This paper responds to Syracuse 20/20's "Toward a Competitive City Agenda, Mayoral Election 2005." The report, the responses of the other candidates, and comments from the public can viewed at www.syracuse2020.org .
Comments on Syracuse 20/20's “Toward a Competitive City Agenda”
Howie Hawkins, Green Party candidate for Mayor of Syracuse
I want to first thank Syracuse 20/20 for initiating this report and asking for responses from the mayoral candidates. This format is a welcome respite from the usual campaign formats of 10-second media sound-bites, one-minute debate responses, and 50-word limits on questionnaire answers.
I found the report is very helpful for the factual background it provides and in its analysis and recommendations. I hope many Syracusans read it.
I am in agreement with most of the basic policies, goals and action recommendations in the 20/20 Agenda and the city's Comprehensive Plan, which the 20/20 Agenda incorporates by reference. Below I will comment in sequence on the recommendations in the 20/20 Agenda, focusing most of what I say on those areas where I disagree, where I think there is need of clarification or elaboration, and where I think needed action has been neglected.
Overall Recommendations
1. Implementing Syracuse 's Comprehensive Plan
Syracuse 20/20 recommends that the candidates for mayor develop an action plan for implementing the Plan's recommendations, including prioritizing the recommendations, assigning time frames for their completion, and specifying benchmarks to measure success.
It is beyond the resources of my campaign to do spell out such an action plan for the well over 200 recommended actions spread out over 20 pages in Syracuse 's Comprehensive Plan. However, I believe this is exactly how the plan should be implemented by the next city administration.
I agree with the 20/20 Agenda recommendation that the Mayor should make an annual written and oral report to the public on progress toward reaching the plan's goals and benchmarks.
Neighborhood Assemblies and Participatory Planning: I would go further and develop a neighborhood-based planning process through which the residents of Syracuse can participate in an annual review and revision of the citywide goals and benchmarks in the Comprehensive Plan, as well as set priorities, goals, and benchmarks for how the citywide policy goals and urban design framework in the Comprehensive Plan are to be implemented in their respective neighborhoods.
To do this, I would transform the eight TNT sectors into Neighborhood Assemblies in the 25 or so historical/cultural neighborhoods of the city. The Neighborhood Assemblies would be like New England Town Meetings where every resident has voice and a vote in setting the broad policies of their community. They would elect a Neighborhood Council of officers to responsible for the implementation of their decisions.
The city could facilitate this planning process by formatting the goals, timeframes, and benchmarks in a spreadsheet-like chart, which Neighborhood Assemblies could use to discuss the plan and vote on recommendations for priorities and revisions. The same type of chart could be used to develop priorities, goals, and benchmarks for each neighborhood's plan. Part of this review should also include reviewing the city budget and recommending priorities they want in the city budget and setting priorities for a portion of the budget to be allocated to the Neighborhood Assemblies for their own projects. The “participatory budgeting” process pioneered in Porto Alegre, Brazil, birthplace of the Global Social Forum, and now used by increasing number of cities, particularly in Latin America, is the model I have in mind here.
Most of the TNT sectors are too geographically dispersed and social diverse to be inclusive units of planning. Neighborhood planning needs to be done on a human scale in the real neighborhoods with which residents identify. There should provide technical and organizing support to get the Neighborhood Assemblies up and functioning, but without dictating the agenda or pre-empting the development of neighborhood leadership. This assistance should include a priority on addressing the economic (e.g., child care) and social (e.g., literacy) obstacles that discourage lower-income people from participating. We can learn from the Latin American cities' experiences in “participatory budgeting” in addressing this issue.
This participatory planning process will lead to better planning decisions and implementation because more people will have had their say and invested themselves in the process. The goals and actions of the plans, citywide and in each neighborhood, will better reflect what the citizens want. People in their neighborhoods have on-the-ground, practical, empirical knowledge of their neighborhoods problems, needs, and priorities that city planners in government can never have. Surveys are biased toward the interests of the survey designers. They are no substitute for interactive debate and decisions by the people who have to live with the plan on the ground. Participatory planning will lead thus lead to better decisions and more support for implementing them.
I believe that the Neighborhood Assemblies create a political form in which a vibrant civic life can grow, which will help propel the achievement of many of the goals in the city's Comprehensive Plan and 20/20's Competitive Cities Agenda. Quality neighborhoods, safe streets, full-service community schools, and a lively arts and cultural scene are among these goals, which serve as the basis for other goals, such as the decision of families and business to locate in Syracuse, thus expanding the tax base, thus enabling better public services and amenities, thus attracting more families and businesses, and so on. Engaging the residents in the planning process will give it the social and political momentum it needs to succeed.
2. Building Political Coalitions to Advance an Urban Reform Agenda
I agree 20/20's specific recommendation that the Mayor should convene an ongoing forum of the County and State delegations to develop a common agenda. Two immediate issues where this would be useful are the pending $600 million school construction bill and the need for a statewide legislative solution to the state's public school funding formula found unconstitutional in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity's case in New York City .
Developing a Metropolitan Reform Agenda: I believe also we need to convene a broader forum that includes municipal officials throughout the county and union, business, and community leaders in developing a common metropolitan agenda. I believe that traditional antagonists – unions and communities of color, inner city and blue-collar inner ring suburbs, businesses and environmentalists – can find common ground around a metropolitan agenda that would include:
• State legislation empowering counties to plan regional land use, mass transit, and infrastructure
• Anti-sprawl measures utilizing those regional planning powers (such as the urban growth boundary that Portland , Oregon has)
• Fairer state and metropolitan tax base and revenue sharing across rich and poor communities in the region (as the six counties around the Twin Cities in Minnesota do)
• Home rule for municipalities and counties to have the option shifting local tax burdens from exclusive reliance regressive sales and property taxes to progressive income taxes (as Ohio and Pennsylvania permit)
• Living wage laws that increase disposable income of the poorest one-third of workers, thus stimulating local retail markets and reducing the cost of health, housing, childcare, heating, food stamp, and other forms of public assistance for which low-wage workers qualify (constituting a hidden subsidy to low-wage firms)
• Fair housing policies to reduce racial and class segregation and division that makes forging a common agenda more difficult
• Anti-displacement policies that protect people on low and fixed incomes when communities improve and property values rise due to social investments
• Public power to lower energy costs and build renewable energy sources that are local and reliable
• Withdrawing public subsidies from “low-road firms” that compete by lowering costs (primarily wages and benefits) and raising externalities (waste, pollution, public assistance for low-wage workers)
• Moving from generic subsidies, which tend to reward low-road firms and erode municipal fiscal bases, to targeted incentives
• Targeting incentives to “high-road firms” that compete by raising productivity and quality (and hence tend to support shared education and training programs and pay higher wages) and lowering externalities (hence improving the tax base for the public services and amenities that attract more high-road firms)
• Targeting economic incentives to build on existing clusters of firms (e.g., environmental engineering, regional food processing) to promote cross-firm learning and sectoral growth by encouraging firms and unions to cooperate in marketing products and training workers
• Requiring recipients of incentives to meet performance goals (jobs, affirmative action, adherence to labor and environmental standards) or pay them back
Obviously, this agenda would not meet with universal acclamation. But it is the kind of agenda we must try to forge. Current transportation, housing, land use, economic incentive, and many other policies at the state and federal levels subsidize suburban sprawl while hollowing out urban cores. Inner ring suburbs are as vulnerable as the inner city, if not more so because they lack the central city's business and tax base and public infrastructure. Inner city and inner-ring suburban delegations together constitute a majority in the county and state legislatures and Congress. We will not have policies at these levels of government that support the urban core until we can build a political coalition and common agenda around the common interests of this majority.
More important than the agenda I have suggested is that an ongoing forum be created to begin the discussion. In the absence of a common policy vision, local municipal officials and county and state delegations fall back on visceral symbolic issues like mandatory minimum prison sentencing and parochial pork barrel projects for their districts, which only exacerbate inter-district competition when cooperation and a common agenda is needed.
Fix the Basics
I agree that the basics – good schools, quality workforce, safe streets, attractive neighborhoods, efficient public services, public amenities – are far more important in sustaining a strong city economy than tax breaks and other incentives. Indeed, much of money spent on these economic incentives (put at $2 billion by Syracuse over five years in the late 1990s by Forbes magazine a few years ago) would be better spent on fixing the basics.
Education
Management and Governance: I agree with 20/20 that the Mayor should take responsibility for improving educational outcomes. But I don't agree with 20/20 the Mayor should take active role in the governance and management of the school district. City residents elect a school board to set policy and hire management. The Mayor should not try to interfere with that function and micro-manage the school district. I can only see that leading to unproductive turf battles.
City Income and Commuter Tax for School Funding: The Mayor can better help in other ways. He or she should first of all take responsibility for insuring the schools have adequate funding. That should mean, as 20/20 recommends, an annual increase in the city budget allocation to the school district. It should also mean working with our county and state delegations to shift school funding more to income taxes than property taxes. As the 20/20 report documents, Syracuse faces the paradox that its overall property tax rates are higher than the surrounding suburbs, but the portion of those taxes devoted to school funding are lower than the surrounding suburbs. A major reason for this paradox is the fact that about half of Syracuse property is tax exempt, yet the city has to provide police, fire, road, sewer, water, and other services to these properties (notably Syracuse University; several hospitals; federal, state, county, and city government buildings; and many tax abated for-profit enterprises). Moreover, the property tax is regressive. Indeed, the lowest-income 20 percent pay 14 percent of their income in local sales and property taxes, while the highest-income 20 percent pay only 7 percent.
A city in income tax, including a tax on the over 40,000 commuters to the city (who are currently free-riders who use city services without paying anything to support them and often work at property tax exempt institutions), would be a fairer, larger, and more stable revenue base for the city and the school district. Better than a city income and commuter tax would be a county and/or state income and revenue sharing system. But the city should pursue a city income and commuter tax unless and until the county and/or state come through with their own income tax and revenue sharing plan.
Efficiency: The Mayor can also work with the school district to improve operation efficiencies through consolidation of some shared functions and using the SyraStat system to monitor school district operations, as the 20/20 Agenda recommends.
Drop-out Prevention: The school district should develop a comprehensive drop-out prevention plan as 20/20 recommends and the Mayor should encourage them to do so. If they don't, the creation of a Dropout Prevention Commission by the Mayor as recommended by 20/20 should be undertaken.
Meanwhile, I think it is clear that the drop-out problem is not a problem solely in the schools, but also importantly a problem of the larger environment. Many students drop-out to make money for their families. The Mayor can contribute to reducing the drop-out rate by developing an effective anti-poverty program for the city. I will present my ideas on this below under the section on “Invest in Working Families.”
Community Schools and Neighborhood Assemblies: I fully support 20/20's recommended Full-Service Community School model and agree the Mayor must work closely with the County Executive to coordinate the delivery of county social services in the community schools
In addition, I think the Parks, Recreation, and Youth programs need to be coordinated with the schools so that between the schools and the parks in each neighborhood there are supervised programs available after schools, weekends, evenings, and summers for all kids that need them. As someone raised in a single parent household where the parent worked long hours, I was really raised in a city recreation center in California where I grew up. Unfortunately, that center like many around the country fell into disrepair and limited hours as municipal finances have tightened since the late 1970s. I know that the financial support to parks, recreation, and youth programs in Syracuse was about double what it is today in the 1970s. Older Syracusans tell me about all the programs they had as kids in the 1930s during the Great Depression. Today, children don't have the same support from city recreation programs they once had and it contributes to the street crime problem. We need to substantially raise our support for these programs and they should make use of and coordinate with the schools' physical facilities.
Moreover, community schools should be the physical home for the Neighborhood Assemblies, with office space for the officers of the Neighborhood Council. This will link residents of the neighborhoods more closely to the community schools and the city and county services available there. By sharing the same space, this will also increase the cross-generational interactions between children and adults that will help build stronger communities in the neighborhoods.
Workforce Development
I haven't read the MDA's Essential New York Initiative, but I think its six strategies summarized in the 20/20 report are good strategies. I also agree the Mayor should support research to provide OCC and BOCES with employer needs so they can tailor their educational programs to meet those needs. And I agree that we need to develop a joint business and workforce development plan that coordinates the work of all the region's economic development agencies.
Within this framework, I would emphasize two things:
Job Ladders: We should support workforce development programs and economic incentives to businesses that enable workers to start at the entry level and work their way up to higher skill and higher responsibility jobs within their firms. Too often there is a glass ceiling for entry-level workers. This ceiling can broken if firms are encouraged through incentives and the availability of workforce training programs to train and promote workers from within. This emphasis is particularly needed in Syracuse given the relatively high proportion of residents who drop out of school and have gone through the criminal justice system. We need job ladders with realistic chances for advancement to give these people a practical way to economic security and satisfying work lives.
Community Ownership: We should put primary emphasis on retention of existing businesses and industry clusters and the creation of new locally owned businesses rather than recruiting national and multinational firms to put branches here. For one thing, if we fix the basics, many of those national and multi-national firms will want to locate here anyway. For another, locally owned firms are more likely to create the kind of job ladders that enable entry-level workers to advance in the firm. Often absentee-owned firms import management rather than draw them out of their existing workforce. In addition, local, and particularly what I call “community ownership,” means profits are reinvested in the community rather than siphoned out by absentee owners.
By community ownership, I mean worker and consumer cooperatives, resident owner-operated small businesses, and “community corporations” where voting shares are restricted to residents. An example of the latter is the Green Bay Packers, where the little 60,000-person city of Green Bay maintains a successful NFL franchise. If the Syracuse Nationals had had a similar ownership structure, Syracuse would still be an NBA town. Another form of community ownership worth exploring would be a city-managed Community Investment Trust where tax breaks and other incentives to corporations are converted to voting shares held by the city.
These forms of ownership anchors public investments made in these firms to the community by their ownership structures for the long-term benefit of the community. Absentee-owned firms are far more likely to take economic incentives and re-locate elsewhere anyway.
Worker cooperatives are particularly worth supporting from the workforce development perspective. They are governed on a one-member, one-vote basis and involve the workers as owners in setting broad policy and, in the larger ones, hiring technical and management expertise. This organizational form thus develops the people in them as it develops the economy.
Municipal Bank: The city needs a much stronger business development capacity, particularly in helping locally-owned business start-ups. A municipal bank could provide consumer and home loans, particularly to low-income communities that have been historically redlined. It should also have a business development arm that can help plan, finance, and advise local business start-ups.
The model here is the cooperative bank that developed the Mondragon cooperative network in the Basque region of Spain . Over 25 years from the early 1950s to the late 1970s, this bank did market research to identify businesses they could start, planned those busineses, and spawned one industrial enterprise after another, until there was network of more than 70 industrial worker cooperatives with nearly 30,000 workers. They made Mondragon the manufacturing center of Spain . The bank planned and financed the start-ups, hired the initial workers and management, and sold the firm to the workers as they were able to manage it on their own. The sale proceeds went back to the bank to finance more start-ups.
This model could be used to revitalize the depressed commercial business districts on the South and Near West sides as well as light industrial zones in the city. It could also support the development of new firms in key industry clusters such as environmental engineering and services.
Other models inform this idea. One is the flexible manufacturing networks of co-ops developed with municipal support in the Emilia-Rogmana region around the city of Bologna which transformed that region from one Europe 's poorest into one of its wealthiest. Another is a similar low-tech version implemented in the Kerala province of India , which has enabled one of the country's poorest regions in per capita income to have the highest literacy and health indices and lowest rates of extreme poverty in the country. A third model is the State Bank of North Dakota , which has turned the state a modest profit providing home and farm loans since 1918, even though its goal is to operate at cost rather than profit maximization.
Safe Streets
Affirmative Action to Diversify the Police Force: One of the most powerful ways to improve community/police relations is to hire more police officers who come from and live in the city, particularly black and Latino officers. The affirmative action goals set by the consent decree in the 1970s need to be raised since the black and Latino proportions of the city population has more than doubled since then. The city has made some progress recently in this regard, but the police force is still not close to reflecting the city's ethnic composition and too many live outside the city. More resources need to be put into recruiting and retention of city resident, black, and Latino officers. Including civil service exam preparation in the high schools is one step that could help more city residents qualify for these jobs.
Citizen Review Board: The next Mayor should insist in contract negotiations and, if, as is likely, it goes to binding arbitration, to the arbitrator, that the city will not sign off on a contract that does not include an agreement that officers will participate in Citizen Review Board hearings. It is unrealistic to expect improved community/police relations when the police defy the law that set up the Citizen Review Board.
Community Policing: The existing community policing program is a small public relations operation. We need to have 24/7 community policing where the same officers patrol the same beats in the same neighborhoods. Its purpose is to work with residents to prevent crime, reduce the fear of crime, and help resolve disputes before they escalate into violence. This will require a major shift in resources within the police department.
Crime Prevention through Youth Job and Recreation Programs: Numerous studies show that it is more cost effective and more effective in reducing crime to invest in youth job and recreation programs than it is to focus on arresting and incarcerating the young people after the crimes have been committed. We need a sufficient police force to arrest and remove destructive and dangerous people from the community. But adding ever more police will not prevent crime. We have to address the roots of most crime in poverty and alienation. In this regard, funding, and having officers participate as coaches and referees, in Police Athletic Leagues would help improve community/police relations as well as provide recreation for youth.
Harm Reduction: We should also not waste limited public resources imprisoning drug users. We should begin experimenting with the harm reduction policies advocated by groups like Reconsider. City Auditor Minch Lewis report a few years ago found that over 20 percent of the Police Department budget goes to trying to suppress illegal drug use and sales. The prisons are full, but every arrest just creates a new job opportunity in depressed neighborhoods. Meanwhile, LeMoyne professor Ted Stewart has released a study showing that the more a community spends on trying to stop the drug trade, the more all types of crime go up. The apparent reason is that this business is illegal and underground, so business disputes are settled by force rather than lawsuits. Every major drug bust seems to stir up a hornet's nest of violent street recriminations and fights for turf. The Common Council held hearings last year where law enforcement officials described successful alternatives to this war on drugs that other cities have tried, such as de-prioritizing drug busts and focusing resources and prevention programs such as treatment on demand for addicts and recreation and job programs for at-risk youth. It is time to test some of these harm reduction policies in pilot projects to see if they work better than the failed “war on drugs.” Using Lewis' study, that means there is roughly $5-8 million in the police department budget that could redirected to community policing, youth job and recreation programs, and other crime prevention approaches.
Efficient Services
I support the 20/20 Agenda recommendations here. Seeing what the OCC's Lean Institute can offer is worth exploring. I'm all for consolidation and collaboration where it improves efficiency as long as it does not structured so the city is forced to accept decisions it does not agree with. An example of this is the consolidation of sewer trunk lines and sewage treatment under county management in the 1970s. This consolidation has enabled the county to impose regional treatment facilities at Midland and Armory Square that these neighborhoods do not want. It is especially hard to swallow given that there are much better solutions than the chemical treatment and swirler technologies being used.
Neighborhood Assemblies and Officers: Empowering Neighborhood Assemblies to elect officers who can work with the various departments to guide the delivery of services in the neighborhoods, and empowering some officers to issue citations for code and other ordinance violations, would help make city departments more responsive to neighborhood needs and problems.
Build on Assets
Downtown Development
I support 20/20's recommendations to increase downtown housing, businesses, office space tenancy, and public safety.
Light Rail Mass Transit: Downtown will be greatly improved as a residential neighborhood as well as business district by reducing its dependence on cars for commuting. A convenient, affordable system of light rails linking downtown to the rest of the city and the suburbs would achieve this goal. The political moment to put this on the front burner and get commitments to help build it from the state and federal levels may have arrived. A mid-September AP poll showed that 7 in 10 Americans now want more money spent on mass transit than roads. As energy prices rise, this sentiment should solidify. The time to act on this has arrived.
A People's Waterfront and Neighborhood-Based Development, Not Destiny USA : Here is where I have the strongest disagreement with the recommendations of the 20/20 report and the city's Comprehensive Plan. Destiny USA is a highly subsidized competitor to downtown and neighborhood business districts. Few visitors to Destiny will come to downtown or the neighborhoods to eat, shop, or be entertained. Destiny is designed to provide that within its structures. Destiny is not a charity; it wants to maximize spending at its location.
Destiny perpetuates the car-culture social isolation and sprawl that flatly contradict the otherwise “new urbanism” thrust of the 20/20 Agenda, the city Compehensive Plan, and the county Settlements Plan, for that matter. Just as North Salina Street did not thrive from the “ripple” and “multiplier” effects of Carousel Mall as projected, so Syracuse , and indeed the whole metropolitan region, will not thrive from Destiny.
Destiny is the most important issue in this election. It will shape the city and metro-region for generations if it goes through. Syracuse will become a low-wage barracks for a publicly-subsidized, socially-atomizing, sprawl-promoting theme park. The consultant hired by the city to evaluate it projected 13,000 jobs paying an average of $6.67 an hour.
There are better options. Syracuse can become a sustainable city of neighborhoods based on green technologies, community ownership, and a vibrant neighborhood-based civic, commercial, and cultural life. The Inner Harbor/Oil City area should become a People's Waterfront with parks and public access, mixed-use development, and mixed-income housing.
People born in Syracuse often stay because of the social networks they have in their neighborhoods. People who come here and decide to stay do so because the city has real neighborhoods. This neighborhood-based sense of community – as challenged as it is by lack of job opportunities, poverty, crime, poor school performance, and limited public services due to a shrinking tax base – is still one of the strongest assets of the city upon which we should build. Predominantly low-wage jobs at Destiny servicing shoppers and tourists are not going to stop the drain of people who leave for better job opportunities elsewhere.
Despite Destiny's hype about running on renewables, it is a business premised on the consumption of massive amounts of fossil fuels transporting people long distances to get to this “destination resort.” Ecologically sustainable development, on the other hand, is premised on bringing goods, shops, entertainment, renewable energy production, and so forth to where people live in their neighborhoods. We don't need Destiny to stimulate renewable energy in the Syracuse metro region. We have the whole built environment of the region to retrofit for renewable energy as well as sustainable designs for housing, transportation, sewage, water, and waste recycling infrastructure. Public investment should go toward these infrastructure renewal for sustainability, not a Destiny project that contradicts sustainability.
Between peaking oil and gas production – whether it is now or, in the most optimistic projections, in a few decades – and mounting environmental problems, cities are going to be forced on the path of sustainability. It would be far better for Syracuse to get ahead of the curve and lead the way. Directing public investments toward sustainability can strengthen our already existing industry cluster of environmental engineering and services. That would spin off in construction industry expertise in sustainable designs. Together these two related industry clusters would provide a sound base for the kind of “knowledge economy” 20/20's Competitive Cities Agenda envisions.
People say there is no other possibility of billions in new investment in Syracuse . Pardon my skepticism, but who is going to invest these billions? How many billions is it? We've seen Destiny projections jump around between $2 billion to $25 billion? If Destiny is so viable, why does it need city, county, state, and federal public subsidies, which in the end amount to a small fraction of the billions of projected investment? Why is closing on a financing package for the first phase, a mere expansion of the mall, so difficult?
Destiny is not a one-shot magic bullet to save Syracuse . As the “new urbanism” planner Andres Duany was quoted in a Sean Kist column in the Post-Standard about the Destiny project as saying, “ What a city requires is slow, patient work by excellent government and many small investors.”
Dedicated Taxes to Support Arts and Culture and the Cultural District: I agree with the priorities on arts and culture downtown recommended by the 20/20 report. Arts are as important to city life as its sewage or transportation systems. They are essential to our humanity.
It has been 13 years since the city last provided funding to the arts in Syracuse . I support the development of a dedicated tax or taxes to support arts and culture institutions and projects in the city. The two proposals I have heard are a 25-cent tax on tickets for entertainment events in the city and a 1 percent tax on investment in new construction and improvements to downtown. I believe both have merit and one or both of them should be implemented.
Arts and culture should not be restricted to downtown. They should permeate the public schools. I've run into several parents who have moved their kids to private or suburban schools because of missing arts and culture programs in the city schools. It should also be part of the recreation programs of the Park, Recreation, and Youth Department in the parks and schools. Having the proverbial struggling artists of the city teach arts part-time in the city's schools and recreation programs will help sustain local artists.
Higher Educational and Health Service Institutions
I support the 20/20 recommendations here for drawing on local university expertise for city government and linking city residents to job opportunities in the health services.
Create Quality Neighborhoods
Neighborhood-Based City Government: Quality Neighborhoods need a political form to constitute themselves as living body politics that can manage and improve their communities. I have already discussed the Neighborhood Assemblies and Councils as the foundation for this. What needs to be added is these Neighborhood Assemblies should be the political districts that form the basis for representation on Common Council, the school board, and other city boards.
This reform would take us back to the pre-1935 structure of representation when all 19 ward elected a district councilor, a school board member, a county supervisor, and a ward constable. This would make these representatives more closely accountable to their constituents than our current system of at-large and large district councilors and at-large school board members. For the school board, it would give each neighborhood and community school its advocate on the school board, precluding the current domination of the board, as well as Common Council, by the more affluent neighborhoods.
At-large members should also be elected to the Common Council in a system of mixed-member proportional representation where voters vote once for their district councilor and once for their party, with the party list candidates added district winners to provide representation on Common Council in proportion to each party's support. This system of proportional representation would retain the benefits of district representation while also giving all political philosophies their proportionate share of representation citywide. Countries where elections are proportional invariably have higher voter turnout than countries with our winner-take-all system because every vote counts in electing members of one's favored party. Countries with proportional representation also invariably have more women and ethnic minorities elected.
These reforms would enhance the civic participation needed to improve the city and its neighborhoods.
Inclusionary Zoning and Anti-Displacement Policies: While we should encourage more middle and upper income people to locate downtown and in all the neighborhoods as the 20/20 Agenda recommends, we should do so in a way that does not gentrify communities and displace low-income people. Inclusionary zoning that requires developers to include one affordable unit for every six units developed would help maintain the stock of affordable housing in the city and insure mixed-income development that prevents segregation by race and class that exacerbates the problems associated with poverty. Community land trusts, such as Time of Jubilee, can protect homeowners and tenants with limited or fixed incomes from being displaced by rising property values.
Land Value Taxation : I support the state-funded targeted tax relief to help urban areas recommended in the 20/20 Agenda. The city should also reform the city property tax by going to land value taxation. Land value taxation taxes the market value of the land but not its improvements (homes and businesses). Land value taxation restricts property taxes to the unearned income derived from appreciation of all land in the community, which reflects social investments in good schools, parks, and other infrastructure and amenities, not the actions of the owner. By discouraging speculative investment in abandoned city lots and buildings, land value taxation stimulates inner city redevelopment. As such, it is an anti-sprawl. Because land ownership is far more concentrated than the ownership of home and business assets, land value taxation makes the property tax progressive.
Greenways: Neighborhood quality will be greatly enhanced by reducing traffic and enabling people to move around the city on “greenways.” The greenways would replace some streets with park-like corridors for pedestrians, bikes, and light rails. They would link residential neighborhoods to schools, parks, and shopping districts. Traffic calming in residential areas and pedestrian malls in shopping areas would also improve the quality of neighborhoods. The Greenways would encourage more social interaction than the socially isolating nature of private car travel. The bike paths should accommodate electric carts and vans for transporting disabled and elderly people.
Waterways: One of Syracuse 's underutilized assets is its water: Onondaga Lake , Onondaga Creek, and the now buried Erie Canal .
A People's Waterfront design should give the public access to Onondaga Lake within the city limits.
The Onondaga Creek Corridor should be a broad linear park, not just a creekwalk. The designs for this being developed under the direction of landscape architects of the SUNY School of Environmental Sciences and Forestry with community participation should be fleshed out and implemented. This “civic and environmental highway” as Emanuel Carter, the landscape architect coordinating project, describes it, will do much to revitalize the depressed Near West and South sides and link them to the rest of the city.
Rather than build a phony indoor Erie Canal at Destiny, the city should look at creating an East-West civic and environmental highway to complement a North-South Onondaga Creek Corridor. Bringing the Canal back to downtown will integrate downtown to the People's Waterfront and the Greenway and Waterway networks. Extending it down Erie Boulevard to the east could tranform a mundane suburban-style shopping strip into a park-like corridor of commerce serviced by the waterway, bikeways, and primarily by light rail.
Invest in Working Families
I agree with the 20/20 Agenda recommendations that the Mayor should promote access to tax credits, social services, health care, and public assistance for which people qualify.
City Minimum Wage that is a Living Wage: The 20/20 Agenda recommends that the Mayor encourage businesses to pay living wages. I'm afraid the labor market will dictate that they pay the lowest wage possible unless we put boundaries on the labor market with living wage laws. In the 1995 councilor at-large race, I was the first candidate for public office in Syracuse to call for a city living wage ordinance. The narrow ordinance that finally passed in 2005 is not what I had in mind. I don't believe it was what voters had in mind when they voted for candidates pledged to support the living wage in 2001 and 2003. It only covers 50-100 workers for city contractors.
Syracuse should adopt a citywide minimum wage that is a living wage that covers all workers in the city. Citywide minimum wages have been adopted in New Orleans , Santa Monica , Santa Fe , Madison , and Washington DC in recent years. Though the courts of Louisiana knocked down the New Orleans law, the others have survived court challenges. New York City adopted a city minimum wage in 1961 that was struck down at that time. That means we need state legislation to enable us to adopt a city minimum wage. We should pursue it. No Syracuse resident who works full-time should still live below the poverty line.
As FDR put it in his “ Statement on the National Industrial Recovery Act,” June 16, 1933 :
“… no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.…and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level—I mean the wages of decent living.”
If Roosevelt could call for a living wage in depths of the Depression, there is no reason why we can't provide it today when our output per capita is several times what it was in 1933.
An Effective Anti-Poverty Program based on Community Ownership: Helping low-income people access social services, public assistance, and the Earned Income Tax Credit only maintains people at around the poverty line. If the citywide minimum wage used the city's current living wage standard as its basis, it would still take two full-time workers to get a family of four to the federal poverty line.
There are other measures Syracuse should take to help ease the economic hardships of low-income people in the city, including:
• public power for affordable energy;
• progressive income and commuter taxes to relieve the tax burdens of low income people while increasing revenues to fund city services and the schools;
• crime prevention through community policing and youth jobs and recreation
• community hiring halls to insure city residents, particularly people of color, get their fair share of work on public projects.
But the best anti-poverty program is a good job and ownership of productive assets.
A serious anti-poverty program would redirect the tens of millions of dollars Syracuse gives to absentee-owners as corporate welfare each year into job-creating public investments in public works and community-owned enterprises.
The public works program to Rebuild Syracuse Green would retrofit the city's energy, sewage, transportation, and housing infrastructure for economic and ecological sustainability in an era of rising energy costs that render sprawl development and global supply chains increasingly unviable.
The community-owned enterprises would include worker and consumer cooperatives, resident owner-operated businesses, and community-based corporations where voting shares are restricted to residents and where tax breaks and other incentives are converted to voting shares held by a city-owned investment trust. The Municipal Bank would play a central role in helping to plan, finance, and advise these community-owned enterprises.
The Neighborhood Assemblies would provide guidance as to the types of enterprises they need in their shopping and, in some neighborhoods, office space and light industry districts. For example, downtown has needed a grocery store for its residents for many years. An upscale grocer recently announced it will open up downtown. But that still leaves the many working people in 500 Clinton Plaza, the Presidential Plaza towers, Pioneer Homes and McKinney Manor without a grocery to fit their budget. Here is where a case where the Municipal Bank could respond to a need, plan the business, finance and hire its initial workforce, and then receive payments for its financing as the grocery operated until it was owned by its workers.
By broadening and democratizing the ownership of productive enterprises, this approach will attack poverty and inequality where it is generated. After-the-fact tax-and-redistribution programs are only band-aids that do not attack the source of poverty.
Influence Metropolitan Growth
I have indicated support for the recommendations in this section of 20/20 Agenda in my comments on the second overall recommendation of the Agenda, which I summarized as “Building Political Coalitions to Advance an Urban Reform Agenda.”
Public Investment, Not Corporate Welfare: All I would add here is a comment on the phrase “business-friendly environment,” used in both the 20/20 Agenda and the city's Comprehensive Plan without definition. The phrase is often used as euphemism for low taxes and high public subsidies, also known as corporate welfare.
I don't believe that low taxes and high subsides are effective in attracting, retaining, or starting up new businesses. When businesses make location decisions, they start with basics of their particular business. Does the location have the needed workforce; energy, water, and transportation infrastructure; proximity to raw materials, suppliers, and markets; a cluster of similar businesses that means opportunities to share information, technology, skilled workers, and suppliers? If a location has these business basics, then managers look at the location as a place to live. How are the schools, cultural life, parks, and public safety? Then they decide to locate…and only then do they see what kind of tax breaks or subsidies they can get. They hire consultants to help them with this, often the same guys who advise cities on how to give away the subsidies. The consultants help them play one city off against another in a bidding war that is a race to the fiscal bottom for municipalities.
Corporate welfare is now a $50 billion a year giveaway by states and municipalities that hardly existed before the 1970s. It doesn't generate new jobs and businesses. It just erodes the municipal tax bases that provide the public services that help attract businesses in the first place.
State and local taxes are a small part of doing business. Internal Revenue Service statistics show that state and local taxes are only 1.2 percent of an average firms cost of doing business. After federal deductibility, the cost is reduced to 0.8 percent.
As Paul O'Neill, former CEO of Alcoa and President Bush's first Treasury secretary, stated during his Senate nomination hearing, “I never made an investment decision based on the Tax Code….if you are giving money away I will take it. If you want to give me inducements for something I am going to do anyway, I will take it. But good business people do not do things because of inducements. They do it because they can see that they are going to be able to earn the cost of capital out of their own intelligence and organizations of resources.”
If we follow the basic thrust of the recommendations 20/20 Agenda and the Comprehensive plan, which involve improving public services and infrastructure, enhancing the quality of life for families and in the neighborhoods, and building on our existing and natural strengths in Syracuse and Central New York , businesses will want to do business here. Our public money should be invested in making these things happen, not given away as tax breaks and subsidies to business that would probably have located here anyway.
