New York City: Your Ad Here

Posted by Doug Turetsky, September 6, 2012

New York City itself may not be for sale, but the rights to tie your corporate name and logo to a variety of city facilities and services may increasingly be up for grabs as public agencies look for ways to raise revenues to meet growing expenses and offset city funding cuts.

On September 14, the city’s parks department is scheduled to receive bids from companies for the right to affix their names to 55 dog runs and 631 basketball courts. The city’s 2013 budget anticipates $1.5 million in annual revenue for the naming rights to the dog runs and $3.5 million from the basketball courts in fiscal years 2013-2016. An additional $8.0 million in annual revenue over the same period is expected through more sponsorships, although the parks department has not yet announced what facilities it will offer to potential sponsors. The city’s financial plan expects the parks department to take in $13 million annually in sponsorship revenues through 2016.

The parks department’s effort to sell these naming rights is being done under an initiative it calls the NYC Parks Corporate Partnership Program.  Under this program, the agency says, “[C]ompanies can invest in a unique opportunity to promote their brand through NYC parks assets.” The parks department is offering potential partners rights that can stretch from onsite to online.

IMG Worldwide, a major sports and fashion marketing and licensing company, has been enlisted to play a key role in the parks’ partnership program (IMG is the marketer of New York City Fashion Week). The parks department Web site describes IMG as “the exclusive designated agency to develop and commercialize this opportunity.” Proposals for sponsoring the dog runs and basketball courts are to be sent to IMG. For its work on behalf of the parks department, IMG is reportedly being paid by NYC & Company, a private organization that does tourism promotion and marketing for the city. In 2011, about 40 percent of NYC & Company’s $36.4 million in revenues came from city funding.

The parks department is not the first agency to market naming or sponsorship opportunities. The Department of Transportation’s bike-share program, now expected to start rolling in March 2013, is being funded solely with sponsorship money: $41 million from Citigroup and $6.5 million from MasterCard.  For its cash, Citigroup will get its name on 10,000 bikes and 600 docking stations around the city. MasterCard is providing the payment system for the program.

Similarly, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is seeking to take greater advantage of the MetroCard’s ubiquity as well as its iconic link to the city by offering advertising space on the front of the card. The back of the card has already been available at costs ranging from $25,500 for 50,000 cards to $450,000 for 2.5 million cards. Rates for the front of the card haven’t been determined yet.

The transportation authority has also sold naming rights to the Atlantic Avenue-Pacific Street subway stop for $200,000 a year for 20 years to the British banking firm Barclays. The station, which sits under the soon-to-be opened Barclays Center arena in Brooklyn, is now called Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center (Barclays paid $400 million over 20 years to purchase naming rights for the publicly subsidized arena from the Nets).

At least one other local agency has declared its intention to offer up its facilities for some form of advertising. Last September, the Daily News reported that the New York City Housing Authority was floating the notion of offering billboards to advertisers at its development projects, an idea that provoked unease among some residents and elected officials.

But the housing authority still sees its 2,600 buildings in 334 developments citywide as an opportunity for prospective advertisers. In January, the housing authority released Plan NYCHA: A Roadmap For Preservation, a five-year plan to improve services and increase partnerships and revenues. Although it provides only the barest of details, the plan states that the housing authority aims to “design and launch a plan to offer NYCHA property for advertising with input from residents.”

New York’s streets were once believed to be paved with gold. In the future, they may increasingly be paved with sponsorship dollars.

Filed in Fees and Fines, Housing, Parks, Transportation | | Permalink |

Water Conservation Program Could Cause a Flood of New Problems for the City’s Housing Authority

Posted by Doug Turetsky, August 16, 2012

With the New York City Housing Authority facing a recent barrage of critical press, it’s not surprising that a seemingly small change in how the housing authority will be billed for water has been overlooked. But what may seem like a small drip of an issue now could open a floodgate later.

In an extension of its effort to encourage water conservation, the city’s Department of Environmental Protection last month put the New York City Housing Authority into a water conservation program that  requires water meters to be installed at all of the housing authority’s 334 developments. If the housing authority cannot meet the requirements of the conservation program, it may instead be billed by water meters that track the amount of water used in a building. This could result in higher water and sewer bills for an agency already struggling with budget shortfalls and has trouble with the timely upkeep and repair of its properties.

Water already comes at no small cost for the housing authority. In 2011, the water bills for the housing authority’s developments totaled $149.9 million, according to IBO analyst Justin Bland. Under the new conservation program, the housing authority will pay about $160 million in 2013. The housing authority’s five-year operating plan shows a General Fund deficit of $61.3 million this year and $63.3 million for 2013 (about 3 percent  of the roughly $2 billion budgets for public housing developments in both years).

The housing authority is not the only property owner being compelled to join the conservation program, but it is the largest. All of the city’s buildings were supposed to be metered and billed by water usage more than a decade ago. Launched in 1988 following a severe drought, the metering program aimed to be universal within 10 years. A decade after that deadline, as recounted in an October 2009 IBO Weblog Post, the program was well behind schedule, with nearly 50,000 water accounts still being billed on the frontage system—fees based on building size and the number of sinks, showers, tubs, and toilets.

As of July 1, the Department of Environmental Protection required that most of the remaining unmetered residential buildings in the city take a step towards the Universal Metering Program. The department has automatically enrolled the housing authority and other owners of properties with four or more units that have lagged behind in the city’s water metering efforts into its Multi-Family Conservation Program. The program sets a flat rate of $894.15 per apartment annually for water and sewer fees, about $60 higher than the average under the previous system. But paying the flat rate and staying in the conservation program is contingent upon installing water meters by January 2014 and “high-efficiency water-using filters” in 70 percent of a building’s apartments by June 2015.

Meeting these requirements may be a challenge for the housing authority, which is already awash in a backlog of repairs and delayed renovation projects.   A June 2012 City Council Report for a budget hearing on the housing authority cited a 2011 backlog of nearly 300,000 work orders for about 17,900 apartments, 10 percent of the 179,000 units in public housing developments. And recent articles in the New York Daily News have chronicled the ongoing delays in major upgrade and renovation projects at housing authority developments. The need for such upgrades is likely to grow—1,400 of the 2,600 buildings in housing authority developments are at least 50 years old.

Many New Yorkers would no doubt agree that water conservation is an important public policy goal. But as it struggles to provide its 400,000 residents with safe and livable apartments, this may be a particularly difficult time for the housing authority to take on a new challenge.

Filed in Environment, Housing | | Permalink |

Few Layoffs in 2013 City Budget, But Municipal Workforce Would Continue to Shrink

Posted by Doug Turetsky, July 24, 2012

Are cities and states around the U.S. undergoing a surge in hiring? That was the finding of a USA Today news story earlier this month, which noted that hiring by cities, states, and local school districts during the first four months of 2012 was 20 percent above the rate for the same period last year. This hiring comes in the wake of steep recession-related government job cuts. A just-released report by the Volcker/Ravitch Task Force on state budgets found that state and local governments slashed employment far more than in previous recessions.

 
While New York City government is certainly doing some hiring, don’t expect a rise in the number of municipal workers anytime soon—at least not based the budget that was recently adopted for fiscal year 2013, which began on July 1. Based on the budget for 2013, the city workforce will decline by 1,697 this year and total 294,961 by June 30, 2013 (including the number of hours worked by part-timers calculated to add up to an equivalent number of full-time positions). That’s down from 311,018 in June 2008, just as the recession began to squeeze city tax receipts. The decline has occurred through a combination of layoffs and attrition—not rehiring if a position becomes vacant due to an event such as retirement or resignation.

 


Proposed staffing cuts played a relatively small role in the recent round of budget debates. That’s far different from last year, when wrangling over the Mayor’s proposed budget for 2012 was largely dominated by his proposal to lay off nearly 4,300 teachers and not replace about 1,900 other teachers who were expected to leave the school system. Although the teacher layoffs were averted in negotiations with the City Council, other layoffs have occurred in the wake of the recession.

 
Determining the number of city workers that have been laid off is difficult because not every employee is in the city’s main payroll database. For example, Department of Education administrators and, as of a few weeks ago, custodians are in the main database. Other education department employees, such as the 672 school aides laid off last year, are in a separate database.

 

A review of the city’s main payroll database by IBO labor analyst Martin Davis identified a total of 2,031 layoffs among regular full-time and part-time city workers from fiscal year 2009 through May 2012. Most of the layoffs in the database we reviewed were concentrated in just a few agencies, and nearly half occurred in 2010 when there were 940.

Besides the Department of Education school aide layoffs, the Administration for Children’s Services accounted for the most layoffs we were able to identify in the 2009-2012 period, with 598. Well more than half of these occurred in 2010.There were 509 layoffs among staff identified as administrators at the Department of Education over the same four-year period. The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s layoff total was next at 296.

 

The Mayor’s initial budget proposals for the current fiscal year projected far fewer layoffs than his 2012 proposals. And more than half of the projected layoffs for 2013 were not actually of municipal employees but rather the result of anticipated cuts in the city subsidy to libraries and cultural organizations—cuts that were ultimately reversed in the most recent budget deal with the City Council.

 
Among the comparatively small number of layoffs that are included in the budget adopted last month are staff cuts at the Department of Transportation as the city makes the shift from single-space parking meters to Muni Meters. The declining number of layoffs here mirrors a national trend found in an April 2012 survey by the Center for State & Local Government Excellence. Twenty-eight percent of responding governments said they had undertaken layoffs this year compared with 40 percent the year before. At least in the short term, layoffs may increasingly have more to do with changes in staffing needs than fiscal needs.

Filed in Municipal Labor | | Permalink |

Tallying the Extra Cost of Four Citywide Election Days in 2012

Posted by Doug Turetsky, June 19, 2012

Democracy may be priceless, but the cost of voting in New York City comes with an extra tab this year. That’s because next Tuesday’s Congressional primary will be the second of four citywide elections being held in 2012—the most in recent memory. It follows the Republican Presidential primary held in April. Still to come are the state legislative primaries on September 13 and the general election on November 6.

The price tag for each of these citywide elections: as much as $23 million.

We typically have three citywide elections in a year when the terms for state and federal officeholders are up for vote. But this year a federal judge ruled that New York State’s scheduling of its Congressional primaries in September, in conjunction with the state primaries for Assembly and Senate, would not leave enough time to get absentee ballots to military personnel overseas before the general election in November.

Albany officials could have shifted state legislative primaries to June 26 as well, but chose not to. With New York’s legislative session scheduled to run until June 21, the State Senate balked at the idea of holding an election just five days later that would leave them little time to get home and campaign. So counties across the state pony up more money to cover the cost of an additional day for voters to go to the polls. For the city this meant adding $23 million to the Board of Election’s budget. The funds cover expenditures such as printing ballots, transporting voting machines to the city’s more than 1,300 polling sites, and paying about 30,000 poll workers.

Although the city budget included $23.9 million for April’s Republican primary, actual expenditures totaled about $13.3 million according to information obtained by IBO’s Bernard O’Brien. The original allocation was made last year based on the assumption that both Republicans and Democrats would be holding primaries. But with only a primary for the city’s 486,000 registered Republicans taking place, the Board of Elections could cut some costs. By law every polling place had to open, but the elections board was able to combine some election districts within polling places. This allowed the board to reduce the number of voting machines needed to be delivered, ballots printed, and poll workers hired.

Despite the cost savings, the price per vote didn’t come cheap. Turnout in April was light, with 25,475 registered Republicans casting ballots, or about 5 percent of eligible voters. The cost per vote: about $522.

Turnout should be somewhat heavier in the upcoming elections, although that means there will likely not be as many opportunities for cost savings similar to those in the April 24th election.  So the total cost for the four elections this year may be upwards of $80 million.

That amount doesn’t include the cost of overtime for police officers stationed at voting sites. In 2008, when the city similarly had federal and state elections, police overtime cost an average of $500,000 for each of the three election days that year.

Nor does the $80 million include the cost of the special election in Brooklyn’s 27th Senatorial District held in March. While the city budget originally included $840,000 for this election, the cost for the March election day was closer to $750,000. But the vote tallies for the two candidates were so close that it triggered a recount that is expected to bring the full cost significantly higher—for a district slated to disappear at the end of the year as new Senate lines go into effect in the wake of the 2010 Census and redistricting.

Filed in Goverment Operations/Performance | | Permalink |

The Coop & Condo Tax Break Is About to Expire, Renewing the Existing Bill Will Cost the City Millions in Unintended Benefits

Posted by Doug Turetsky, May 17, 2012

With about five weeks to go in the New York State legislative session, there are still some controversial issues to resolve such as the push to increase the minimum wage, the DREAM Act, and pay hikes for legislators. One issue that has received little if any public notice is the impending expiration in June of New York City’s tax break for coop and condo owners.

If Albany doesn’t act to reauthorize the tax abatement, roughly 365,000 New York City coop and condo owners could see their property tax bills jump. But if legislators simply renew the existing bill, they’ll be giving far steeper tax breaks to many coop and condo owners than originally intended and costing the city hundreds of millions of dollars in foregone revenue.

In the early 1990s, many coop and condo owners complained that the city’s property tax system was unfair, burdening apartment owners with higher tax rates than those paid by owners of one- to three-family homes. A special commission to look at problems with the city’s property tax system was appointed by Mayor David Dinkins and Council Speaker Peter Vallone. The commission concurred with the complaints of coop and condo owners and recommended that taxes on homeowner apartments be brought into line with those one- to three-family homeowners. (For more details on the commission and inequities in the property tax system, see IBO’s Twenty-Five Years After S7000: How Property Tax Burdens Have Shifted in New York City.)

Fixing the inequity between apartment owner and homeowner taxes proved difficult under the constraints of the broader property tax system crafted by the state. In 1997, at the behest of the City Council and then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the state Legislature enacted what was supposed to be a temporary fix for coop and condo owners.

But the temporary fix has in effect become permanent, renewed four times—at no small cost to the city treasury. The total cost of the abatement in 2012 is about $445 million in forgone revenue. An estimated $260 million of that is a tax break for coop and condo owners whose tax burdens are actually lower than what they would face if they were simply moved into the homeowner tax class, according to calculations by IBO’s Ana Champeny. And many of these coop and condo owners live in some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city, particularly east and west of Central Park and brownstone Brooklyn.

Why do many apartment owners have lower tax burdens than homeowners? Under state law coops and condos are assessed as if they are rental buildings, meaning that in many instances the properties are greatly undervalued—especially in neighborhoods where values have risen dramatically over the years.

The effect of the state’s assessment rule becomes clear when IBO estimates coop and condo building values using actual sales data rather than the assessments the city is required to use. Take the example of 101 Central Park West. The Department of Finance market value is about $630,000 per unit while the average sales price for apartments sold since January 2011 has been $8.4 million. Using our sales-based market value ($5.8 million per unit) for the building, 101 CPW has an effective tax rate for of 63 cents per $100 of market value in 2012. That’s 19 percent less than the city-wide average effective tax rate of 78 cents per $100 of market value for the one- to three-family homes—before applying the coop and condo abatement. With the coop and condo abatement, apartment owners at 101 Central Park West have an effective tax rate of 52 cents per $100 of market value.

As the clock winds down on this year’s legislative session with no bill as yet introduced to make the promised adjustments to what was supposed to be a stopgap measure, it is likely the coop and condo abatement will simply be renewed as it has been before—an outcome with repercussions for the city’s budget. The $260 million in revenue foregone by providing a benefit for some apartment owners that goes beyond the intended level of tax relief is enough to restore some of the most contentious cuts in the Mayor’s budget for 2013 such as reductions in after-school programs, the subsidy to the city’s libraries, and the closing of 20 fire companies.

Filed in Taxes | | Permalink |

As Rental Subsidies for Families End, Time in Shelter Grows

Posted By Elizabeth Brown, February 23, 2012

February marks the first month that the city will not pay subsidies for families who signed leases under the Advantage rental assistance program. The city officially eliminated Advantage nearly a year ago after Governor Cuomo ended state support for the program, leaving the city without a plan to move families out of homeless shelters and into permanent housing.  While no new families have entered the program in almost a year, the city had been under a court order to continue paying the subsidies for families already enrolled—until earlier this month when the order was lifted. The loss of the subsidy jeopardizes the housing of the 8,000 to 9,000 formerly homeless Advantage recipients still in the program. The city’s decision to stop paying the subsidy comes as more families are already staying longer in shelter and follows shortly after Governor Cuomo’s suspension of $15 million in homelessness aid to the city for the next fiscal year as part of his budget proposal.

The city ended Advantage, a rental assistance program that paid a portion of families’ rents for up to two years, when the state withdrew both its funding and the federal match for the program last April. (See Analysis of the Mayor’s Preliminary Budget for 2012 for details.) When advocates for the homeless sued, the city was ordered to continue to subsidize families who had already rented apartments through the program, while the court determined whether the city could stop making payments for these families before their leases end. Although final resolution is pending, in the interim, the order requiring the city to continue payments was lifted earlier this month and the city announced it would not pay the February subsidies. (The case is currently on appeal, the city won in trial court.)

The city had already spent $71 million on the Advantage payments in the first seven months of fiscal year 2012, before the court order was lifted. In addition to these costs, it is likely that the cost of family shelter will now rise. Without an alternate program or change in policies to help families move out of shelter, the length of time that homeless families stay in the city’s shelter system has increased. In the eight months after the city stopped signing new Advantage leases, the average shelter stay for a family was 316 days, nearly two months longer than the average of 258 days during the same eight months in the year before the Advantage program ended.  As families stay longer, the total number of families in shelters has also begun to increase in recent months.  And now that the city has stopped paying subsidies to former Advantage tenants, some of these families may also return to shelter, which would further drive up city homelessness spending.

This potential increase in shelter costs comes after the suspension of homeless aid from Albany. After the state cut Advantage funding last April, it provided a $15 million grant for a loosely defined new homelessness program in New York City—about a fifth of what the state had spent on Advantage in the prior year. According to the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget it was largely left up to the city to decide how to use the $15 million, and the city used $10 million of the funds to help pay for the Advantage program’s continuing costs.  However, the governor’s most recent budget suspended the homelessness grant for the upcoming state fiscal year noting that, “because the initiative remains under development, additional funding will be suspended pending a determination of the efficacy of the program.”

Thus, the loss of funds from Albany comes when more families are staying longer in the city’s shelter system, and when it is likely that their numbers will continue to increase. Even if the courts decide that the city must pay Advantage subsidies until the end of the remaining tenants’ leases, without a replacement program or policy change the pathway to permanent housing for current and future homeless families remains uncertain.

Filed in Housing | | Permalink |

Where the Jobs Are Growing the Money Isn’t Always So Good

Posted by Doug Turetsky, January 18, 2012

IBO’s latest economic projections for the city anticipate the creation of nearly 39,000 jobs this year and about 50,000 in 2013. That’s good news for the city, which has already regained more than half the 135,000 jobs it lost in the recession. As the New York Times reports today on a U.S. Conference of Mayors’ study, New York City is doing better than many other cities, including Los Angeles and Chicago. In total, the U.S. has regained about a quarter of the jobs it lost.

But before the celebrating gets too loud, there’s another important consideration: the jobs we’re regaining don’t pay nearly as well as many of the ones we lost. While the city shed thousands of jobs in such high-paying sectors as Wall Street, where securities and commodities brokers earn average salaries of about $360,000 annually based on 2010 New York State Department of Labor data, we’re regaining jobs in industry sectors that pay just a fraction of that yearly wage.

The largest job gains projected by IBO are in education, health, and social services (excluding government jobs such as those in public schools or public hospitals). Together these sectors are expected to generate more than 33,000 jobs—or nearly 40 percent—of the city’s jobs growth over the next two years. But the industries expected to lead the growth in that sector have annual average wages below the citywide mean of $77,997 in 2010.

We anticipate that about 15,000 jobs will be created in health services, where salaries average roughly $54,900 a year (labor department salary estimates for these jobs include government positions). This industry includes occupations such as home health aides, medical assistants, and nurses. Another 10,000 jobs are expected in education, where the average salary is nearly $52,600. The education industry includes jobs ranging from child care workers to teachers to support staff. IBO also expects about 7,000 jobs will be gained in social assistance, where annual salaries average just $27,800. Social assistance includes occupations such as social workers, pre-school teachers, and recreation workers.

The average salary is even lower for the waiters, food prep workers, bartenders, dishwashers and other restaurant and bar staff whose occupations are included in the leisure and hospitality industry. We project food service and drinking places will add 15,000 of the 19,600 jobs expected to be gained in leisure and hospitality over the next two years.  But the average annual salary for food and bar staff is just $24,050—less than a third of the citywide average—although tips help increase the take home pay.

The other industry we expect significant growth in is professional and business services, with a 19,200 increase in jobs over the next two years. This is a fairly well-paying industry as a whole and it lost a considerable number of jobs in the recession. About 11,000 of those jobs are projected to be in professional and technical services, which averaged $109,500 in annual salary in 2010. This portion of professional and business services includes occupations such as lawyers, accountants, and computer programmers.

But another 8,000 jobs to be gained in professional and business services are in administrative and support services, which doesn’t pay nearly as well, averaging $50,400 a year. The administrative and support services include jobs such as telemarketers, secretaries, and security guards.

The growth in comparatively lower paying jobs is better than the alternative—job losses. But lower paying jobs don’t give as big a boost as higher paying ones to the local economy and the city’s tax revenue. And that means less relief for a city budget already straining to keep up with the demand for public services.

Filed in Local Economy | | Permalink |

Senior Centers Come, Senior Centers Go

Posted by Nashla Salas and Doug Turetsky, December 8, 2011

You may soon need a scorecard to keep track of many of the city’s senior centers. Against a backdrop of limited funding, the city has closed some senior centers and curtailed services and changed the status of others, yet also launched an initiative to create new senior centers.

In October, the Mayor announced that community-based organizations were selected to create eight new senior centers as part of his “Age-Friendly NYC” initiative. But less than two years ago, the Mayor was proposing to close 51 senior centers across the city.

The plan to close the more than four dozen centers was one of the most controversial parts of the Mayor’s budget plan in the spring of 2010. In the end, 27 centers were shuttered and 24 were spared. The Department for the Aging closed the centers based on criteria such as the number of meals served, the center’s level of use, and the quality of recordkeeping by the center’s operator.

Not long ago there were more than 300 centers in the city’s official network of senior services. Now there are 256—a count that doesn’t include some of the centers that were spared in 2010.

Of the 24 senior centers that were not closed under the Mayor’s proposal, the Bloomberg Administration agreed to maintain city funding for seven. The City Council agreed to provide $1.6 million to keep the other 17 centers open. The funds took a while to reach the centers, long enough that one, Glenridge—located in Ridgewood, Queens—closed its doors. The funding for Glenridge was subsequently redirected by the Council to 12 different agencies serving seniors.

The Council has again provided $1.6 million in the current fiscal year for the 17 centers, including $130,000 for Glenridge. But the building Glenridge had operated in has been sold with no immediate plan for the senior center to be allowed to reopen there. The president of the senior center’s board told the Times Newsweekly last month that Glenridge is “in the process of dissolving completely.” IBO assumes the Glenridge funds will again be reallocated by the Council. Other City Council allocations for the 17 centers range from $20,000 for the Wilson M. Morris Senior Center in West Harlem to $185,000 for the Rain Bailey Avenue Senior Center in the Morris Heights section of the Bronx.

Despite the public funds, the 17 centers were cut loose from operating under the aegis of the Department for the Aging. The department does not consider the 17 as part of the city’s network of senior centers, which makes them ineligible for city funds to support transportation and food, two prime services for seniors.

While these centers have been orphaned from the city’s official network of senior centers, the Bloomberg Administration is moving ahead with its plan to create eight new centers under its Age-Friendly NYC initiative. Eight organizations were selected to operate what are being called Innovative Senior Centers. Among them, Bronxworks will run a center that includes a community garden, SNAP in Queens will provide vegetarian meals, and SAGE will offer services to the city’s LGBT seniors. The centers, which are expected to open in January, will receive a total of $3.5 million in city funding for their first year of operation; these city funds will be supplemented by philanthropic support. The Bloomberg Administration intends to announce the creation of more centers under the initiative in the coming months.

The funds are being found for these new centers even as the Mayor’s budget plan for next year includes a $23.5 million, or 17 percent, reduction in city funding for the Department for the Aging. Last June, the Council restored $14 million that the Bloomberg Administration had proposed cutting in basic support for the operations of the senior centers that remain in the city network, along with another $3.5 million for transportation and food.

Although the new innovation centers are likely to be spared from the city’s budget pressures, other senior centers could find themselves “aging out” of the network.

Filed in Seniors | | Permalink |

Living Wage, Again

Posted by Doug Turetsky, November 30, 2011

Amid the uproar during the past few weeks over the proposed living wage law there’s one important point that you might have missed: the city already has a living-wage law. Its rules cover thousands of workers employed under more than $1 billion worth of contracts with the city.

In fact, New York City had one of the first living-wage laws in the country, though the city’s first bill covered just a couple thousand workers. Passed in 1996, over the veto of then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the legislation was championed by advocacy organizations such as the Industrial Areas Foundation as well as local unions. It required that private firms contracting with the city to provide food services, security guards, cleaners, and temporary office workers pay their employees a living wage that ranged at the time from about $7.25 to $12 an hour.

The number and type of workers covered by the city’s living-wage rules expanded in 2002 when Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed a law that extended living-wage provisions to home health care and child care workers whose agencies had contracts with the city. The Brennan Center at New York University estimated that under the new requirements the pay of 50,000 home health care workers would rise immediately and later the pay of up to 9,000 child care workers. Shortly after the law went into effect, Steve Malanga wrote ruefully in City Journal, “Thanks to Mayor Bloomberg, New York will now have the largest number of workers covered by any living-wage law in the nation.” For a complete list of covered workers and wage rates, click here.

The proposed living-wage bill now garnering so much attention moves away from a focus on city contracts for services and instead aims at economic development projects. The bill would cover all workers in projects that receive certain public subsidies worth $1 million or more. But it would exempt from its wage rules businesses with revenues of less than $5 million a year, all manufacturing firms, and nonprofits. IBO’s George Sweeting submitted testimony to last week’s City Council hearing on the proposed bill in which he said about six or seven projects a year would be affected by the proposed rules, based on the economic development projects subsidized by the city in 2002-2008.

That’s a small number compared with the 437 contracts the city signed in fiscal year 2011 that are subject to the existing living-wage law. These contracts were valued at $533 million, according to an annual report by the Mayor’s Office of Contract Services. Over the past four fiscal years, the city has signed nearly 1,100 contracts worth more than $1.5 billion that must comply with living-wage rules.

Too bad so much of the debate that continues to simmer on the new living-wage bill largely ignores the fact that the city already has a fairly significant commitment to living-wage provisions. Maybe the $1 million shelled out by the city’s Economic Development Corporation for a study of the potential effects of a living-wage law would have benefitted by looking at what’s happened under the rules that already exist here.

Filed in Contracting, Economic Development | | Permalink |

Less Trash, Less of it Recycled

Posted by Doug Turetsky, November 10, 2011

An October 26th Daily News article reported that New Yorkers put out less trash for curbside pickup in fiscal year 2011 then they did in 2010. But lower trash levels are not a citywide phenomenon. The one exception: the Bronx.

Some sanitation experts say there’s more trash in the Bronx destined for landfills or incinerators because the borough diverts a comparatively small share of its trash to recycling.
In 2011, the Bronx diverted a paltry 10.3 percent of its refuse to recycling, well below the diversion rate of the other boroughs. Manhattan topped the charts at 19.0 percent with Staten Island a close second at 18.6 percent. Seven of the Bronx’s 12 community districts recycled less than 10 percent of their trash. Of the city’s 47 other community districts, only 6 had recycling rates below 10 percent.

Still, the citywide recycling rate declined overall in 2011 to 15.4 percent from 15.7 percent in 2010. Every borough except Staten Island saw the share of its refuse diverted to recycling fall in 2011. Only 25 of the city’s 59 community districts met or exceeded the citywide goal in 2011 of diverting 16 percent of its trash to recycling. In the same Daily News article, Council Member Letitia James, who chairs the City Council’s sanitation committee, blamed low recycling rates on the city’s failure to adequately educate the public.

Although the Mayor’s PlaNYC lists several initiatives to encourage recycling, including the expansion of education programs, funding levels for education efforts have varied over time. Numbers compiled by IBO’s Yevgeniya Bukshpun show the extent of the fiscal ups and downs. Spending on recycling education and outreach tumbled from just under $11 million in 2007 to barely $5 million in 2010. It rebounded to nearly $10 million last year but IBO currently projects it to total about $450,000 less than that this year.

Inconsistent funding of education and outreach may not be the only reason many New Yorkers find it hard to know (or care) what should and shouldn’t be recycled. There have also been some abrupt changes in the program.

In an effort to save money, the city temporarily stopped collecting glass and plastic in 2002—only metal and paper were recycled. In July 2003, plastic recycling resumed, but the city temporarily shifted to alternate week pickups of recyclables. For many New Yorkers, this meant letting recyclables collect in their apartments or basements for a couple of weeks—or simply tossing it with the regular trash. Glass was not recycled again until April 2004. Anecdotal evidence such as a peek at neighbors’ recycling cans give an indication there’s still confusion over what is and isn’t recycled.

While more education and outreach programs could relieve the bewilderment over what’s recycled, it won’t address the “slimming down” of some of what is recycled. Sanitation experts generally talk about how much is recycled in terms of the diversion rate: the share by weight of our curbside trash stream that’s set aside for recycling.

Declines in the city’s diversion rate may in part be because recyclables don’t weigh as much as they used to. Some plastics have gotten lighter and newspapers and magazines are shrinking (along with their readership and advertising pages). Some of the drop in recyclables, as well as regular trash, may also be a side effect of the sluggish economy—people are buying and throwing out less.

Perhaps there’s a lesson to be learned from this fall off in curbside trash. While recycling is the “apple pie” of environmentalism, it might make sense to increase the emphasis placed on those other two “Rs” in the litany of environmentally sound trash management practices: reuse and reduce.

As IBO has well documented, it costs more to collect and dispose of a ton of recycling than the city’s regular rubbish, although the gap has been narrowing as the cost of exporting trash to landfills and incinerators has escalated. But stuff that never winds up at curbside for pickup, whether recycling or regular trash, costs nothing for collection and disposal. Of course, additional efforts to decrease the amount of stuff that winds up in the city’s waste stream may take more investment in public education and outreach.

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