Good Government

A well functioning democracy requires citizen engagement that is best accomplished through open meetings where members of the public have an opportunity to testify. Unfortunately, just in the month of June this year, all of the City Council's public meetings posted on their calendar occurred on weekdays during business hours with only one meeting happening in the community instead of at City Hall or in the adjacent 250 Broadway Hearing Rooms. We can put the "public" back in public hearings by expanding times, location and methods of testimony to catch up with the 21st Century. City agencies should endeavor to have public hearings in the evenings or weekends when residents can participate. Testimony should be accepted in any language and should follow the New York State Senate example of accepting testimony by YouTube and expand it to include phone in, PowerPoint with voice over, Skype, live chat accompanying a streaming broadcast and whatever technology may come up in the near future. Similarly, all hearings should be available on YouTube, PodCast, or electronic transcript so that interested New Yorkers can engage their government on their own terms.

New York City spends millions of dollars a year in subsidies to companies which promise to create jobs and increase economic development. Sometimes, however, few or no jobs are created, or the company leaves the City without repayment. For example, in 2004 Pfizer was granted $10 million in tax breaks in return for increasing employment at its Brooklyn plant. Just three year later and after collecting all of the money Pfizer closed the plant and left the tax payers holding the bag. Minneapolis currently requires that companies that fail to live up to their job creation requirement must repay the funds it received plus pay an additional penalty. Putting similar “clawback” provisions and rules on all new subsidies to the private sector will allow us to recover these valuable tax payer dollars where they fail to create jobs they promised or violate their agreement in bad faith.

It's absurd that the budget for a 178 year old, charter-mandated City office intended to be a watchdog over City Hall is decided by City Hall. For the Office of the Public Advocate to be able to fulfill its charter obligations, the budget for the office must be removed from the political process. Let's create an independent budget for the Public Advocate's office, tying it to the budget of a Mayoral agency or the City Council, similar to how the budgets of Independent Budget Office and Office of Management and Budget are tied together.