When you discuss the NYC budget with city council member Charles Barron (East New York; Brooklyn), you come away with the distinct impression that he is one elected-official who spends a lot of time going through the many items listed. He was the only council member who voted against its adoption; and this isn’t the first time he has voted it down.
Over the past nine years, Barron has tried to expose the NYC budget for what it is: a legal way to perpetuate system-maintenance with taxpayer-monies. It’s a document which seeks to maintain the status-quo at all costs. It rewards the greedy and screws the needy. Instead of being an instrument for social-transformation and much needed change in the way we do politics in this city, it has become a reactionary tool captured by special interests of the wealthy and powerful.
To Barron, a budget simply undresses your priorities and clarifies your values (my words/my interpretation of what he said and meant). To him, it is obvious that the mayor (Bloomberg) and council speaker (Quinn) are hopelessly out of touch with the needs, pains and sufferings of average new Yorkers: especially those who are colored.
He gives an immediate example. In 2002 when he came to the council, Barron said the budget was roughly 40 billion dollars. Today it is roughly 66 billion, and yet the number of slots allocated for summer youth jobs has dipped from 53,000 to 31,000. He gives another example: day care vouchers which helps single parents (especially) stay in the brutally competitive job-market, keeps being cut more and more with each passing year. This has the effect of costing poor and middle class parents more money for a vital need. He claims that you cannot even begin to calculate the long-term costs of these cuts in subsidies and spaces.
He argues that given the city has recently identified a surplus in its coffers, then why should there be cuts in either of these areas. He also took offense with the mayor spending 100million dollars to build a theater in Tish James’s district. A place for people to produce, act and watch Shakespeare’s plays. He said that with the same money we can build 10 community centers for young people (in ten different council districts) and have an immediate impact on crime reduction.
Barron says that there are usually around 150,000 applicants for summer-youth jobs. With a few extra millions, he says all applicants can be hired to fill gaps in our vital-service needs; even if only on a temporary basis (summer). He believes that there will be immeasurable savings relative to the costs we incur, from the social ills of having these youngsters out roaming the streets all summer: without monies in their pockets.
For starters, he says crime will drop precipitously. So too, teenage pregnancies, drug use, substance abuse, and things of that ilk. He says that petty crimes of the “quality of life” nature will be seriously impacted by simply shifting dollars away from certain areas to facilitate this annual need. When inner-city youths have very little to do -that is productive and creative- all year round (but primarily in the summer), issues around violence, vandalism, guns and gangs will dominate the social landscape and attendant conversations.
Barron says that more and more city contracts are being phased out to for-profit companies, at the expense of the community-based organizations and non-profits (or not-for-profits). He notes that the increases in city budgeting hasn’t come from inflation over the past nine years, or even from higher demands for services. He claims increases in contract allotments in near ever area of city government has gobbled up the money. He claims this is where the highway robbery takes place.
He pointed to the contracts in education spending. Barron suspects that the mayor’s rich business cronies have made a killing during Bloomberg’s tenure in office. And that’s why he believes the annual budget-dance is bogus. He says the false argument is that we have to choose between cuts in either city services or city personnel in order to balance the budget. Baron believes it can be fixed by simply increasing funding streams for city coffers. That’s why he supports a tax-surcharge on wealthy New Yorkers. He is all for a “millionaire’s luxury tax”.
He also sees the problem ensconced in the many tax breaks given to the rich and powerful individuals and individual corporations. He supports a stock-transfer tax. He supports revamping the tax code. He also supports aggressive investigation and enforcement against those who would lie, cheat, hide and steal instead of paying their fair share of taxes. He says any combination (or all) of these measures will force rich individuals and individual corporations to pay their fair share of taxes.
If we reallocated and/or shifted a little less than 2 billion dollars from the 66 billion dollar budget, Barron says that there will be no need for a single layoff of any city personnel. He said that there are 2,600 teachers who they are getting rid of through attrition. These teachers won’t be replaced thus class sizes will be higher (again) next year.
About the contract-racket, Barron sees minority and female business-owners continuing to be screwed. He said this has been going on throughout the history of NYC government. Blacks, Hispanics, Asians and other minorities (combined with white females) continue to receive less than 20 percent of all city contracts. He sees this as shameful for a city as diverse as this one.
He talked passionately about CUNY. He talked romantically about his vision for higher-education in the city. He would still love to see a tuition-free city university system (an idea/ideal I discussed with him at length, while I was his paid consultant back in the day).
Barron chaired the city council’s Higher Education Committee for 8 years prior to being stripped last year. He believes they stripped him not for his performance as chairman but because he dared to challenge Christine Quinn for speaker. To him, it was retaliation and retribution all rolled into one: and with a vengeance.
Some of Barron’s supporters have privately said to me that the new Higher-Ed chair (Rodriguez) is inept and incompetent. They claim that he is “language-challenge”. They say he can hardly speak English far less run that committee. Many complain that his thick “Spanish-brogue” makes him almost incomprehensible; although Barron himself had nothing negative to say about Ydannis Rodriguez. From the outside looking in, it appears that Barron and Rodriguez have a good relationship. It is just that some of Barron’s fanatical supporters are still smarting over what they perceive as unfair treatment, when he was stripped of his chair.
He spoke about the Peter Vallone Scholarship which was routinely funded in previous city budgets prior to his coming to the council. Back then, a high school student from any of the city’s public schools would qualify for a grant of one thousand dollars per year to attend a CVUNY college, once they obtained a “B” or better grade-point-average.
He said the stipend eventually went down to five hundred dollars. Then funding was cut from nine million to six million dollars. This year, he claims zero dollars were allocated for it. He continues to receive letters from students begging him to do something about restoring it: even though he no longer chairs that committee.
Barron says that the city still has two billion dollars in its rainy-day fund. He asks why this fund isn’t being used, since we are still feeling the after-effects of a severe recession. With unemployment amongst blacks higher than 25 per cent city-wide (many blacks have dropped-out of the economy and aren’t being counted), there is a need for emergency actions in job-creation. He sees the nation-wide republican effort at fiscal-austerity being totally counterproductive. He says that once the federal government start cutting -back, they will force state, city and local governments to lay off workers. He said that these governmental entities are the largest employers of people of color in this country. Barron asks: who will feel the pain the most?
Rightly so, it makes no economic sense to cut back government spending immediately coming out of a recession. This could lead to a double-dip recession; and if that happens people of color will suffer beyond measure. He said that in a budget where at least 2.6 billion are given out in tax breaks to corporations and business entities, then he couldn’t vote for it. Not when workers are being laid off.
Barron went on to talk about discretionary monies at the city’s disposal. He mentioned the Health care Retirement fund and other such monies. He said that the city could utilize some of these monies to cushion the impact of layoffs and cut-backs. He said this budget was another example of budgets being balanced on the backs of poor people. He pledges to continue the fight in the council, for poor people and their needs in this city.
Stay tuned-in folks.