NYC NOW - May 22, 2024: Midday News

Episode Date: May 22, 2024

Governor Kathy Hochul's poll numbers keep dropping according to a Siena College poll, her lowest rating since she took office in 2021. Also, park researchers say cities can improve access to outdoor recreational spaces by emulating New York City's Community Schoolyards Program which allows schools to open their yards to the public during off hours. Lastly, New Jersey says it's easier for residents to apply for unemployment benefits thanks to the rollout of a new and updated application system. WNYC's Sean Carlson speaks with New Jersey Labor Commissioner Robert Asaro-Angelo to talk about the new system.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WMYC. It's Wednesday, May 22nd. Here's the midday news from Michael Hill. Calvin and Kathy Hockel's poll numbers keep dropping. That's according to a new Sienna College poll of registered voters in New York. The poll was just released. 38% of voters said they have a favorable view. view of the Democratic governor, but 46% have an unfavorable view, according to the poll.

It's local's lowest rating in a Sienna poll since she took office in 2021. The governor returned yesterday to Albany after a trip to the Vatican and Ireland, where she attended conferences on the economy and the climate crisis. Park researchers say cities can improve access to outdoor recreational spaces by emulating New York City's community school yards program. The Trust for Public Land, a national nonprofit that works with city governments to improve parks, says hundreds of city schools open the yards to the public during off hours. Mary Alice Lee directs New York City Playgrounds for the Trust for Public Land.

She says it's an inexpensive way to expand a city park's footprint while improving safety. Sites that are more well used by the community where they're more positive uses, there are less negative uses. There's less vandalism, crime, etc. on our school yards because they're really spaces that the community feels comfortable, enjoying, and meeting others in. Despite widespread access to parks, New York City is down two spots from last year, ranking 12th in the nonprofit's annual national ranking of city parks.

Washington, D.C. was named the best big city park system for the fourth straight year. A good day to get out there, but make sure you have your sunscreen, 79 and Sunday now, but going up to 87 with lots of sunshine today, and we're in the mid-80s the next couple of days. Stay close. There's more after the break. I'm Sean Carlson for WNYC. New Jersey says it's easier for residents to apply for unemployment benefits, thanks to the rollout of a new and updated application system.

The revamp comes after the state's unemployment system reached a breaking point in mid-2020 with the outbreak of the pandemic. New Jersey Labor Commissioner Robert Osoro Angelo joins us now to talk about all of it. Commissioner, talk to us about this new system. What are some of the differences compared to the old one and how will it improve the process for New Jerseyans? Yeah, so listen, this is definitely a pivotal moment for New Jerseyans who maybe face the job loss. We will now have an easier, friendlier experience with unemployment insurance from start to finish. Being between jobs is certainly stressful enough.

I've launched this new application and many other improvements. We relieve much of the frustration. The workers need to access the benefits they're entitled to and deserve. I think the improvement will be most obvious for users probably that you can now save your application and come back to it later. But overall, I think it can be broken into improvements that are customer facing and those that aren't. So this new system is said to cut the time it takes to complete an application down by several hours. How is the new app cutting down on that much time? How is that possible?

A big part of it is the ability to save and come back. So we're just carrying the time that someone's on the application. But before, people have to start the application, realize they need more documents, not be able to get them right in time, say to come back later on, so that the whole length of time is going to be strutten down well over an hour for most folks. For the nearly 80% of the application questions have been removed or rewarded, make it a more intuitive process throughout the claim where now every time someone logs into their account, they don't need to find out what's next. They will automatically take them to the correct page or action that's needed to

move their claim along. So the whole process is now way more intuitive for both the claimant as well as our staff. Commissioner, during the pandemic, a lot of attention was placed on COBOL. It's a 65-year-old programming language powering many of New Jersey's systems. The state was even scrambling to find people who knew how to program in that pretty ancient system as it dealt with huge backlogs in the pandemic. Now, is that still a risk factor for ensuring things move smoothly next time the system comes under strain? To be honest, the back-end held up remarkably well, paying out $40 billion to over a million and a half of New Jerseyans. The biggest problem for, it is it's hard to make changes. Hence, all the delays in New Jersey and across the country

when five brand new federal programs were put into place. So fully replacing the back end is a longer process, but every piece that we are building to replace it is easily adaptable and improvable. We learned from COVID we couldn't wait to make these changes. So the customer-facing changes will be able to make are built on an agile system. They'll be able to be compatible, modular, and easily improbable along the way. Even though the backend did hold up, it's fair to say, there was a lot. a backlog, though, right, during the pandemic because of that system? To be honest, the clean claims that came through for your regular UI had no problem.

They were going through in two or three weeks on a general basis. It was those changes we had to make that slowed everything up and all those new programs. But the biggest problem is not super flexible. That's what we're changing piece by piece. Every new piece we build can be interacting with other programs, interacting with other state systems, federal systems. We couldn't do this without the partnership of the U.S. Department of Labor and our states around the country who are in the same boat as we are. When can we expect these changes to start rolling out? And are there other changes in store to continue to improve the process?

Yeah, they've been out. The new part about this is that we've done this in a piece-by-piece method. So like 10 users were the first users back in October. We went to 15% earlier this year, then to 50, then to 100 last month. Everything's running super smoothly because we were testing and fixing and testing and fixing all along the way. So this is live now at my unemployment.nj.gov, along with multiple other additional. actually dozens of other improvements to letters, communications, emails, to make all this much easier for our folks or our customers

to understand the process they're narrow part of. Yeah, talk more about those other changes in store. Yeah, I mean, we're updating every single day, which is why this agile method instead of doing one big bang, you know, flip a switch, has been great. I think the other biggest changes the claim status page. We found out during COVID that, in addition to waiting for benefits, having complications, the biggest anxiety producer was not knowing what's next

of the claim and that we really improved our communications across the board. Most so in the claim status page. Now they can go on there, see what's next to their claim. They could access documents they need from us instead of having tried to find their email or open their junk folder. They could do their ID verification from there and take action and take ownership of their claim on it in a way they couldn't do before. That's New Jersey State Labor Commissioner Robert Osro Angelo.

Commissioner, thanks for joining us. Thank you so much, Sean. Thanks for listening. This is NYC now from WMYC. Be sure to catch us every day. weekday, three times a day, for your top news headlines and occasional deep dives. And subscribe wherever you get your pockets. We'll be back this evening.