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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams will join us in this segment to react to the New York State budget. At long last, as you've heard, Governor Hochul announced a conceptual budget deal on Thursday. They still haven't voted it in and we still don't know all the details. Mayor Adams meanwhile, has unveiled his executive budget for New York City. We'll get the public advocate's response to the details there too. They disagree philosophically on some things that come out in spending priorities. The state budget had hit snags over a few hot-button issues and proposals like bail reform and this conceptual deal includes changes around bail.

The governor says these changes will give judges greater discretion in evaluating whether people awaiting trial pose a threat to the community and more power in setting bail. Elsewhere it'll boost the state's minimum wage to $17 an hour in the coming years and it'll also help the MTA. We talked on Friday about how it will launch a free bus experiment, one bus line in each of the boroughs. We'll also talk about some other local news, if we can get to it, including the public advocate's Homeless Bill of Rights, which the City Council approved last week. That didn't get enough coverage. Important in the context of a report last week on the true cost of living in New York City.

The report from the fund for the City of New York finds that 50% of working-age New Yorkers, that's almost 3 million people, are struggling to cover their basic needs. With us now is New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams. Public Advocate, always good to have you on. Welcome back to WNYC.

New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams: Thank you so much. Peace and blessings, love and light to you. Always a pleasure to be on.

Brian Lehrer: Well, let's start with the New York State budget. It's a broad strokes $229 billion plan. I'll give you a chance now to react to any piece of it that you would like and to say what you think the tentative agreement means specifically for New York City, which of course is what you represent.

New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams: Some of the things that you pointed out are good. Particularly the MTA piece was, I think very helpful for the city. I have to say there was just a lack of leadership from the governor on this one. It's been disappointing to watch. Most of the political chips were put into bail. That's very unfortunate because the governor herself just this past week, said that the headlines in the newspaper are one of the reasons that we should be changing this, and that's very disappointing and dangerous to hear.

That means we're not making policy based on what is actually happening and how to actually keep people safe, but based on certain publications, salacious headlines, which have real victims in it, and we have to address it. The way that she's done it doesn't really help and the thing that people are hurting the most like housing, there was nothing happening in this budget, and that's just disappointing to look at happen in real-time.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. You want to talk about the housing failure in the budget from your perspective. One could argue it was because Hochul was trying to be very progressive, which is to say she was trying to require 800,000 new units to be built in the coming years and require the resistant to that suburbs to build more housing, and they resisted state control over their local zoning. She lost by being very progressive on housing, or how do you see it?

New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams: I don't know that that's completely incorrect. I think the housing in concept wasn't a bad plan to try to start off. I was actually surprised and impressed that she took the [unintelligible 00:04:04], so I do want to give some credit here. What surprised me is how she tried to get it through. Trying to shove this down people's throat in a short space of time in this budget. Again, I just don't understand the leadership here. You can't shove honey down people's throat, much less a plan like this that you know there's going to be some resistance.

What I think should have been done was a series of sessions where you're speaking to the community, hearing what the concerns are, and responding to it, at minimum getting some of these elected officials on board. That didn't happen and that was disappointing. I would say even if this happened to shove down people's throat in a budget, you wouldn't have felt the effect for at least three, four, or five years. The things that would have helped us the most in housing, the governor did the least on. That's good cause eviction, which she allowed many, many erroneous thoughts and erroneous things about the bill to be continued to put out there, and housing vouchers.

Waiting to see hopefully the final budget does do a lot on housing vouchers. If not, then it's a complete loss. Those are the two things that can help us right now. The governor did the least on those. Again, that's hard to watch based on what you just said. We are up from 30% in 2020 to 50% of New Yorkers now who can't reach their minimum needs. That's not going on vacation, that's not trying to go to a play or a movie, that's literally trying to feed themselves and house themselves. The governor failed it.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Coming back to bail reform for a minute. Republicans and centrist Democrats in the state, as many of our listeners know, were pushing to revisit what they call the least restrictive requirements for judges on bail. That's what this new budget outlines or does away with, it'll give judges less restrictive power in setting cash bail. I'm curious who you think the victims of that will be. What do you think the consequences of this change might be? For whom?

New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams: Well, we've seen it. Where these restrictive standards have happened the way the governor wants, what we just see is Black and brown people who are the ones that are deemed should be remaining in jail. That's just what happens. We see it all over. What is most frustrating here is all of the data says that this is not what's causing an increase in crime, particularly violent crime. There are places across this country that actually already have the standard that we're changing back to, that have seen a bigger increase and have more violence and crime.

This is not what it is. What we have are people who, as the governor admits, are responding to salacious headlines. That's not what we should be doing. What she could have done is said we should be supporting and putting funding into pretrial supportive services that never got the funding that they needed with the bail reforms that happened. Still, we saw that bail was not the reason for the increase in crime. It's unfortunate to see this have to play out time and time again. We suffered daily during this past election. This is a election speak now, because of exactly this type of language that was used by a few folks in the city and the state and not only causes locally, it causes nationally.

I would ask the governor to stop because we need to focus on so many other things that can actually keep us safe than continue to repeat the false narrative that bail reforms was costing us all. You just have to look at the numbers and see what's going on to know that this is not true. Again, look across the country in other places. You'll see that this is not true. By the way, I just need to add this. What's most frustrating is particularly violent crime in New York City is going down right now. When this change happens if it continues to go down, they're going to credit another change of bail reform. As it starts to go back up, they're going to say we have to change bail again.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take your phone calls on the New York State tentative budget agreement. Mayor Adams' executive budget proposals for the city, which we'll get into, or anything else you might want to say or ask of the New York City Public Advocate. He is your advocate Jumaane Williams. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Especially if you live in the five boroughs or anyone else may call as well. 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692. I guess before we transition from the governor to the mayor, we should say just by way of context and transparency, remind people that you primaried Governor Hochul in the last election cycle. Obviously, she got the nomination and she got elected. How do you think she's doing generally?

New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams: Obviously not that well. I didn't primary very well. I have to say many of the things that I brought up as concerns have borne out to be true. I wish that wasn't, but it is the case and I think many people would agree with that sentiment, I hope that begins to change. What I've seen in the past two budget cycles, in particular, are very concerning. People in New York feel it, they don't feel the change as needed in their lives. As a matter of fact, things seem to be getting worse in terms of how people are able to live and not live in the city, and their moving with their feet. I think people wrongly always say that we're going to lose millionaires and billionaires. What we are losing in the tens and hundreds of thousands are working-class New Yorkers who can't afford to stay here.

Brian Lehrer: Do you have a comment on the MTA funding? They're going to raise payroll taxes to help fund the MTA on the biggest employers in New York City. I'm not sure the exact cutoff number is out, but it's something like companies employing 500 people or more. Only in the city, not in the rest of the MTA region, where the commuter rails, the MTA, and the Long Island Rail Road go. That's another victory for the suburbs that comes at the expense of the city, like the housing failure.

New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams: The suburbs made out like a band-aid here. I guess, good for them, they applied political pressure, but as you rightly stated many times, there was a cost to the things that we allow the suburbs to get away with, and the cost is borne by the city. Whether it is housing production, housing costs, even helping the suburbs in certain places, the suburbs don't have enough people to even have their own infrastructure. The state has to supply that, that comes from the city's economics and ability to pay into that.

Exempting them from the payroll, I don't understand what that is, except you just wanted to bow to the political pressures that were there, I guess, similar to what happened to a bail. It's very unfortunate. We definitely do need to raise revenue, and so we have to entertain to look at other revenue raisers. That also did not happen in this budget. Everybody always looks at the size of the budget increasing, but they do that without looking at the size of the cost of living increasing, and that's what the problem is. It's not like the cost of living is going down and the budget is going up.

If the cost of living is going up, and it's causing everybody's cost more just to survive, then, of course, support services have to go up. They never seem to go up enough. We have to be looking at revenue raisers to make sure we're supplying the support that's needed by New Yorkers, and we still haven't done that.

Brian Lehrer: Just real quick, on this experiment that they're going to launch to make one New York City bus line free in each borough, just one per borough, and there are so many bus lines in each borough, I'm curious-- We're going to do a segment on this eventually, like Nominate your Bus Line, but I wonder if you have any opinions about either a particular bus line in your Borough of Brooklyn or anywhere else or how they should go about selecting the one.

New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams: I do think the MTA budget was a bright spot here. I'm into pilot programs, so I have no problem doing pilot programs with free buses. I do think our bus service, our transit service, should be aiming and looking for being free at some point. This is something that's actually needed for people to get around, and so we have to move in that direction. Unfortunately, we keep moving in the other direction, where it costs more for less service. I have to say, this budget, and in recent months, I'm optimistic of what we can be doing when it comes to our public transit system. Hopefully, we can get some faster buses and some more on-time trains.

Brian Lehrer: Now, New York City's executive budget or the mayor's executive budget, which will now be negotiated with City Council and their version, and the city's fiscal year starts July 1st, there is some overlap in the topics. Obviously, the big issues for the city are the big issues for the state and vice versa, and one of them is education. One of the other headlines that came out of the state budget is there will be an expansion of charter schools in the city, and in the mayor's budget, the education department is set to shrink by upwards of $1 billion, according to my colleagues at Gothamist, who've looked at the details.

Now, that's $1 billion out of about $30 billion, but that's still $1 billion. The mayor has promised no service reductions, layoffs, or cuts to school budgets, so I'm not sure how to put all these things together. How do you understand it? What the city and state budgets mean for the immediate future of school funding in New York City?

New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams: Again, I think it's a failure on the governor's part, particularly with the zombie charter schools, where they're going to be putting back online. I think people don't realize the whole picture of charters. They're not inherently bad, I just want to make sure that we're clear about that. I have, myself, supported charters that had their own space, but the way we've treated them are harmful to other public schools in the system. I think people don't even know that 60%, by some counts, of charter schools already existing are empty. What Eva Moskowitz has been able to do, because she has a lot of money, is put out Success Academy.

People see Success Academy, and they get excited without knowing the whole picture. Whereas, if you had some of the good schools and great schools we had, and the Department of Education put the same money out to advertise themselves, people would say the same thing about those schools. I think people don't know that New York City is the only city in the nation, in the entire nation, where we have to pay for their rent, which is a concern. 60% of the Foundational Aid that we'll get, the billions of dollars, is going to go to charter schools, so it is really, really unbalanced. I believe that there's waste in the Department of Education.

I've been saying that for a long time since I was a Council member, but I don't know that that money should be taken out. I think we should find the waste and repurpose it for the things that haven't gotten funded in a very long time, such as restorative justice, such as making sure that we have enough social workers and nurses in the school. I think we can repurpose those things, not take them out of the budget. Particularly, when the charter schools get such a lion's share of some of the additional aid that will be coming.

Brian Lehrer: How about the police budget? This is an area where I imagine that you and the mayor disagree. In response to the criticism that has come of the NYPD's unrestricted overtime spending, he says, "No one ever talks about overtime in the Parks Department or the Human Resources Administration." Did you hear the mayor say that? If so, what were you thinking as you listened?

New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams: I will say, those words-- I believe he said that you're either anti-overtime or we're anti-police. That, I think, was unnecessarily inflammatory. I think he said, "Shame on us," and I will say, "No, actually shame on the mayor," here for this continued binary language that we've seen pop up from time and time again. We've heard it with the Rikers. Hopefully, it's getting better with the asylum seekers, but we've heard it similarly there. My push would be like, "Let's try to use language that unites us." Calling people who question overtime anti-police is a very unfortunate rhetoric that makes a difficult conversation even harder, and it's just untrue.

The truth of the matter is, NYPD is unlike almost all agencies in how they're treated, oftentimes, sacrosanct. They don't have the same constrictions that other agencies have. They have doubled, regularly, their overtime to lots and lots of money. It's not just small amounts of money. $340 budgeted, I think it was up to $700-something million. It's done, whether or not the headcount goes up or down, and it's one of the differences in other agencies where the headcount goes up or down, it does not change overtime.

NYPD is the only place where overtime is so structured into the pay that a lot of the people that we saw leave the police department, it wasn't for anti-police rhetoric, it was literally because we were trying to get overtime under control, and they wanted to leave because their paycheck would have got affected. There's no other agency, I think, that has that embedded in its structure, standardized overtime. Lastly, the agency also doesn't have the accountability that other folks have. When something happens and people die, we struggle to get accountability.

In the Kawaski Trawick trial right now, where people broke into someone's door, house, didn't answer the question of why you're in it and shot someone dead. We're struggling to get accountability. We don't struggle like that in other agencies. Now, the real fact of the matter is our police-- We should be supporting our law enforcement, particularly, in the jobs that they should be doing. I want to make sure that we continue to support that, but I feel like we ask them to do too much, and that's where a lot of the problems come in.

Now, imagine if some of that overtime, that consistently goes to the NYPD, went to the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to respond to mental health emergencies. What would that actually look like? Maybe we wouldn't have someone like Kawaski Trawick, who's dead now, and trying to hold some officers accountable for something they probably shouldn't have been doing in the first place.

Brian Lehrer: TK in the Bronx. You're on WNYC. Hi, TK.

TK: Hey. Good morning, Brian. Good morning, sir. I'm very happy to hear you, Jumaane. Really, I'm proud of you, brother. I want to say one thing about this bail reform thing. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but when they offer you bail, it's before the trial, so they don't know if you're guilty or innocent. It's just a way for you to say you're coming back, so you pay it. If you're poor or working class, you don't have that money to pay. It's the same situation. You're still not tried, not convicted, and I'm confused about where all the angst is coming from because we have people that's doing the exact same crime, but they have the money to pay.

We're making a big deal about the fact that these people don't have the money to pay, we don't seem to care about the guilt or the innocence. It's about, can you pay. When did this country become so big? Maybe it always was about money. I'm confused. I thought it was home where they're free and lands of the brave not home of the good credit and land of the checks. I'm sorry, Jumaane. Just give me some insight, please. I appreciate you, Brian. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, TK. Public advocate.

New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams: Thank you, TK. Appreciate the kind word. I really appreciate it. I think TK did a really good job of explaining that most people don't even know what bail is for. We've managed to confuse bail with remand. We have judges in some of the cases, the most high-profile ones that could have asked for bail and didn't, we don't know why. The bottom line had been that if you were poor, you couldn't make the bail, so you had to wait in someplace like Rikers. That even the federal monitor is making plain, is failing, and is dangerous for everybody who's there.

If you did have the money, you can come out and continue to go to work and continue to go to school while you awaited your trial to figure out if you were guilty or not. I think what people often leave out is the fact that the biased unconscious that exists in the courtroom itself. You see this in the difference of people who are able to come in with clean shaving, having a good night's sleep at their home, with good clothes come in and have their trial. People who are found guilty less than people who are stuck in Rikers and come in looking disheveled, haven't slept well, trying to figure out how to survive in that hell hole coming out maybe in jail clothing are found guilty more often and very often just because of perception of where they're coming from, how they're looking.

This thing has a lot of reverberation. We do want to remind folks that over 80% of the folks who are on Rikers have not had their trial. What many of us agree on is let's focused focus on speedy trial and less about bail. Let's get people adjudicated and figure it out. Lastly, again, what we should be doing is putting money into the pretrial services that were supposed to be funded after the bail reform occurred that never happened.

Brian Lehrer: What people on the other side of this from you would say is the attempt here is actually to detach pretrial detention from money at all, even though we talk about it in terms of bail, which suggests money. That the idea of the dangerousness standard is supposed to give judges the ability to assess in some way whether this person is likely to commit another crime, especially another serious crime, and use that as the criteria for pretrial detention rather than money, and that that's what this reform that the legislature has passed leans toward. What would you say to that?

New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams: What we already know now is that some of those things exist for violent crimes now. Even bail exists for violent crimes now. There are ways for people to be held pretrial right now. What happens with the dangerous standards in the way they're trying to present it, and we've seen all over, even in neighbors in New Jersey, is that this just means Black and brown people. Those are the ones that are deemed dangerous and remain in jail pretrial. That's what we have to make sure doesn't happen.

Brian Lehrer: That's what New Jersey has now is no bail at all but a dangerousness standard that judges can go by. They've completely detached it from money but you are saying it's coming out biased anyway in New Jersey, that's not a good model for us.

New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams: Yes. We've seen that the dangerousness standard usually just means that Black and brown people remain in jail pretrial and folks who are not Black and brown don't. What I would like to really see is a concerted effort for people to have their cases heard. That's where we should be putting a lot of energy in my opinion. I think there's a support across the board on this issue. You have people on Rikers who've been waiting years to have their trial. You shouldn't wait a year outside or inside. Let's focus on speedy trial and get folks adjudicated.

Brian Lehrer: Chuck in Manhattan, you're on WNYC with Public Advocate Jumaane Williams. Him Chuck.

Chuck: Good morning. Thanks very much for taking my call and thanks for all the great information that you get for us at least New Yorkers, if not Americans in general, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you.

Chuck: Sure. My question is a little bit off-topic but it's a side issue. In terms of the housing crisis that we have, I wondered what our public advocate's views are on the proposed raises in rent-stabilized rent by the Rent Guidelines Board and specifically a comment on how Mayor Adams has constituted that board that seems to have changed the balance a little bit to owner orientation from renter orientation if he agrees with that assessment. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. Public advocate.

New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams: I would say I have a lot of concern with what's been put out so far. Whenever there's certain folks like utility companies or landlords, when they have issues that have to do with their bills going higher, they get to go to the tenant or the consumer, but the tenant and the consumer have no place to go when their bills get higher. That's a problem for me because everyone has struggled during this pandemic. To try to say you're going to raise tenants' rent 16% in the middle of a housing crisis, in the middle of a homelessness crisis that are connected, makes absolutely no sense.

Now when you say we were going to raise it 16% and only raise it 6%, you're going to make it seem like you did folks a favor. All you're going to do is get more people evicted. Another problem is that we have these things disjointed. The Rent Guidelines Board is going to say, "We can only look at certain things and this is our job." Someone else is going to say, "This is our job, that's the Rent Guidelines Board job," when we have to look at these things together. Because it's disjointed and we kind of silo it out, people are suffering, tenants are suffering, Black and brown folks are suffering, working people are suffering, immigrants are suffering.

Now, I have to be clear. There are some landlords who are suffering as well, particularly small, mid-size owners. Their bills did go up and the pandemic was rough on them, and we have to look out for them. I think the government needs to step in with a program to help them. The way to address this can't be trying to suck money from people who literally don't have it. The report just said that over half of the households literally can't meet their minimum standards right this minute. It's a catastrophe already, and it's waiting to be exacerbated by the bad work, I think, of the Rent Guidelines Board.

Brian Lehrer: One more call. Renee in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with Public Advocate Jumaane Williams. Hi, Renee.

Reene: Hello. Mr. Williams, first of all, I want to really thank you for standing up for the 250,000 retired municipal workers who are having our paid supplementary insurance taken away from us by the city and being shoved into privatized inferior Medicare Advantage plan. I'm very concerned about this issue. I'm going to be 79 this month. I've been to demonstrations with people who are in their 70s, their 80s, even their 90s. There's no coverage in The New York Times. The City Council, very few City Council members are speaking up for us, and I'm feeling very desperate.

I'm wondering if you can reflect on this and give some advice because I'm so stressed out that I'm going to doctors for this because I'm so stressed out. First of all, thank you too for standing up for us.

New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams: Thank you. I'm sorry it hasn't gone in the way that we wanted to go. I think that the Mayor was wrong here. I know folks are trying to look at their options. I think there was some other options that could have been chosen. Not sure why they weren't. I do have a concern in my opinion, retirees made a contract that they would work and in restrain for that they would get services after that. I'm always concerned when that bond is broken the way it has been here. I did get some inside information about why this was happening. It wasn't fully persuasive and I think there were other options that could have been chosen.

I'm trying to figure out why they weren't. I'm very concerned and I'm sorry that you're having to go through this. I'll keep siding with the retirees and using all the options that we have to try to reverse it.

Brian Lehrer: Is it over or is it reversible? This is supposed to kick in with this Medicare Advantage plan in September. The retirees are already getting their new package of benefits, registration, all this stuff in the mail.

New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams: It doesn't look great. I think folks are looking at what they can do in terms of additional lawsuits and things to try to stop it. I don't want to give false promises around this, so I don't want to pretend I know something that I don't. As long as the fight is there, I want to make sure I'm fighting. Unfortunately, it doesn't look good. As people may know, the retirees are not working. It's not like they're getting additional money to offset what's going to be some new costs. This is a tough time, which is why I wish the budgets reflected the times that we're in, in terms of working and retirees and people who need the most help.

It always seems to revert to protecting people who are powerful and wealthy. I had wished after we came out of this pandemic that we wouldn't go back to normal because we lost so many people, but it seems that's what we're doing. "Normal," quote-unquote, is why we're here in the first place.

Brian Lehrer: New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams. We always appreciate your time. Thanks so much.

New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams: Thank you very much.

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