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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Ask the Mayor with Mayor de Blasio coming up after the eleven o'clock news. Hold your mayor calls till the top of the hour. June is, of course, primary month in New York City. While most coverage has been focused on the mayoral race and borough-wide elections, there are also 51 City Council Districts, which means there are 51 other elections around the city. Many of them are competitive.

Did you know that 35 out of the 51 are open seats because of term limits? Competitive in the primary, a Democratic primary, obviously. There are just three Republicans on the council. Democratic primaries this month will probably decide who runs City Council next year. We can't cover all 51 of them here, though, we will focus on some of the key districts in each borough later this month.

Today, though, Amanda Luz Henning Santiago, a reporter for the news organization, City & State, and author of their Excelsior newsletter, joins us to explain what council members actually do and how you can study up on how to vote, and of course, for up to five candidates, remember, with ranked-choice voting, and why it matters to you who wins or loses the primary in your local City Council district.

Your vote matters. Your individual vote matters. Why more than usual? Consider that 20% turnout is about average in municipal primaries. Just 20%. The Times pointed out recently that Mayor de Blasio won his mayoral primary in 2013 with the votes of just 3% of New Yorkers if you count people who were eligible to vote but didn't vote, eligible to register but didn't register, and et cetera. Every vote counts in a primary. Amanda Luz Henning Santiago, welcome to WNYC.

Amanda Luz Henning Santiago: Thank you so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Civics 101. Does City Council have as much power to make city law as Congress has to make federal law?

Amanda Luz Henning Santiago: The short answer I think is no. It's not quite like that, obviously, because this is just the city. The city is limited by the state law. Basically, Albany can choose to overrule some local laws. For example, the council can't really decriminalize offenses. I think that's a pretty solid example of the ways in which it's limited, but it can make a lot of different local changes. I think we saw, over the course of the pandemic, the introduction of the open streets, more outside seating for restaurants, things like that. No, it's not quite as powerful as Congress.

Brian Lehrer: Now, listeners, as you figure out how to rank the candidates running to represent your district in City Council, do you have a question for this segment on what City Council exactly does? 646-435-7280. This is a civics class, folks. Remote learning, 10:00 AM to noon. That's what we do. It's civics class today or if you have advice for what your fellow voters should look for in a City Council member.

No campaigning for one candidate over another in this segment, but call in with your questions or insights. 646-435-7280. 646-435-7280. Amanda, I know City Council gets involved in budgeting, and it gets involved in land-use decisions like rezonings, and they hold hearings on all kinds of issues. Law enforcement is obviously a hot button in the last couple of years, even though the mayor makes the policy.

Let's take a few of these one at a time. A couple of weeks ago, the mayor proposed a $98.6 billion budget for the next fiscal year. Not quite feverish haha at 98.6 but maybe not normal either in this case. It's the biggest budget ever. What is City Council's role in how much the city taxes and spends and where that money actually goes?

Amanda Luz Henning Santiago: It's interesting. The mayor really, he sets the budget. He sets the tone for how much the city can spend.

Brian Lehrer: He proposes the budget.

Amanda Luz Henning Santiago: Oh, he proposes the budget. Yes, he proposes the budget. There are three different kinds of budgets. There's the executive budget, there's the capital budget, and then there's the revenue budget. What the council and the mayor-- I think they go back and forth with all of them. The council will--- Once the mayor proposes the budget, they will review it. They'll take it into consideration. They'll make recommendations themselves.

A really pivotal part of how they affect the budget is that they hold lots of different hearings to gain insights from lawmakers, from advocates, and residents to identify what, if anything else, should be included and addressed in the budget. Then they submit their recommendations to the mayor based on what the most think the city's most important issues and monitoring needs are.

There's some debate on how much power the council really has here. A lot of people tend to feel like the mayor has really the overall power in a sense, but the pressure that the council can put on the mayor to revise and adjust the budget is really where it's most powerful in terms of the budget, I think.

Brian Lehrer: Then the council has to approve certain land-use decisions, right? Like rezonings, where, in exchange for getting to build bigger buildings, developers make certain promises about affordable housing and local jobs, but ultimately, City Council has that say.

Amanda Luz Henning Santiago: Yes. They also have a lot of say in terms of landmarks, which I think is pretty interesting as well, determining what should be considered.

Brian Lehrer: Are there guidelines-- I don't know if it's guidelines. Nobody would have written guidelines, but do you have any thoughts or have you heard any interesting thoughts on just what makes a good City Council member? Different skills help people in different kinds of jobs. What makes somebody a good City Council member?

Amanda Luz Henning Santiago: This is actually a really interesting question because if you look at how different council members operate, there's just such a wide range in how people come into the office. I don't really think that there's any one thing in particular that you really need. Some people come in having law degrees. Some people come in having a lot of experience in finance or in terms of human services.

I think if you look at different members, they each have their own specialty. There are people that sit on the health committee like Mark Levine. That's what his passion is and what he pushes for.

I think the thing that really makes someone a good council member is if they have an issue that they're very educated in, they're really passionate about, because everybody has different issues that they take on. No one does everything. In fact, council members aren't really allowed to legislate on every issue.

It really just varies, and it varies from district to district. Some districts might be more concerned with health. Some districts had higher rates of COVID mortality. Maybe that's more important to someone running for one of those districts. Maybe another district has had issues with pollution, with climate change like flooding.

It really just varies. It's so particular to each district, to each council member, and it's different depending on what constituents want to see of a council member. It's very different. They all have their own specialties, but they really, I think, are all very powerful when they're working together as a legislative body. It's very varied, it's hard to really say one thing in particular.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Mike in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Mike.

Mike: Regarding rents and real estate, none of the candidates are talking about the rent calamity that's about to happen when the landlord-tenant courts reopen.

Brian Lehrer: When you say none of the candidates, we're talking about 51 City Council Districts, each of which has multiple candidates, but go ahead and make your policy point.

Mike: I'd like them to know how much money they're getting from the real estate industry. I mean these candidates. Ask questions about where their money is coming from because Manhattan Plaza is 20%, Red Star's capped at 25% and also Monte-Carlo and other places around the world. Why can't we have a system like that? Why doesn't any create a talk going on about the real estate problems?

Brian Lehrer: Mike, thank you very much. To his point, Amanda, what about funding of City Council races and a way that people can assess as they look at their local candidates how much the real estate industry, as the caller mentioned, or any other powerful interest has their hooks in those people?

Amanda Luz Henning Santiago: Yes, so actually to this point, there's no real policy on how much any given real estate could like necessarily donate across the board. I'm not sure that I really have the numbers, I'm not familiar enough with that, but I would really encourage people to go on the city's campaign finance board website, where they can very easily look up how much people have been donated to and they can see different businesses, individuals.

If they're curious to know what a particular council member, borough president, mayor, anyone, they could go to that website and very easily look up where these donations are coming from. For council members for all city offices, there is a campaign donation limit. It's not like a real estate agent or conglomerate or whatever could just go and give a council member millions of dollars, that just would not.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, but there is the loophole of independent expenditures like we see that some of the mayoral candidates. Though there are these limits on how much people can donate directly to their campaigns, they have some very wealthy supporters running independent ads for them and spending a lot of money on their behalf. I don't know if that can be found in those workers.

Amanda Luz Henning Santiago: Yes, it actually can. You can see all of that on the city's campaign finance board website actually. They have a lot of really interesting tools you can use. It is a densely packed website, [chuckles] but if you play around there's actually a page where you can see exactly what these different packs and companies have donated to like flyers, banners, all kinds of things like that.

Brian Lehrer: In general, what can individual council members do independently of the council versus when they need a majority of fellow members to pass something as a bill? What about constituent services intervening on behalf of district residents with other government agencies when somebody has an eviction problem or a noise problem or anything else?

Amanda Luz Henning Santiago: It really depends. I think that council members can get involved and they often are very involved in different community boards. I think that's a lot of times where they've been interacting with constituents. I know that they have taken up these issues in different committee meetings, hearings in terms of the bounds of what they're allowed to do and not do to help constituents. I would have to probably look at the charter to see what it says. I'm not so sure what the bounds and the barriers are there. I think that there's-- Sorry.

Brian Lehrer: No, no, go ahead. Well, I guess you made your point and we're going to run out of time soon, and then we have the Mayor, but I want to take one more call and it's actually a term-limited member of the City Council calling in. She's not running for reelection and let's see what Council Member Helen Rosenthal from Manhattan wants to say about being a City Council member now that she's done it for eight years. Hi, Council Member.

Council Member Helen Rosenthal: I'm so glad you're doing this session because it is hard to figure out what makes a good council member. I also think that it's dependent on the district that people serve. There are some districts that overwhelmingly need more constituent services. The council members that represent those districts spend more time in the district making sure that their constituents get tenant support or access to healthcare.

Where in a district like mine, where, yes, we have many who have those needs. 80% of the people who walk through the door are facing eviction, but because we don't have shootings every week, I have a bigger bandwidth to spend time at City Hall fighting for things that I think are important in the budget or fighting for citywide legislation.

Brian Lehrer: Are there any reforms- and thank you for that insight. Are there any reforms that you would make or any powers that you would hope that City Council would be given? I guess that would take a charter change, or that they would use more effectively to accomplish more things, especially in light of the inequality you were just laying out?

Council Member Helen Rosenthal: There are things that specific speakers have done to address that inequality. For example, all members get the exact same amount of discretionary funds to allocate to their districts, but for the higher poverty districts, they get twice as much money in some particular areas, anti-poverty money.

For example, my district, I have $25,000 to allocate, but in Ritchie Torres' former district in the Bronx, he had over a hundred thousand dollars to allocate, same as true for our domestic violence funding. We measure that in specific ways that are fair and equitable. I think it's dependent on who's speaker and whether or not that speaker has an equity lens.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Council Member Helen Rosenthal, thank you for calling in. On our last 30 seconds, Amanda, with 51 City Council districts up for election and so many candidates in this year of ranked-choice voting, how are we going to cover it at city and state?

Amanda Luz Henning Santiago: Whew. The ways that we've been covering it is that we've actually been working with other outlets covering different races. We've had to cherry-pick the races that we've been covering just because it's overwhelming. There's just so many. There are as many as 10 candidates for some reason.

Unfortunately, we've had to pick and choose, but we've also worked in partnership with other outlets such as City Limits to help us make sure that we're not missing anything, but it is difficult to cover so many.

Brian Lehrer: Amanda Luz Henning Santiago, reporter for the news organization, City & State, and author of their Excelsior newsletter. Thanks for talking through a little bit of what City Council members do and how to pick one on election day. Thank you.

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