORLD

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By JEREMY UNGER

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city & state — August 10, 2015

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hen the Federal Communications Commission voted in favor of strong net neutrality rules in February, activists across the country hailed the decision as the beginning of what would hopefully be a sea change in the way government regulates telecommunications companies.

But in New York, government officials are only just beginning to wade into the debate about changes to the industry. Telecommunication laws in the state have not seen any significant updates since the 20th century, and with the Public Service Commission, the state’s regulatory body, conducting its first study of the sector in a decade, advocates, companies and legislators are seeing attention being brought to what had seemed a forgotten issue.

“With the continuing evolution of the communications technology market and changing consumer demands, oversight of the telecommunications industry to promote core public interests remains paramount,” PSC Chairwoman Audrey Zibelman said in a press release announcing the study.

When the PSC deregulated the telecommunications industry in 1996 through what was known as the Competition II proceedings, cellphones and the Internet were just starting to become prevalent in the average American household. In the 20 years since, the products that rely on the networks of wires crisscrossing the state have been completely overhauled.

Smartphones reduced the need for landlines. Television sets increased in quality and variety. And most importantly, on-demand video and music services, just a small sliver of the products traditionally associated with phone and television services, began migrating to the Internet, making high-speed broadband access a necessity for most New Yorkers.

But few changes or additions have

BROADBAND AVAILABILITY IN NEW YORK

25 Mbps service available from one company 25 Mbps service available from more than one company 25 Mbps service unavailable

Source: Public Service Commission

been made to the regulations or the Public Service Law governing the PSC since 1996, and today most New York municipalities face either a monopoly or duopoly in their telecommunications choices. When it comes to broadband, competition only exists in New York City and its suburbs, the BuffaloNiagara, Syracuse and Albany metro areas, and a few counties in the North Country.

According to advocates, the lack of regulation has led to the industry excluding low-income residents from basic services, neglecting infrastructure—including an aging copper wire network—and charging consumers too much for poor services.

In New York City, for example, basic home phone bills have increased by 84 percent since 2006, while maintenance charges went up by 132 percent.

This is not the first time the PSC has looked into changes. The last study it conducted, in 2006, known as Competition III, concluded “that the residential market for non-basic service was effectively competitive,” and “the Commission expected to reduce regulation and rely more heavily on market forces to achieve just and reasonable rates.”

Advocates have said that the 2006 decision was, much like the 1996 study, based on predictions that emerging technologies would create more choices

for New Yorkers who wanted affordable telecommunication services. Services such as satellite and broadband fiber phone cables, such as Verizon FiOS, were seen as emerging competitors to traditional cable providers, and any regulation could have hindered their development. But these services never reached a large enough market share to impact their competitors.

“It was a good idea to change some of these regulations,” said former Assemblyman Richard Brodsky.

“But it’s clear now that a lot of this, which was based on predictions, isn’t working, and it is time for a real fundamental change to the regulations.” cit yandstateny.com

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An immediate family member of City & State Executive Editor Michael Johnson works for Time Warner Cable. He has recused himself from any reporting and editing for this article to avoid any conflicts of interest. cit yandstateny.com

CHRIS COLLINS

competition. The irony is before Wheeler and the president imposed Title II there was universal agreement, absolutely unanimity, between the Republicans and Democrats on the need for net neutrality. We agree, effectively, 100 percent. Title II doesn’t provide anything that we haven’t already agreed upon, but it throws in the unknown of current utility-type regulations being forbeared, which could change tomorrow and is the definition of uncertainty.

U.S. Congressman City & State: What would you say is the single biggest issue that the congressional Subcommittee on Communications and Technology has been dealing with recently?

Chris Collins: Our biggest concern has been what we think is the overreach of the Obama administration and (Federal Communications Commision Chairman Thomas Wheeler) directly in imposing Title II regulations on the Internet. We’ve expressed our concerns at hearings on it and clearly there are lawsuits that are now resulting from it, which we all saw coming.

C&S: What effect has the Title II enforcement had on industry behavior?

CC: The day after they imposed Title II, Verizon announced that they were cutting back on some investment plans. It was evident that investments, private sector investments in building out broadband going into the next generation, these are 20-plus year investments. They need to know, for their shareholders, there’s going to be an adequate return. Title II, even if there’s current forbearance, doesn’t mean there could not be future regulations. It’s like a wet blanket on what we need to be encouraging, which is investment in everything to do with better coverage and next generation-type technologies.

C&S: What about providers distributing higher speeds to people who can pay more or slowing speeds when consumers are using their competitor’s products?

Aren’t those legitimate concerns if there is no regulatory framework in place to prevent those practices?

CC: If you look back a year ago you would hear concerns like that and when you would ask for direct answers (from the administration) you would sometimes get muddled answers, depending on who you’re talking to. You would hear, perhaps on the Democratic side, a stronger position on some aspects of what is referred to as net neutrality and on the Republican side you might hear a response that sounded more like free-market

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JAMES VACCA

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Chairman, New York City Council Committee on Technology

MAYA WILEY Counsel to the Mayor City & State: How does Verizon’s FiOS rollout mesh with Mayor Bill de Blasio’s equitable broadband vision? FiOS, when available, is not cheap. Are there plans to change this and if so how would that be done?

Maya Wiley: The high price of broadband service is a problem for people who can’t afford to start a subscription but also for households that have to spend too much for what has become an essential service.

The mayor believes competition and consumer choice are important ingredients for equitable broadband, and we have committed to holding Verizon accountable to its promise to serve all New Yorkers so no one has their cable company as their only high-speed option. Pursuant to federal law, the city cannot regulate the prices that franchisees charge customers.

C&S: Following the audit of Verizon’s FiOS rollout, all discretionary Verizon contracts will be reviewed at City Hall, not agencies. What will City Hall be looking for when reviewing contracts, and generally, to demonstrate a changed approach to FiOS? What other options may the city pursue to ensure the FiOS rollout happens as planned?

MW: Our job is to hold Verizon’s feet to the fire. The city will treat Verizon fairly but, as we’ve said, where we have the power to make decisions, we will make decisions that benefit good corporate actors. Verizon will have to demonstrate to us that it is a good corporate actor.

City & State: The city has taken steps to ease concerns about the outer boroughs having a higher concentration of LinkNYC stations with slower Internet speeds. What can the city do in the future to ease concerns about inequitable distribution of higher-speed stations?

James Vacca: The main infrastructure constraint is the existing fiber network.

I would say that in the future, the city must work to encourage the build-out of the fiber network. Promoting an advanced technological infrastructure is a key component for New York City becoming “a smart city.” As chair of the Technology Committee I will monitor the rollout of LinkNYC for inequality discrepancies and when needed hold oversight hearings to bring light to the issue.

C&S: Some have raised questions about what is and what is not considered data under the city’s Open Data Plan. For instance, the NYPD’s Murder in New York City publication and the comptroller’s minorityand women-owned business statistics are not considered data. What do you think of the current definition of data?

JV: Murder in NYC is a report, and reports may contain data or use data, but they are not themselves data. It is my hope and expectation that the data underlying this report will be included with the general crime data that is planned to be released by the NYPD. Regarding the comptroller’s MWBE data, that question on why it is not being directly included on the site would be better directed to the comptroller. The current definition of data was reached after much careful thought and negotiation when this law was first passed. I think we may need to wait for the law to come closer to full implementation before we can decide if that definition needs modifying or if problems are instead stemming from misunderstanding or compliance issues.

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city & state — August 10, 2015

A decade later, the PSC is taking public comments throughout the state as part of its study of the telecommunications field after receiving petitions from advocates such as the Connect New York Coalition, which consists of goodgovernment groups, state legislators and current and former local elected officials, including Brodsky, Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner and Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan.

“It’s clear to me that the revolution in telecommunications is impacting us in every way,” Miner said. “Things like Common Core, which requires that parents have Internet access so their kids can use online materials, is just one example of how this affects people at all levels of our state.”

But in an assessment released in June, the PSC said that in its role as state regulator of the telecommunications industry, “the Commission has long supported competitive markets as the most effective approach to ensuring these core interests and consumers’ evolving needs are maintained.”

While significant overhauls to the PSC via legislative action seem unlikely, there have been some recent successes. Legislation increasing the standard of approval for the mergers and acquisitions of telecommunications companies, and another strengthening service quality standards and penalties, passed out of committee during this year’s session, and supporters hope to see a full vote next year.

Assemblyman James Brennan, the sponsor of those two pieces of legislation, along with his colleagues on the Committee on Corporations, Authorities and Commissions, are also considering hosting hearings on the new PSC study.

“We are reviewing the study for the whole gamut of services and we’re considering conducting a hearing about possible legislation to address the issues associated with the study,” Brennan said, “including bringing in more competition into New York state, especially in areas where there is only one provider offering high-quality speed. The world has changed and access to high-speed broadband is becoming integral in the advanced communication society we are living in.”

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DATA DELUGE

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DOES THE CITY’S QUEST FOR DATA ACTUALLY OFFER ANY INSIGHT?

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By SARINA TRANGLE

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ast February, Bronx City Councilman Andy King described a bill requiring annual reports comparing the demographic and test score statistics of traditional public schools with those of co-located charter schools as a “very important” step toward intercampus collaboration. The council discussed the measure during two hearings and received written testimony from more than 30 parties, before ultimately passing it five months later.

The report isn’t due until the end of August, and yet the statistics are already available—the state Department of Education has been chronicling the same information on every school in New York on its website.

King’s legislation is among at least 185 bills seeking the compiling of fiscal, statistical or other quantitative information that have been introduced since elections ushered in new representatives at City Hall last January. Roughly one-fifth of all council measures proposed since last winter seek data. Of these, about two-thirds do not cite a specific course of action tied to the data.

Current lawmakers aren’t the first to seek the collection of quantitative information. The 2012 Open Data Law details how agencies will work toward periodically posting data sets on a central online portal by the end of 2018. Some 1,300 such documents are on the site, chronicling everything from a map of Brooklyn’s trees to the number of city prison visitors arrested by fiscal year. (Some statistics originally set to be posted on the site, such as the NYPD’s murder report, were deemed too interpretive to qualify as “data,” according to City Council Technology Chairman James Vacca, and have been removed from the city’s compliance plan.)

Even among relatively informed New Yorkers like civic group executives and community board

FORMULA FOR WATER FOUNTAINS Brooklyn Councilman Brad Lander introduced a bill last year that would require the city to compile a list every five years of 75 locations near parks or green streets that would most benefit from drinking fountains based on the proximity to existing public fountains and the pedestrian and bicycle traffic. From this list, 25 would ultimately get a fountain.

leaders, there seems to be a lack of knowledge about the portal, Vacca said. The site appears to have slipped lawmakers’ minds, too; very few, if any, of their requests for information such as demographic analyses of city contractors or an examination of foot traffic near park drinking fountains specify that the final reports be posted on the website. But when there is not always a clear goal for using and distributing data, why do so many elected officials seek these statistics?

Rhetoricians like Don Waisanen, an associate professor of communication at Baruch College, describe data as one of the quickest ways to sway constituents or stakeholders— especially when officials can offer up the so-called hard evidence for vetting.

“We call it the halo effect,” Waisanen said. “It’s like you draw a little angel’s halo around whatever your issue is. Often there’s a rhetoric

of, ‘We post things online. We’re very transparent with our data.’ It’s meant to seem like there’s no persuasion going on. But there always is.”

Indeed, Vacca said the portal’s primary purpose is to increase transparency. The councilman said constituents should not have to “take his word” when they wonder why a stop sign or speed bump installation request was denied or whether catch basins have been cleaned as frequently

as specified in city protocol. Rather, he said, they should be able to look up the information online.

Waisanen and other experts stressed that policymakers are acting prudently when they study proposals before investing public money in them.

But Waisanen pointed out that officials shouldn’t fool themselves; data is never completely objective. There is always a certain level of persuasion inherent in selecting data—or the algorithms used

THE COMMITTEES THAT DEALT WITH THE MOST DATA-RELATED BILLS

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PUBLIC SAFETY

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TRANSPORTATION

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ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION

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HOUSING AND BUILDINGS

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EDUCATION

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FIRE, CRIMINAL JUSTICE SERVICES

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“Sometimes just saying, ‘We’re looking for data’ is a way of not being accountable. … Data is always tied to human beings or human beings’ interests,” he said. “ So is the data sort of a way of pushing accountability away from certain people or groups?”

Sometimes such statistical analysis can come across as a stalling technique. Geoffrey Croft of the New York City Park Advocates described legislation seeking further detail on private funding for park conservancies and another calling for a breakdown of maintenance crew costs by park as “subterfuge.” Croft said the information targeted by the bills would be valuable, but ultimately, the measures do not outline any legislative or regulatory process to rejuvenate languishing parks. “These disparities exist because the same people introducing these bills are also voting for these outrageously insufficient budgets for parks,” he said.

While acknowledging that green space inequity had been explored cit yandstateny.com

THE COUNCIL CLINIC Manhattan City Councilman Corey Johnson proposed a measure last year that would have required a doctor to attend all youth tackle football practices and games, bar those who merit a concussion test from playing until symptom-free for 24 hours and document their treatment actions on a form, which the city would use to publish an annual report.

PETITIONING POLITICIANS Bronx Councilman James Vacca introduced a bill last year that would have created a website where constituents could post petitions and city agencies or authorities could respond publicly.

The number of petitions would be broken down by agency and their response rates would be included in an automated reporting system. of any situations in which the work of compiling data detracted from an agency’s ability to meet its central mandate.

When asked about the impact on historically burdened offices, such as the Human Rights Commission or the parks department’s maintenance team, the mayor’s office said the administration tries to help. “As part of their oversight role, City Council members often request data either formally or informally, and we do our best to deliver this information— whether it’s a simple request or as part of a broader proposed law,” a spokesperson for the administration said.

New York City’s struggle to find the right balance between pumping out raw data for public inspection and taking the time to contextualize it is not unique, according to Derek Mueller, an associate professor of writing at Eastern Michigan University and board member of the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative.

“You could say there’s been a fetishization of data analytics that has crept up over the past decade pretty steadily—companies, management, government, many walks of life, in higher ed, in the sports world, especially, we see this presumption that the data analytics are going to answer for us questions more intricately than we’ve been able answer them before,” he said. “There’s still a lot of work going on around how to do that well and sort of what is the right balance between computational processing and human processing.”

THE PRIME SPONSORS OF THE MOST DATA-RELATED BILLS

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DANIEL DROMM

12 JUMAANE WILLIAMS

11 LETITIA JAMES

11 ELIZABETH CROWLEY

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JAMES VAN BRAMER

10 BRAD LANDER

9 RORY LANCMAN

9 YDANIS RODRIGUEZ

8 DONOVAN RICHARDS

7 JAMES VACCA

city & state — August 10, 2015

REALITY RESTAURANT REVIEW Staten Island Councilman Steven Matteo submitted legislation last year that would establish a pilot program where at least 10 percent of sanitary inspections of food establishments are conducted by staff wearing body cameras. Statistics would be compiled comparing the results.

during the 2013 mayoral campaign, City Council Parks Chairman Mark Levine said his bill requiring a more detailed report on where private funds wind up in public parks would mandate “uniform, clear” reporting on the matter for the first time. “We don’t need this data now to know that we’re underfunding neighborhood parks, but this will strengthen our argument and will, I hope, guide the budget process in coming years in a more impactful way,” Levine said.

Similarly, King’s office said his bill on co-located school statistics would help keep the city Department of Education accountable by ensuring it examines how equitably resources are distributed on co-located campuses.

Because the council has no jurisdiction over school policy, Council Education Committee Chairman Daniel Dromm said, sometimes all it can do is amass information and “use the office as a bully pulpit.” His colleague, Councilman Rory Lancman, said agencies can feel pressure to perform responsibly when they know the public will be scrutinizing statistics such as how frequently prison inmates are put in solitary confinement or how often police make arrests at schools.

King’s staff said the council had a required cost-benefit analysis conducted before voting on the education measure, which concluded it was not an inefficient use of resources.

No council member interviewed by City & State said they were aware

Source:: New York City Council

to cull calculations—which ultimately frame arguments from specific vantage points.

And this data-driven approach doesn’t always encourage direct interaction with constituents.

For instance, one bill calls for a feasibility study to gauge the cost and environmental impact of placing sensors on trash cans so trucks can empty them as soon as they are full; Waisanen points out that the study could benefit from focus groups or interviews with those in garbageburdened areas.

PERSPEC TIVES

HOW TO SAVE PUERTO RICO

ERIC SCHNEIDERMAN

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ew Yorkers are watching the deteriorating fiscal situation in Puerto Rico with deep concern.

For many New Yorkers, the Puerto Rican debt crisis is not a distant, abstract matter of fiscal planning and bond payments. It is about the real lives of mothers, fathers, siblings, friends and neighbors, both on the island and here at home.

Puerto Rico and New York have long had a close, almost familial relationship. Nearly 1 in 10 New York

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TECH SOLUTIONS

MINERVA TANTOCO

city & state — August 10, 2015

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s New York City’s first chief technology officer, I am very fortunate to be part of an administration that is open to new ideas and recognizes the power of technology to transform government, to democratize society and to improve the quality of life for all New Yorkers.

I also have the privilege of being part of a groundbreaking team of technology leaders responsible for fulfilling Mayor Bill de Blasio’s inspiring vision of making New York City the most tech-friendly and innovative city in the world.

New York City’s tech ecosystem is well on its way, with $30 billion in

City residents is Puerto Rican or of Puerto Rican descent. The fiscal crisis there is deeply personal for the people of New York.

That is why it is so important for New Yorkers to weigh in to make sure that the federal government’s financial decisions over the next few months balance the needs of Puerto Ricans and their families with the commonwealth’s need for long-term fiscal help.

The critical step is to end an exclusion that prevents Puerto Rico from doing what all state governments can do when faced with such a crisis.

Congress should immediately grant Puerto Rico the same rights as states to allow distressed government entities to declare Chapter 9 bankruptcy and restructure their debts.

Puerto Rico’s unequal status when it comes to bankruptcy protection has already led to the closing of more than 100 schools and residents fleeing to the mainland. Bankruptcy protections could forestall some of the worst effects of the spiraling fiscal crisis.

The simple threat of bankruptcy itself may help Puerto Rico weather the crisis by forcing all parties back to the negotiating table to stave off

bankruptcy. New Yorkers know this from our own experience because it worked for us in the 1970s.

When New York City was on the brink of declaring bankruptcy in 1975, it was, in the words of Richard Ravitch, who was named chairman of the state Urban Development Corporation that year, “the threat of bankruptcy that got everybody to do things that in the beginning of this process they swore they wouldn’t do.”

When bankruptcy—and the reduced creditor payouts that come with it—suddenly becomes a very real possibility, local officials and creditors work harder on compromises to find a solution short of bankruptcy that could be agreeable to all parties.

During the 1970s fiscal crisis, New York City faced levels of debt that were unprecedented at the time. City officials had used all the accounting tools at their disposal to keep the city afloat.

By April 1975, the city had to take out a three-day loan just to cover payroll. By October of that year, Mayor Abraham Beame had quietly drafted a petition that would have declared the city in default.

While that petition was never invoked, the very real threat of

default—and the cascade of challenges that would surely follow—brought city and state officials, business leaders, unions and others to the table to hammer out a sustainable solution.

That solution was not exactly what any side wanted. It required difficult compromises from everyone at the table. But eventually, the threat of bankruptcy was enough to help the city steady its finances and make it through the crisis.

As Stephen Berger, the head of the state’s Emergency Financial Control Board at the time, recalled years later, “All the stuff we did was to keep the kid from drowning.”

We need to make sure that Puerto Rico is saved from drowning now so that local officials have the time and space they need to craft a long-term solution to the debt crisis.

Congress should move swiftly to end Puerto Rico’s unequal legal status and give it the tools it needs—including bankruptcy power—to bring everyone to the table and solve this crisis.

annual wages, 300,000 jobs and the most female tech founders and startup requests in the country. I encourage my colleagues and partners in the tech sector to use their skills and apply the best technology where it is needed most: to address inequity of all kinds, close the tech divide and make our mark as the most socially responsible tech community in the world.

There is no place more diverse than New York City, and our rising tech sector can leverage and capitalize on that core strength. It gives us an edge toward a more socially sustainable city and builds a healthy bottom line. According to McKinsey & Co., gender-diverse and ethnically diverse companies are, respectively, 15 percent and 35 percent more likely to have financial returns above their national industry medians. We must act thoughtfully and proactively in order to fully leverage this diversity and expand on it to remain globally competitive.

If a diverse set of employees isn’t being brought to the table, amend recruitment strategies and help “prime the pump”: Invest in local computer science education programs or get in touch with the city to find out more about how we are incubating tomorrow’s tech leaders through the Tech Talent Pipeline initiative.

Together, we can collaborate to make my story—a Filipino-American, a

product of New York City public schools, and a woman in tech—the norm, and not the exception.

I’m increasingly approached by individuals and organizations who want to step up to the plate and use their tech for good but don’t know where to start. Public-private partnerships are a fantastic way to give back. Governments and nonprofits tackle some of the most challenging social issues of our time. Technologists love a good challenge and thrive on seeing their work have an impact.

There couldn’t be a more perfect fit.

For instance, could your predictive analytics or digital marketing methods help steer social services to where they will have the most impact? My office recently supported HudsonHack, an intern hack-a-thon produced by Warby Parker in which participants from over 50 companies were asked to find tech solutions to social issues presented by Robin Hood’s Blue Ridge Labs, Donors Choose, and the city Department of Homeless Services.

Looking ahead, the annual NYC BigApps competition will continue through October and brings together over 35 partners who will work with technologists to deliver solutions for issues identified in the city’s OneNYC plan. We encourage you to participate in events like these, sync up with partners to create your own, or think of other ways your latest solutions

could help solve our toughest urban challenges.

Let’s be the tech sector with a heart as big as New York City itself. In my short time in City Hall, I have been inspired and deeply touched by the warmth and genuine kind-heartedness of those inside and outside government, propelled by a deep desire to make a difference for other human beings. It’s one of the most rewarding parts of this role in public service.

There are many paths to being helpful and impactful. Topics such as homelessness, access to mental health resources, domestic violence, workforce diversity and the digital divide all require solutions as big and bold as the challenges themselves.

I know the tech community is up to the challenge. All it takes is the same hands-on, entrepreneurial spirit that brought the industry to where it is now. After all, we can’t sit around and wait for progress and opportunity to just happen. To create a more just, equitable and socially sustainable city, we must actively pull that future into the present—together.

Eric Schneiderman is the attorney general of the state of New York.

Minerva Tantoco is the first chief technology officer for New York City, where she drives the citywide technology strategy.

cit yandstateny.com

BERTHA LEWIS

T

here’s no denying Donald Trump has had a great ride— he’s gotten all the attention he’s ever wanted, and he’s clearly been enjoying himself.

Plus he’s been a gift to the Democratic Party and progressive movement, too: His vile, racist comments have put the spotlight on Republicans’ backwards immigration

policies and angered millions of the sporadic voters we need to turn out next year.

Recognizing an easy press opportunity, even Mayor Bill de Blasio got in on the game, boldly declaring he was keeping Trump’s city contracts untouched, but that he’s “certainly not looking to do any business with him going forward.” Let’s hope the next few mayors of New York City also feel that way.

Here in blue-state New York, Trump’s an easy target. Compared with Uber, or Gov. Andrew Cuomo, there’s not much risk in calling him out. And even private companies like Univision earned praise for divesting from the Donald.

But when his inevitably doomed campaign crashes and burns, what has the progressive movement actually accomplished? Are we looking to make noise or build lasting change?

So let’s put the expanding boycott against Trump’s business to some real use.

From his elite golf course in the Bronx, which sits beside some of the poorest NYCHA tenants in the city, to his real estate ventures in Las Vegas,

Atlantic City, Florida and other cities, Trump has benefitted from hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayersubsidized corporate welfare.

With local governments across the country under pressure to divest from Trump, and companies from Macy’s to NASCAR cutting ties with him, there’s potentially billions of dollars of business up for grabs.

What too many in the progressive movement have missed is that where that money goes next is just as important as who has it now.

Want a little poetic justice? Let’s turn the Trump economic backlash into the largest minority- and womenowned business stimulus our country has ever seen. Instead of praising companies like Macy’s (which Trump happily noted has made racial discrimination payouts as recently as 2014) for taking an easy step out of self-interest, let’s keep the pressure up until their replacement vendors are MWBEs. And let’s lobby the federal, state and local governments that have bestowed tax breaks, public subsidies, low-interest loans and other concessions to the Trump Organization to shift their resources

toward empowering people of color in their own communities.

After all, there’s no better way to debunk Trump’s ridiculous claim that Mexican immigrants are a bunch of “rapists” than empowering immigrant communities with the financial tools to succeed.

So when the city’s contract with the Trump Golf Links at Ferry Point expires, let’s make history by holding the state’s first PGA tournament at a minority-owned golf course. And since there’s a dress code, remember to pick up some new formal wear from an MWBE designer at Macy’s before you go.

Donald Trump might be an unabashed racist, but he’s always prided himself on being a businessman first. Even Trump would recognize my plan as a better deal for communities of color than the feel-good, but ultimately pointless, firestorm our side has encouraged.

PERSPEC TIVES

LIFE AFTER TRUMP

Bertha Lewis is president of The Black Institute.

49

A

t a time when the public and private sectors are struggling to create jobs, the technology sector is struggling to fill innumerable open positions. Jobs in computing fields are among the highest paying and fastest growing, and yet our current workforce is not equipped to fill them. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that by 2020, there will be 1.4 million new computer science jobs, but only 400,000 computer science students.

It’s time our education system prioritizes the skills these jobs demand in a scalable way.

At Girls Who Code and The cit yandstateny.com

Urban Assembly, we’ve dedicated our missions to addressing these gaps in the market by preparing the next generation with the skills they’ll need to pursue 21st-century opportunities.

Thus far, we’re making great strides.

Girls Who Code will have taught computer science to more than 10,000 girls by the end of 2015 between our summer immersion and clubs programs. The Urban Assembly is a leader in creating next-generation career and technical education schools that introduce students to the most in-demand skills in the workforce.

This year, for example, The Urban Assembly opened the Maker Academy in New York City, to steep students in

Advanced Placement exam that would allow them to enter college with credits in a STEM field.

Allowing coding to fulfill the language requirement would also accomplish other important goals. It would raise awareness among many more families—and their children— about the importance of computer science skills for long-term success; it would expand coding to many more students throughout the New York City school system; and it would create demand for more teachers to learn these skills and become certified in this language. Unless there is demand, after all, it’s hard to increase supply.

For our students, learning those skills today translates into a pathway to the jobs and the middle class of tomorrow.

Reshma Saujani is founder and CEO of Girls Who Code, a national nonprofit working to close the gender gap in the technology and engineering sectors.

Richard Kahan is founder and CEO of The Urban Assembly, a network of 21 small high schools in New York City.

city & state — August 10, 2015

RESHMA SAUJANI AND RICHARD KAHAN

coding, 3-D printing and other skills that will prepare them for computer science programs and jobs. These are important steps. But it’s simply not efficient to think we can address this problem school by school, program by program.

One easy yet impactful way our school systems have historically addressed these challenges is through language acquisition. Back in the 1990s, when we began to see major economic, political and cultural shifts in the global marketplace, schools across the country began expanding their Japanese language offerings.

In the 2000s, Mandarin became the language of choice for students seeking a leg up in the job market. Imagine how much skill building our schools could achieve if the state allowed coding to fulfill the language requirement.

For starters, it makes good educational sense. Coding builds on the problem-solving and criticalthinking skills inherent in the new the Common Core state standards. It requires students to take a challenge, break it down into parts, understand the relationships between those parts, pose a solution, and then test it to see if it works. Coding makes problem solving visible. It also prepares students for the computer science

BACK & FORTH

BREAKING GROUND C

onstructing a new Tappan

50

City & State: We have known for decades that the Tappan Zee Bridge needed to be reconstructed, and that congestion needed to be alleviated along the I-287 corridor.

So how did we get to where we are now with the new bridge finally breaking ground?

Philip Plotch: The impetus for replacing the bridge wasn’t because it was some rotting structure, it was that the Thruway Authority wanted something wider, they wanted to increase the capacity of the Thruway.

Customers also were not happy having a bridge that was subject to a lot of delays, because there are no shoulders on the bridge, it’s harder to remove broken-down cars, and because it doesn’t have as much capacity as other parts of the Thruway.

city & state — August 10, 2015

the kind of person who likes to say no to people. There was enough stuff going on with the budget that he was alienating and pissing off people, but with the Tappan Zee Bridge he didn’t have the desire to say no.

Zee Bridge is a project that has long flummoxed New York state politicians and planners. A toxic combination of bureaucracy, lack of political will and logistical challenges all contributed to the inertia that finally led Gov. Andrew Cuomo to take matters into his own hands.

In his new book, “Politics Across the Hudson,” Philip Plotch, the director of the public administration master’s program at St. Peter’s University, extensively details the project’s history and explains why it was punted by several administrations before Cuomo finally broke ground on the bridge in 2013.

Plotch spoke with City & State’s Nick Powell about his book, the politics behind the controversial project and whether the final product will solve the problems that it originally intended to.

The following is an edited transcript.

C&S: Where in the decades of punting did the public transportation component get lost?

PP: In some ways it was the bureaucracies that ran amok. The Metro-North Railroad pushed for a new rail line across the Hudson Valley, and they lowballed the cost estimates, and when they lowballed the cost estimates, Gov. George Pataki didn’t

A Q&A WITH

PHILIP PLOTCH realize that was happening. He thought this was sort of a feasible idea to build a rail crossing. He got numbers that the whole project, replacing the bridge and replacing the rail line and building the stations, was going to cost $4 billion.

It turned out later that the number was over $20 billion. What happened was everyone got really excited, but we couldn’t afford it. It turned out it wasn’t a feasible alternative. That’s where the politicians started to punt on it. Gov. Pataki said, “OK, we’re going to keep on studying this,” Gov. Eliot Spitzer kept on studying it, and Gov. David Paterson kept on studying it. It was easier to study and to keep on studying something that wasn’t feasible as opposed to telling the public that this was not a feasible alternative.

C&S: How much did the contrasting styles of governance from Pataki to Spitzer to Paterson to Cuomo contribute to the constant kicking of the can?

PP: Gov. Pataki was somebody who really believed in local community input. He was a former mayor of Peekskill, and he saw how sometimes the state came in and the engineers didn’t know exactly what was going on and the local officials kind of knew better, in some instances, than the state officials. For him, having the local input was really important. And he was a Westchester guy, and he actually used to represent both sides of the Tappan Zee Bridge during his short term as a state senator before he became governor, so he understood the complexity, he understood all of the political pitfalls, and he really wanted the local buy-in. So his style was very different than the political operative that Andrew Cuomo is.

Spitzer’s brilliant and he understands all the different implications and all of the different issues. If he had time as governor, I think things might have panned out a little differently, but we’ll never know. And Gov. Paterson is not

C&S: What was the overarching message that you wanted to drive home about this project and how these large-scale transportation projects are built in New York?

PP: I was trying to explain the complexity of addressing a problem.

It could have been any problem because I had access to information and access to people. The problem along this part of the New York State Thruway was highway congestion, and people wanted to solve the highway congestion problem, but you really couldn’t actually solve that problem.

If you widen the highway, people are just going to move over to Orange and Rockland counties, and you’d just get more congestion. You could raise the tolls high enough to reduce congestion, but politically that’s not really acceptable.

C&S: And does the new Tappan Zee Bridge adequately solve that problem?

PP: No. I think what we’ll have is a wider, more stable, more robust transportation along those three miles, but it won’t solve the congestion problem. No, it’s a problem I don’t think you can really solve to begin with.

What you can do is you can replace a bridge, and that was one of the genius things about Andrew Cuomo. He figured out we’re not going to resolve a problem that we can’t solve, we’re just gonna solve some other problem.

For the full interview with Philip Plotch on the Tappan Zee Bridge project, including whether New York and New Jersey dropped the ball on cooperating on construction, and why Cuomo took out the public transportation component, visit www.cityandstateny.com.

cit yandstateny.com

Look Who’s Talking with

Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr.

Alphonso David, Chief Counsel to Governor Cuomo

New York City Public Advocate Letitia James

State Senate Democratic Conference Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins

State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli

To learn more about attending our events or partnering with City & State, visit Events.CityandStateNY.com or contact Jasmin Freeman 646.442.1162

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