Publius.nyc

Thinking about at how New York City government works

QUIS  CUSTODES?

March 28, 2024 /

Who Guards the Guardians?

            One lens through which New York City government in the 20th Century has been viewed is the decades long clash between elected officials who were products of political machines and self-styled “reformers” The classic discussion of this history is Sayre and Kaufman’s “Governing New York City: Politics in the Metropolis.” Today, there seem to be no reformers – no public voices who advocate for what they regard to be in the best interest of all New Yorkers. They have been replaced by advocates for particular communities and personal interests. How did that happen and is it important?

The machines were political operations built up from neighborhood organizations that whipped votes for their candidates in exchange for patronage and contracts. Jimmy Walker, William O’Dwyer, Robert Wagner and finally Abraham Beame were products of the city’s organization political clubs. The machines generally dealt in ethnic politics and rallied around Irish, Italian and Jewish candidates. The machines were regarded by reformers as corrupt, inefficient and exclusive – particularly excluding Black and Hispanics from power. The most famous reformer was, perhaps, Fiorello LaGuardia. Both John Lindsey and Ed Koch came up each through reform ranks. Reformers saw themselves as advocates of merit hiring, competitive contracting and professional public administration. Before LaGuardia, New York was exclusively a machine politics town. 

            The reformers had supporting them an array of political and civic organizations. There were “reform” as well as “organization” neighborhood political clubs that gathered nominating petitions and supported their own candidates in elections. But also, importantly, there was a range of “good government” civic organization, the boards of which were dominated by the city’s commercial and social elite, like the City Club, the Women’s City Club, the Municipal Art Society, the Regional Plan Association and the Citizens Budget Commission, among a dozen others, that advocated for merit hiring, competitive bidding of contracts and high-quality service delivery of government programs. [It is interesting to note that among the most high-profile reformers of the first half of the 20th Century, at least at the beginning of his career, was Yale graduate, Robert Moses]. There was a kind of yin and yang between machine and reform control of city government throughout the second half of the 20th Century in mayoral elections. The electorate went back and forth between choosing mayoral reformers and organization candidates. 

However, this began to break down with the election of the city’s first Black mayor, David Dinkins, who came up through a parallel Black political organization – and was not part of the conventional white ethnic political clubs. With the advent of media driven mayoral campaigns, the strength of the machine and reform organizations broke down, with advertising replacing organizing in turning out the vote. While many of mayor Michael Bloomberg’s initiatives mirrored the priorities of earlier reformers, he was independent of political organizations (in part because he was able to finance his own campaigns) and didn’t come out of reform political clubs (and ran as a Republican, as did Lindsey). But Rudolph Giuliani and Bill DeBlasio and would be difficult to locate on a machine/reform scale.

            Our current mayor, Eric Adams is a product of a multi-racial Brooklyn old style political machine which has continued to function into the 21st Century. He is also, importantly, a former city employee and union member. But significantly, there is no reform counterbalance to his old school political policies. Like previous machine operatives he places loyalty and ethnic politics ahead of reform type of “professional” government. An interesting argument that Mayor Adams occasionally makes is that there isn’t much evidence that “professionally” managed government was actually more responsive to local communities or delivered better services than did community embedded local political club driven machines. I am unaware of anyone today, either elected officials or visible civic organizations, advocating for traditional good government policies. Criticism of Mayor Adams is either political or personal. 

Where are today’s “reformers.” There aren’t any, as far as I can see. I would argue that just about everyone involved in local government today has a vested interest in the way things are. There are no serious voices that advocate in “the public interest” in local politics. While there is an important argument that the past promoters of reform were actually advancing the interests of the white, privileged New York establishment (aka “the ruling class”), and there is nothing besides self-interest governing politics and government, I am not so totally cynical. I do believe that there is a place for merit and professionalism in public administration. This absence of activism for professional local government has created a troubling vacuum in our discussion of how local government best might function. 

            Public spirited individuals came into high profile during the city’s fiscal meltdown of the 1970’s, when people like Felix Rohatyn (an investment banker) and Richard Ravitch (a real estate developer), wealthy, white, Jewish men from prominent families, pretty clearly selflessly got involved in attempting to rescue city government from bankruptcy – with not much in it materially for them. They were willing to take the risk of the possibility of failure and diminished reputations. They were prepared and able to speak truth to power. At that time there were other high-profile leaders who were in it to advance themselves, and who were, by contrast obsequious to power. But there were also a number of individuals who, in my judgement, were selfless and brave in their efforts. Perhaps that’s a difficult distinction to draw, or even bad form to do so, but after decades of work in and around city government, I think I’m in a position to make such an important judgment fairly – between the good guys and the bad guys.  I would venture to say that there isn’t anyone around today who could or would want to play that “good guy” role. 

            Some of this lack of civic leadership has to do with corporate globalization, which has produced business managers who tend not to feel a connection with any particular place. Just for example, while Chase Bank is headquartered in New York, I suspect its CEO, Jamie Dimon, would likely tell you that he is a citizen of the world, and is concerned with national and international issues affecting the bank. This is in contrast to David Rockefeller, a previous Chase CEO (although it was at the time a much more local and smaller enterprise) who was in the 60’s and 70’s active in New York affairs and founded the civic organization, The New York City Partnership. The leaders of the two great New York City universities also, I would guess, regard themselves as world citizens, and likely couldn’t name the Borough President of Manhattan. There are some people today who style themselves as local civic leaders, but I can’t think of one who isn’t using the public sphere to attract attention to themselves, is concerned about staying on the good side of the powerful and seeks principally to advance their personal or institutional interests through their civic involvement. They all have an agenda. They aren’t Rohatyn or Ravitch.

In the past, the boards of civic organizations were very much a creature of the business and institutional elite. Their leadership were personally and financially independent of city government and in a position to be critical of its operations. I might note that I believe essential to being able to play the role of independent public citizen is/was a certain amount of independent wealth. One needs to be in a position to not care about what powerful people in government and the media think about you. 

Today, strikingly, the boards of those organizations, while they include a few corporate leaders, have a disproportionate share of lobbyists who very much have a stake in the status quo, and not running afoul of those in power locally, who are the object of their lobbying on behalf of various commercial interests. For example, the highest profile civic organization in New York today is probably the Citizens Budget Commission – which sets itself out as a private sector monitor of the city’s fiscal probity. My recollection is that in the 1990’s its board was composed of representatives of entities with a stake in the business of municipal finance, investment banks and law firms. They had an interest in the fiscal integrity of local government, particularly as an issuer of tax-exempt debt. Today the chair of the CBC is a corporate lobbyist, and I count 11 other such lobbyists on the organization’s board. Because of the nature of lobbying, staying on the good side of elected officials is essential to the business. The same is true in the real estate industry, which is deeply reliant on local government and has about 26 members on the CBC board. It seems unlikely that CBC can be effectively critical of government operations given its governance.

It is worth noting, though, that recently, when Mayor Adams thought that the city was likely to face a serious shortfall of revenues, his first impulse to cut the budget in order to get it into balance. This was not how Mayors Lindsay and Beame operated (that is, deficit spending was seen as a legitimate policy) – and mayoral fealty to balanced budgets is a significant advance in the institutional culture of local government. 

Some of the retreat of civic organizations from controversy also has to do with the twelve years of Mayor Bloomberg’s time in City Hall. Mayor Bloomberg came from the business and social world of the boards of civic and cultural organizations – and, importantly, he shared their values of merit-based, data-driven public administration. As a result, the boards of those groups were made up of many friends and social acquaintances of Mayor Bloomberg and were loath to criticize him. This was most visibly true of the Municipal Art Society, which prior to the Bloomberg administration, had been in the business of suing city government when municipal actions were at odds with its advocacy of good public design, intelligent zoning, and historic preservation. MAS fired its in house attorney and dissolved its law committee early on in Bloomberg’s tenure are mayor. 

Now, when we have returned to a form of machine politics, there seem to be no prestigious voices articulating the public interest – no contemporary analog to Rohatyn and Ravitch. The city’s personnel and procurement systems are highly dysfunctional. There is no powerful group with the ability and interest in identifying those problems and offering solutions that would require a major overhaul of local government (structural challenges that Mayor Bloomberg, who was professionally ideally suited to address, may have chosen not to take on because they appeared so intractable to him and his team. Bloomberg seemed to be focused on addressing problems he was confident his team could solve during a mayor’s ordinary tenure). The groups that now exist on the public scene have extremely narrow agendas, like the present incarnation of the City Club, which is anti-development and anti-institutional and is exclusively involved with using litigation as a tool to advance its positions.

The diminishment of local press coverage is also a part of the problem. The New York Times, long a bastion of local good government opinion articles, also sees itself playing on a world stage. Most of its voices on local issues have narrow, “progressive” agendas. Certainly, there is no one at the Times with any knowledge (or interest) of the nitty gritty of how local government operates. The Post isn’t a serious newspaper, as actual facts seem to not be a priority in its reporting.  The Daily News is both resource constrained and consumed with mayhem and scandal. NY1 relies on a coterie of New York City lobbyists with vested interests to offer opinions on local politics and is oriented towards personalities and horse races. There are a number of independent websites now covering local government in a sophisticated way, like The City and Gothamist. But they have a limited audiences and even more limited resources. 

The worst part of this situation is that I don’t see a solution. Almost everyone who cares about New York City government today is someone who has an interest in it and doesn’t want to antagonize it. One of the things I learned mid-career is when there is government dysfunction it is not because public officials are incompetent, it is because those systems are the way they are because it is in someone’s interest for them to be that way. There is always someone or an interest group to oppose almost any change in the status quo. Those who don’t have a direct interest, aren’t interested. 

Translatio Erici Adams

March 14, 2024 /

Translating Eric Adams

            In the circle of white Manhattanites among whom I travel, Mayor Eric Adams is an enigma. He doesn’t seem to advance their interests, as they perceive them, and as a result they don’t understand what motivates him politically. Having had the rewarding experience of spending more than a decade working in the Southeast Queens community in which he grew up, I thought it might be something of a public service for me to attempt to explain the world view of that community and how the Mayor represents it, as best I can. Doing so requires generalizing about a community of which I am not a member, which risks, at best, inaccuracy, and at worst pejorative stereotyping – but I am willing to hazard doing so to attempt to make matters clearer to those who are perplexed. 

            Jamaica, Queens is said to be one of the largest communities of African American homeowners in the United States. Two of its zip codes have among the highest income levels in Queens. It includes the neighborhoods of St. Albans, Hollis, Springfield Gardens, Laurelton and Rochdale, unfamiliar to most white residents of Manhattan south of 125thStreet. Not only are these the neighborhoods that shaped Mayor Adams, but they are also represented by City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams (the City’s second most powerful public official) and Congressman Gregory W. Meeks. Congressman Meeks is the Queens County Democratic Chair, the ranking minority member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and the Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. While Queens member of Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,’ name may be more familiar to Manhattanites, Congressman Meeks is a far more influential and powerful figure. Arguably, southeastern Queens is New York City and State’s most politically formidable community – one about which most white Manhattanites know next-to-nothing. 

            Southeast Queens has been home to many notable New Yorkers. Congressman Meek’s predecessor, former Member of Congress, the Reverend Dr. Floyd Flake, was long the pastor of one of the city’s largest churches, Allan A.M.E Cathedral (succeeded by his spouse Dr. Elaine Flake). Former Citicorp CEO Richard D. Parsons also grew up here. In the past, a large group of well known, successful jazz musicians made Jamaica, particularly St. Albans, their home. 

            Mayor Adams represents and advances the interests of his constituency well. Many neighborhood residents are government workers – postal employees, teachers, transit employees, police and corrections officers. Among the higher income neighborhood residents are school principals and other senior administrators (and, in fact, Mayor Bloomberg’s schools Chancellor, Dennis Walcott, continues to live there and is now President of the Queens Public Library). The largest private sector employer in the community is jetBlue, whose personnel work at airports run by quasi-governmental entity, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. These folks care about the compensation and benefits received by government and union workers – and the Mayor has gone a long way towards bringing to closure a large number of public employee union contracts that had expired. Residents of Jamaica also care about public safety – both in terms of preventing violent crime, but also in terms of averting the random stopping of Black men by police. Most are car owners and are less invested in public transit. Bike lanes are not their issue. 

            What they also care less about are the public space issues in midtown and downtown that so bother us Manhattanites – like litter, street homelessness and sidewalk vending – which white Manhattan residents view as being “out of control” and where City government is viewed as failing. Not to say that they these issues don’t matter to residents of southeast Queens and Central Brooklyn, but they are certainly less important than other things. The most important issue to southeastern Queens residents, in fact, is the flooding of the basements of their homes by a rising water table in the decades since the closure of the Jamaica Water Company – a multi-billion-dollar problem with which Greenwich Village residents are entirely unfamiliar. 

            Mayor Adams is serious when he refers to himself as a “working class mayor,” and when he notes that he neither has nor needs a “degree from Harvard” to be a successful leader of New York City. He has appointed to city positions people whom he trusts with whom he has had long relationships, and individuals who are proven vote getters in areas across the city, presumably with the idea that this will be beneficial in his campaign for re-election. This has been standard operating procedure for New York City politicians for generations, particularly those of the first half of the 20thcentury who came up through political machines. While Mayors have appointed people to senior positions with prestigious academic credentials and/or high-level private sector experience, this has been a more recent and occasional practice. And I would note first, that it hasn’t been obvious that those Ivy Leaguers have proven to be more effective public servants and second, that the Mayor’s Commissioner of the Sanitation Department, on which many of the complaints I hear from my social set are focused, is an Upper East Side resident with three degrees from Harvard. 

            The Mayor is also focused on directing government contracts to Black-owned businesses previously excluded from the benefits of government largess. Some of these efforts have come under scrutiny and questions have been raised about them in the media. But pushing public dollars to Black-owned businesses, to which government lip service has been extensively paid in recent years, is definitely part of the Mayor’s agenda. Similarly, I think it can be safely said that some of the practices in which the Mayor and his campaign have engaged that have raised journalistic and white eyebrows, are, in the view of Black folks, practices in which whites in power have long conventionally engaged without public comment. It is only when people of color have taken up the levers of government, in their view, that these have become issues. 

            It should also be acknowledged that Mayor Adam’s prior position in government was as the Borough President of Brooklyn. Borough Presidents preside over small operations. Much of their time is spent cheerleading for their boroughs, attending public events, making announcements, and issuing press releases on matters of public concern. So, it shouldn’t be surprising that Mayor Adams continues to view these to be central components of his mayoralty. In any event, there is less to mayoral control of city government than might be otherwise obvious because of the decades of accreted bureaucratic structures the constitute city government, particularly in matters of contracting and employment, that tremendously constrict the effectiveness of any mayor. Mayors have all announced great sounding programs that never happen.

            It can be accurately said that Mayor Adams is fairly representing his constituency, the folks who voted for him. Further, it should be noted that we Manhattan liberals have long taken pride in our advocacy of empowering people of color and working people – giving them a voice in the deployment of government power. There is something hypocritical about complaining about how they are exercising it now that they have it. 

AUXILIO PROFUGO

December 21, 2021 /

New York City spent over $3 billion in fiscal year 2021 providing services to the homeless. In August, 2021 almost 50,000 people were housed in the municipal shelter system. The last census of street homelessness found about 4,000 sleeping in public spaces. That’s a great deal of money for what appears to be a problem that has not been sufficiently addressed by the billions of dollars invested in services for the homeless over the last three decades (The number of homeless individuals in shelters was about the same in 2013.)[1]. Advocates for the homeless would argue that those dollars spent have “improved the experience of homelessness” (as I have heard Commissioner Steven Banks of the New York City Department of Social Services state).  They would also say that since homelessness is caused by a continuing housing crisis, homelessness can’t be properly dealt with without an order of magnitude increase in the availability of affordable housing – particularly for the lowest income families. This has been the policy position of many homelessness advocates since the mid-1980’s. Will it really be possible to build “enough” affordable housing to eliminate homelessness? If not, does that mean that homelessness is a fact of urban life in New York? We suggest that some re-thinking about homelessness, its causes and how to assist those without shelter needs to be reconceptualized in order to seriously meet their needs. 

To most New Yorkers, “homelessness” means folks living in public spaces. That is, the 4,000 highly visible, generally high need people (mostly men) they see on the street. The 50,000 members of families in shelters each night probably doesn’t register with most New Yorkers. But, given how people perceive public space, most New Yorkers, if asked, would probably estimate that there are 50,000 homeless people living on the street. If you told them that them it is a mid-four figure number and that billions of dollars were being spent to provide services to the homeless, they would be suprised, since addressing the situation of the street homelessness is what impacts their lives, and their perception of public safety and quality of life in New York City. 

There is also a regularly cited claim that 100,000 New York City public school children experience homelessness each year[2]. That is 10% of New York’s school population. I recently heard the leader of a city-wide food bank say that one-quarter of New York City families are “food insecure.” This is all quite confusing. How could it be that housing prices are rising to an unaffordable level when a quarter of the population of the City could be defined by one measure as impoverished? That defies the basic rules of economics. If people don’t have money, they aren’t in a position to drive housing prices up. There is no question that inequality of income and wealth is at an unprecedented and morally intolerable level in New York City (and the US). But that does not logically lead to a conclusion that everyone who isn’t wildly wealthy lives in poverty. Plutocrats drive up the prices of ultra-luxury towers on 57th Street, not of two bedroom apartments in Briarwood. 

In addition, New York City’s affordable housing program is one of the great public policy successes of the last fifty years. Beginning with the New York City Housing Partnership during the Koch administration, and continuing through today, the City has built or preserved hundreds of thousands of affordable housing units.[3] New York City’s affordable housing programs are more robust than anywhere else in the United States and the City invests tens of billions of capital dollars in subsidizing the construction of affordable housing – in addition to the hundreds of thousands of low-income units managed by the City’s Housing Authority. Neighborhoods throughout Brooklyn, The Bronx and Manhattan were transformed by the programs subsidizing affordable housing over the past three decades. 

None of this makes any sense if you view these statistics comprehensively. Let’s try to unpack some of it.  We are by no means an expert on homelessness – although in our career in public life we have been at least tangentially involved for over twenty-five years in the issue of working to improve the situation of individuals who find themselves without shelter in public spaces. We were involved in the operation of a homeless facility and outreach program for about ten years, and then later, managed a remarkably successful outreach program in an outer borough neighborhood. That community also housed a dozen family shelters, which had external effects on their neighbors, which we worked to improve. While not a professional in the field, we have certainly been a close, careful observer of homeless policy over an extended period of time.

We’ve also had the good fortune of coming to know two of the thought leaders in the field, Bob Hayes, the founder of the Coalition for the Homeless[4], and Rosanne Haggerty, the founder of Common Ground (now Breaking Ground), and later Community Solutions, the recent recipient of a $100 million grant from the McArthur Foundation to eliminate street homelessness. We’ve learned from listening to and observing the work of them both (although neither can be blamed for any of this that we get wrong). 

Bob Hayes and the Coalition, represented by Steven Banks[5] as counsel at the Legal Aid Society, were the moving forces that created the right to housing in New York State in the landmark case of Callaghan v. Carey in 1979. (Callaghan v. Carey, 188 N.Y.L.J., Dec. 11, 1979, at 10, col. 4 (consent decree filed with N.Y. Sup. Ct. Dec. 5, 1979)). As a result of that decision, under threat of Court sanction, New York City created what is now a huge bureaucracy that evaluates claims of homelessness and provides shelter to those who are deemed to be eligible within a Court prescribed period of time. In the first years after Callahan, there were 4,000 shelter residents.[6] Today, as noted, there are more than 50,000. It may be that part of the vectors pushing this number is supply creating its own demand. 

We think most homelessness experts would say each person who finds themselfs homeless has become so for multiple reasons. Some are unable to make their monthly rent because of their poverty, and as a result are evicted. Most face a range of other challenging issues including domestic violence, substance abuse and mental health problems (which, of course, are related to poverty and lack of employment). But as statisticians often say, a relationship doesn’t prove causation. Are people mentally ill because they are poor or are they poor because they are faced with mental illness? We can certainly all agree that our society fails to provide sufficient resources to assist people coping with mental illness. These are complex sets of social problems that require complex solutions. Housing isn’t enough.

For folks facing psychological issues, particularly single adults, Haggerty’s solution, devised in the 1990s, is supportive housing. Supportive housing provides not just shelter, but also the range of social services, particularly mental health and addiction services, that enable residents to succeed in being off the streets and living in a relatively safe and stable environment. In New York City, the single obstacle preventing the creation of more supportive housing is finding sites on which to build it. No neighborhood in New York City of which I am aware welcomes supportive housing in practice (some pay lip service to it, but when sites are selected, they seem to always be in the wrong place). We know that supportive housing works, and that well-run supportive housing facilities are invisible to their neighbors. That has certainly been our first-hand experience with facilities in our neighborhood. 

Haggerty is now involved in a program called Built for Zero that works to eliminate street homelessness and has been successful across the country.[7] While her organization, Community Solutions, has a project in a Brooklyn area, to our best knowledge, Community Solutions and Haggerty have no influence over the provision of New York City’s homelessness programs. Instead, hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on outreach services to single adults living in public spaces, while thousands remain outdoors and at risk. Contracts are awarded to not-for-profit social service agencies on a geographic basis to do outreach to the homeless. Outreach workers for these extensive programs appear to be generally unsuccessful in persuading clients to accept service. Our sense is that the structure of the outreach contracting, appears to create a situation of box checking – outreach workers recording how many potential clients they have spoken to over a given period of time. It is as if it is assumed by the system that they will be unsuccessful in their efforts to engage with people without shelter. The system’s is designed is to place people in programs with available beds – attempting to fit the client to the programs (rather than finding programs that address the needs of particular clients), and treating potential clients as members of a group, rather than as individuals. 

Our experience is that outreach work requires gaining the trust of people who find themselves on the streets, learning about them from extended conversation, determining what their needs are, also, very importantly, determining what benefits they might be entitled to that they are not receiving, and finding programs that address their needs, rather than the reverse. 

New York City has also created a massive social service economy for providing temporary shelter to the homeless. The City does little of this directly. Because of Callahan, the City is literally desperate for shelter beds in order to meet its obligation to provide housing to those who in need, and contracts with some poor-quality facilities, some poor-quality providers, and as has been recently reported on a number of corrupt providers. Some of this is certainly due to the process by which contracts are services are awarded on the basis of price, which incentivizes providers to spend and do less. 

Because the City needs beds to comply with the Callaghan requirements, and it never has enough beds to meet its ever-growing need, it is loath to terminate any provider. Even the high-quality providers have become empires, paying their senior executives generous compensation packages, for some in the mid-six figures (certainly many times the salaries paid to their government colleagues) even though almost all of the income of these not-for-profits comes from government funds. Recent news reports have documented even higher pay and financial self-dealing for CEOs at entities under audit and investigation.[8] The City continues to contract with those suspect organizations because of the beds they provide. These practices cannot be justified, particularly when the homeless clients themselves often tell the media that they refuse to use shelters because of a perceived lack of safety. 

And even with the expenditure of these billions of dollars for services to those in need, the number of clients served each year does not decrease. Because the providers need to have clients to fill beds in their facilities in order to be reimbursed by government funders, this too creates the appearance of a perverse incentive – to sustain a pipeline of families claiming to be homeless, all of whom, undoubtedly are attempting to improve a housing situation they find unacceptable. 

This would all be a rather academic discussion if Community Solutions were not working in dozens of communities across the country successfully eliminating street homelessness, with particular success with veterans, in its Built for Zero program. Our understanding is that the success of Built for Zero is based on its data-driven approach, which treats potential clients as individuals. We cannot claim to understand all of the details of Built for Zero’s success, but it seems clear that working with people who find themselves without shelter to determine their needs, is quite a bit different from dealing with street homelessness as a group phenomenon as New York City does. This kind of specificity takes into account the fact that what people without shelter say they need — sometimes because of problems arising out of mental illness and substance abuse, or because living on the streets can be disorienting or embarrassing — may not be what they actually need.  Identifying potential clients as veterans opens up a wide range of available services, but accessing those services requires documentation and navigating the process of qualification. Thus, outreach workers must be trained to work with potential clients to establish this information, and then to have the persistence and expertise to obtain the required paperwork (birth certificates, discharge papers) and submit them to the Veterans Administration in the required form. Otherwise, this is a nearly impossible task. 

In our view, homelessness is not an unsolvable problem. Thinking within the current parameters that define the issue is what makes the issue seem unsolvable. The solution requires unconventional thinking. This is what we would suggest:

  1. We need to reframe the issue. When Bob Hayes founded the Coalition for the Homeless, he cleverly argued that the issue was about “housing, housing, housing.” But that was an oversimplification. The fact is that in New York City we will never build enough affordable housing to meet continuously rising demand. And, actually, housing is most affordable in places where people don’t want to live (think Cleveland, St. Louis).  Homelessness, like all social problems, is a complex one, caused by a crosscutting matrix of forces. By framing the issue as one that would be solved by building enough affordable housing, we pose it as something unsolvable. By including in the discussion mental illness, substance abuse, domestic violence and lack of income/employment, we make it the frame more complex, but also makes homeless more subject to solution.
  2. The City should go to court and seek to end the consent decree entered into in Callaghan – and eliminate the “right to housing” in New York City – which defines homelessness in such a way as to make the demand for low cost housing infinite. Empowering people to demand immediate shelter, sounds humane and reasonable, but sets an ever expanding and receding Sisyphean goal. 
  3. Prioritize the development of supportive housing and clear away obstacles to its creation. Perhaps the City Charter needs to be amended to remove the ability of local forces to veto the location of supportive housing in their communities. Those forces are often racist. The funding streams that pay for supportive services are now too many and too complex. They need to be simplified (this is primarily a State and Federal problem). 
  4. Prioritize the development of mid-rise, mixed income housing with a substantial affordable component. In our experience, these are the most successful projects (for example, 50% subsidized middle income, 20% subsidized low income and 30% market rate. While they will never fully meet the demand for low cost housing, they do promote neighborhood economic diversity. Housing that is built entirely for the lowest income band of families tends to be socially unsuccessful (think Far Rockaway), and so mixed income development is preferable. 
  5. Set a date for the elimination of street homelessness and utilize Built for Zero’s tools for reaching that goal. 
  6. After the Callaghan decree has been lifted, work to decrease the number of shelter beds as demand declines culling low quality providers. 
  7. Stop awarding contracts with shelter providers and outreach services on a lowest cost bid basis. Get rid of the corrupt and poor quality providers. Work only with operators who have demonstrated the ability to support families as they move towards permanent shelter. This can only happen if the Callaghan obligations have been terminated. 

[1] https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Social-Services/Directory-Of-Homeless-Population-By-Year/5t4n-d72c

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/nyregion/nyc-homeless-children-pandemic.html

[3] https://furmancenter.org/files/publications/AHistoryofHousingPolicycombined0601_000.pdf

[4] Now the President and CEO of Community Healthcare Network.

[5] Who recently announced that will join Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton and Garrison as its director of pro bono services at the end of the De Blasio administration. 

[6] https://www.nytimes.com/1981/12/30/nyregion/city-to-make-a-count-of-homeless-people.html

[7] https://www.joinbuiltforzero.org/our-approach/

[8] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/23/nyregion/ethel-denise-perry-millennium-care-fraud.html?searchResultPosition=1; https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/20/nyregion/nyc-homeless-levitan-de-blasio.html

OPUS SUGIT

July 7, 2021 /

Many have told us that working in municipal public service has been their most rewarding professional experience. They have talked about the opportunity to have a positive impact on their city. They have also more candidly talked about the pleasures associated with the wielding of power. Others have spoken of the interesting nature of the challenges they have faced. When we took on our role in City government we looked forward to this kind of work environment. 

However, this not been our experience. We have found working for the City of New York frequently boring and frustrating. We haven’t had much impact. We haven’t experienced that assertion of power. The longer we spent in the service of City government, the less challenging it became.

We have written previously about the ways in which the City is a progressive and humane employer. The City is particularly successful in attracting and retaining a diverse group of employees, certainly reflective of the city’s demographics, and much more so than in the private sector. For all its faults, the civil service system does provide a point of entry for skilled workers from demographic groups otherwise overlooked by the private sector. Many highly skilled recent immigrants, particularly with engineering (civil, electrical, mechanical) educations at non-US institutions are able to find employment with the City. 

While not as generous as they once may have been (for non-uniform workers), City employment benefits are still what employees in the 21st Century are entitled to expect. Health insurance options are comprehensive and inexpensive, paid vacation and sick time can accumulate, protections are in place against harassment, discrimination and retaliation of various sorts. Opportunities for training and advancement exist, particularly for front line workers. Our agency has a professional organizational development team that tries to do its best. Various messaging from employing agencies, as well as from the central Department of Citywide Administrative Service attempts to be welcoming and encourages tolerance and respect. 

But, unfortunately, and despite the systems in place, our day-to-day work experience has been of a “hostile work environment.” Generally, City work has been depersonalized, made unrewarding and is subject to frequent arbitrary exercises of managerial authority. 

  1. Lack of discretion. 

In our position we had very little discretion over our work. In previous jobs in the private sector we could actually make decisions about things. We could decide to buy things. We could initiate programs. We could hire people of our choice to do jobs. None of this was possible in City government. We had no budget authority. We couldn’t buy the tools our staff required. We couldn’t reduce or increase the size of our staff depending on the work available. We couldn’t create new ways to solve problems and attempt to implement them. We had to work with the resources already in place to perform the tasks that they were already doing. We could coach people in how to do their jobs better (which was by far the most rewarding part our job). 

For most of our tenure we were prohibited from speaking or meeting with people from outside our agency without permission. We had never experienced this before. This cut us off from information from a wide range of sources. It prevented us from collaborating with others. It made it difficult, often impossible, to solve simple problems that came to us either from other agencies or from the public. This was another means of limiting our discretion over our work. It was infantilizing and demoralizing. 

Diluting managerial decision making even more, is the institutional preference for group decision making. Most decisions required multiple large meetings. The radical democracy of City government administration meant that each had their say (although those higher up in the bureaucracy were more closely paid attention to). Often, responsibility for a decision was broadly dispersed – making managerial authority even more circumscribed. This had the advantage of making it impossible to blame anyone for a bad decision. 

2.The importance of hierarchy. 

Hierarchy was more important in decision making than experience or expertise. Decision making was about power relationships. The higher up in the pecking order one was, the more one was deferred to – regardless of one’s knowledge of the subject matter of the decision. Our experience in the private sector was that even if an individual did not have the most senior title, if they had the subject matter expertise, their advice and counsel were respected and taken seriously. In government, powerful officials made essentially random, willful decisions because they could. Policy making and discretion came with power. At the end of the day, decision making was about the excise of power by individuals who formally had it. 

This situation made work unrewarding. The further down in the hierarchy you were, the less discretion and power you had over your work and the more powerless you were and felt. Those on the bottom had their work tightly circumscribed by those above them. Given that, it is no wonder that operations level government employees are often viewed as lazy drones, attempting to cut corners, work less and of having no initiative. The system makes their jobs more boring and enervating than they might otherwise be. As result, people don’t feel invested in their work. 

We have never had a job before where going out to lunch seemed like a luxury. Those with power above us expected us to be available from about eight A.M. to about eight P.M., five days a week, and generally to be available on the weekends, if needed. If emails and calls were not responded to immediately, supervisors got annoyed. And, of course, the CityTime system, about we have written, provided no incentives to employees to make themselves available beyond nine-to-five because that time was impossible to record. 

Yes, professional employees are generally expected to take responsibility for their work, and to be available to the organization on short notice. But that generally comes with professional responsibility and control over work. Because we had so little discretion over our work, it was essentially not professional. When officials called us, they were looking for data about our work, to complain about a mistake, or to order us to do something. They were not calling to take advantage of our professional judgement; or to confer with us about decision making. Almost always, the subject of the calls had an artificial deadline associated with the work, generated by the power of the people involved – not by the requirements of the task. 

3. There are too many people.

We were rarely busy. As far as we could tell, our staff were rarely busy. Everyone tried hard to appear to be busy. Folks talked about how busy they were. Folks complained constantly about the demands made on them by their work. And yet, we spent hours, days during our tenure in City government reading. We tried to keep our reading as work related as we could – so we read non-fiction rather than novels at work. Because of CityTime and City rules, no non-City work could be done during City work hours and the City expected City work to be done at one’s desk. So, ideally, in order to comply with the rules, if one had no work to do, one was to sit at one’s desk with their hands folded, staring straight ahead (and not surfing the internet), something like in first grade. Also, seeking additional work was not done – as it was seen as getting out of one’s lane; straying into other peoples’ domains. 

We had too many people for most of the work we had to do. However, for one or two of the functions we managed, we had a very small percentage of the staff required to actually do the job that was our brief. We made do. Assigning underemployed people to the work where we were understaffed wasn’t possible; in part because it wasn’t practical (due to the work sites or the expertise required) and in part because the civil service and union rules prohibited people from working outside of their job description.

In our case, our underemployment was as a result of the hierarchy not taking full advantage of our expertise and experience, the hierarchy’s removal of discretion from our work and the impossibility of taking initiative to take on new projects or do things in new ways. That would be regarded by the hierarchy as impermissible coloring outside of the lines. Most of what we were called on to do in interacting with supervision was providing data about the performance of our business unit up the hierarchy. Often that data was found to be unsatisfactory – but we were rarely allowed to improve the way data was collected or the way in which staff work was organized.

The other task that took up our time was compliance work. Our business unit was frequently audited by both the City and State Comptrollers. Much time was spent providing information to auditors and informing them about the manner in which the work was done. As the audit reports were being written, we were required to respond to drafts of audit reports. The hierarchy was deeply involved in the preparation of these responses, requiring many meetings and drafts. The hierarchy did not contribute to the drafting, or defend the work of our business unit to the auditors and their inquiries. They did not have our backs. They sat back and criticized our work and quibbled over our drafting. They wanted to distance themselves from responsibility for the substance of the business unit’s work, which they micro-managed. We also spent a good deal of time preparing data for internal reports (many of those data points measured things that were important decades ago, but no longer had relevance. It was impossible to change them, we were told by the Mayor’s Office of Operations, because that would make the data “not comparable.” The fact that the data measured nothing of value was unimportant to them.). We took a wide range of required trainings on conflicts of interest, sexual harassment (more than once a year), government ethics and preventing various forms of discrimination. We filled out various disclosure forms. 

We spent a very small portion of our time in City government engaging in problem solving, helping people or trying to provide improved services to city residents and visitors. We occasionally suggested ways in which we might be more useful to City government, and those inquiries were never responded to. We were to keep in our lane. 

Senior people in the hierarchy seemed to always be busy. Rushing from meeting to meeting. Cutting phone conversations short with subordinates because someone more important was calling on the other line. Supervisors often seemed overwhelmed. They failed to read the many memos they demanded, prior to meetings. They seemed not to have time to respond to emails and calls from subordinates. And yet, meetings that were scheduled for an hour always had to take an hour – even if the business at had took only a few minutes. Meetings with supervisors seemed to meander along, especially late in the day. Meetings involved redundant numbers of people. Air time at meetings was frequently taken up with talk of weekend plans and the weather, as well as with endless self-congratulation about minor accomplishments. Our guess is that even many Commissioners often don’t have enough to do. 

4. No recognition of performance. 

We had never previously worked in a job for more than a year or two without being given more responsibility, being promoted and having our compensation substantially increased. We recognize that the last of these wasn’t what government service was about. What employees were rewarded for in government, though, was obsequiousness to power. It was the sole currency of the realm. The few people we saw advance were people who flattered their bosses and entertained their willfulness. This sounds naïve, maybe even trite. Of course, this happens in all organizations and bureaucracies. But we experienced nothing like this in any of my prior private sector positions. In City government, responsiveness to power was the exclusive talent being rewarded (we suppose that shouldn’t be surprising in an enterprise that is political at its heart). There was little recognition of a high level of skill, the ability to improve efficiency or increase revenue or, particularly, improving the job satisfaction and performance of employees. Being useful to the boss, or having a political network within government, was what mattered in terms of rewards and advancement. And, as we have discussed, advancement through civil service tests seemed to have little relationship to professional ability. The tests seemed not to measure anything of value for managerial positions. 

It was another dispiriting part of the work environment that it seemed not to matter how well you did your job. You did not receive recognition or reward for high performance (longevity was often recognized). We tried to praise our excellent employees for their frequent good work, and this was appreciated and had some value in an otherwise unrewarding work environment – but without the ability to provide tangible rewards they were essentially empty gestures.

For example, at one point, upon a manager’s retirement, we promoted a really excellent first line supervisor into a managerial position. This person was a woman and a person of color. However, the bureaucracy never gave this individual the increased salary or the more senior title that came with the added responsibility. After about a year in the managerial position without the raise, the person asked to be returned to her supervisory position. It was maddening. We were unable to do a good thing, even after the expenditure of considerable effort to get the person into the position.

As a result of this culture, and these often obsolete and often overly restrictive systems, City government work was, unfortunately, generally unrewarding. We suspect that this produces widespread dissatisfaction with work and poor morale. We certainly felt unchallenged and unappreciated. But then again, maybe, despite our fancy education and wide experience, we’re simply a lazy, unimaginative, useless, time serving bureaucrat. Like in the novels of Kafka, the system produces the behaviors it claims that it is designed to prevent. 

SPATIO IMPERIUM

June 22, 2021 /

            Our business unit dealt with issues involving hundreds of millions of dollars – a scale that would make decisions about them be deemed to be major in an organization of any size – even one with an almost $100 million operating budget like the City of New York. The revenue in this operation was generated in a highly technical complex markets, and our staff had years of deep expertise as to the operations and regulatory environment of those markets. Some of the important questions with which we dealt rose to the level as having to be made by the Mayor. However, between the individual with the subject matter expertise on the problem and the Mayor there are five or more layers of intermediate executive levels.

First, we would be briefed by our staff on, and have to make an initial determination regarding, the decision. Often times, we would bring a level of knowledge, expertise and experience that the line supervisor lacked to the analysis, and we were able to add some value to the evaluation of the issue. That decision would then be required to work its way up through the layers above us in the Agency, ultimately going to the agency’s Commissioner for review and decision. Generally, the Commissioner would need to be fully briefed on the question, with which he or she frequently was previously unfamiliar.

            The Commissioner would then brief the Chief of Staff of the Deputy Mayor, who would in turn brief the Mayor’s Chief of Staff, who would then set up a meeting with the Commissioner and the Deputy Mayor to brief the Mayor. The Deputy Mayor may also consult with other effected agencies, particularly the Office of Management and Budget, when there are revenue implications, and the Corporation Counsel, when there are legal issues involved or there is a possible outcome of litigation to be considered, to both get their perspective and make sure they were on board with the recommended decision. The Mayor usually has a very limited amount of time to be briefed, has very little prior knowledge of the circumstances, and is required to make a decision before the conclusion of the meeting. Generally, a recommendation is brought to the Mayor; occasionally, the Mayor is forced decided between competing agency interests and views. 

            As the question percolates upward through the bureaucracy, ideally each level should bring a broader perspective and additional information to the analysis. At the Commissioner level, across the agency. At the Deputy Mayor level, across agencies, which may have competing interests. At the Mayoral level, the decision must be considered with a citywide view. The Mayor, being the only official in the chain of command actually elected by the voters, brings the very important political perspective to the process – assessing the impact on the City Council’s members, and the vast array of competing interest groups across the City. But at each level of review going up the chain, the decision maker gets further from the person with the deepest knowledge of the facts and probably the most subject matter expertise. 

            Generally, at each level a briefing memo is prepared for the decision maker. In the lower orders of review, often the subject matter expert is consulted to look over the memo prepared for each level as the decision moves up the chain. Once the decision leaves the agency, though, the analysts preparing the memos for the Deputy Mayor and the Mayor are within each of their offices, with a review by the Commissioner’s staff before being forwarded to the principal. Also, as the decision rises more closely to the Mayor, the briefing memos get shorter – as the higher up you go the more demands there are on the decision maker’s time. Often, the Mayor gets a “one-pager” that breaks the facts and interests down into a small number of bullet points. My understanding is that the Mayor is generally handed the “one-pager” at the beginning of the meeting at which the decision is made. 

            Sometimes, as a decision rises through the bureaucracy, there are briefing meetings for each decision maker, and up to the Deputy Mayor level all of the executives at the lower levels are present to answer questions. If multiple agencies are involved, each agency sends a number of subject matter experts to the meeting. Some of these “inter-agency” meetings can have as many as fifty people present – as no one wants the decision to be made without their at least being present, and better yet putting in their two cents. As cumbersome as these meetings can be, we believe they are certainly superior in informing the Deputy Mayor and her staff about the complexities of the issue than a two page, or even a longer memo. But at the meeting with the Mayor there are generally only the commissioners involved, the Mayor’s Chief of Staff, an attorney or two, and on rare occasion the front line person with the most complete and sophisticated understanding of the facts.

            This is not a situation that is unique to big city government, as it occurs in all very large organizations; money center banks come immediately to mind as very large institutions with a wide range of operations. The challenges are to i) make sure that the final decision maker has access to the right set of information presented to them and ii) to determine at what level it is appropriate to be made, so as to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of that official’s time. To exaggerate, having the CEO of multi-billion dollar concern make decisions about which copier paper to buy is not a good use of that person’s time, and won’t necessarily result in the best decision outcome (as the CEO is unlikely to know much about copiers or copier paper unless the company is Xerox or International Paper). Also, optimizing the level at which decisions are made should improve the quality of decision making – maximizing the amount information available to the executive and the minimizing the use of more senior executive’s time. 

            What we have found in City government is that the authority to makes decisions tend to drift upward. At one time in our agency, the Commissioner’s style was to make the final decision on just about every decision. Why would this happen? The Commissioner is likely to think that this minimizes his or her downside risk. If he or she signs off on every issue, he or she will then know about everything that is going on in the organization. If they have confidence in their analytical abilities, they will feel assured that the right decision is being made in each case. Commissioners are often parachuted into agencies with which they have no prior relationship, even if they have deep subject matter expertise. They have no way to judge, particularly at the outset, the quality of staff members’ decision making, or the depth of their support for the new Commissioner’s agenda. Most often, “the outset” is all there is, as Commissioner’s tenure is probably usually about three years. But working in this manner may feel like it is in the political or short-term career interest of the official, but it is certainly not in the best interest of the agency or the City. 

This kind of thinking permeates City government – an unwillingness to delegate and a lack of trust in the decision-making capacity of other administrators. The result is that some more ministerial issues (but still important to government functions) get lost in a pile. More importantly, it means more time spent preparing memos to fully inform the executive who may have little to no knowledge of the context of what they are being asked to decide. Even with the best materials and extensive briefing, it also results in the person making the decision not necessarily being the one with the most relevant information to making an informed decision. The further up the chain unimportant decisions get, the more likely they are to get clogged in the system, and for the wrong decision to be made – as a lack of understanding of the facts and context. Managers need to feel that successful agency operations are in their personal interest – which is particularly difficult to do in the absence of the profit motive and flexible compensation systems. 

            Decisions finding the appropriate level at which they should be made is another issue that requires culture change. It’s a management issue and it has to come from the top down. Government officials, particularly those in elected office, need to work to push decision making down to the lowest possible level that has complete information regarding the content and context of the issue. This takes a long term view. Incentives have to be created to encourage high and mid-level managers to do the same. Getting decisions made at the correct level makes the process move faster and the outcomes better. Doing so, also makes the jobs of those in the lower orders more rewarding – as they have more control over their work and feel like their expertise and experience matter and are being appreciated. Devolving decision making authority within City bureaucracies would go a long way to unclogging the sclerosis that afflicts government. 

            We have been asked why this type of systemic managerial problem wasn’t solved during the administration of Michael Bloomberg. Mayor Bloomberg known to be a successful manager of a large organization. His administration drew heavily on appointees from the ranks of top-class management consulting firm McKinsey. Our sense is that Mayor Bloomberg made a very reasonable determination that these institutional problems were intractable – and that if his Mayoralty was going to be successful, his administration would have to work around these problems and avoid these structures to the greatest extent possible. As a result, though, these systems and practices remain, and become even more difficult to improve as they accrete further layers.

CONVENTIO ET MODUS VINCUNT LEGEM

June 2, 2021 /

Cities buy a lot of stuff. In Fiscal Year 2020, New York City spent almost $50 billion in what is called by its budget experts “other than personal services,” most of which is stuff: vehicles, office furniture, computers, software, pencils, envelopes, etc. In some categories, the City of New York is a likely top U.S. customer by dollar volume. We were surprised (and pleased) to find on our first day in City government, a bountiful package of office goodies on our desk; the usual stuff; pads, pens, staples, paper clips, a pair of scissors. An iPhone, iPad and MacBook, a second giant computer monitor were all centrally procured and supplied in some cases after being requested, in some cases not (the second screen, the iPad). 

Getting other stuff was not so easy. Our group’s electric vehicles all had over 100,000 miles on them. When we complained, we got banged up replacement vehicles with over 80,000 miles on them and were told that we should be delighted. Someone, we suppose got new vehicles, but it wasn’t us. The data bases our group used were over twenty years old and ran on twenty-year-old servers – which during our tenure stopped being supported. The process of replacing them took years, and persistent lobbying of both our superiors and agency budget folks. One replacement application had been in development with internal City personnel for years without progress. We eventually procured replacement software from an outside supplier, which took years to get funded, purchased and implemented. Later, another, different, data base was developed internally for our group, by a different internal team, took two years to code and another year to implement – which, by City standards, was like lightening (to its great credit, the internally coded application was excellent). 

The City’s contracting and procurement processes are designed to prevent the constant government plagues of fraud and graft. There are many historic examples of gross malfeasance in City purchasing, with William Marcy “Boss” Tweed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_M._Tweed) and the Tweed Courthouse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tweed_Courthouse) as, probably, the most high profile examples. Without net profit as a metric to determine efficiency as in the private sector, the City is forced to replace it with layers and layers of process to make certain that no one is being personally benefitted from City purchases and that the City is getting the best products at the best prices from its contracting and procurement processes. The system also attempts to ensure that the City has adequate remedies when products fail and services are inadequate. There are hundreds of people employed by the City to monitor this – each with his or her own narrow list of boxes to check-off as contracts go through the system.

Outside of the City’s Office of Management and Budget (which allocates resources), and Office of Citywide Administrative Services (which includes the City’s central purchasing arm) there is a large Mayor’s Office of Contract Services that oversees this system. Unfortunately, while the system may protect the City from fraud and graft, it results in its own serious inefficiencies and failures. In our judgement, the most obvious problem with the system is that too many hands are required to touch each contract and procurement: there are too many steps as a result of the many checks involved in approving each contract. We would guess that this comes from accretion. Each time a new scandal has erupted out of a city contract gone bad, the City Council has risen to the occasion, and added a new layer of protection, which has increased the amount of oversight and the number of people who review each procurement. The result is a complex and lengthy process, with a long series of hurdles and no one looking at the big picture of whether the thing being bought is actually the best thing at the best price. 

We were recently involved in the procuring of a service, which highlighted the function’s dysfunction. In order to expedite the procurement, it was decided to utilize existing contracts with providers of that kind of service. Theoretically, therefore, these contracts had already been vetted with respect to pricing by a prior solicitation process. But this was entirely theoretical, as what was being purchased was an entirely new, and a somewhat unique service. Because only companies with existing contracts could be considered, this limited the procurement to three entities. Only two of those companies bid on the contract. The two bids were in the high six and low seven figures — $500,000 apart. It seemed like a lot to us, given the service being requested. The proposal accompanying the higher bid was clearly superior. When we spoke with a colleague involved in the procurement about the magnitude of the higher bid they shrugged it off as being about what they expected, and certainly within the “available” funds. A negotiation then took place to render the vendor’s “best and final offer” (called a BAFO). The company automatically knocked ten percent off the bid price. There was no detailed discussion about the hourly fees being charged, or the number of hours the company claimed were required for the job. As the contract was being drawn up and awarded, we discovered that, in fact, there was “no money left in the contract” with this vendor, and the process for having more funds budgeted for the company would take an additional nine months. Then, all of a sudden, for reasons that were something of a mystery to us, the procurement became a priority, the funds were appropriated and approved by OMB, and the contract was able to proceed. The basis for the end run around the procurement process, turned out to be false, but a workaround was found to the problem – creating an end run around the end run. We can’t imagine that this is what the drafters of the City Charter had in mind to protect the public fisc.

We might also note that the vendor is a large, national firm, the principals of which no doubt earn at least high six figure incomes – which the City is likely supporting through this contract – probably not through the hourly rates being charged (which seemed reasonable for the services being provided), but through the inflated number of hours quoted in the proposal/contract. This is a considerable problem facing City purchasing, put in highest relief by social service contractors, the CEO’s of which often receive compensation much greater than that of civil servants, even the Mayor. At one such agency, with nearly a $100 million in government contracts and very little other revenue, the top executive is paid around $400,000. 

There are many steps to the getting of stuff in City government. After a relatively short time (less than a decade) within the bureaucracy, we are a novice at how this all works – and we are sure that there is much more detail than we are able to identify. First, funds must be secured. A request from the lower orders has to make its way up the chain of supervision to the top of an agency – generally to its Chief Financial Officer and Commissioner (this is true, no matter the size of the request). Most requests die on the way up, or at the end – being determined to be unimportant relative to other priorities. If a request survives that gauntlet, it then goes to the agency’s budget staff to package up properly and send to OMB for view. The City’s budget agency wields tremendous power. It is responsible for making sure that at the end of each fiscal year the City has only spent what has taken in in revenue. It does this, in part, by turning down most agency requests (this is, in part, in order to make room for the Mayor’s new requests, which, obviously, take priority). Given the scale and scope of City government, and its many moving parts, this is a herculean task. Requests can languish indefinitely at OMB, without actually being turned down. Those requests that are approved by OMB return to the agency’s budget staff for procurement. 

Procurement is a highly formalized process involving the announcement of the purchase in the City Record (a daily publication of the City containing its formal legal announcements of hearings, new rules and purchases), and the solicitation of bids from vendors. In general, the lowest bid from a “responsible” bidder is required to be selected. The system has tried to bleed as much discretion out of this process as possible, in order to eliminate the possibility of malfeasance. This creates its own set of problems – because the quality of the product or service of the lowest bidder is often suspect, and the definition of “responsibility” has to do mostly with prior performance on City contracts (this isn’t much of a metric since, as we’ve previously discussed, contract terms are rarely enforced, and poor performance is often excused) and involvement in the criminal justice system. In order to prevent illicit interference with the system, agency staff’s hands are very much tied. 

We experienced this problem first hand outside of government when dealing with a huge social service provider which had been selected for a homeless services contract based on a low bid. The provider’s facility had serious negative external effects on the adjacent neighborhood.  When we met with provider’s representative, they pled lack of resources as a reason for the bad situation. It was clear to us that the provider had procured low quality security services and didn’t have enough professional staff to adequately manage the facility. We were surprised to learn after doing a little research that the provider had hundreds of millions of dollars in City contracts. We assumed this was because they were the low bidder on these procurements. But for the City to consider the quality of services being offered in selecting an operator for a facility for the homeless would be to require some civil servant to exercise some level of discretion. How to avoid favoritism, ensure quality service provision, and not be overcharged for the service being offered is a conundrum. We would err on the side of permitting the injection of some amount of judgement as to the quality of the services being provided to be included in the process. 

It is interesting to note, as a side matter, that lobbyists and prospective vendors were often asking to meet with us and our superiors to promote their products and services. This is a lot of what lobbyists seem to do – secure meetings for vendors with City officials. We couldn’t figure out why this might be the case since the procurement process was so severely constrained. Did those companies know something we didn’t know? Quite possibly. But if there was some benefit to the vendors from these meetings, the substance of that benefit was above our pay grade. If more discretion were allowed in the decision making over purchases, such meetings would be problematic unless highly structured by appropriate rules. 

Once a contract has been awarded to a vendor, a contract generally has to be drawn up, and we have discussed at some length the many attorneys who get involved in contract drafting and the results from that process. We will decline the pleasure of repeating that analysis. A contract having been agreed to, then the many hands again start to touch it. The vendor must enter its information into the City’s complex PASSPort system, the purpose of which is to weed out “irresponsible” vendors. The system keeps track of companies that owe the City money (in the form of taxes or fines) or that have defaulted on prior city engagements. The contract is then reviewed by the staff at MOCS. It is their job to make sure that all the required boxes have been checked – including whether the bidding process has been done properly, whether the procurement has land use or environmental implications (requiring an additional year-long land use review) and whether PASSPort has approved the contract. Upon MOCS’ approval, the contract then goes to the Office of the City Comptroller for what is called “registration.” Registration is essential, because it is the prerequisite to a company’s actually being able to submit a bill and be paid for the product or service it is providing for the City. Generally, the Comptroller’s review is pro forma, and if thirty days go by after a contract has been sent to the Comptroller for review and the Comptroller has taken no action, the contract is deemed registered. But the Comptroller also has the right (and, perhaps, the obligation) to fully review once again whether all of the proper steps have been taken in the issuance of the contract or procurement. The entire review process generally takes six months, once a procurement has been awarded. 

Is all this process useful or necessary? In our judgement, no. A hard look is required at the many steps to attempt to eliminate as many of them as possible – particularly those that are duplicative. 

For example, the City Charter establishes an office of the Comptroller to monitor contract compliance with various processes, rules and regulations. Review by both MOCS and the Comptroller is probably duplicative. Certainly, the Mayor’s office would rather catch problems before they get to the Comptroller’s attention (the Comptroller often being a political rival of the Mayor’s), but that doesn’t seem like a valid policy reason for an additional labor intensive and time consuming process. An even more fundamental change to the system might be to push budget making authority down further into the bureaucracy – allowing operating unit heads to control their own budgets – so long as they don’t overspend them. Agencies’ have budgets, and they should be able to allocate funds within those budgets. Similarly, agency units should be given budgets and have the ability to allocate resources within them. OMB’s role should be to ensure that agencies don’t overspend those budgets – not to pre-approve every expenditure. Again, there doesn’t seem to us to be much benefit to the City for every agency expenditure to have to be individually approved by central agency budget staff. Devolving budget authority closer to those making the expenditures would like improve the quality of decision making and expedite the process. Forcing every decision through OMB and agency fiscal staff makes the existence of budgets essentially meaningless. 

Should the City bite the bullet of allowing some discretion to bureaucrats to review bids for quality, with the added risk of at best arbitrary and at worst corrupt decision making? Probably. The risk is likely worth the improvement in City functioning. We believe that the biggest obstacle to reform of this system (besides the protection of bureaucratic turf) is the fear of tabloid stories about abuse of discretion and the waste of City funds buy bureaucrats – no matter how trivial. No one wants to be accused of allowing graft of corruption occurring within their zone of responsibility. Is the system as presently structured entirely free of graft and corruption? Probably not. Would a streamlining of the process produce a material increase in malfeasance? Also, probably not. And, as we have previously mentioned, the cost of the system, is probably orders of magnitudes greater than the marginal amount that it prevents from being misspent. 

PRIMUM EST FACIEMUS: ET OCCIDIT OMNEM SCRIPTOR ADVOCATORUM

May 18, 2021 /

            Look, we were the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, we get it, but the City of New York has too many damn (not my first choice swear word) lawyers. The City’s Law Department has a thousand lawyers. You read that right. And each agency also has its own legal department. We would doubt that the City even knows how many attorneys it has filling attorney positions (and the position we occupied, was a managerial, non-legal, position, as we were frequently reminded by our legal colleagues). There are about 60,000 lawyers practicing today in New York City (it was much more pleasant when we started practicing in the 1760’s and there were only a couple of dozen of us. Even Aaron Burr, wasn’t that bad a guy). Let’s say there are 2,000 lawyers working for the City – that’s over 2% of the total number. And the City tends to lose. For example, the City paid out over $600 million in tort claims in 2019 alone. That’s a crazy number.

            There are and have been some tremendously talented, dedicated and productive attorneys working for the City. Len Koerner, who was, for many years, the City’s chief appellate lawyer, was the most effective legal advocate it has ever been our privilege to observe in court. Working without notes, Len’s command of the law (and ability to cite particular cases) and deft ability to respond to judicial questioning were remarkable. He admirably represented the City for decades. We have worked with attorneys with expertise in real estate, telecommunications, condemnation, zoning and housing law, for example, who are/were the top practitioners in their respective fields of expertise and who were deeply dedicated to public service. 

            But the culture of the Law Department is bizarrely dysfunctional and given the number of attorney positions and the City’s limited ability to compete in the market for legal talent, there are a lot of simply not very smart people practicing law in positions of responsibility for the City. While the Law Department and its chief, the Corporation Counsel, are, in theory, the City’s lawyers, the institution of the Law Department, has its own interests which often trump those of the City’s legal, financial and policy interests. But on legal issues facing city government is the last and final word. 

            City attorneys travel in packs. It is impossible to go to a meeting in City government where legal questions are at issue where fewer than two attorneys are present. Often there can be as many as ten. And City lawyers frequently complain that they are understaffed. If they sent half as many bodies to meetings and shortened the length of those meetings by half, they would quadruple their output. The large numbers of lawyers at big meetings are the result, in part, of the expertise within the City’s legal cadre being sliced razor thin, as well as no one’s being willing to defer or delegate to anyone else. City lawyers suffer from the worst case of FOMO (fear of missing out), we know of – and they were doing so decades before FOMO became a thing. We have been to meetings that included lawyers expert in administrative law, litigation, zoning and planning, the building code, the Board of Standards and Appeals, economic development and the fire code – from both agencies and the Law Department – at one meeting. Not only is this wasteful, but it is also counterproductive. 

            In our legal career we have never been in an environment where attorneys are so disrespectful of the expertise and experience of others. Position and seniority are provided deference, but not subject matter knowledge. We have been in large meetings at which we have been the only attorney with expertise in an area of commercial law (having actually had extensive experience in commercial transactions outside of government), where all in attendance, regardless of subject matter knowledge, have voiced their opinions – and all opinions have been equally regarded by senior decision makers. Often, the loudest voice, the biggest bully, carries the day. A kind of radical equalitarianism prevails. If you scraped by at “Solomon” Law School or clerked at the Supreme Court, your opinion carries equal weight. If you have dealt with the subject matter for decades, or you just graduated from law school – all get to have their say. Again, no matter who has what level of expertise and experience, the Law Department representative has the last word.

There is a lovely bit of idealistic equality here – but it doesn’t result in thoughtful legal decision making. In addition, City government is filled with graduates of law schools that are, shall we say, not that of Kings College, and who simply aren’t very skilled or very smart. That’s a harsh judgement, but we are the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, and we were privileged to study at Kings and read law with Benjamin Kissam – so we are, admittedly, a legal and educational snob. Notwithstanding our former high position, we have never in our career had our informed judgement so routinely ignored – and prior to City government we worked with and for some significant reprobates. 

            All decisions are group decisions. No one person has responsibility for legal decision- making on any issue. This is probably in order to prevent responsibility from affixing to any particular lawyer for a decision. Judgments both major and minor are the results of meetings to discuss the issue;  and there are often multiple meetings on any particular issue. This also does not result in quality thinking. It enables the last and loudest voice from the Law Department to carry the day. It protracts the process. We have been involved in City contract negotiations over a $500 million matter that went on for two years after a default. We were, at least on paper, the person most responsible for the subject matter – and yet we were only tangentially involved in the negotiations – which were conducted by agency General Counsel and the Counsel to the agency’s Commissioner (yes, the agency had both), supported by an agency attorney with subject matter expertise as well as litigation counsel from the Law Department. Yes, there was plenty of legal talent on the matter without need of my aid. After the deal had been cut, different Law Department attorneys with sovereignty of this particular bailiwick, and who admitted that they did not have the requisite financial expertise to understand the transaction, flyspecked the innumerable legal documents for months. The number of irrelevant issues raised by Law Department attorneys, and by other agency attorneys (without particular subject matter expertise) called in to add their wisdom, were both breathtaking and ridiculous. 

            Having practiced in the private sector and interacted with City government for decades, we came to learn that while the City builds layers upon layers of protective vehicles into its documents, accreted over decades of drafting and redrafting,  IT ALMOST NEVER EXERCICES ITS RIGHTS. When were first assigned to negotiate a contract with the City as a young lawyer, we engaged in trench warfare, negotiating line by line and word by word – as one would do in a multi-million dollar private sector transaction. After a couple of decades of experience, we learned that this was pointless. The goal in negotiating with City government is to get the contract signed and approved; and to GET THE CHECK. If the deal were to go south, you should be fully aware that the City is unlikely to assert its contractual rights. The City often demands substantial security in the form of letters of credit and performance bonds in its agreements, and its negotiating posture appears to revolve around the minimization of risk. But we have never heard of the City actually drawing on contract security. And facts on the ground are dispositive. Once a private party is in the system to get paid, has title to real estate or has its equipment in place, the City rarely reverses course. Once you are in, you are in for good – regardless of how badly behaved a counterparty you are. Smart businesspeople and attorneys with experience with New York City government are well aware of this (It’s also amazing, though, how many sophisticated people aren’t!).

            City attorneys spend an inordinate amount of time congratulating themselves on how excellent they are, how avaricious and incompetent private sector lawyers are, and how successful City lawyers have been in getting their way. First off, they are generally incorrect. Secondly, they often think this because they have been outsmarted. Third, the City does often get its way because of its enormous bargaining power (it is has a $100 billion annual operating budget and over three hundred thousand employees), not because of brilliant negotiating. And last, and most importantly, it doesn’t matter because the City doesn’t enforce the provisions of its agreements anyway, and when it attempts to do so in court it generally loses. 

            The most obnoxious practice in the Law Department is putting notes and questions in the margins of documents sent to them for review. Law Department attorneys put in the margin whatever comes to mind; important, unimportant, irrelevant, the result of gastro-intestinal distress, it all goes in there. Law Department attorneys never redraft or suggest language. They just comment. So, agency attorneys and professional managers have to guess at what their Law Department colleagues are looking for. You redraft, and they tell you in a marginal note, “No, that’s not exactly right,” and send it back to you for another round. This can go on for months. There is one widely revered very senior attorney at the Corporation Counsel, with decades of Law Department tenure, who has the last word on a wide range of financial transaction documents who i) never provides drafting, ii) can offer as few as one comment in a round of review, iii) can continue to provide comments for endless rounds and iv) has no sense of time or priorities. Stuff sits on his desk for months. But he is respected for his ability to find problems with documents. It is not his, or his colleagues, job to solve problems. They find problems; they issue spot like on law school exams.  When we were trained as an attorney, we learned that it is a lawyer’s job to solve problems. It is not clear to us whose interests the New York City Law Department is representing in pointing out, rather than solving, legal issues. Most of the issues they raise are so arcane as to not possibly protect any material interests of the City of New York. It’s a kind of academic exercise with the impact of bogging projects down for months and years. This has become a serious impediment to creative problem solving and new initiatives in City government. No one in authority puts a stop to this. Few City attorneys feels responsible for getting matters to closure. 

There might be some virtue in this course of dealing if the City’s contracts were so iron-clad that the City had a fearsome reputation for winning motions to dismiss in lawsuits (a motion that stops a lawsuit from proceeding shortly after a complaint commencing an action has been filed) – but the opposite is true. The City regularly gets bogged down in Jardyce v Jardyce like conflicts (except dealing with major economic and policy issues) that spend years in court without resolution. We were involved with the settlement of a six-year-old case filed by the City that was celebrated by colleagues and by press releases as a major win for City government, but, in our experienced estimation, was the best possible result for the interests of the City’s adversary in the litigation. They got exactly the result they were looking for when they breached their contract with the City years before.

STULTI FUERUNT OMNES NOS IN DIEBUS NOSTRIS

May 11, 2021 /

            The scandal plagued, $700 million Citytime system (https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/15/nyregion/contractor-in-citytime-payroll-scandal-to-pay-record-500-million.html) was the bane of our work life existence. Conceived of during the administration of the former “America’s Mayor,” and completed during the term of the technocratic, billionaire Mayor, Citytime was an attempt to move the City from the pencil and paper keeping of time records of employees into the blazing efficiency of the mid 20th Century. The system was designed to maintain the employment records of over 300,000 workers in scores of agencies – from cops to accountants – all in the same system. Citytime is driven by a program design that every city worker should devote every precious minute of that employee’s seven-hour work doing the people’s business – and nothing else – whether walking a beat, teaching a class, inspecting buildings or sitting on one’s butt at a desk. Woe be to him or her found not to be rendering to the City the full measure of 35 hours a week (or, more accurately, given the way the system works, 70 hours every two weeks). Unfortunately for the programmers of Citytime, no one outside of an assembly line actually works that way.

            When we first joined the City’s employ, no one provided us with any training as to how to put our hours into Citytime. But, if we wanted to get that paycheck every two weeks (lagged by a week, in order to buy the City an extra week of float, to ensure that payment isn’t received for time not worked, and to make clear to City employees that the City didn’t give a fig about them as human beings from the outset), one had to make sure one entered one’s time into the system. Once logged in (a challenge in itself), on the initial screen in Citytime one sees fourteen boxes below the seven days of the week, where one is to enter one’s start and finish times. Non-managerial employees have stated work hours, to which they must adhere. Thank goodness, being on the bottom tier of managerial workers, we had some flexibility as to when our seven hours of daily toil might take place (with an hour or two of daily leeway). One checks a box to create fourteen more boxes into which one enters the beginning and end of one’s lunch period (mandatory for non-managerial employees). 

            The system seems to have dozens of toggles, most of which we have never used. It allows for the entry of the normally routine paid vacation and sick days – as well as many other permitted paid and unpaid uses of workdays (like jury duty). Two hours of leave time appeared in the system available for each COVID vaccine appointment (as we got our shots on the weekend, we used the time to go to a museum on a work day). The system made no accommodation for remote work – as until the pandemic, remote work was absolutely verboten for City workers (under the belief, we assume, that without City workers being on-site, in the office, they would be doing the heretical non-city work during city time). This made the system even more ridiculous for the 80,000 City office workers who were required to telecommute during the pandemic. We made do (and took quite a few naps).

            We struggled to deal with the system as a managerial employee, who was called on to work non-continuous nights and weekends – since other than for the lunch break, the system only recorded start and finish times. One was forced to provide inaccurate information. For example, if you ended your day at 5:30, and then spent from 8 to 11 on phone calls with the boss, you either put in 11 as the end of the day (even though you commuted and had some quality time with the dog sometime between 5:30 and 8) or you added the three hours onto 5:30 and entered that you ended the day at 8:30, which you actually didn’t do. We constantly wondered whether some timekeeping Gorgon was going to descend on us, dragging us to Citytime hell for gross malefactions in accurate timekeeping. 

            Our initial major run-in with Citytime occurred during our first long vacation from City employment. Being a responsible person, with (supposedly) managerial responsibility, we stayed in touch with the office while in Europe, spending as much as three hours on a couple of days on City business (much to dismay of Mrs. Publius) during a two-week trip. When we returned, we entered the daily time we spent on City work and recorded the rest of each day as vacation time (which was tracked within the system as hours accrued, rather than days. One earned so many hours of vacation and sick time for so many hours of paid work time). We submitted our data into the system and received back a flamer from the timekeeping Gorgons – “YOU CANNOT DO THAT.” It was then explained to me (for the first time after a year of employment) that the system requires each managerial employee to record seventy hours of work during each two-week pay period (allowing for some flexibility in hours among the two weeks). But equally importantly, one must record at least one hour of work in each day during the pay period. If less than seventy hours were recorded, the balance must be made up with leave time. If an hour a day was not recorded for every day during a five-day week, then the week must be taken as leave time. So, the system was designed to dis-incent working while on leave. In our previous experience in the private sector, while we generally were provided with four weeks paid vacation (the City provides new employees with two paid weeks, regardless of seniority), no one paid much attention to how much vacation time we took, because we were always available while out of the office, and often spent full days working during crises or major projects while at the beach. The City’s gargantuan system provided no means for such flexibility. It actually is designed to punish it. Maybe this makes sense for sanitation workers or police officers, but it is nonsense for senior managers. 

            Given the weaponization of infractions by jealous or disgruntled co-workers, and the Javert-like mind-set of the human resources Gorgons, it is important to toe the line and do it right. We were often receiving communications from HR that we had not followed the system correctly and were being docked for this or that. The system required doctors’ notes be provided for sick time (like in third grade). The system required one’s supervisor (or in my case, where our supervisor couldn’t be bothered with ministerial tasks, the supervisor’s designee) to check a box in the system next to one’s time record to approve it, in order for a paycheck to be issued. We were often chasing after our supervisor’s designee (a loathed colleague, who was both a bully and the very model of an inflexible bureaucrat) to beg them to approve our bi-weekly pay records. 

            Making matters more fraught, was the fact that we were rarely kept busy full-time while in the City’s employ. We would estimate that our job called for our complete attention for about three hours on most days. We had to find ways to fill the rest of our time that would make us appear to be busy – but not doing work that was proscribed. This included not only the writing of books or essays which might be published (we had a friend who was heavily fined for writing an op-ed for a newspaper on a City computer – for which he was paid $50. Of course a bureaucratic foe had ratted him out), but also non-profit board service or pro bono work of other kinds. Such work on City time was against the rules. So, we read The New Yorker and books (we tried to make them books at least tangentially related to our work. We did not read news websites or shop on-line during business hours, which appeared to be a major occupation of some of our equally underemployed colleagues). We also took long lunches. The truth can now be told: we almost never recorded a lunch break; first because we felt we were a slave to our iPhone at all times (both to phone calls and emails.) and because if we did, we would NEVER have been able to record 35 hours during many weeks. Because the time keeping system really seemed to prefer that time recorded as working hours be spent at our desks, we also spent many, many days staring at the clock at 5:30 or 6 PM (depending on when we arrived) in order to appear to be performing an actual seven-hour day. We were not presented with the alternative of ditches to dig (and perhaps fill back up) or assembly line widgets to produce when not otherwise occupied with the people’s business. 

            We do think we provided good value to the City for our work – but we suppose everyone does. We were effectively available to the City seven days a week, during all of our waking hours (the City iPhone lived on our nightstand). We brought to the City decades of relevant experience in a specialized, highly technical role. We were occasionally called upon to work late or on weekends. But we sat at our desk filling time for many unproductive hours without actual City work to do, as a slave to the inflexible (notwithstanding its many mysterious toggles) Citytime system. 

MALO PERICULOSAM, LIBERTATEM QUAM QUIETAM SERVITUTEM

May 9, 2021 /

            The City of New York is a remarkably humane employer in many ways. The workforce is diverse in just about every manner you can imagine. We had in our business unit Hispanic folks, Black folks, South Asian people, white people of Irish, Jewish, and South and Central Asian backgrounds. We had an Ivy League graduate, and a majority of people without college educations. There was an individual in the group with only a high school degree, who had a large amount of responsibility, a relatively high salary, and the capacity to draft sophisticated legal documents.

            We found that employees were genuinely caring about each other – particularly when there was family illness – people covered for each other and were very supportive. We celebrated births of grandchildren, birthdays and retirements. Sick days were generous. The City’s health benefits were comprehensive, the retirement benefits were generous – for people who stayed with the City for more than ten years, and particularly for individuals who started their careers in City government decades ago. There were also odd benefits that one had to do a little digging to find out about – like for glasses and for the deductibles under other policies. 

            But the idea floating around (particularly in the pages of Manhattan Institute publications) that City government is full of over compensated, richly benefitted timeservers is so just plain wrong as to be practically libelous. In our experience the unions for non-uniformed employees (and we are writing here entirely about non-uniformed City employees, and those who aren’t classroom teachers) were invisible and toothless. To us, the pension benefits were essentially useless, having come to City government mid-career. They are non-portable and unavailable to those with City government for less than ten years. For those who started their work with the City within the last 25 or thirty years, the pension benefits are far inferior to what they were decades ago. The pension benefits are tiered – and the more recently you became employed, the smaller the percentage of your final salary your defined benefits would be after retirement. There are defined contribution plans available, as in most of the private sector, to which the City does not contribute. 

            There are a wide range of protections for City workers ranging from union membership to civil service. The City has a vast range of identity derived protections and trainings, including from sexual harassment and racial discrimination. It appears to be difficult to fire people – we didn’t see it happen. We did see senior people sent to remote, satellite locations to do non-jobs when new senior management was appointed. Unfortunately, those employment discrimination programs, like the board set up to monitor conflicts of interests of City workers, are more often weaponized by employees against each other, than employed to remedy cases of mistreatment. That is, one employee who has a personal issue with another employee files an, often anonymous, complaint with the relevant investigative authority in order to cause problems for his or her unliked colleague. This unleashes an investigation which has to run its course in order to provide an appropriate process; interviewing the individual about whom the complaint was made, and perhaps their colleagues (damaging the subject of the investigation’s reputation, whatever the outcome) in order to establish the facts of the case. Even if there is no finding of wrongdoing on the part of the employee, a good deal of damage to that person can be done.

            And certainly, City government being a political entity, there are plenty of politics driving personnel decisions, and many managers who misuse their authority and treat their subordinates poorly. We encountered no monitoring of bad treatment of City workers by supervisors and no sanctions for abuse of authority – as long as the supervisor wasn’t using their subordinates to do non-city work or engaging in discrimination based on suspect classifications. Treating everyone equally abusively seemed to be OK. While much lip service is paid to best practices in management, there is little training, and almost no actual execution of those best practices. Our agency had an organizational development function made up of perfectly nice people, who didn’t appear to do very much – other than run the occasional employee awards program. And those awards programs tended to recognize longevity of service, rather than outstanding performance. 

            Also odd was that the human resources function of the agency was primarily an enforcement operation – making sure that employees conformed to rules regarding time keeping, vacations, sick days and such. The human resources staff absolutely refused to assist employees in navigating the complex array of benefits and options given to City workers when they are onboarded and during their tenure with the City. A huge information dump of pages and pages of small type text, often poorly copied material describing benefit options is provided to employees at the time of employment – with no one available to assist the employee in making choices. We assume this is to avoid being blamed for providing incorrect information or poor advice. 

            However, human resources staff are eagle-eyed in hunting down errors made by employees in their domain. They are quick to point out mistakes or incomplete information in complex forms. They will contact you when you have tried to access benefits to which you may not be entitled, or when you have taken too much time off, or not provided the proper documentation to justify paid time off. At one point in our tenure, we were docked a day’s pay for taking two mandatory furlough days (during the COVID pandemic) on Christmas week. In the memo announcing the (minimally) budget reducing mandatory five furlough days, it was stated that two days could not be taken in the same week. When we signed up for our furlough days early in the pandemic no one took the time to point that out to us.

We learned a great deal about City benefits literally around the office watercolor. We had a very intelligent colleague with over thirty years of City experience who was extremely helpful in advising us about how to make the most of City employee systems and benefits. Once around said cooler, we mentioned having just returned from having an eye-exam and buying glasses. She said to me, “You didn’t PAY for that did you?” It turned out that the City had an eye care program, that paid for the full cost of the glasses and exam that we hadn’t signed up for. In the same conversation, we learned about a dental program and an obscure program for non-union managers that paid for co-pays and deductibles of other health insurance plans (on the theory that union employees received free health insurance, with no deductibles and no co-pays, and managers should be effectively entitled to the same thing). No one made mention of these benefits when we joined the City, and if materials about these programs were provided to us, we missed them. When we asked for guidance from human resources staff, we were referred to the City’s complex website. 

Civil Service

            While civil service protection was originally created early in the 20th Century as a result of civic movements to reform city government to encourage merit-based hiring and promotion, and to protect employees from political or other arbitrary decisions regarding termination, those goals got lost in the mists of time generations ago. We can see no policy goals now being advanced by civil service other than to employ hundreds of people to design and administer tests that measure nothing of use. The tenure protections seem to keep in their jobs the most belligerent employees and the lowest performers. It is civil service protection that makes motivating and managing underperforming employees difficult to impossible.

            In addition, civil service is an obscure, insiders’ game. While there is a (very well written and interesting) weekly newspaper covering civil service, and a complex series of websites providing information on when exams are given and how they work (https://www1.nyc.gov/site/dcas/employment/take-an-exam.page), only insiders seem to know about them and how to navigate them. Civil servants throughout the bureaucracy seem to be members of clans with other members of their clan who work in city government. Knowing which tests to take for which positions is far from obvious (https://www1.nyc.gov/site/dcas/employment/open-competitive-exam-notice-archive.page). And, once an individual has taken and performed well on a test, using that performance to actually secure a job can take years, and is also labyrinthian. Without a person experienced with the system to advise you, it is nearly impossible to negotiate it effectively. Of course, there is no one either at the City’s centralized personnel agency, the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (DCAS), or within the many agencies, who can or will advise you. You are entirely on your own to figure out how the system works. It is difficult for me to imagine any graduate of a top college or graduate school learning how to access the system, and then using it to secure a position with city government. The system as a result of its obscurity and complexity discourages outsiders for taking advantage of it. I also suspect that most job seekers need a job in the present, and don’t have the resources to wait the years it generally takes to secure a job through the civil service system.

            And what do the tests, test? Beats the merda out of us, actually! Although we were hired as a “provisional” employee, outside of the civil service system (and one can be “provisional” for one’s entire career, and remain outside of the system – something the gorgons of the system actively work to prevent), we took three exams in order to see what it is was like. City jobs have both a civil service title and a “business” title. The civil service title establishes which competitive test one has to take to be eligible for civil service protection in that position. The business title is the one that goes on your business card – but it has nothing to do with anything relating to compensation and tenure. The compensation for any position is related to its civil service title.

One exam, we took, for the highest level positions, administrative business promotion coordinator (https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/dcas/downloads/pdf/noes/20200128000.pdf), was taken entirely on-line, and consisted of in-putting your resume into an on-line form, which would then be scored by some poor soul at DCAS for how well your square peg fits into the square hole. Note also that tests are given irregularly and periodically, some as infrequently as one a decade. Which makes it difficult to gain access to some civil service titles. It is generally impossible from the civil service titles for administrative jobs to determine what jobs the test is actually for. Most are pretty specific though. We aspire to take the examination for ferry boat captain. Seems like a cool job – and pretty straightforward as to what the test is for.

 Notable also is that many tests have “selective certifications” associated with them. Qualifying for the selective certification, moves one to the head of the civil service list for certain positions. In our case, our agency had created a certification which was crafted to match our expertise and experience, making it a near certainty that once we had passed this examination and been placed on the requisite civil service list, and once a civil service position matching the title associated with the test became open at our agency (entirely different from an opening for the business title, for which we had already been hired), we would be a lay-up for the position. All of those various conditions could, and generally do, take years. 

Most tests, however, require going to a test center, and entering answers to questions into a computer. The contents of the tests are closely guarded, and one is not supposed to be able to prepare for civil service examinations. You aren’t supposed to know what is going to be on the test, although the unions provide materials to members regarding test preparation, and there is a company that advertises in the civil service newspaper (The Chief-Leader) that sells practice tests. At the first actual test we took, the union for people in that title handed out calculators (that performed only the DCAS permitted functions) to those waiting on-line for the test. 

The tests we took were for administrative staff analyst (https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/dcas/downloads/pdf/noes/201909058000.pdf) and associate staff analyst (https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/dcas/downloads/pdf/noes/201909061000.pdf). What those jobs do, and which one is more senior to the other, we can’t recall. What I do remember is that the exam for the lower level title was more difficult. In each case we reported to a DCAS testing center to sit for the exam. We were allowed pencils and a simple calculator. We were not permitted water or snacks. The tests were four hours long. The first test I took was in the middle of the winter. We arrived at the test site a half hour early. We stood on various lines in over-heated hallways for over an hour after the announced time for the test to begin. Eventually, after proving our identity and demonstrating that we had properly registered for the test and had paid the requisite (non-refundable) fees, we were seated at a desk with a computer, and panels on either side, to take the test. The four-hour, multiple choice, test was strictly timed, and it was after 7PM and dark when we completed the test. If one needed to pee, the time came out of your four hours. 

We were already exhausted from the long period of hall standing before the test and were totally wasted when we completed the test. We were given a “provisional” score when exiting the test center. We barely passed. We have eight years of higher education, including in law, statistics, finance and general management. We barely passed. What in God’s name were they testing for? We couldn’t tell you. The questions on both tests seems entirely unrelated to any job in city government we might think of. None of them involved functions we had ever performed in decades of work, including in senior management in very large organizations. Some of the questions had to do with performing statistical analysis involving long strings of numbers, and much work with scratch pad and calculator. Some had to do with highly qualitative personnel decisions. We suspect we got most of the mathematical questions right (which we had the opportunity to check over carefully) and some of the more qualitative decisions (which called for guessing what the conventional wisdom about the decision was). But the exam clearly tested nothing that had to do with any real job in City government. So what was the point? Testing endurance?

Making matters more arbitrary and capricious, after many years we have not received the final results of ANY of the examinations we paid for (and paying for the tests seems like a big deal to DCAS, given what is written in its materials) and took. In the case of the resume-based exam, this likely has to do with DCAS’ not getting around to scoring it – despite the fact that during the pandemic we can’t imagine what else the DCAS staff had to do. The two multiple choice tests are likely the subject to an extensive process of challenges to the answers. Test takers have the right to challenge answers they got wrong, and to argue that the response deemed “correct” by DCAS, was actually incorrect. This is essentially a complex appellate process within DCAS. At the conclusion of the multiple-choice tests, we were given extensive materials explaining this appellate process, and invited us to sessions where the answers would be provided and explained, giving the test taker with an opportunity to evaluate and challenge the “correct” answers. So, we continue to sit and wait. We are certain we will have left government service before there is any chance that we will become eligible for civil service protection. 

What civil service would have provided to me in my senior management position would be job security. While we could be removed from our position, another job would have to be found for us, for which the highest level test we passed qualified us. Likely, such a job would offer a lower salary, but we would be guaranteed that income, and the accompanying benefits, for life – as long as we didn’t do something that clearly violated the rules.

Once a test is scored, a list is created of successful test takers in order of their scores. When positions become open in the appropriate civil service title, agencies are provided with the names of the top three scoring individuals from the list to interview for the open position. The agency is able to hire for those positions only from the civil service list. Once a candidate is selected for a position, they must successfully complete a one-year provisional period before they obtain civil service protection.

 Tests appear erratically. It takes years for the tests to be scored. It takes years for the civil service lists to be created. It may take years for a person’s name to advance on a list to the point where they are considered for an agency position, and then the person must wait a year before gaining civil service status. Franz Kafka could not have devised a more dysfunctional, useless system. The tests evaluate irrelevant knowledge and skills and the process takes years. What highly trained, experienced person would subject themselves to such a hiring process? 

As a result, we have come to the conclusion that process is useless. It does not attract and retain top talent for the City. It does not protect highly skilled, mobile employees from arbitrary treatment. The system makes it nearly impossible to manage low performing long-serving staff. It simply rewards patience and longevity for those who don’t have alternative employment opportunities. We are not sure what useful purpose it serves. That being said, as noted at the beginning of this chapter, almost all of our colleagues in the business unit that we managed were dedicated and highly skilled. So, there must be something to it. But it also protects the two or three out of those thirty who are gaming the system, low performing, belligerent or clueless. 

FAS EST AB HOSTE DOCERI

April 13, 2021 /

The use in managerial circles of the term “silo” to mean other than a farm structure is of rather recent coinage. When we were studying at university many decades ago it was an unheard of usage. But the conventional wisdom has become that in large organizations “silos” are bad. 

“Silo mentality is a mindset that exists in organizations, which makes people reluctant to share information and resources with other employees of different departments within the same organization. As a result, it reduces the company’s efficiency and, at worst, contributes to a damaged corporate culture. Also known as silo thinking and silo vision, silo mentality occurs when people think that it’s not their responsibility to communicate with their colleagues or other departments. Silos in business restrict people from taking an interest in the overall success of the company.

The silo mentality mainly arises due to internal competition with other teams or individuals. As this inward-looking attitude grows within each department, it breeds an “us and them” mindset, which invariably has a negative impact on the culture and productivity of the organization as a whole.”

The negative results of organizational silos are said to be i) duplicative work, ii) routine, conformist thinking and iii) a lack of responsiveness to external stakeholders.[1]

Silos, like risk aversion, are a pervasive, systemic phenomenon across New York City government, the result of which is serious, widespread dysfunction. When we first came into public service, among our goals was to take well-considered risks and to encourage as much cooperation among employees in the same business unit, across business units, among agencies and with outside stakeholders as possible. We assumed that with more seniority would come greater capacity for risk taking and collaboration. The reverse was true. The longer we served in City government, the less tolerance there was for unconventional, non-standard managerial practices by the powers that be. Once we were assumed to understand “how things went,” the more we were expected to conform. As years past, we were compelled by the culture to become more risk averse, and less able to work with others (however, we were able to continue to support and encourage our staff to collaborate with each other – the power structure seemed not to care about that and left us to our own devices). Ultimately, all meetings with other agencies and outsiders were subject to the approval of the hierarchy. This forced us to be unresponsive and to resist collaborative problem solving. 

The first reason for the creation of an organizational silo is turf. This is self-imposed by a manager. Mid-level governmental managers have so little decision-making authority and are routinely treated so disrespectfully and arbitrarily by their supervisors that building a tiny fortress is a form of psychological protection. A manager maintains his or her self-respect and sense of autonomy by drawing clearly defined boundaries around their jurisdiction. Those who want to enter the feif must pay appropriate homage to the Lord. Their vassals are, of course, abused (as is the lord by his or herliege). Outsiders are regarded with hostility as a threat to the fortress’ sanctity and safety. If outsiders want something from the manager/Lord they must pay proper obeisance to the power of the Lord and be eternally grateful for their patronage. 

When we first entered City service, among our responsibilities was signing off on routine, ministerial agreements between another City agency and non-governmental institutions. Our role was to check with legal counsel to make sure that the form of the agreement was in good order, make a record of the existence of the document and return it to the originating agency. Our approval was required because this type of agreement tangentially touched on our agency’s jurisdiction and “attention must be paid.” Our performing of this ministerial function was treated by our colleagues at the other agency as a supreme kindness. Before our accession to this responsibility, these documents would sit on various desks for months before being processed. We found it not particularly taxing to process these agreements immediately and ask our legal colleagues to perform their five-minutes of review within days, rather than weeks. 

But this situation was not to continue. The agency changed its policy to remove from our position any signature authority over even the most trivial matters, and to lodge that authority at the highest levels. In order to gain such approval, a series of explanatory memos were required to be created to explain why approval of the agreement by the agency would be appropriate. Even when the correct paperwork was completed, there came a point when the requisite signature was only affixed after a senior executive of the other agency called to inquire as to the status of the document. In one case, such a trivial document languished for over a year between the time it was received by us and time it was returned to be signed to the other agency. For some period of time there was a dispute over the order of signatures to the documents – as to which agency would have the supreme privilege and glory of being the final signatory. Ultimately, when our colleagues at the other agency inquired as to the status of this particular instrument, the inevitable witch hunt was undertaken to determine who was to blame for the delay (this being agreed to be of higher priority than actually finally processing said agreement). 

Perhaps, more importantly, and more destructively, silos exist as a result of the universal importance of credit for “accomplishment.” More specifically, who would be noted in the requisite media release as being most responsible for the described achievement. To collaborate with others is to muddy the waters as to the source of the rare, claimed success. A business unit does not want to share credit with agency colleagues and agency heads wish to reserve credit for such accomplishments for themselves. No right-thinking person, seeking to advance themselves within the bureaucracy or electorally, would ever want to assist someone else in their efforts to achieve something – since all others are seen as participants in the all-essential competition for credit and recognition, particularly from the media. 

Collaborating with external stakeholders exposes the decision maker to the potential for criticism. Perhaps a stakeholder is politically disfavored by the powers that be, and the manager will be cast into darkness by cooperating with that person. Perhaps the stakeholder has unknown baggage attached to them. Within the bureaucracy, all private sector actors are suspect as self-interested liars (as so many of them are, in point of fact). One can never really know – so why get involved with assisting someone (unless they are a well-established “good guy,” often a lobbyist. The phenomenon of the designation as a “good guy,” we will perhaps discuss in a future writing. Suffice it to say that the principal attribute of “good guy-ness” is familiarity –longevity within or dealing with the bureaucracy)? We have been known to say that of the more than 300,000 municipal employees, not one has the time to return a phone call from someone outside government. The reason they do not do so is that there is little to no upside in returning the call of non-governmental actors (other than lobbyists). 

This culture obviously impedes innovation and creative, collaborative problem solving. But without even going that far, reversing of siloed behavior requires remarkably little effort, and little to no actual sacrifice by the parties involved. Returning a phone call is easy. Providing information that is simple for the manager to access, may save the caller hours of research and the possibility of reaching the wrong conclusion. Collaboration prevents duplication of effort among agencies. It enables dedicated public servants to share ideas and be more likely to solve critical problems when all of the requisite information is available to the decision makers as a result of broad collaboration. It takes effort to create silos. Behaving cooperatively is actually easier. You have to work at making silos. 

We were once asked by a colleague at another agency for a brief meeting to review a small, relatively unimportant but imaginative project they had under consideration. The project had the potential for being integrated with an initiative our agency had underway. The caller was a talented and friendly colleague who was eager for our collaboration in order to improve his project. We transmitted the request to the requisite agency authority. Those individuals felt that other senior officials needed to be consulted. A meeting was set with a half dozen senior agency managers to discuss whether such fifteen-minute meeting with colleagues from another agency would be appropriate. One participant in the call expressed deep concern that the other agency’s project might draw attention from our agency’s initiative. The question was tabled for further consideration. Meanwhile, the time slots suggested by the inquiring agency had passed by. 

As with encouraging intelligent risk taking, eliminating silos doesn’t require changes to formal procedure or processes. Senior managers need to encourage collaborative problem-solving and working with other business units, agencies and stake holders in order to increase the amount of information available when reviewing issues and expedite decision making with all knowledgeable staff involved in reviewing possible options. Managers need to be encouraged to meet with other managers. Information gathering meetings with people outside government need to be encouraged, so that government is able to stay up to date with the most current industry information. Senior mangers need to just eliminate the approval structures that create silos. 

It important to note that not every level of the chain of command are required to be at every meeting. Junior managers from various business units and agencies should be able to meet with each other without the need for babysitting from every level of senior manager up the chain. City meetings generally have way too many participants as a result of executives not trusting their subordinates and managers seeking to defend their turf at any meeting that might even tangentially affect their bailiwick. Substantial inefficiencies result from over-staffing of meetings. Over-staffing also makes meetings more difficult to conduct and less likely to come to useful results. The City’s law department is particularly egregious with respect to multiple meeting attendance. The law department in particular would be orders of magnitude more efficient if no more than one, or perhaps two, attorneys were permitted to attend routine meetings, rather than four or five. 

We were pleased with the positive results we were able to achieve when we first entered City service and were able to break down barriers between departments and allow for creative problem solving and collaboration. A lot of good decisions were made, and substantial progress was often achieved. But the more we were required to engage in siloed behavior the more bogged down we became and the less our group was able to accomplish to improve the delivery of public services to the people of the City of New York. 

[1] https://www.engagebay.com/blog/break-silo-mentality-business/

Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi

April 6, 2021 /

Fortune rota volvitur;
descendo minoratus;
alter in altum tollitur;
nimis exaltatus
rex sedet in vertice
caveat ruinam!
nam sub axe legimus
Hecubam reginam.

            Underlying just about every issue effecting the functioning of City systems is the manner in which risk is handled. There is uncertainty involved in most, if not, all managerial decisions. We have to evaluate, in conditions of incomplete information, the likelihood of various outcomes, and the positive and/or negative consequences of those decisions. Sometimes, those probabilistic outcomes can be evaluated in monetary terms, and as a result, decision making is more straightforward. But often that it is not the case that the fiscal impact of decisions can be easily calculated. In the public sector negative political or reputational consequences of a judgment can be more important in decision making.

We would argue that flexibility, creativity and problem solving are essential to obtaining optimal public policy outcomes. What we most frequently find in City government is, first, a preference for doing things the way they have always been done, and a second, a preference for avoiding dealing with problems if at all possible. We have also observed that middle, and even senior, managers are generally discouraged from offering new ideas. 

            In the private sector, the evaluation of risk in the course of decision making can be much, much easier. Incentive systems are pegged to positive economic outcomes, either in the short or long term. The better those outcomes, the more reward to the decision maker or organization. Markets, theoretically, reward successful risk taking (and penalize bad bets). The institutional essence of capitalism, the financial markets, are supposedly all about rewarding correct calculations of risk. The public sector has no analogous meta-metric. 

            That being said, we have long wondered about the characteristic risk aversion among public servants. The avoidance of possible negative outcomes of any kind seems to be an essential part of most public decisions making. This has appeared to us as particularly odd, given that most public employees are insulated from negative sanctions by City personnel policies. There are elaborate processes in place, through civil service and otherwise, theoretically to prevent arbitrary personnel decisions. It is a stereotype about government that employees are difficult to fire or otherwise sanction. While these systems don’t protect elected officials and senior bureaucrats, those positions are only a small slice of public employment. In our observation, only very rarely is City employee negatively impacted by a bad business decision or for excessive risk taking. 

            So why is the taking of risk by public servants so seriously avoided? At the highest level, there is a culture among the media of exposing mistakes, without much analysis of the circumstances of the error. This is also a function of a rough and tumble competitive political culture, where there is benefit to elected officials, and the most senior appointed officers, seen in criticizing the mistakes of others. Good faith errors are not differentiated from egregious incompetence by even the respected broadsheet newspaper of record. Tabloid journalists seem particularly focused on publicizing errors. This might be a reason. But of the thousands of decisions made on a day-to-day basis by government workers, most are entirely unlikely to come to public attention. Those decicions just aren’t all that important. But even more mystifying to us is the lack of impact of the media on the public at large. No one really takes the reporting of the New York Postseriously, except for a small group of insiders – elected officials and senior bureaucrats. Post stories, for example, disappear quickly and generally have little to no effect on the voters at large – and yet a series of blistering Post stories, no matter how scurrilous or poorly reported, become part of an insider echo chamber that takes on a life of its own – with little resonance beyond the political class. 

We have also observed that many elected and other senior public officials are principally focused on receiving positive media attention, even from the tabloids (perhaps, particularly from the tabloids) and are obsessively concerned about protecting their downsides from negative situations which might damage their future career prospects. As a result, they micro-manage their agencies, and demand that their subordinates take no risks at all – in order to avoid any possible negative outcomes. While this is a wide-spread practice, it is far from universal and in very large organizations, does not reach down all that far into the bureaucratic depths. There must be some other reason for the almost complete avoidance of risk by all City employees. We don’t regard the prior sentence as hyperbole. It is a precise statement of fact, in our experience. 

            An interesting example is the general risk avoidance of the policy administration of Mayor Bill DeBlasio during his last years in office.  We have observed City Hall’s unwillingness to delegate authority and difficulty in making close decisions. We found this odd, given that the Mayor was not running for re-election and was unlikely to ever hold political office again. We might think that such a situation would provide fertile ground for bold initiatives and the testing of new policies and programs. There would be no political price to be paid by the Administration if any of these projects were to come a cropper. But City Hall continued to operate as if it were engaged in a reelection campaign, with continued fretting about how decisions might be received by the media, other elected officials and the public. It was if having been in campaign mode for the last two decades, since having been first elected to the New York City Council, the Mayor and his senior political and media advisors could not escape operating as if an election was imminent. As a result, opportunities for seriously addressing the kind of issues regarding equity and service to the disadvantaged, about which the Administration obviously cared, were not fully exploited. 

            The explanation for the broad phenomenon of local governmental risk avoidance, we have concluded, has to be that while government workers enjoy broad protections as to their tenure, no positive incentives are in place to promote risk taking within City government. There is no reward for those who carefully calibrate risk, proceed with something untried, and as a result improve government outcomes. The system is structured in such a way as to provide some negative consequences from failure, but no positive results from success. Obviously, there are no financial bonuses awarded for high performance, let along successful risk taking in government. Promotions within the bureaucracy come, generally not from high performance, but from length of tenure (primarily), ingratiation with decision makers (small “p” politics), and an absence of disqualifying blemishes on an employee’s record. As a result, a culture of risk avoidance permeates government service. 

            There are serious negative results from this systematic risk aversion. Change becomes more difficult to implement. Doing the same thing in the same way, no matter how dysfunctional, is simply easier. New ideas are difficult to suggest in a culture that discourages them and are nearly impossible to implement – unless they come from the top. This is a major reason why government is so often unresponsive and sclerotic. We have seen in government a failure to abandon obsolete practices, policies and even metrics, because there is no incentive for doing so, and often loud voices in opposition. With respect to metrics for example, we have seen City agencies insist on continuing to measure things that are no longer relevant (for example, because practices have so improved that the performance being measured meets standards and never varies). Data managers will refuse to alter the metric because “the data will no longer be comparable to past performance,” even though nothing useful is being measured. 

            This is not an unsolvable problem. A culture of intelligent risk taking could be encouraged at all levels of City government. We would suggest that for a Mayor or other senior City official to make a difference in the performance of local government that early in his or her tenure he or she very visibly reward a middle level manager for making an intelligent decision based on a careful analysis of risk – that didn’t pan out. This would send a message across government that implementing smart new programs will be rewarded – regardless of whether they work. The idea is to encourage flexibility and creative problem solving. Better decision making is more a question of leadership than it is of the establishment of new systems or processes.

            The cost is low. In our experience when new initiatives haven’t been successful, the problems created are always relatively easy to solve. In fact, more often than not, even if the initial foray failed, the repair of the failure ultimately produces a superior outcome. Rarely do incorrect decisions as a result of flexibility or creativity in local public administration result in irremediable outcomes. Problems can be fixed. The benefit to the governmental outcomes of empowering managers to solve, rather than avoid, problems would be extraordinary. 

            Serious consideration needs to be given by thoughtful public officials to practices that support local public sector decision makers to find practical solutions to problems. While this sounds straightforward it would require radical cultural change in New York City government. Doing so requires a commitment to improving people’s lives through government and ignoring the noise created by short term carping competitors and the media. Encouraging risk in City government requires taking a long view that over time, aggerate outcomes of high-quality decision making will improve governmental results. 

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