Elected Officials, Parents, Advocates and Providers Call on Mayor and Council to Fully Restore Child Care Funding in Final Budget

Coalition Commends Mayor for Finding $40 Million for Child Care as a “Good First Step” But Says the Mayor and Council Must Fully Save Child Care

In response to Mayor Bloomberg’s announcement that his Executive Budget will include $40 million more to avoid some of the drastic cuts to child care made in the Mayor’s preliminary budget proposal, the Emergency Coalition to Save Child Care called on the Mayor and City Council to find the money to fully save child care. The coalition noted that the money marks a step in the right direction, but said that the cuts to child care will still have devastating effects on children and families across the city – especially in the city’s most struggling communities.

While exact details of the Mayor’s proposal are murky, and should be clarified in the coming days, the coalition of elected officials, parents, advocates and providers noted that the Mayor only restored $40 million of the original $91 million cut to child care. In addition, in the revised budget, hundreds of early childhood classrooms remain at risk, family providers will still lose slots, and 9 day care programs remain slated to close. Furthermore, the city hasn’t provided a clear guarantee that every child currently receiving care will still be served.

“We are encouraged by the fact that the Mayor recognizes the importance of child care, but this budget still means that children around the city will be deprived of care, parents will be forced to choose between child care and going to work, and child care teachers and providers will lose their jobs,” said The Rev. Dr. Emma Jordan-Simpson, Executive Director of the Children’s Defense Fund – New York. “The City Council and the Mayor must ensure that no child loses child care and that we maintain critical early childhood capacity in our most under-resourced communities.”

The Emergency Coalition to Save Child Care, made up of organizations representing thousands of city residents, says it will continue fighting for all children from low-income, working families who are in danger of losing child care. The Coalition, which released a report last month detailing the unequal impacts of the Mayor’s cuts, maintains that the city can’t afford to cut a single child care slot. This care allows working parents to keep their jobs, stay off public assistance, and provide their children with a strong foundation for school success.

"While it is a step in the right direction, it is unclear if what the Administration has put on the table is really an appropriate solution to the significant reduction of funding to the child care system," said Council Member Annabel Palma, Chair of the General Welfare Committee. "More conversations and details are needed since it is unclear how services can remain intact for all 16,500 children with $40 million instead of $91 million; it is also unclear what the impact will be on existing out-of-school programs, providers, child care centers and classrooms."

“This seems to be a good first step,” said Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz. “But until we see all the details of how child care will be maintained for children of working families, I remain concerned. We must restore all of the funding for these critical early education services because the future of New York City depends on it.”

“All our city’s children deserve access to safe, affordable, and educational child care,” said Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer. “These proposed cuts are destructive not only to children, but to parents and other family members who would have to bear an even tougher economic burden in the days ahead. The Mayor and City Council must make fully funding child care a priority in the final City budget.”

"The Mayor's proposal is still $50 million short of what is needed to maintain child care for 16,500 children, said Council Member David Greenfield. “The Mayor's plan would provide enough funding for only 4,400 children to attend safe, city subsidized child care programs next year, leaving 10,000 children with a fraction of the child care services and thousands more with no child care at all. Our children deserve more – they deserve a complete restoration of child care funding."

“Without child care, I don’t know what I’m going to do,” said Kim Sandy, a single mother whose 3-year old son attends The Educational Alliance’s Lillian Wald Day Care Center. “I won’t be able to keep my job and provide for my family. So many parents depend on this care – for the Mayor to continue to cut child care just doesn’t make sense.”

“The City Council is committed to fighting for the children of this great city,” said Council Member Steve Levin. “We are proud to stand together and say we cannot cut child care for even a single child.”

“The Mayor has taken an important first step towards both recognizing the importance of early childhood education and restoring funding for our child care system,” said Jennifer March-Joly, Executive Director of Citizens' Committee for Children. “But unfortunately significant capacity will still be lost and, in the final budget, the Mayor and City Council must ensure that child care centers and family day care providers remain fully funded and that capacity remains in place for future generations of children.”

“The city already has high unemployment, and cutting child care means more people out of work,” said Raglan George Jr., Executive Director of AFSCME District Council 1707. “Parents without a safe place to leave their child while they work would be forced to quit their jobs, and child care professionals would be laid off. The Mayor and the City Council must protect working families by restoring the cuts to child care in the final budget.”

“The Mayor has said himself that child care and early learning programs are critical to our children’s success,” said Council Member Brad Lander. “Now more than ever, we need to ensure that all children have access to safe, education child care that hard-working parents can afford.”

“The Mayor’s cuts to child care would hit some of New York City’s most struggling communities the hardest,” said Council Member Tish James. “In places where unemployment is already high and school achievement is already low, the last thing we should do is cut child care for working families.”

ABOUT CHILD CARE

New York City’s public child care system provides subsidized care to 47,887 children from low-income families. These families are not eligible for public assistance but are defined as working poor, with an income of less than 200% of the poverty level ($36,620 for a family of three). The City’s own Community Needs Assessment released in 2008 found that the city was serving only 27 percent of eligible children in city-funded programs, and only 37 percent of all children under the age of six were being served in any early childhood setting. The Mayor’s proposed changes come on top of 14,000 child care slots that have already been lost since 2006.

Progressive Caucus Responds to Mayor Bloomberg's 2011 State of the City

Caucus calls for living-wage jobs, more contracts for minority- and women-owned businesses, and a fair tax structure

Watch a video of the statement, read by Council Members Debi Rose, Brad Lander and Melissa Mark-Viverito below:



The NYC Council Progressive Caucus members Debi Rose, Brad Lander and Melissa Mark-Viverito respond to Mayor Mike Bloomberg's 2011 State of the City address.

The tragic shooting in Arizona earlier this month has caused us all to reflect on the plague of gun violence in our society, and the need for greater civility in our political discourse. We laud the Mayor for his longstanding leadership and tireless efforts to get illegal guns off of our streets, and to reduce gun violence.

But we are disappointed that Mayor Bloomberg spoke about the need to “face reality” in his State of the City Speech today (Wednesday, Jan. 19, 2011) without outlining a real plan of action to address the economic realities facing most New Yorkers at a time when our city remains in a severe economic crisis.

Residents of outer boroughs may appreciate the chance to hail a livery cab … but too many can’t even afford the ride. Especially when a recent report shows that income inequality is greater in New York than in any other large American city. The top 1% of New York households, just 90,000 people, earn the same amount in one day as the 900,000 New Yorkers in deep poverty earn in a whole year.

Most New York City workers and their families have experienced very little real income or wage growth over the past two decades and high unemployment continues to plague our city. Unemployment remains at an official rate of 9%, but nearly double that when you factor in discouraged people who have dropped out of the labor force, and the rate is much higher among African-Americans, Latinos and residents of low-income neighborhoods.

The Mayor spoke to the need to attract tourists, college graduates and white-collar entrepreneurs, but we heard nothing about how we can create living-wage jobs for New Yorkers who are struggling to make a living here. The jobs that are being created in our city tend to pay low wages, often without benefits or even the ability to take a day off when you’re sick. And homelessness remains near its all-time high. 37,363 people slept in City shelters last Thursday night, of which more than 16,000 were children.

On jobs – our city’s most pressing issue – the Mayor’s speech, like his recent performance, was disappointing.

The Bloomberg administration has not launched a single new major jobs initiative for low-income New Yorkers. Community service jobs and wage subsidy programs are scheduled for further cuts.

Despite giving his recent “jobs speech” at the Brooklyn Navy Yard – where innovation is thriving in new industrial niches – the mayor has dramatically reduced his policy commitment to the manufacturing sector, and presided over a steep decline in blue-collar jobs.

City contracting with minority- and women-owned businesses (M/WBEs) is embarrassingly below goals set in 2005. While the Mayor acknowledged a need to improve in this area, a recent report showed that only 1 out of 15 major City agencies met even half of the M/WBE goals.

The Mayor has opposed and stalled consideration of living-wage job creation requirements, even when the City is providing millions in subsidies to for-profit corporations and real estate developers.

These challenging economic times do require fiscal discipline, and the City Council – under the leadership of Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Finance Chair Domenic Recchia – has worked with the Mayor to make difficult decisions and choose painful spending cuts. But we need a fair approach that keeps our city strong and asks for shared sacrifice, rather than balancing the budget primarily on the backs of the poor and the middle class.

Mayor Bloomberg said no today to any new taxes – but our current tax structure is unfair and regressive. That’s why the Progressive Caucus has proposed a temporary income tax surcharge on household incomes over $250,000 – to recapture the windfall that

Congressional Republicans won for the wealthiest 2% of households. Mayor Bloomberg has been the chief defender of these very households – he’s opposed regulatory reform of Wall Street despite the fact that it was Wall Street speculation that cost us millions of jobs in the first place.

The Mayor today asked nothing of Wall Street or the wealthiest New Yorkers, and for sacrifice only from public school teachers, police officers, librarians, and the working- and middle-class New Yorkers they serve.

While the Mayor has often said that the rich pay more than their share, the opposite is true. The wealthiest 1% of New Yorkers earned 45% of the city’s total income, but they only paid 34% of city taxes. Our plan would make our tax structure more fair, raise $8 billion dollars to address State and City deficits, help us save core services like education and public safety, and allow us to create the jobs we so desperately need.

In response to the Administration’s failures to address the recent blizzard, the City Council held hearings, led by Speaker Quinn and the Progressive Caucus’ own Letitia James and Jumaane Williams. At those hearings, the Bloomberg Administration acknowledged its mistakes, announced significant policy changes, and pledged to do better in the future.

We need the same kind of commitment to do better to create well-paying jobs and advance economic security for struggling low-income, working, and middle-class families in neighborhoods across the five boroughs. We also need policy changes to ensure affordable housing for our residents and policies that make sure our children get the kind of education they need and deserve.

The Progressive Caucus calls for a real plan of action to move New York City out of this economic crisis and appeals to Mayor Bloomberg to work with us in our shared vision of a better New York City.

Development Flows Slowly Along Gowanus And Newtown - As Predicted, Superfund Designation Supersedes Building Plans in Brooklyn by Laura Nahmias - City Hall News

Read original...

Superfund designations at Newtown Creek on the Queens/ Brooklyn border in October and at the Gowanus Canal last March incited panicked waves among developers and city administrators worried over the impact the label could have on growth in the city's most populous borough.


And the worries have only continued to fester, like the gonorrhea in the Gowanus.


The designation at Newtown Creek did not spur as much vocal debate as the Gowanus designation, but there is still potential for the label to have an adverse impact on the city’s hopes for economic development in the area, in Brooklyn and Queens, according to Marc LaVorgna, a spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office.


The Bloomberg administration openly opposed the Superfund designation at Gowanus, advocating for an alternate cleanup plan that would allow prospective developers to voluntarily contribute funds for the work.


The 140-year-old, four-mile-long canal is lined with thick sludge from years of toxic dumping, most from untraceable sources.


At Gowanus, Toll Brothers planned to stop building a $250 million development if the designation were approved, and when it was, they did. The Bloomberg administration was not pleased.


The parties responsible for the pollution at Newtown, on the other hand, are well known—ExxonMobil, BP and Chevron, along with several industrial companies along the waterfront. The city supported the designation at Newtown because there was “no other way to clean it up,” Lavorgna said.


One reason the designation at Newtown may have been less openly controversial is that locals already associate the neighborhood with toxicity. There is nothing wrong with the neighborhood’s water, but residents still use Brita filters anyway. The neighborhood is downwind from one of the city’s sewage treatment plants. Locals call the area “Stinkpoint.”


More importantly, awareness has been growing of the massive oil spill, under the neighborhood’s northern end, since it was first discovered in 1978; over the past several years, environmental impact studies, news articles and a lawsuit from the attorney general’s office have helped publicize the presence of oil—an amount scientists have estimated to reach 17 million gallons, or three times the size of the Exxon-Valdez spill.


According to Assembly Member Joe Lentol, who represents the part of Brooklyn affected by the designation, the Super-fund label is a relief.


“People are optimistic that something is finally happening,” he said of his constituents.


Lentol, who grew up in Brooklyn and says he swam in Newtown Creek as a child, used to believe the designation would drive down property values in the area, he said.


“My misgivings were that, you know, I don’t want the people of Greenpoint to think they’re living in such a contaminated place that they’re going to move out. I don’t want them to think that their property values would be lowered. It’s a delicate issue for people who live here. A lot of people remember Love Canal, and when they think of Superfund, they think of contamination. They think of people dying from cancer,” Lentol said.


A report issued by the Environmental Protection Agency suggests the impact of the designation on property values is mixed, and changes from site to site, with some sites’ property values rebounding after designation, before the cleanup is complete. The exact costs, extent and time frame for cleanup at both sites is speculative until more research is done, said EPA regional spokesperson John Senn.


Knowledge of the pollution and the Superfund label have not impacted average home prices in Greenpoint yet. Sales prices for two-family homes have risen over the past year from $771,449 to $799,386. The number of total home sales dropped off though, by about half, according to records from the city’s Department of Finance.


But the city is still concerned over the future of development near Newtown Creek, according to the mayor’s office. There are 184 blocks and two miles of waterfront still developable in Greenpoint, as well as the possibility for up to 7,000 additional units of housing and 7.9 acres of open space along less than a mile of waterfront, LaVorgna wrote in an e-mail. Those plans are contingent on private investment to reactivate the East River and Newtown Creek waterfront.


One part of the designation that has received little consideration is how it will affect the Queens side of the creek, specifically Hunter’s Point South, which was rezoned for development in 2008, LaVorgna wrote.


The area is cited for 5,000 housing units, a new public school, $175 million worth of utility and road infrastructure and 10 acres of waterfront park, he added.


Perhaps most crucial are $500 million in planned capital improvements for the area. Those projects could stall as the area comes under federal control, Lavorgna said.


The cleanup might not be controversy-free even if it began that way. In mid- October, Queens politicians, including Borough President Helen Marshall, Assembly Member Catherine Nolan, Assembly Member Michael Gianaris and Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer, issued a letter to the regional EPA coordinator taking the agency to task for what they perceived as a lack of attention to cleanup in the borough.


Few of those issues were raised by constituents when the EPA opened up the designation to public comment, Senn said.


“I will say that we got a lot more comments from the public about possibly putting the Gowanus Canal (more than 800) on the Superfund list than we did about possibly listing Newtown Creek (several dozen),” Senn wrote in an e-mail.


The reason for the limited feedback was not clear, he said.


But legislators say the designation in both areas cannot ultimately be held responsible for stagnation in development.


Lentol acknowledged that 45 planned building projects have stalled in Greenpoint since the recession began. Those developments were the byproducts of two rezonings—one in 2005 to open up the waterfront to high-rise condominiums and increased affordable housing, and another in 2008 to entrench the lowprofile post-war housing in the neighborhood’s center.


At Gowanus, Toll Brothers planned to stop building a $250 million development if the designation were approved, and when it was, they did.


The Bloomberg administration was not pleased.


Council Member Brad Lander, whose district encompasses parts of Gowanus, said he thought the developer might have had to pull out anyway, given the state of the economy. Other planned developments for the area, such as speculative plans for a Whole Foods, were never as concrete as the Toll Brothers housing development, he said.


Both Lander and Lentol suggested the designation would ultimately be good for their neighborhoods. Lander hoped the EPA could contract out cleanup work to local firms, stimulating the local economy. Lentol hoped the Newtown Creek designation would clear the way for eventual residential rezoning of the areas directly adjacent to the waterfront. Those sites are currently industrial, but the waterfront has been desolate for years, Lentol said.


“Everybody was waiting for industry to come back, and guess what?” Lander said. “It wasn’t ever coming back.”

Taxing Wall Street Would Ease Budget Cuts by Brad Lander and Melissa Mark-Viverito - Gotham Gazette Commentary

Read original...

This year's budget for New York City is among the most challenging we have seen in recent years, including nearly $2 billion in painful cuts to schools, day care, senior centers, libraries, firehouses, food programs, jobs program and other essential services.

Even as working New Yorkers are bracing themselves for these cuts, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his administration have refused to consider taking a more balanced approach by enacting new revenue-generating options that would reduce cuts by asking Wall Street and the wealthiest city residents to put in their fair share. The current economic crisis has only made already longstanding inequities in our city much worse. In taking revenue options completely off the table, the administration is failing to demonstrate the leadership that the majority of New Yorkers needs in order to bring more fairness to the current budget and to secure a stable future for all residents of our city.

With an even bleaker outlook for next year, the city simply cannot wait any longer to ask the wealthiest for their fair share. This coming year, thousands of low and moderate-income families could find themselves hit by budget cuts on multiple levels and across generations -- in just one low-income area in Brooklyn, two child-care centers, a senior center, a health clinic and a public pool are all on the chopping block. Meanwhile, the safety and quality of life of our communities as a whole could be compromised by the closure of fire companies, the reduction of public health services and decreased maintenance in our parks.

How many more cuts can our families and neighborhoods endure?

What New Yorkers Say

This spring, almost 2,000 New Yorkers responded to our online survey about the city's budget and to consider revenue generating options. An overwhelming 89.4 percent said that the city should protect vital services by asking more from those who can afford to pay. Instead of solely slashing services, survey respondents preferred closing a tax loophole for hedge-fund managers and asking for just a bit more from our wealthiest citizens (Read more about the survey results here).

In spite of the financial crisis, Wall Street just had a record year, with $61 billion in profits, largely due to a taxpayer-funded bailout. Yet private equity and hedge fund managers enjoy a loophole that makes the vast majority of their income exempt from the New York City unincorporated business tax (which any other partnership or sole proprietor business is subject to). Closing the city’s "carried interest" loophole would generate $100 million to $200 million for New York City, desperately needed funding that could help restore some of our drastic cuts.

This issue has gotten the attention of Congress. The House of Representatives has passed a bill that would begin to close the federal loophole, and the Senate may be looking to do the same. Sen. Charles Schumer -- a strong supporter of Wall Street and its role in the city and state’s economy -- has come out in favor of the House's proposed change and has rejected claims that it will create adverse effects for our city’s financial sector.

Survey respondents also favor restructuring the city's personal income tax to make it fairer, and ask for a modest increase on our wealthiest residents. Right now, when all state and local taxes are considered, the wealthiest 1 percent of New Yorkers actually has a lower tax rate than the middle class, the working class or the poor.

We propose adding two additional tax brackets for high-income earners -- one for joint-filers earning income over $250,000 (to be taxed at 1.2 percent) and another for those earning income over $500,000 (to be taxed at 1.8 percent). For a household earning $500,000, this would mean just $1,000 more per year. By putting these reforms in place, the city can generate over $1 billion in new revenues, while reducing the tax burden on families earning under $40,000 (who are already exempt from federal taxes).

The working families of this city have already been asked to make enormous sacrifices in recent years, in part as a result of a regressive sales tax, property tax and water rate increases. Now they will continue to make more sacrifices as they see the erosion of the services that so many of them depend on.

It is time to ask hedge fund managers, Wall Street executives and the wealthiest New Yorkers to share in the sacrifices that we are all making in these difficult times and to put in their fair share.

Unfortunately, Bloomberg has refused to have any discussion of revenue generating options. The mayor's "dead on arrival" response to approaches supported by most New Yorkers is disappointing and short-sighted.

We can achieve a balanced approach here. There will have to be some difficult decisions and even many painful cuts. But if we adopt a fair-share approach that balances cuts with modest revenue increases from those who can most afford it, we can make sure our neighborhoods and our city remains strong and vibrant through these tough times and move together toward better times ahead.

City Council members Brad Lander of Brooklyn and Melissa Mark-Viverito of Manhattan chair the council's progressive caucus.