Comptroller Lander on Migrant Contracts, Suing Fox and More

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone, and thanks to Arun Venugopal for filling in yesterday when I was off atoning for my sins. That would take weeks really, but they only give us one day a year in Judaism. Of course, maybe God was making everyone in the tri-state area atone for our sins for three days with the constant wind and rain of biblical proportions we've been living with. I especially feel bad for parents of young kids, I have to say, having been in this position, many of whom had a three-day weekend off from school no less, and parents had to be the entertainment committee.

You know how that goes, but you did it. Now your moral slate is clean and good to go probably for another year. Speaking of the public schools, when New York City Chancellor David Banks was on the show this month, he acknowledged the challenge of preparing 5% to 15% budget cuts, like all city agencies will have to do under Mayor Adams's recent order, given the looming budget deficits. The chancellor said this.

Chancellor David Banks: It's going to probably affect every aspect of what we do. It's not any specific program. I can't imagine any program that's not going to be affected by cuts of this size. We will know the specifics more in the coming weeks, but everything is on the table.

Brian Lehrer: Chancellor Banks here on September 12th. He's supposed to submit details to the mayor's office of what he would cut by November. The mayor, as you know, is hanging that $12 billion projected deficit over the next several years on city services for the 100,000-plus asylum seekers who have come since last year. Now, we're going to talk to the New York City Comptroller whose job it is to oversee the city's finances.

As a point of reference on where he's coming from, Brad Lander wrote an opinion piece for The Nation Magazine this month called Don't Listen to Eric Adams. Immigrants Make New York City. We'll also talk to Comptroller Lander about other things, including his statement yesterday on the tentative settlement of the writer's strike. Did you know he's suing Fox News? Comptroller Lander, always good of you to come on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Comptroller Lander: Good morning, Brian. Great to be on with you. Yes, it's nice to have had the day yesterday to reflect on all the things we got wrong last year and face the new year hoping to do it better.

Brian Lehrer: Indeed. Maybe I buried the lead in my intro. I want to start with the New York City pension funds under your direction suing Fox News for breach of fiduciary duty in connection with defamatory broadcasts. That's a mouthful. What does it mean?

Comptroller Lander: The New York City pension funds, that's the retirement security of teachers and nurses and firefighters and cops, about $260 billion of assets under management. We actually had a really good year investing last year. We take a broad responsible approach to investing, so we're figuring out where in the economy we should be invested in. We're invested all across the economic sectors.

We are invested in Fox News. We're invested in MSNBC as well and a lot of other media companies, and we pay attention when they're making decisions that put shareholders at risk. That's a $787 million settlement that Fox had to reach with Dominion Voting Systems because they lied over and over and over again. On-air personalities knew they were lying and management knew they were lying. The board that's supposed to represent shareholders knew they were lying, but they kept doing it and then they had to pay out three-quarters of a billion dollars.

That's happened several times. They lied about Seth Rich and his family won a lawsuit. That's shareholders' money that's being spent on those lawsuits, so we sued the board on behalf of shareholders. All five of our pension funds sued the board and said, "We want you to make shareholders whole." Rupert Murdoch, Lachlan Murdoch, Paul Ryan's on that board. "You guys should cover this settlement, make shareholders whole, but also, you guys should change policies at Fox; governance and ethics, so that it's not okay to defame people, to lie over and over on-air, and expose the company and its shareholders to these losses."

Brian Lehrer: On that changing policy, it's not that you want them to become liberal or progressive in their politics. It's that you allege Fox has an illegal business model of pursuing profits by committing actionable defamation. You're actually saying that falsely defaming people on purpose is part of Fox's actual business model?

Comptroller Lander: Yes, unfortunately, and again, you're exactly right. Again, we're invested in a lot of different media companies. They have many different points of view. The retirees of the city, many of them have told me they're Fox News watchers, but defamation, lying about people when you know you're lying-- Seth Rich, people don't remember this as much as Dominion Voting Systems, there was this Wikileaks thing. He was killed in just a random awful crime.

Then Fox News falsely, knowingly falsely, wrapped it up into a conspiracy story that made his family-- just lied about him and his family. You're not allowed to do that. That's illegal. If you do it, you're going to get sued and you're going to owe a lot of money. If you're a company with shareholders, now you're wasting your shareholders' money. You're losing your shareholders' money on defamation lawsuits. Yes, they can have their business model of putting out a conservative point of view on the news in a way that doesn't break the law through defamation over and over again at the cost of shareholders.

Brian Lehrer: Do you have a dollar figure that those defamation lawsuits have cost New York City taxpayers that you're asking for in this suit?

Comptroller Lander: Well, we're bringing the lawsuit with some other shareholders as well, the Oregon Pension Fund. We are asking the board to cover the recent losses. The biggest of those by far is the Dominion. That was $787 million. The settlement at Seth Rich's family I think was on the order of about $10 million. There's the Smartmatic. That's the other voting company they lied about that's suing them for over $2 billion. The lawsuit calls on the board to cover losses that the company has paid out from what is otherwise shareholders' money.

Brian Lehrer: You'd have to do the math on what percentage of their payouts and those defamation suits represents the percentage of their stock that New York City pension funds own?

Comptroller Lander: Well, I should be clear that it won't necessarily come directly to shareholders. This would be the board covering it on behalf of the company. Then the company does dividend payouts, and obviously, the stock price goes up and that's what kind of represents value for New York City. The goal here really is to win the governance and ethics reform, to change policy, and the force to do that is to sue the board to cover the company's losses rather than have shareholders do it.

Brian Lehrer: I see. I guess you sort of address this, but some of our listeners might be thinking, "Wait, why does Brad Lander, founder of the city council's Progressive Caucus, back when you were in council, allow the city's pension funds to invest in Fox News in the first place?"

Comptroller Lander: Well, hopefully, they would say, "Oh, I'm glad to see that Brad Lander, the progressive who got elected as comptroller, isn't letting his politics influence how the city invests its pension funds." When you have $260 billion of assets under management, you've got a quarter of a trillion dollars, you're invested broadly all across the economy. That's smart diversification. I'm not making and my team of smart investment professionals is not saying, "Let's make big bets on a risky company."

What you say is, "Let's look all across the economy in public and private markets, in the full range of economic sectors." We want to do that responsibly. There's some places like fossil fuel reserves where we did choose to divest, but mostly, we invest broadly across the economy. We try to add value by encouraging companies to make wise decisions and then where we see problems-- Last year we sued, not sued, we brought shareholder resolutions at a couple of pharmaceutical companies where we were concerned that they didn't have strong enough insider trading policies in place.

I'm pleased to say that, actually, the SEC wound up strengthening insider trading rules. On climate, on more thriving workers' rights, on not having defamation lawsuits or insider trading, we seek to add value to grow our portfolio in ways that are both wisely diversified, just basic good investment decisions, and through responsible investing, what Republicans are now sometimes tagging as ESG, but to us, it's just helping companies operate in ways that manage risk effectively, are responsible, and lead to longer-term thriving.

Brian Lehrer: You mentioned the fossil fuel divestment, and I see your office is being sued for that. Reading from Fortune Magazine in May, it says, "Three New York City pension funds were sued for allegedly breaching their fiduciary duty by selling billions of dollars of fossil fuel assets. The plaintiffs represented by Donald Trump's former Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia claim the retirement plans' decision to divest roughly $4 billion in fossil fuel investments is wrong because the pension plans have, 'a duty to act prudently in making investment decisions.'" Want to give your defense in a nutshell? Do you deny that the funds will make less money after divestment from the very profitable oil and gas industries?

Comptroller Lander: Over the last couple of decades, actually, the oil and gas industries have not been profitable. There was the brief spike after Russia invaded Ukraine, so if you just measure on that one year, you can cherry-pick a stat. We filed a motion to dismiss that lawsuit, and I'm really quite confident we will prevail there. As I mentioned, our funds returned an 8% return for the fiscal year that ended June 30th of this year after completing the fossil fuel divestment that was better than the 7% benchmark that we are assigned to hit, better than a number of our peers.

That decision to divest in fossil fuels was made actually before I was comptroller, but I do support it. It was done with a lot of economic and investment research. It was a prudent decision. Again, I think some people think it's like day trading, but a first-year teacher this year, his or her retirement runs out many decades at this point. Our job is to take the long-term view to be prudent, and I think if you're thinking over the next decades what will lead our funds to do better, it is building an economy that's burning less fossil fuels so that the seas aren't rising and temperatures aren't warming, and we invest in the transition to renewable energy.

Climate Week last week, I talked to so many investors, public and private sector. Everybody from around the world is heading in that direction, and I'm confident that we will prevail in this lawsuit.

Brian Lehrer: My guest is New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, and all right, we've talked about lawsuits in, lawsuits out, Fox News, fossil fuels. Let's talk about the city's projected budget deficits and their causes and potential impacts on services. Obviously, Mayor Adams is talking about the asylum seekers influx. Do you agree with the mayor's top line number that there will be a $12 billion shortfall between tax revenues and expenses over the next, I think it's three years?

Comptroller Lander: The short answer is yes. We share the point of view that the city has significant out-year budget gaps. For this year that we're in, fiscal year 2024 that ends next June, it's manageable, a gap of between $1 billion and $2 billion on a $107 billion budget, so a little over 1%. That's still meaningful money and has to be managed, but then in the following years, it grows over $10 billion a year. That we agree on. I'm happy also to talk about the things we don't agree on.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. How much does your analysis lay at the feet of new asylum seeker services, let's say, compared prior to last year when the current influx at these levels began?

Comptroller Lander: The way that we do the math, a little under a third. About a third of the gap we're facing in the coming years is as a result of the new expense of--

Brian Lehrer: Whoops, did we just lose the Comptroller's [unintelligible 00:13:52]?

Comptroller Lander: A really necessary and long overdue raise to public sector workers over the four years of the financial plan that added about $17 billion to the budget, the right thing to do. Inflation's hitting, those folks worked hard through the pandemic, but that has a real cost. The federal pandemic aid we were receiving is expiring, and we started great new programs like Summer Rising and expanding 3-K and a range of other programs. Now that money is running out and as a result, we've got to figure out how to balance.

Then there's just other costs that are growing. Last year, we paid out over $1.5 billion in claims and lawsuits against the city. That was the most ever-- There's a lot of growing costs. About a third of the gap is the new provision of shelter and services for asylum seekers. Getting that under control, helping those folks get on their feet and get working and move out of shelter is a really critical goal for the city, but the work to manage the budget is broader and needs to be done prudently because we got to keep delivering strong city services.

It'd be a mistake if we can't keep the streets clean and keep our neighborhoods safe and keep our schools strong. Managing the growing budget deficits with providing good competent services, that's a real challenge.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. You talk about keeping the schools strong. I played one clip of Schools Chancellor David Banks earlier. Here's another of Banks on this show on September 12th, acknowledging the very large amount of money the city spends on education and saying in response to a question about these cuts, that money isn't everything. Listen.

Chancellor David Banks: Our New York City schools have a budget of $37.5 billion, and yet, 51% of the kids can't read and haven't been reading for quite some time. While this remains a funding issue for us, it also remains an issue about vision and implementation of things that work. Because I can give you $100 billion, and if you don't know what you're doing or you have the wrong playbook, the amount of money you're bringing won't matter.

Brian Lehrer: Chancellor David Banks. My question for you Comptroller is are you auditing the education department, which is more than a third of the city's budget as he acknowledges, by far the largest expenditure area for city taxpayers for inefficiencies? Are you auditing them for inefficiencies in a $37 billion budget? There might be some pretty big ones that wouldn't hurt children to blow the whistle on.

Comptroller Lander: Yes, absolutely. We just issued a report, for example, on special education due process claims, which have grown tenfold in the last decade. There's two parts to those. Some are for tuition when parents sue and say, "My kid can't get the services they need in New York City Schools, so I want the city to pay the tuition for a private school that does provide those services."

Then there's also special education service claims for speech therapy, occupational therapy, a range of other things, and the way that we need to provide the services because students have a real chance to thrive if they get the services they need, but we have not been doing that efficiently. Those claims cost us in many cases much more than we could provide those services in the schools.

We outlined some specific ways that we think we can actually-- Again, they grew from $33 million to $372 million a year, and if you add the tuition on top, the cost is over a billion a year. We have some real concrete ways that we think the city can still provide services, can provide even better services in the ways that the chancellor was referring to, but doing it at less cost. We're looking at other areas of the DOE budget as well.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Since you mentioned the cost of lawsuits from parents of kids with disabilities, I'll refer everybody to our education reporter, Jessica Gould. Excellent reporting on dyslexia among New York City Public School students, something the mayor had as a child and has made a priority to serve children better on, and yet, there are still Byzantine bureaucratic hurdles, lawsuits being filed over children with dyslexia not being served yet. Check out wnyc.org or Gothamist for Jessica Gould's reporting on that. Listeners, we can [crosstalk].

Comptroller Lander: Let me just--

Brian Lehrer: Yes, go ahead. Go ahead, Comptroller.

Comptroller Lander: I just want to give the chancellor some praise here. I do think the work on reading on dyslexia has a vision for helping make sure all kids can read and making the course correction necessary. Of course, if you cut the budget-- I agree with him, money isn't everything. You need a good focused program that helps kids learn to read and correct some of the mistakes that have been made there, but you're not going to succeed at doing that with less money either. This is why we can't just--

I did think that the mayor's across-the-board blanket cuts run the risk of cutting critical services, and that's what we're going to be looking for. Agencies have to come back now with answers, but there's no way for libraries to make a 15% cut and not probably lose a day of service. We'll see what the chancellor can come up with at DOE. Maybe he'll take some of the ideas we and others have offered, but if we want every kid to read, we do need better vision, but we're also not going to get it on the cheap.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take your calls and texts and tweets for New York City Comptroller Brad Lander on anything having to do with his job, overseeing the city's finances and pension funds. This can relate to spending on asylum seekers or suing Fox News on behalf of the pension funds, or divestment from fossil fuel companies, or anything else relevant. 212-433-WNYC for your calls and texts, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Here's the text that came in on what we were just talking about, Comptroller.

A listener writes, "I'm not sure if these reach you," Yes, listeners, your texts do reach us, "but I am interested," the person writes, "in how much money it costs the city for lawsuit payouts every year for failure of principals to be in compliance regarding special education, bilingual education, et cetera. I think it is exorbitant. I would like to know how much approximately, and if it is growing, and what he thinks needs to happen to fix it."

Comptroller Lander: We put out two good reports. I don't know that number specifically. It might be in the information. We put out a report every year on all the claims against the city that I mentioned last year was $1.5 billion, which was the highest ever. We can get the link to share back or tweet out. Then we did this specific report on special ed claims which have grown. I don't remember specifically that claims for failure on bilingual, special ed were, what that number was, but it really is true that providing language competence services is a big challenge.

Obviously, that's one of the challenges of making sure we're meeting the needs of the new students we have who are from families seeking asylum. They're being placed in schools, in many cases near the shelters where their families are going, which is just wherever the city could get a shelter on that day, and whether that school has a bilingual social worker is maybe unlikely.

There's some schools doing amazing work, one around the corner from my house. I want to shout out P.S. 124 in Brooklyn. Happens to be next door to a couple of shelters that are right around the corner, and they've gotten a ton of students seeking asylum. They, fortunately, have been able to use the increase they got from our first student funding formula to add some bilingual capacity, but this is a big issue all across the city.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, here's a text that came in hearkening back to something I said in the intro to the show that actually is not on the topic of anything having to do with Comptroller Brad Lander, but the very first thing I said when saying hello to you this morning, hello to you all. A listener writes, "I love your program and have been a listener for many years, but allow me to humbly correct you on what you said at the beginning of today's program. In Judaism, one can atone every day and not just on one day for one's sins. It's never all or nothing. I would be delighted if you can make this correction on-air as we both know incorrect information is not helpful. I wish you and your family a healthy and peaceful New Year."

So, yes, to that listener. Obviously, I was just having a little bit of fun with the fact that yesterday was Yom Kippur, which is the one official day of atonement in Judaism. Obviously, Judaism and every ethical system do expect us to first commit as few sins as possible and second, when we do, humbly acknowledge them right afterwards and make amends, so acknowledging that you are--

Comptroller Lander: My rabbi said the gates are closing toward Yom Kippur, but they are never fully closed. If you didn't get that conversation with somebody you owe an apology to, try to do it before Sukkot.

Brian Lehrer: [chuckles] Which is just a week or a few weeks away. Brian Lehrer on WNYC. More with Comptroller Brad Lander in just a minute. James in Bayside, you'll be the next caller. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue with New York City Comptroller Brad Lander on everything from his office suing Fox News on behalf of the New York City pension funds for all the defamation lawsuit payouts and therefore losses, the news corporation, which the city pension funds invest in, and yes, they invest in MSNBC too, have had to pay out, also on the New York City budget deficits which Mayor Adams lays largely at the feet of services for all the asylum seekers coming in.

The Comptroller wrote an article in The Nation Magazine saying, Tell Eric Adams He's Wrong. Immigrants Make New York City. James in Bayside wants to weigh in on that and ask a question. James, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling up.

James: Hi, thanks for taking my call. I wanted to ask almost a philosophical question in a way. Obviously, a lot of New Yorkers are very concerned about the immigrant crisis and how this is going to affect our budget. It's the mayor's own words, I'm not saying this, that this could destroy our city. My question is, images come out in South America of migrants being welcomed into our cities, being taken care of as far as shelter, healthcare, police protection.

They come from, obviously, war-torn countries, and if more and more keep coming, what's to say, as silly as this sounds, everybody from these countries from coming up here. Is there a limit to what we are going to accept? I know the laws say we have to accept them, but what if everybody down there just decides, "Hey, we can come up there and get into the good schools, and protection, and healthcare, and jobs"? At what point does our country say we can't accept this anymore?

In many ways, I think the Republicans want things to go to hell because this is going to be a big point for them. The worse things get, the more they can use this towards the 2024 election, which in many ways might be decided by a few hundred thousand votes. I'm just curious from almost a hypothetical question. At what point do we just say we can't do this anymore?

Brian Lehrer: Comptroller?

Comptroller Lander: Well, let's separate the federal government question. There's the obligation to give people the right to safely seek asylum, but there is, as it actually was being talked about on the show just prior to this one, the right for the US to set border policy. That's a tough set of issues that, fortunately, the New York City Comptroller is not responsible for. Our challenge in the city is those folks that get here, how do we get them integrated into generating value in our economy? They're coming here to work. They don't want to live in shelter and have us pay for them. How do we make that happen?

I think it's worth, one, just stepping back to an order of magnitude. We're getting about 10,000 a month right now. At the peak of Ellis Island, we were getting 5,000 a day. New York City has taken in a lot more immigrants than we are taking in at this moment in the past. We'll see when the annual numbers come out, but it dipped, actually, during the pandemic. We lost 400,000 people. That's the traditional pattern. Families move out to get more cheaper space and immigrants from around the world come in.

That has been a driver of New York City's economic value, not just for those families, but for everyone. It helps the economy grow. Who would you want more as your kids' daycare teacher or a home care worker or somebody starting a new restaurant in your neighborhood than folks with so much faith in the future, so much love for their own kids that they walk across a continent and through a jungle to get here? It is not easy to do. Most people stay put. Only a few people get up and say, "I can't take this oppression. My people are being discriminated against," or grinding poverty and violence.

It is a real challenge. I don't want to pretend it's not, but if we could put more energy into helping people file those asylum applications, take advantage of the president's new temporary protective status, learn the English they need to step into jobs, which is, again, overwhelmingly what they want to do for New York City, we'll see that return in our economic thriving for the long-term.

That's how we'll pay future pensioners and future taxes and new businesses that get created. That's how this whole city has worked for several hundred years, and to me, that's the way to lean in. Now, we got to manage the money wisely. It is a big budget and logistical challenge. There's no doubt Republicans are exploiting people's anxieties about it for their politics, but we'll let the federal government work to set national immigration policy.

Obviously, that's not easy given Republicans in Congress not even letting us just pay for our defense budget, but in New York City, I'm hoping with the TPS decision the president made, with the governor sending new National Guard to help with TPS and work authorizations, and the mayor, though he doesn't talk about it that much, has helped stand up this great asylum seeker application center I have visited a couple of times that's now helped, I think, about 4,000 people apply for asylum and move to work authorization.

If we could knit those efforts together more effectively, I think people would start to see results pretty quickly.

Brian Lehrer: You're making some of the points in your article in The Nation and I want to follow up on one aspect. James, thank you for your call in starting this part of the conversation. We've talked on this show several times recently, as regular listeners will know about the Ellis Island era, which you bring up an average of 700,000 arrivals per year for more than a decade, a quarter of whom settled in New York or New Jersey. That's more migrants per year than today for New York City for an extended period of time.

We look back on that as a huge contributor to making New York what it is today, economically and culturally, as you described. People will also rightly point out that the Ellis Island era immigrants who came with nothing had to fend for themselves on housing. I'm sure you've been to the New York City Tenement Museum, which physically shows us some of that history.

Today, we have the right-to-shelter policy, which is where the mayor says much of this expenditure is going. Do you agree with the mayor and the governor that the right-to-shelter policy was never meant to be for this situation and that they are right to ask the court to limit it now?

Comptroller Lander: I don't agree with that. The right to shelter did not anticipate this situation. That is true. It was brought in the '70s by folks who were homeless, sleeping on the streets, and in that case, were not asylum seekers. This is new and we do have to figure out how to rise to it. I guess a couple of things. One, I don't like the changes that have been made arbitrarily without the permission of the court or the consent of the Legal Aid Society or the Coalition for the Homeless who agreed to the consent decree that established the right to shelter.

The Adams administration cut the duration of shelter placements for single adults to 60 days just a few weeks ago, and now cut it in half to 30 days. I don't know if it's connected to folks who've been sleeping on the floor at the Roosevelt over the last few days. What I would like to see us do though is-- the folks that I have talked to, they don't want to be staying in hotels or shelters. They want to get to work, and then they want to move out and find housing. Some will stay here, some will go to places where housing is cheaper.

There is a tradition, it's not one anyone's proud of, that folks who are here will live in housing that other people-- wind up in more crowded conditions. I think what we should really throw most of the energy at is helping people apply for asylum, get temporary protective status, and get jobs. I think we can focus our affordable housing programs on long-term stays in shelter, the lot of the vouchers that the city council's been pushing for. I just don't think we've done that. We haven't made that effort hard enough yet.

That's where I think if over the next few months, let's sprint between now and the end of the year to make sure every asylum seeker in shelter gets the support they need to file their asylum application in that new center to get work authorization after they do either through TPS or with a delay and connect them to-- There's so many jobs right now in healthcare, in restaurants, in childcare, in home care, in delivery that people need to have folks do.

To me, if we spend the next few months really leaning in together, city, state, and federal government, my hunch is lots and lots and lots of those folks will move out of shelter on their own.

Brian Lehrer: You did, I want to acknowledge, cancel a contract recently with a migrant medical services provider called DocGo. That was a no-bid contract. I think the mayor's office position was they needed medical service fast for so many people, no time to take bids in a conventional process, go with a company known to do this. What happened there as you see it?

Comptroller Lander: Well, first, they weren't actually contracting with them mostly for medical services. DocGo is a medical services company. During COVID, the city contracted with them for vaccinations and COVID tests, totally appropriate, but then it contracted with them to do shelter and services for asylum seekers, both in New York City and upstate, something they had no experience doing. We've approved 70 contracts so far for the asylum seeker emergency folks providing shelter and food and medical services.

This one, a $432 million no-bid contract to a publicly traded company that did not, at least as the city presented it to us, have a track record before doing this, they didn't answer basic questions about how they were going to vet their subcontractors. The New York Secretary of State found that a couple of their subcontractors had unlicensed security guards upstate. It just raised too many questions. We declined to file it in the system to approve it.

When it got to our office, we returned it to the city's housing department, which is managing this contract, even though we need the city's housing department to be focused on affordable housing in New York City. The mayor decided to move forward with it anyway. The charter gives him the right to proceed with that contract over our objection. We've launched an audit of it.

We're going to look at the invoices and make sure they're actually delivering to us what we're paying for. We're stepping back after a little over a year now to look more broadly at emergency contracting. In this case, we have to learn some things from what we've been doing so far. You need to move quickly and flexibly in a crisis. It's true, but you also need to keep some of your cost comparison methods in place.

You're paying attention, are we paying this contractor a lot more for staffing than this one or the same on hotel rooms? Yes, again, we've approved 70 contracts. We've got dozens more coming, but this one $432 million contract with DocGo, we did not think past the test.

Brian Lehrer: One more call before we ran out of time. Gordon in Montauk with the New York City expenditure issue. Gordon, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Gordon: Blessed holy holidays to my dear friends. Brian, as a Flushing kid, I'd like to remind everybody about the Flushing [unintelligible 00:36:37] at 1652. We are Christians, we are Muslims, and we are Jews, and we live in peace.

Brian Lehrer: Nice.

Gordon: One of the insidious things is this real scam with the PBA. The final three years, police officers put in huge overtime arresting people. They'll get their eight-hour shift, then they're in the courthouse all day, maybe over a weekend. I know of a police officer retired at $15,000 a week, $175,000 a year. Then these people exonerated a trial, then turn around and sue the NYPD and the New York City for millions of dollars and win. I'm calling for legislation to put an end to this PBA scam.

Brian Lehrer: Comptroller Lander, I'm going to tack on a question to that which, does the mayor's call for 5% to 15% cuts in every agency include police overtime?

Comptroller Lander: We're going to have to see when the agency comes back. The mayor put that call out. Agencies will come back to OMB with their proposals, but there is no doubt that uniformed overtime in general and NYPD overtime in particular is something that has been contributing to blowing the budget. It increased by more than $700 million over the last decade from $1.5 billion in 2013 to $2.2 billion in FY 2022.

The city overspent its overtime budget last year by 93%. NYPD overtime is the biggest contributor. That is [unintelligible 00:38:17]. The mayor has sometimes talked about recognizing that this is one area where cost controls are needed, but we haven't seen it yet. I agree that that is an area in a time of belt-tightening, not the only one, but one meaningful one that we do need to get at.

Brian Lehrer: Before you go, you issued a statement yesterday acknowledging the tentative settlement of the writer's strike. Want to talk about that briefly in relation to the city's finances?

Comptroller Lander: Absolutely. That is great news all around. Obviously, we'll be eager for the actor's strike to get settled as well, and the entertainment industry, which is an important part of New York City's economy to come back thriving. It's also great because--

Brian Lehrer: The writers have to ratify, I'll point out. We don't know what's in that tentative settlement yet, or if the rank and file will approve, but assuming they do.

Comptroller Lander: They got a lot of what they were looking for. I was out on the picket line with them a number of times. I'm actually going to be out on the picket line tomorrow for a joint picket with the actors and some UAW members. I think it's encouraging. I think folks know that the studios were booming during the pandemic, increased their profits or switching to streaming, and have-- they want to keep all the money.

This was the writers and the actors, and in different ways, the auto workers now saying, "As the economy shifts and changes, workers have to make sure that they have decent stable jobs and don't have to live in precarity." Big props to the writers on going out, on winning what looks to me they'll have to vote to ratify it, but props to their leadership, a good contract. They, and the actors can-- after the actors get what they deserve as well, can settle. Of course, those are negotiations and they'll be back and forth, but I'm encouraged.

I think this moment with workers demanding just a fair share as the economy grows and shifts and changes, that's encouraging. This is a place where people come and then there's big dreams. Some folks will really strike it rich, but it's an expensive city and therefore, workers have to be able to get a fair shake if they're going to afford the rent or the cost of a home. That is not easy, but this takes us one step forward.

Brian Lehrer: New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, we always appreciate that you come on the show and take questions directly from listeners. Not every citywide elected official does. I won't mention any names, but we really appreciate that you do. Thank you very much.

Comptroller Lander: I appreciate you and your listeners, Brian. Thank you.

 

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