NYC NOW - May 23, 2024: Evening Roundup

Episode Date: May 23, 2024

As negotiations over the city budget heat up, New York City council members are slamming Mayor Eric Adams' proposed cuts to early childhood education. Plus, Nassau County's Police Department is being held in contempt of court for refusing to release an internal document after spending $100,000 in taxpayer money to keep it secret. And finally, WNYC’s Sean Carlson and David Brand discuss Mayor Eric Adams’ rezoning plan, “City of Yes.”

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WMYC. I'm Jene Pierre. We begin at City Hall, where negotiations over New York City's budget are heating up. Council members continue to slam Mayor Eric Adams' proposed cuts to early childhood education. Council Speaker Adrian Adams says the cuts come as more than 2,000 families found out they were waitlisted for seats in the city's free 3K program. The executive budgets more than $170 million cuts to early childhood education programs. Yeah, you can boo that. Directly contradicts the administration's stated efforts to secure a seat for every child.

Mayor Adams said there were more open 3K seats than applicants, and everyone who wanted a spot will get one. But many families say they didn't get any of their choices and worry they will have to travel too far for care. Next year's budget is due July 1st. In Nassau County, the police department is being held in contempt of court for refusing to release an internal document, its phone directory, after spending four years and $100,000 in taxpayer money to keep it secret. WMYC's Charles Lane reports on his efforts to obtain a directory and proposed legislation that could make fighting for public records in New York a little easier. The phone book saga started in 2020 when I filed a routine freedom of information.

request. Freedom of information laws in New York and throughout the U.S. entitled the public to government records. They belong to taxpayers and phone directories on top of helping reporters find potential sources are a window into the hierarchy of an agency. NASA police denied the records request, citing privacy concerns, even though the directory only contained work phone numbers. Then they fought it in court all the way to the state appellate division. They assigned three different attorneys who wrote thousands of pages of legal briefs read by six different judges who ultimately said, yes, the phone directory needs to be turned over. Still, the department refused.

Last week, it was held in contempt of court. Joey Aaron is the lawyer who helped argue for the release of the record. It's an admonition or declaration or whatever of not following the law, which, you know, our whole American society is really based on a legal system. And if you can't get a phone directory from the police department, just imagine when you need an arrest report. NASA Police and County Executive Bruce Blakman declined requests for comment. The county also didn't respond to the motion holding it in contempt. Aaron says this is the limit of the current freedom of information law.

I think it is important to get legislation that encourages people to not settle and to get the documents that the law provides for. that the law recognizes is important for them to get. Aaron points to a pending bill, which would make it easier for people who have to sue for records to recoup legal fees from government agencies. The bill is poised past the state Senate, but its prospect in the assembly is less clear. Senator James Scophis, who sponsored the bill, expects local governments to complain about the costs. So that will be the public-facing argument.

The quieter argument is that a lot of these bodies, not all of them, them. But a lot of these municipalities, they want to continue with that default of saying no, uninhibited. Assembly member John McDonald of Albany, who's in charge of moving the bill out of committee, says he is still exploring the impact of the bill. That's WMYC's Charles Lane. Part of Mayor Adams' rezoning plan got approval from a city council committee this week. He calls it City of Yes. More on that after the break. In a city with very little to build on, an ambitious rezoning plan can play a big part in defining a mayor's tenure while transforming the character of the city. Like former Mayor Mike Bloomberg's rezoning of the then-largely industrial Brooklyn Waterfront, and look at it now.

Mayor Adams has an ambitious rezoning plan of his own. He calls it City of Yes. My colleague Sean Carlson talked with WMYC Housing Reporter David Brand about a component of the plan. that got the green light from a city council committee this week. David, can you give us some insight into what exactly city of yes is? What does Adams want to rezone? And what exactly will the city be saying yes, too, if this plan gets approved? Well, this is exciting stuff, Sean.

Adams wants to revamp land use rules that were written more than 60 years ago. So basically, the city's carved into zones where housing, commercial businesses, manufacturing or mix is allowed in other places it's not. There are rules telling you how big buildings can be and what they can be used for. So Adams wants to change some of those. He's splitting his proposals into three categories. One is to make way for more housing in every neighborhood. Another is to help businesses open in places they're currently restricted.

And a third would make it easier for green, sustainable infrastructure to get built. We're going to hear from the public, from community boards and council members who all get to weigh in. And you mentioned earlier that these rezoning for specific neighborhoods that really changed the feel and the use of these huge neighborhoods. This is going to be a little different because this is citywide for each of these three proposals. So this is across the board. All right. So we had one component of city of yes that came up for a city council committee vote. It passed.

This one was aimed at businesses. Can you tell us what it's about? Yeah. So this is the city of yes for economic opportunity it's called. It's supposed to make it easier for businesses to open and operate by scrapping. some old, sometimes pretty arcane regulations. So, for example, it could let people run certain businesses out of their homes like barbershops. There was a few pretty big issues around this one. One of those was about regulating last mile shipping. So it's like Amazon warehouses that generate

a ton of truck traffic and corresponding pollution. The city agreed to review a special permitting process for the siting of these last mile shipping facilities, these huge warehouses. The other, the city wants to allow for more manufacturing zones. This wouldn't say where those zones would be, but it gives the opportunity for the city to say, let's make this section of Brooklyn, a manufacturing district to generate more jobs and more industry. Now, the rezoning's targeting carbon neutrality and economic development seem fairly uncontroversial. The rezoning targeting housing, surprise, surprise is the one expected to generate the most opposition. What can you tell us about it? It's always the case.

Yeah. People hear City of Yes these days and they probably do associate it with housing. Okay. And it's really the name itself, City of Yes, that Adams has labeled this plan. It's supposed to counter the not in my backyard or the NIMBY mentality. So really Adams wants to drive new housing in every single neighborhood because we have a housing shortage, especially when it comes to affordable housing. Rents are out of control, so our home prices. That means that in higher density areas like a lot of Manhattan,

The city could allow for taller apartment buildings and make it easier to convert more offices into housing. In a lot of other neighborhoods like South Bronx, Mid-Bronk, building around train stations, in lower-density neighborhoods, like some of these kind of, you think of like a more suburban feel, like Northeast Queens or Staten Island, that would mean allowing more housing on commercial streets. The Adams administration has been talking about building on top of like single-story businesses. So like that laundromat, that's just one story. What if we added two or three stories of apartments on top of it? So, David, we all know that things are super expensive in New York City, renting or buying a place.

So what is the opposition to this proposal? Well, the opposition's really coming from people in those more suburban sections of the cities who own those smaller homes. They fear big new development or that huge skyscrapers are going to get built. That's not really what this plan is allowing for, but that's the fear and people are concerned about changes to the character of their neighborhood or what adding more people would mean to the sewer system or the infrastructure. But really overlapping with that fear as well is people just don't want new housing. They don't want affordable housing and the low-income people who would live there.

So that's informing some of this opposition as well. And civic groups are really mobilizing against the plan. What does the approval process for all this look like? Yeah, New York City has a really structured land use process where community boards, the borough president get to weigh in with their advisory recommendations. There's a few other steps and eventually we'll get to a full council vote after a few months. We're getting there with the business plan you mentioned. They'll be likely voting on that next month.

But this housing fight is really just getting started and a vote before the council won't happen until the fall. So it's still early days. And again, people are really passionate about this one. Supporters say, look, we need more housing. We need it everywhere. And opponents are saying, well, don't put that housing in my neighborhood. Yeah. Now, like we said, you can really see the effects of rezoning in neighborhoods where there have been big plans put into place like Greenpoint. You can really see changes brought about by Bloomberg's rezoning that was approved like 20 years ago. Same thing for neighborhood like East New York that saw a bunch of new construction as a result of the former Mayor Bill de Blasio's rezoning effort. So when we think about Mayor Adams rezoning bearing fruit, what's that can look like in his ideal world? Well, you mentioned Bloomberg's rezoning and we definitely see the impacts of those. Another one that maybe we don't see as well is that Bloomberg also down zoned huge swaths the city. So that meant preventing

anything other than single family homes from getting built. And that's something that Adams is explicitly trying to reverse in a lot of parts of New York. Again, he just really wants to build more housing to alleviate the shortage and the affordability crisis. So I don't think that's going to look like skyscrapers in Southeast Queens or Staten Island. But I think if this goes as planned, it would mean slightly larger apartment buildings on main commercial streets. Extra apartments allowed in people's yards or the second story of their homes. More housing along train lines is called transit-oriented development. And maybe we'll see like some 99-cent stores with three-story apartment buildings on top.

That's WMYC housing reporter David Brandt, talking with my colleague, Sean Collison. Thanks for listening to NYC now from WMYC. Catch us every weekday, three times. a day. I'm Jenae Pierre. We'll be back tomorrow.