14 minute read
FIRST READ
Gov. Kathy Hochul will be working with state legislative leaders to get a “timely” budget, even if it wasn’t passed on time before the April 1 deadline.
DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR BUDGET IS?
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The April 1 deadline for lawmakers and the governor to reach a deal on a new state budget has come and gone with no fiscal plan in sight. In fact, legislative leaders sent members home for the weekend without taking a vote, with the expectation that when they returned for session on Monday, they would be ready to approve a budget. When lawmakers left town, state leaders had few if any details pinned down, with changes to the 2019 bail law at the center of discussions. Gov. Kathy Hochul’s introduction of a 10-point criminal justice plan that included further rollbacks to bail reform upended negotiations late in the game, and little has budged as state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie continue to resist significant changes to bail. Talks around other contentious issues, like
NIGHT AT THE CAPITOL
As state budget negotiations went past the end of fiscal year deadline last week, progressive Democratic lawmakers weren’t taking any slights to their legislative priorities lying down – even if it appeared that way at a sleep-in at the state Capitol. Assembly Members Yuh-Line Niou and Marcela Mitaynes were among those who camped out in sleeping bags while advocating for “Coverage for All,” among other priorities.
– state Senate Majority Leader Andrea StewartCousins, speaking about the state budget hours before lawmakers missed the deadline to pass it, via Gothamist
– state Sen. Alessandra Biaggi, expressing frustration with a new proposal to reform ethics oversight in the state, via the Times Union expanding health care for undocumented immigrants and funding for child care, and even less controversial things, have stalled as bail dominates the conversation.
BILLS, BILLS, BILL(S)
Hochul announced a deal to build a new Buffalo Bills stadium that put the state on the hook for $600 million, yet another wrench in the budget talks. The state-subsidized stadium was met with backlash fairly quickly from lawmakers, editorial boards, government watchdog groups and other organizations for both the rollout of the deal as well as the amount of taxpayer dollars the state would give to the billionaire owners of the Bills. Some also questioned the governor’s involvement in the negotiations given that her husband, Bill, works as counsel to the company that operates most of the concessions in the existing stadium. Hochul, however, celebrated it as a victory for the state and Western New York since it would ensure the football team would remain in New York for decades to come, generating economic benefits for the region. She also said that very few tax dollars would go to the stadium because longoverdue casino revenues from the Seneca Nation would cover most of the bill. Days before announcing the deal, Hochul used a hardball tactic to settle
years of dispute with the Seneca Nation, getting a court to freeze the nation’s bank accounts until they paid the nearly $565 million in revenues that state said it owed. The move and the decision to spend the cash on a new Bills stadium was condemned by Seneca Nation leaders.
ADAMS TARGETS HOMELESS ENCAMPMENTS
New York City Mayor Eric Adams has begun making good on his promise to rid city streets of homeless encampments, sending municipal workers to break up the makeshift living arrangements. In the first week of sweeps, the city broke up well over 200 such encampments, largely in Manhattan, with the purpose of directing those living there to shelters or other services to get them off the street. In that time, only five people took city workers up on the offer to relocate to a shelter. Despite that low number, Adams expressed optimism that more people would accept offers of shelter as the efforts continued, citing the 300 homeless people the city has gotten into a shelter from the subway system since efforts to address homelessness in the tunnels began in February.
AMAZON UNION COMING TO STATEN ISLAND
History was made on Staten Island when Amazon workers at the warehouse there voted to create the company’s first union. The victory came after several failed organizing attempts in other parts of the country amid the company’s staunch anti-union positions. Workers on Staten Island are asking for a $30 minimum wage, twice the existing pay, as well as things like more break time and additional sick days. Contract negotiations will affect the 6,000 people who work at the Staten Island warehouse.
Amazon Labor Union President Chris Smalls watched as Staten Island employees voted underneath a white tent to form the e-commerce giant’s first union in the country.
Assembly votes to let Brad Lander stay in office
On March 29, the Assembly passed a bill to extend the deadline for New York City Comptroller Brad Lander to file paperwork necessary to stay in office. Lander was sworn in back in January, but he filed a surety bond with the city clerk’s office after the legal deadline, making him technically ineligible to serve as the city’s comptroller. The $200,000 surety bond is required to ensure the comptroller’s “faithful performance of the duties” of their office.
The bill, which was sponsored by Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, passed in the Assembly with just one “no” vote.
According to Stewart-Cousins’ office, the bill was expected to be put to a vote in the state Senate after the conference reviews its specifics.
Lander needed to file a surety bond within 30 days of taking up the post. He filed the bond, but did not do so in time, and was technically ineligible to serve as the city’s chief financial watchdog until he filed his paperwork with the appropriate office. Heastie proposed the bill to the Assembly on March 28 to rectify Lander’s error.
Lander claimed that he was not the first comptroller to mess up his paperwork after being sworn in, saying both his predecessors John Liu, currently a state senator, and Scott Stringer did not file their surety bonds correctly either.
“The requirement to have the bond on file with the clerk within 30 days was not known to our office, or to the clerk, who did not have a process for it. The previous comptrollers did not file it with the clerk, their bonds were on file here in the municipal building,” said Naomi Dann, a spokesperson for Lander, about the clerical mishap.
Dann clarified that, while his predecessors did not file their surety bonds, there was no process set up to do so with the clerk’s office, which is why the bill will help in allowing for that process to happen more smoothly in the future.
When reached for comment on his apparent error, Liu’s spokesperson Scott Sieber said, “Beyond the fact that it’s bad form for Comptroller Lander to blame his oversights on predecessors, John Liu signed piles of paperwork, forms, and disclosures upon taking office as comptroller and it’s impossible to remember now 12 years later exactly how each individual piece of paperwork ultimately ended up being filed.”
City & State was unable to reach Stringer or his spokesperson for comment. – Candace Pedraza
THE WEEK AHEAD
WEDNESDAY 4/6
Crain’s New York Business hosts a power breakfast featuring New York City Housing Authority Chair and CEO Greg Russ at 8 a.m. at the New York Athletic Club. WEDNESDAY 4/6
The Manhattan Institute hosts a forum on The First 100 Days of Adams starting at 12:30 p.m., evaluating the start of New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ mayoralty. WEDNESDAY 4/6
City & State and New York Nonprofit Media honor the Nonprofit 40 Under 40 at a 6:30 p.m. reception at The Mezzanine in lower Manhattan. INSIDE DOPE
These rising stars have already distinguished themselves and are on their way to amassing more noteworthy accomplishments.
By Angelique Molina-Mangaroo & Ralph R. Ortega
ABOUT 200 NEW YORK
nonprofit executives and board members attended the return of Nonprofit BoardCon on March 29, New York Nonprofit Media’s first in-person event since the COVID-19 pandemic began.
The daylong event at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan provided a robust program of educational panels, such as financial management and governance.
“You have to have faith in the decisions that you make, that the leadership that you hired will be able to execute. I think that’s really sort of the theme of the day,” Met Council CEO and Executive Director David Greenfield said in his opening remarks for the event.
Current management topics were also discussed, including diversity, equity and inclusion in the boardroom. “Don’t hide behind ‘we can’t find diverse candidates’ because they are out there,” Surjit Chana, board chair for Care for the Homeless, told attendees.
For many in attendance, it also was an opportunity to reunite after not seeing each other during the pandemic.
“I think we really can’t underestimate how much of us in the nonprofit world actually missed interacting with our colleagues and really working on brainstorming solutions to some of the biggest and most complicated problems in New York City,” said Greenfield, who also is member of NYN Media’s advisory board.
From left, James E. Mann, Surjit Chana, John Harrison and Jennifer Jones Austin discuss diversity, equity and inclusion
Nonprofit BoardCon
New York Nonprofit Media’s annual event for executive leaders and board members.
PKF O’Connor Davies Partner Alexander Buchholz was part of a panel on accounting, finance and auditing functions
In between panels, attendees had time to network and greet each other in person for the first time in two years
Rabbi Josh Joseph, left, is the executive vice president and chief operating officer of Orthodox Union
From left, Nancy D. Miller, Kate Krug and Marcella McKoy Staten Island Not For Profit Association Executive Director Sharmila Rao Thakkar moderated a panel on boardstaff partnerships
Some New York City Council members remain unconvinced by the NYPD’s description of the new neighborhood safety teams.
By Annie McDonough
NYPD OFFICIALS AND New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ administration attempted to draw a thick line between the city’s new neighborhood safety teams and the department’s disbanded controversial plainclothes anti-crime units at a New York City Council oversight hearing on Adams’ Blueprint to End Gun Violence on Wednesday.
“To be clear, these are not the anti-crime units of old,” NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell said of the neighborhood safety teams, which launched earlier this month – and which in two weeks of operating have seized 20 firearms, according to the department. “Officers, detectives and supervisors serving on the neighborhood safety teams are individually selected and thoroughly vetted, receive enhanced training prior to deployment, wear a hybrid uniform that clearly identifies them as police, wear body cameras and have their camera footage and activity routinely audited by designated supervisors and the Risk Management Bureau,” Sewell said Wednesday.
Originally described by Adams as a modified version of the plainclothes anti-crime units – the latest incarnation of which was disbanded by then-New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2020 – the neighborhood safety teams are being closely watched as a key part of Adams’ Blueprint to End Gun Violence. The NYPD’s previous anti-crime units were found to be involved in a disproportionate number of killings by police. Skeptics and critics of the new neighborhood safety teams have argued that they represent a change from the old units in name only, and progressive City Council members and police reform advocates continue to raise concerns that they will result in the overpolicing of Black and brown communities.
At the council hearing, police officials sought to counter those concerns. “Three big things that differentiate the neighborhood safety teams from the anti-crime teams of old can be summed up as selection, training and oversight,” said NYPD Chief of Department Ken Corey. The members of the neighborhood safety teams – which so far have been rolled out in 27 precincts and four housing police service areas – had to volunteer and then be recommended by their commanding officer, Corey said. The borough commander had to make a subsequent approval before the recommendation was sent to the department’s Risk Management Bureau, which vets the officer’s past performance, including reviewing any complaints, disciplinary action and the officer’s body camera footage.
The officers who were selected to join the teams then had to complete a seven-day training course, which Corey said included de-escalation tactics, constitutional policing, risk identification and mitigation. “That curriculum includes two days of courtroom testimony (training), three days of tactics training, including the use of minimal force techniques, and then two days of risk management training,” he said. Corey also noted that some officers who made it through the selection and vetting process were removed after their performance in training.
Finally, department officials said the new teams were comprised of five officers and one sergeant – whose sole responsibility would be the supervision of those five members. Oversight also involves the department’s Risk Management Bureau reviewing the teams’ body camera footage, their paperwork and the outcomes of arrests. Corey added that all of that information will be available to the department’s court-appointed federal monitor as well.
– Ken Corey, NYPD Chief of Department
who joined Wednesday’s hearing probed the department’s case, asking for more transparency on how the officers on the safety teams were trained and how the department will ensure that body camera footage, for example, will be adequately reviewed.
City Council Member Tiffany Cabán, a progressive Democrat and former public defender, said she spoke to a neighborhood safety team being deployed in her district earlier this week and was told that the training they received was similar to training officers already received as part of their recertification process. “When I asked (the officers) about what were the special enhanced components that made them above and beyond, or better equipped, to carry out this particular function that they have been given, the answer that I was given was that instead of sitting and watching PowerPoints, the trainings were more quote-unquote interactive,” Cabán said on Wednesday.
Corey responded that the training for neighborhood safety teams is in fact new. “Something that has never been done before is that we bring the entire team in, and we train them as a team,” Corey said.
Michael Sisitzky, senior policy counsel at the New York Civil Liberties Union, said increased training won’t address skeptics’ key concern: that investing in more policing won’t make communities safer. “I think we’ve been down this road before,” Sisitzky told City & State. “We’ve heard promises that training is the way to address problems within the NYPD. For years, the de Blasio administration kept touting over and over again that de-escalation training was going to be rolled out departmentwide, that we were going to see that as a primary vehicle to address police misconduct and excessive force. But what happened with all that training in the summer of 2020, when we saw a massive amount of police violence directed at racial justice protesters?”
The police department also provided new demographic data about the neighborhood safety teams, noting that the racial makeup was broadly reflective of the department as a whole. The department testified that the new neighborhood safety teams were 41.7% white, 38.2% Hispanic, 16.6% Black and 3.5% Asian, and 0% Native American. Departmentwide, the NYPD is 44.5% white, 30.2% Hispanic, 15.3% Black, 9.9% Asian and 0.10% Native American.
Democratic Council Member Althea Stevens said that even though these demographics were broadly in line with the department as a whole, the teams will be sent into majority Black and brown neighborhoods. “I’m concerned that it’s not more reflective of the communities,” she said.
Still, some moderate Democratic and Republican council members at the hearing on Wednesday expressed faith in the neighborhood safety teams. So far, the department said, the teams have completed 84 arrests and taken 20 firearms off the streets. “It seems to be working,” said Council Member Bob Holden, a moderate Democrat who was also elected on the Republican Party line last year. ■
NYPD officers attended a training announcement for the new neighborhood safety teams.
