Mayor Adams has called for city agencies to cut their budgets, but the Independent Budget Office found the city is owed more than $2 billion dollars in unpaid fines. NYC Council Member Gale Brewer (District 6, Central Park, Lincoln Square, Upper West Side, Clinton), who commissioned the IBO's report, shares her priorities for the city's budget.
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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone, on this Good Friday, this 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Peace Accord for Northern Ireland, which we'll talk about, on the morning after the Tennessee House expulsions, which we'll talk about and let you call in on, and more today, even how George Santos's latest fakery may be faking that he's a Mets fan. We'll start with a deepening dispute between Mayor Adams and New York City Council on the city's budget priorities for the coming fiscal year.
He wants cuts at most city agencies, while he negotiated a big raise for NYPD officers this week, and while the city's Independent Budget Office has just revealed that the city could have $2 billion more to spend on essential services if it actually collected fines and fees that scofflaws owe the city. We'll talk about that and more first with City Council Member Gale Brewer from the West Side of Manhattan. She is also the former Manhattan Borough president, as many of you know. Council Member Brewer, always good to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.
Gale Brewer: Thank you very much.
Brian Lehrer: I see you've been commenting on the Independent Budget Office report. Can you describe for us what they found?
Gale Brewer: Well, they found, since 2017, that there have been, at least in a few areas, not all, $2.1 billion in uncollected fees, everything, of course, from people not paying their parking tickets when they go through a red light, people not paying their property taxes, and then people not paying when they go to OATH, which is basically the city's tribunal, not paying their sanitation or their health, those kinds of fees.
It adds up to $2.1 billion, and that doesn't [unintelligible 00:01:54] business taxes or sales taxes because IBO just picked a good sampling but not the entire lack of paying their fees. That's a lot of money, $2.1 billion, that could've been used for all the services that we need.
Brian Lehrer: How did they get away with it? For example, you mentioned property taxes. How do people get away with not paying their city property taxes without having their properties possessed or repossessed or whatever the word is?
Gale Brewer: Well, I think that's exactly the question. How do you get away also with not paying your parking tickets? Shouldn't your car be booted? That kind of thing. I think this report hopefully will make it really clear to the mayor and to the agencies that they have to do a much better job. I don't know if collection agencies are involved or if the collection work is being done by those who are in city agencies, but either way, it has to be done in a much better fashion. Of course, there are some COVID issues, we know that, but this is something that has to be focused on.
Brian Lehrer: Listeners, anyone want to help blow the whistle on how people get away with waste and fraud in city government? I'm not asking you to call out your neighbor. I'm asking you if maybe you work for city government and you're off today because it's Good Friday, you could talk about any frustration you may have in trying to collect fees and fines that are owed to the city or anything related. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 for City Council Member Gale Brewer. Has Mayor Adams commented on the report?
Gale Brewer: I have not heard any comment. I am going to send him an official copy with a letter from me asking him, not only to look at these issues but, as I indicated, there are other fines and fees that are not collected. We need to make sure that the entire spectrum from sales, income, business taxes, water, sewer, that's not included just because of time constraints. All of that has to be looked at very carefully, particularly, going forward.
Brian Lehrer: Listeners, you can also call about these other agency budget cuts that are being proposed. Let's say, a little bit of lobbying allowed here right now if you work for or get services from a particular city agency that you want to make sure they get their funding preserved or maybe even increased. 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692 for Gale Brewer. Can you talk about the agency cuts overall? I'm seeing the number 4%. Who's being asked to cut 4% from what?
Gale Brewer: Well, the issue is that there have been several PEGs, Program to Eliminate the Gap. In fact, the mayor has had now a total of three. The last one came somewhat as a surprise. It came right after the City Council last week had their budget response to the mayor's budget, and we said there's $2.7 billion in addition. I just heard you point out that IBO said $2 billion, so we're close. There is more money, but the mayor has said that these agencies have to cut, in the past, $3.1 billion, and now he's just added for next year another $1.64 billion.
Most of the agencies have to cut 4%. They're already down to the bone, and there are 22,000 vacancies as of the end of February 2023 in these agencies. How do you get your SNAP food stamps? How do you get affordable housing that your building [unintelligible 00:05:41] when there's nobody there in a low-income tax credit office? We feel strongly that these PEGs are too many. Libraries, CUNY, et cetera.
As you just indicated, the police just got a $5.5 billion contract, which wasn't mentioned the other day when the OMB commissioner sent out his letter on April 4th. He said he was concerned about labor deals but didn't mention the police. He talked about his concern about the governor's executive budget costing the city more, but he never mentioned about the police with the PBA.
Brian Lehrer: Are you against--
Gale Brewer: What we're saying is, there is money to be able to fund some of these services. Go ahead.
Brian Lehrer: Are you against the contract with police? I think you generally advocate for good pay for city workers.
Gale Brewer: Yes. I don't have a problem with the contract, but then, what is it that is the challenge with the asylum seekers? Because a lot of these PEGs-- A PEG is hard to understand, but basically, it's telling the agencies to cut and cut and cut. The mayor's blaming it on a lot of the asylum costs, which are big. He says they're $4.3 billion. Again, there's no backup for that. We say it's about a billion less, and we don't feel that these issues are as drastic as he does because there is more money to offset these cuts.
IBO just said that to you, we say it, and we think our revenue projections are better. We are not going to be able to have a sustainable city agency with these kinds of cuts. That's what we're concerned about. You've got to make sure that there's somebody home in CUNY, in education. We don't want the schools to be cut so drastically. That's what our concern is.
Brian Lehrer: I think Kristen in Bed-Stuy has a story to tell. Kristen, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.
Kristen: Thank you, Brian. I have lived in Bed-Stuy for the better of nine years, and before I lived there, an entity, an LLC owned my property, as most properties in any city do. I have received no less than a bill every month for that property, the LLC, that's totaled about $10,000. Every so often I call the city. I call 311 and say, "Hey, you guys have this bill out here. It's not going to the right person. You need to reach out to the right person." They were like, "Oh, you can write a letter. You can do all of these things that make it very difficult for them to even collect the $10,000 that they owe for one property in Brooklyn."
Brian Lehrer: This is money that's owed by the company that used to own your building. You keep getting the bill, you keep alerting the city, and they never seem to send it to the right person?
Kristen: Not once. They're like, "Oh, you can write them a letter and say that it's not yours." I'm like, "It's not mine, so I don't have to worry about it, but you guys need to figure out who the right person is."
Brian Lehrer: Thank you for that story. Council Member Brewer, is there something there to follow up on?
Gale Brewer: I think absolutely, and I would be glad-- Kristen, you can certainly just call me at 212-873-0282. That's our district office. I'm there often. We will get it straightened out with the Department of Finance. That's who's supposed to be handling this issue, and we will make sure that it's handled. Thank you for bringing it to our attention.
Brian Lehrer: Michael in Manhattan, however, might have a complaint about some of those fines. Michael, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.
Michael: Thank you. I recall Black Lives Matter saying they don't want any more of these parking traffic violation-type things. The councilwoman doesn't make any distinction between classes. The reason they're not being paid for parking tickets, particularly, is because they're too much. Why doesn't she talk about when your car is booted? If it was, you have to pay a fortune, hundreds of dollars. I don't see her talking about that. Lowering [unintelligible 00:10:01] working people, I don't see her talking about lowering the fines for a simple alternate side-of-the-street parking violation. The mayor is proving that he's not on the side of the working class owning the police. Now this councilwoman seems to be the same, not making any working-class distinctions, so maybe she should reorganize her program.
Brian Lehrer: What was your Black Lives Matter reference at the beginning of that? I'm not sure I got it.
Michael: They had a program that they presented to the mayor, I believe months ago, even during the pandemic or something, where they said they didn't want any more of these fines on the working class for parking violations. I'm pretty sure that they wanted to obliterate all parking violations. That was what I said.
Brian Lehrer: Mike, all right. Thank you for raising the issue. I don't know if that Black Lives Matter reference is accurate or something that he's just using to make an argument. Council Member Brewer, your reaction to any of that?
Gale Brewer: Yes. I believe very strongly in more middle class and working class being able to live in this really expensive city. I agree with you, Michael, it's a very expensive city and we should do much more to make it less expensive. However, particularly for those who are going through red lights, which is what this particular IBO analysis looked at, I do think that people should be charged. You can't go through a red light. I see people doing it all day long. There's not a red-light camera at every single intersection so it's only some.
When you get booted, it's usually after quite a bit of time when you haven't paid the less expensive tickets. I do think that if you don't make a mistake, then you're not going to be having to pay these tickets. I think I would agree with others who feel that the tickets are appropriate. If you park your car in the right place, you're not going to get a ticket. Please, people should not be going through red lights; children, pedestrians, families crossing at the right moment of the crosswalk. The car could hurt them.
Brian Lehrer: Yes. You want to make that distinction though between a moving violation like going through a red light which could be a matter of life and death and a parking violation.
Gale Brewer: Correct. If you paid the parking violation early, you're not going to get booted.
Brian Lehrer: Let's take another call. Let's see. Tina in Harlem, you're on WNYC. Hi, Tina.
Tina: Hi, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. Good morning Councilwoman Brewer. You're amazing. I called you, Brian, a few months ago when we were talking about sanitation issues. I said, enforcement, enforcement, enforcement, the cops are not ticketing cars. They don't move the cars to double park so the street cleaners can get by. Ms. Brewer has an amazing newsletter she puts out every week, and last week's newsletters, thank you, Councilwoman Brewer, she said to call her office if you're in her district and cars aren't moving. We need to have cleaner streets, and every one of those cars should be ticketed.
Guys with boots, don't have the car if you can't be responsible enough to park it for sanitation and if you can't be responsible enough to pay the tickets before you're booted. Anyhow, the city could be making a fortune simply on the sanitation street cleaning laws not being enforced.
Brian Lehrer: Tina, thank you. Council member?
Gale Brewer: No, I have a big problem. When the mayor and the City Council-- we agreed to have twice-a-day cleaning on the avenue, so litter pickup, and more often street cleaning on the streets, two days a week in many places, maybe one day a week. More street cleaning generally. In the streets where there's street cleaning, I don't know if people are used to it because during the pandemic, Mayor de Blasio limited the street cleaning, and so people got used to not having to move their car very often. Now they have to move it twice a week.
They don't like to move it, so how are you going to keep the street clean if there are cars in the way? What we've been doing is working with the sanitation department and the police department to ticket cars that don't move. What she's complained about, what Tina's stating is it is still a problem on her block. Tina, you should call us and we will work with you. It's a few tickets, and people do move. That's my experience. It is a problem. You want the street to be clean.
Brian Lehrer: Even if all $2 billion owed by the scofflaws was collected, that would only be about 2% of the hundred billion dollars or so annual budget. Where can the rest of the money come from?
Gale Brewer: The rest of the money has to come from-- On a regular basis, you do have to make some cuts, but the fact of the matter is it needs people who see others who are not paying their taxes wonder, "Why do I have to pay my taxes?" Not only is it an issue of collection, it's also an issue of fairness for New Yorkers in general. The point of the matter today is with 22,000 vacancies.
The mayor in our opinion in the City Council should be looking to the fact that there is additional revenue that he doesn't have to make this massive amount of PEGs and that we need to make sure that these agencies are fully staffed so that the taxpayers of the city of New York and residents can get the services that they deserve. We're really concerned about vacancies.
Brian Lehrer: By the way, on the Black Lives Matter reference that the earlier caller made, I've been looking this up in the background and there are things that are out there. There was a Medium post from the Houston Institute a few years ago about parking while Black, as the article calls it. It often or at least sometimes gets used as a pretext for searching cars of Black residents of whatever city just based on a parking violation. Here's one from the University of Minnesota from 2017.
Headline, "Cities target low-income people of color with fines and fees." Humphrey School researcher says, that's the Humphrey School at the University of Minnesota, "It can start with a simple parking ticket. If a person doesn't have enough money to pay the fine on time, he or she will probably be assessed an additional fee or order to appear in court. Criminal justice practices such as these are in wide use in cities across the country, especially those with large communities of color." Is there a racial issue here?
Gale Brewer: I think that the person has a point. Michael has a point in the sense that it's very hard to have a car in the city. It is too expensive to park it in a garage. They run $800 a month in some cases, and there are lots of laws, meter laws. You got to have an alternate side of the street parking laws. There are lots of laws to be able to have both car, street cleaning, traffic mitigation, et cetera. I think that you have to be just incredibly careful as a car owner. I don't know that the fees and fines are going to go down, to be honest with you. You are correct.
The real issue, of course, is the moving violation because going through red lights could be life and death, but I don't know, to be honest with you, that the fines and fees for parking in the wrong place are going to go down. I think people should pay attention to the law. Maybe there should be a different streetscape on a particular block with a signage. Lots of times signage is very poor or confusing. That's something that could be addressed. I think that's something that with your local community board and elected officials you could make changes to.
Brian Lehrer: May I also ask while you're here, how's crime in your West Side district right now? I see the NYPD just released crime stats for the month of March. Now that we're in the first week of April, shootings and murders continue to decline, subway crime continues to decline, robberies are down. I know the West Side that you represent was said to be the locus of a lot of the smash-and-grab pharmacy, chain store robberies. How are things?
Gale Brewer: People don't feel incredibly safe even though the statistics that you have provided and that the mayor talks about are going in the right direction. There's still a lot of fear, not just on the subway, but people do see people stealing in stores. Somebody saw something the other day, and that reverberates on the local blogs and people feel uncomfortable. People have been held up quite a bit. There is some car robbery. I would say that we have a long way to go, whether it's reality or perception in terms of making it feel like a safer city.
I will say that particularly older people are complaining. The other thing is not a crime, but we have e-bikes and they go fast. They don't always follow the rules of the road. It's not a crime, there's no feeling of being held up for that, but people feel very strongly that it's frightening. You still have a lot of mental illness. Somebody may not be assaulting somebody, but there is a fear of people who have mental illness.
Brian Lehrer: We've done segments on the e-bikes and these scooters, and a big complaint is that the police don't enforce the traffic rules when it comes to them as opposed to other motor vehicles. Is that your perception and is there any pressure meaningfully to get the NYPD to enforce the traffic rules with respect to those?
Gale Brewer: I think what should happen is the cops when you go to the monthly meeting state that they have a huge number of summons that they have given to e-bikes but you don't feel it when you're on the street. I think that the e-bikes, not a bicycle and not something that's a pedal-assist, but others should be registered. It has to be done by the state and not the city. Even people with a regular bicycle feel a little intimidated and uncomfortable because there is so much not following the rules of the road. I would certainly advocate making sure that there is a license for an e-bike.
Brian Lehrer: As you advocate for more funding for essential services in these budget negotiations, you were one of the 15 members who recently quit the council's Progressive Caucus over their new statement of principles that says a holistic approach to public safety would include a vote to "reduce the size and scope of the NYPD and the department of correction". Is that such a bad thing if other holistic public safety approaches are incorporated more?
Gale Brewer: I think that that particular phrase wasn't something that I could sign, so that's why I left, as did others. I think that the issue of public safety has to be more comprehensive. You do need to have more social workers working with those who have domestic violence, mental health, homelessness, but we need the police. I work with them every single day.
I think we can always talk about their overtime, which seems to go up and up and up, but I think that they are obviously in many cases needed, maybe not in as many locations for a parade or some of the other places where they gather, but we need them. Overtime needs to be curtailed, and that's something that we're all working on.
Brian Lehrer: 30 seconds left. You've been in this game for a while now as a City Council member in the past, then Manhattan Borough president, now you're back on City Council. Compared to other mayors, how reasonable does Mayor Adams seem to be in terms of negotiating essential services back into the budget?
Gale Brewer: I think we've never had a good-- You could blame it on the pandemic, but we've never had these many vacancies. I think we have some job fairs. I don't know how successful they are, but I can tell you that people who are, for instance, as I indicated earlier, building affordable housing, which is the number one goal of the city of New York, homeless people unable to stay in the city because it's too expensive. We need affordable housing. Yet when you go to the housing preservation and development as a non-profit developer or a for-profit developer, apparently you're not getting any support in a timely fashion.
That's what we need. Same thing for those going to the Department of Social Services. We're very concerned about our libraries being open at least six, if not seven days a week. At least keep them whole. I could go on with the City University of New York, Department of Education. Those vacancies have to be filled and the budget cuts cannot impact the need that people in New York City have. That's what we're most concerned about. We feel there's enough money to address at least the constant requests that are being at this time. Use the money that's there and you can still put some away for the rainy days, which we all agree is necessary.
Brian Lehrer: City Council Member Gale Brewer from the West Side of Manhattan, thank you so much. We always appreciate it.
Gale Brewer: Thank you.
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