Impressions of a Rubber Stamp

The Council’s rapid passage of rules reform is a welcome and surprising development. Many observers of the Council expressed skepticism that the new regime would make good on its promises to change the operation of the body, but the Mark- Viverito/Lander machine appears to have implemented some substantive alterations that will likely result in a differently functioning City Council. 

For instance, rules reform will make it much easier for bills to reach the floor for a vote, regardless of their support by the body’s leadership. Previously, the entire process of drafting and moving bills was a charade where the Speaker unilaterally pushed legislation through writing, committee and to the floor for votes that were almost always stage-crafted to yield lopsided if not unanimous victories. Packages of anodyne legislation concerning areas like environmental or construction regulation, totally beyond the expertise or initiative of any Council member, were drawn up at the order of mayoral agencies, and then the Speaker, as a political favor, would assign prime sponsorship to individual members, who could tout their dogged advocacy of the new laws at election time. 

The existing rule of “discharge,” whereby a bill’s prime sponsor can summon six other members to call a vote to bring a proposed piece of legislation to the floor for general discussion and a vote, was actively squelched by previous Council leadership. On the rare occasions that a member threatened to petition to discharge, senior central staff members would call around and warn Council members not to sign on. Legislative discipline was firm and rarely challenged. 

It will be very interesting to see what happens when (and if) proposals reach the floor without the imprimatur of leadership. Speaker Melissa Mark- Viverito has praised herself for the brevity of her stated meetings, remarking to applause from her colleagues that the newspaper of Colorado Springs, Colo., was impressed that New York’s Council meetings are so “professional, orderly and down to business” that they last less than an hour, including the Pledge of Allegiance and invocation. Apparently Council meetings in Colorado Springs can last for 12 hours as the members hash out municipal questions in mind-numbing detail. 

Running a quick stated meeting will clearly make the Speaker popular among the other Council members, but why should New Yorkers be pleased? Doesn’t a rapid, essentially perfunctory stated meeting just reinforce former Councilman-at-Large Henry Stern’s famous adage that “The difference between the Council and a rubber stamp is that a rubber stamp makes an impression”? If stated meetings are less than an hour, then either the Council has nothing to do, or the real business is being done elsewhere, probably behind closed doors. 

Supposing that rules reform allows individual members outside the charmed circle of leadership to get bills to the floor for debate, stated meetings could turn into lengthy, combative public displays of partisanship and rancor—which is what healthy legislative bodies should look like in the first place. 

The recent arrest of Ruben Wills came as no great surprise to anyone paying attention to his political career. From his bizarre outstanding arrest warrants for criminal mischief to his misplaced vigilantism in pursuing a group of gun-toting gang members into a park, Councilman Wills was an indictment waiting to happen, and ran the lowest odds in the City Hall next-to-go-to-jail pool. 

The weirdest thing about the Wills story is that his official Council Web page still cites his leadership of the notorious “New York 4 Life” community-based organization, which by all accounts appears simply to have been a conduit that felonious former state Sen. Shirley Huntley set up in order for Wills to collect and spend $30,000. Maybe removing the reference would register as an admission of wrongdoing, but one might think that someone in Council leadership would gently remind Wills that touting a shell organization that is under federal investigation among his biographical highlights strikes the wrong note. 

The Council held a hearing recently on faculty diversity at CUNY, and various Council members let slip some revealing comments. 

Councilwoman Darlene Mealy, chair of the Committee on Civil Rights, was perturbed by the news that Italian- Americans are considered a “protected class” for the purposes of affirmative action at CUNY. This admittedly odd and unique designation dates to the 1970s, when a faction of Italian-American legislators in Albany managed to get the city’s university system to agree to treat Americans of Italian descent as a group that has suffered a history of bias and discrimination, and to take affirmative steps to advance and protect their presence in the workplace. 

Since then, the percentage of Italian Americans among CUNY instructional staff has increased, while the percentage of non–Italian-American whites in that same category has fallen, indicating that inclusion as a protected class of person is a benefit when it comes to hiring. As CUNY works to hire more black and Latino professors, it is prevented from chipping away at its number of Italian educators lest it face civil rights litigation. 

If you think that CUNY’s designation of Italian-Americans as a historically disenfranchised minority represents the zenith of the absurdity of affirmative action bean counting, then you might have an unlikely ally in Mealy. “Italian- American is designated as a category distinct from white people. … Why [is this] broken out as a distinct category?” asked a befuddled Mealy. “Italian-Americans are now separate?” 

When the CUNY representatives explained that the Italian-American category can be rolled up with the general white category for the purposes of federal civil rights reporting (the federal government, whether less or more enlightened than CUNY, having not yet included the sons and daughters of Italy among the recognized victims of history), Mealy seemed to assume that there was a conspiracy afoot. “So it could be used for your advantage when it is necessary, to put them in a different category. … That’s very interesting. One way you do it for the feds, but for us, you break it up. Wow.” 

Mealy appeared to believe that the effect of the different reporting schemes was to somehow mask discrimination against the other protected classes at CUNY, mainly blacks and Latinos, whose employment was the primary focus of the nearly five-hour hearing, although how exactly that concealment would work was not spelled out. 

Councilman Jumaane Williams also questioned the CUNY representatives about the underrepresentation of black faculty relative to the student body at CUNY, which is overwhelmingly black and Latino. Over the 20 years from 1990–2010, the percentage of black full-time faculty members increased from 11.6 percent to 12.7 percent, which is disproportionate to the makeup of the student body, which was 25.4 percent black in 2010. 

Williams expressed anger about the failure of CUNY to recruit and retain enough black faculty members, calling it “completely unacceptable.” He then referenced a statistical falsehood that is widely prevalent among politicians when talking about minority employment by the city: “I am tired of, across the board, whether it is agencies of the City of New York, or leadership of the city, or CUNY, even when it is places where black and brown are the majority of the population, they are never represented in the institutions.” 

The reality is that black people in particular are rather well represented— arguably even overrepresented—in many city agencies. For instance, the staff of the Department of Correction, which offers some of the highest salaries of any city department, is 65 percent black. The departments of health, housing, youth, parks; the Administration for Children’s Services and the Human Resources Administration all have substantial numbers of black employees relative to the black population of the city, which is roughly 25 percent. The NYPD is about on par, with roughly commensurate representation to the population distribution overall. The prime exception is the Fire Department, which is only 10 percent black—one of the reasons the FDNY is currently under a federal hiring dictum that is being strictly monitored to bring black and Latino parity to the firefighting population. 

So while it is true that CUNY has trouble hiring and retaining black faculty, it is not the case that the same holds in city hiring as a whole. Rhetoric in the Council should match reality. 

Seth Barron (@NYCCouncilWatch on Twitter) runs City Council Watch, an investiga-tive website focusing on local New York City politics