Economic Democracy for Economic Development

By Howie Hawkins

Statement announcing Howie Hawkins' candidacy for Mayor of Syracuse at the Inner Harbor in Syracuse , July 11, 2005

The Green Party decided to announce our candidacies here at the Inner Harbor because this place illustrates what's right and what's wrong with Syracuse .

What's right is this beautiful waterfront land you see before you. It's ready for development that can benefit the whole community.

What's wrong is this land and its development rights are controlled by a private developer that is doing city planning in its own interest.

Robert Congel and the Pyramid Cos. have an odious record of:

busting unions
bankrupting contractors
racial discrimination
sending phony tax bills to mall tenants
allegedly stealing from business partners in a case now in pending in court
and avoiding taxes wherever they go.

Why is the city doing business with an outfit with this kind of track record?

Their Destiny USA plan is a plan to turn Syracuse into a tourist trap where the jobs for local residents pay a poverty wage averaging $6.67 an hour with no benefits, according to the study commissioned by the city to evaluate the Carousel Center expansion.

Poverty wages are not a good plan for the people of Syracuse .

The big developers have been calling the shots in Syracuse for too long. It's time that the people who live here determine the direction of development.

We can't count on corporate manufacturing to save us. The big manufacturing corporations have left for cheap labor markets abroad. The Big Boss isn't coming back.

We can't count on the state or federal government to save us. They've never had a serious urban policy and the policies in place subsidize suburban sprawl at the expense of the urban core.

Despite this tide of corporate, state, and federal abandonment, the City of Syracuse still has many powers it can exercise to rebuild its economy and raise living standards of its working people.

But that won't happen if the next city administration is just another caretaker administration, doing business as usual.

A Green administration in Syracuse would be about giving the people of Syracuse the power and institutional capacities to develop their communities as they want, not as outside developers want.

The Greens would take eight initiatives to build Economic Democracy so the people, not big developers, set the direction of economic development.

First, Community-Owned Enterprises . Where the market has failed to meet the people's needs, we can set up public enterprises and other community-owned enterprises to meet those needs. By community-owned enterprises, I include municipally-owned public enterprises, worker cooperatives, consumer cooperatives, owner-operated businesses as opposed to absentee-owned businesses, and joint stock companies where voting shares are restricted to residents.

Ownership structures matter. The Green Bay Packers have this residency restriction on voting shares and that's why Green Bay , a city smaller than Syracuse , still has an NFL franchise. Imagine if the Syracuse Nationals had had such an ownership structure. Syracuse would still be an NBA town. Imagine if all the manufacturing plants that have shut down over the last three decades had been locally owned. Now we have to rebuild our manufacturing base, but let's insure it's locally owned so the public investments we put into them are anchored to our community by their ownership structures.

Second, a Municipal Bank . Most of all, we need a publicly controlled development capacity to step in where the market has failed and also provide expert advice to the city on private development proposals. The Municipal Bank would take deposits and make loans without the discrimination so many of our residents face from the private banks. But it would also have a business planning arm that could plan and finance Community-Owned Enterprises.

Take, for example, the grocery stores we need downtown and in many of our neighborhoods. The Municipal Bank's business planning department could develop a business plan for a network of neighborhood-based groceries, arrange the initial financing, and hire the initial management and workers. As the management and workers learned how run the groceries, they would buy the business from the bank and own it as a worker cooperative. The proceeds of the sale of the business would go back to the bank to be used for financing other community-owned enterprises.

Third, Neighborhood Assemblies . These would guide the planning process. They would be like New England Town Meetings where every resident has a voice and a vote. Each of the city's 25 or so historical/cultural neighborhoods would its own neighborhood government, the Neighborhood Assembly. They would replace TNT, which are too big and only advisory. Neighborhood Assemblies would have power, not just input to the city administration. They would put the details into the city's new comprehensive plan, neighborhood by neighborhood. They would tell the Municipal Bank what businesses and housing development they want in their neighborhoods.

Fourth, Public Investment, not Corporate Welfare . Syracuse already has sizeable sums of money for economic incentives. Even before the Destiny project's enormous subsidies, $2 billion was given out in Syracuse over five years in government grants, tax abatements, benefits from tax-exempt financing, infrastructure improvements and utility breaks , according to Forbes magazine. That's more than the total city and school budgets combined over the same period.

The Greens would convert corporate welfare giveaways into public investments where the city, like any other equity investor, gets management and income rights in the enterprises in which they are invested. That way we anchor our public investments and the wealth they create to our community through public ownership.

Fifth, Public Power . In Syracuse and Onondaga County we pay four times more for electricity to Niagara Mohawk than the people in Solvay and Skaneatales pay to their city-owned power companies. The second highest energy costs of any utility in the country is one of the big things discouraging businesses from developing here. It's time to flip off NiMo and go for public power so we can cut energy costs for local residents and businesses and develop clean, renewable energy sources.

Sixth, Living Wages . The Green Party was the first to call for a living wage law in Syracuse in 1995 and I campaigned for councilor at-large on that proposal. Finally this spring, more than a decade later, the city finally adopted a living wage ordinance. But law is too narrow and only covers 50 to 100 workers. That is not what we had in mind 10 years ago. It is not what the people who voted for candidates pledge to a living wage ordinance had in mind.

As mayor, I would propose to the Common Council the adoption of a municipal minimum wage that is a living wage that covers all workers in the city. Municipal minimum wage laws have now been done adopted five other US cities. Every person in Sryacuse who works should be able to pay their bills and live a decent life. As President Franklin Roosevelt declared in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression:

“… 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.”

Seventh, Fair Taxes . The poorest 20% pay 14% of their income in sales and property taxes while the wealthiest 20% pay only 7%. (The city also has a recurring structural deficit. We need new sources of stable revenues in order to provide the schools, parks, infrastructure, and other services that will make Syracuse attractive. So we need progressive tax reform to create a fair and stable local tax structure, including:

Cuts in regressive sales and property taxes.
A city income tax, progressively graduated.
A city commuter tax on the over 40,000 commuters, progressively graduated.
Sales Tax Reform means Eco-Taxes: Replace the across-the-board sales tax with selective eco-taxes on harmful products.
Property Tax Reform: Tax land values, not improvements to homes, businesses and farms.

Eight, Sustainable Economy . The Metropolitan Development Association's Vision 2010 study several years ago identified environmental services as the global market in which Syracuse was best positioned to be a world leader due to the local cluster of business and academic assets in this field. It wasn't tourism. It was environmental systems. Syracuse should be the environmental engineering capital of the world.

Syracuse can be the model for ecological sustainable economy based on renewable energy, biological waste water treatment, organic farming, zero-emissions manufacturing, recycling, and other ecological technologies. This is where our public investments and technical assistance should be targeted, not to the tourist traps and gated communities the Pyramid Companies have planned for us.

Which brings us back to this place, the Inner Harbor . The Green Party wants to see a People's Waterfront here, not Destiny USA over in Oil City and an exclusive enclave of condos for the rich here around the Inner Harbor . We want a People's Waterfront with p arks and public access, mixed-used development, and mixed-income housing.

With the policies and institutions for Economic Democracy I have outlined, we can make a People's Waterfront happen here in the Inner Harbor, we can rebuild the depressed Near West Side and South Salina Street corridor, and we can empower every neighborhood in the city to develop the businesses and public amenities they need to make them great neighborhoods in which to live.

Economic Research Associates, Report for Carousel Center Expansion Economic Impacts Assessment , Submitted to Syracuse Industrial Development Agency, June 8, 2000 .

William P. Barrett, “Willis Carrier's Ghost,” Forbes , May 29, 2000 .

Franklin Delano Roosevelt , “Statement on the National Industrial Recovery Act,” June 16, 1933 .

Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, “ New York Taxes Hit Poor and Middle Class Far Harder Than the Wealthy,” January 7, 2003 , Washington DC .

Vision 2010: An Economic Development Strategy for Syracuse and Central New York , Prepared for the Metropolitan Development Association by SRI International, June 1996.