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Janae Pierre: Welcome to NYC NOW, your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. I'm Janae Pierre. Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has lost his bid to dismantle the state ethics board. The ruling came down Tuesday from New York's top court. Cuomo's lawsuit challenged the structure of the Commission on Ethics and Lobbying in Government. That's the board that enforces state ethics laws.

The board has been investigating Cuomo's $5 million deal to write a book during the pandemic. In a split decision, the court found the law creating the commission did not violate the Constitution. The ruling means the ethics board can continue to enforce the state's lobbying and ethics law, and it can proceed with its investigation into Cuomo's book and whether he improperly used state resources to write it. Cuomo did not immediately respond to questions about the ruling. Sources say he's weighing a run for New York City mayor.

Lieutenant governors are often quiet supporters of state governors, but WNYC's Jimmy Vielkind reports New York's lieutenant governor is developing a bit of an independent streak.

Jimmy Vielkind: Antonio Delgado says he views his job as being a voice for New Yorkers. He plans to travel the state to combat antisemitism and bias crimes, and he has no problem singing a different song than Governor Kathy Hochul. Delgado says he didn't consult with the Democratic governor before saying publicly that Mayor Adams should resign.

Antonio Delgado: I serve with the governor, but I don't serve at the pleasure of the governor, right? I am my own person. I have my own voice.

Jimmy Vielkind: Hochul appointed Delgado as lieutenant governor, and then the two ran together when Hochul won a full term in 2022, but Hochul's spokesman says Delgado doesn't speak for her administration.

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Janae Pierre: New York City's first Black train conductor broke racial barriers in the 1930s. After the break, we look into the pathway to the middle class for tens of thousands of African Americans and other people of color. Stay close.

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Janae Pierre: 90 years ago, New York City's transit system hired its first Black train conductor. WNYC's Ramsay Khalifeh reports on the man who broke a racial barrier that has since offered a pathway to the middle class for tens of thousands of people of color.

Ramsey Khalifeh: New York City's subway system as we know it today was built during the first decades of the 20th century, but back then, Black people were not allowed to work on board the trains. That changed on October 15th, 1935, when Jotham T. Coleman was hired as the first Black conductor on the Independent Subway System, New York's only publicly-owned transit at the time. Polly Desjarlais, a researcher at the New York Transit Museum, says he should be remembered as a civil rights icon.

Polly Desjarlais: I'm focused on the stories that the museum tells. I have a hand in a lot of different things.

Ramsey Khalifeh: Desjarlais discovered Coleman's story in the museum's century old archives. She says before Coleman's appointment, Black New Yorkers were relegated to lower paying jobs in the subways working as porters or cleaners.

Polly Desjarlais: It was the Depression, and having civil service rules was more equitable. Suddenly, jobs were opened up that were formerly closed to African Americans.

Ramsey Khalifeh: The Transport Workers Union was formed a year before Coleman became a conductor in 1934. I wanted to learn more about him, so I took a trip to the New York University Special Collections room to find records from the union's founding president, Michael Quill. In one letter from Quill to a Harlem City Council member written at the end of the 1930s, Quill writes about the union's position in including non-white workers. The letter says the TW "has not only advocated for equal rights and privileges for negroes in industry, but has consistently batted for such equality within the limitations of the present state of our society".

Joshua Freeman: You have to look at the trajectory.

Ramsey Khalifeh: Joshua Freeman is a labor historian and retired professor from CUNY.

Joshua Freeman: In the 1930s, transit workers were poorly paid. It was a notoriously badly paid industry, and Black workers in it were paid the worst, right. Once you get unionization, you begin a path towards benefits and salary increases that really blossoms after World War II.

Ramsey Khalifeh: He says although the new door opened, sentiment from other white transit workers to include more Black people in the union wasn't exactly positive.

Joshua Freeman: There was a lot of racism among white workers who didn't want to compete with jobs with Black workers.

Ramsey Khalifeh: Yet, the Board of Transportation kept moving forward. Records show that between 1939 and 1944, the number of Black conductors in their workforce increased sixfold. Today, almost 50% of all bus and subway employees are Black.

Janae Pierre: That's WNYC's Ramsay Khalifeh. New York City officials are trying to figure out how to deal with an issue that affects us al, life expectancy rates. For a deep dive on the topic, my colleague Sean Carlson talked with Michelle Morse. She's the acting health commissioner of New York City.

Sean Carlson: Commissioner, can you tell us more about the life expectancy of New Yorkers before the pandemic and after?

Michelle Morse: In the decade or so leading up to the COVID pandemic, we actually saw a plateauing in life expectancy improvements for New York Cit, and during the pandemic, unfortunately, we had a significant drop in life expectancy. In fact, it dropped average about five years for Black New Yorkers and Hispanic New Yorkers in particular and a few years for others.

Considering those significant drops in life expectancy and the inequities related to them, we have been really thoughtful about how we get back to our healthiest state of health for New York City and how we can work collaboratively across all parts of government to do so.

Sean Carlson: What is causing the decline, and why is it so hard for the city to bounce back?

Michelle Morse: Unfortunately, the emergency phase of the pandemic led to a really significant, unfortunate loss of life. It also led to a number of other life-threatening illnesses being exacerbated, quite frankly, and causing a higher rate of mortality than we would normally see. Now, the good news is that we just released our 2022 data, and that data showed that life expectancy has improved in New York City. In fact, it went up from 78 years the year before to about 81.5 years, so we're excited to see that level of improvement.

However, it's really challenging to get back to where we want to be because there are a number of barriers that New Yorkers have to health improvements. Those improvements require us to really make progress on the number one killer of New Yorkers right now, which is chronic diseases.

Sean Carlson: Yes, we wanted to ask you about that. Which disease is the most prevalent among New Yorkers, and how is your office planning on addressing it?

Michelle Morse: It is the combination of cardiovascular disease and diabetes-related diseases that cause the highest rate of mortality, the number one cause of mortality for New Yorkers, and second is cancer. Those honestly had been the top causes of early death in New York City prior to the pandemic, so we're kind of back to the challenge that we were facing before the pandemic in addressing health across the city.

Sean Carlson: What are some of the other ways the city plans to increase life expectancy?

Michelle Morse: Some of the other major concerns we have is overdose. Unfortunately, overdose from opioids in particular with fentanyl in our drug supply has been a leading cause of death, and it's preventable 100%. The Opioid Settlement Fund dollars that are going to community-based organizations across the city is one of the ways we're doing that. Another area that we're focusing on is violence. We know that violence is a leading cause of death as well, and it is one of the areas where New York City's health department has been leading in our violence intervention programs that are based in hospitals, and those are extremely effective.

Sean Carlson: Now, if you had to choose 1 out of those 19 proposals, which one do you think will have the most impact?

Michelle Morse: One of the most important interventions that we developed in the report is our community health worker interventions. The reason I say that is because community health workers are people who are from the community they're serving. They are able to accompany the community that they're working in to address the top health issues of that community. We saw this work incredibly well during COVID.

We were able to bring up the vaccination rates and bring down the cases in the neighborhoods that had the worst impacts from COVID using, again, community health workers who know what their community needs and who are armed with the health information and interventions that are going to be most protective in the neighborhoods we know we need to focus on. We've shifted that work from the emergency phase of COVID into chronic disease now.

Sean Carlson: Do we know what the price tag is on all of these proposals?

Michelle Morse: Combined, it's an investment of about $36 million per year. Some of the work has already gotten started, which is very exciting, and some of it really is going to need more resources to either get it going or keep it going.

Sean Carlson: You've been talking about identifying geographic areas in the city that need help and need attention. Which neighborhoods in the city do need the most help?

Michelle Morse: The legacy of residential segregation in this city is still impacting which neighborhoods have access to which things and which neighborhoods do not have access to which things. That might be healthcare, that might be healthy food, that might be safe parks and streets. The data tells us that some of the areas where we need to put our resources are in the South Bronx, in East Harlem, and in central Brooklyn, especially Brownsville and Bushwick.

Those neighborhoods, when we look at our data, show us over and over again that these are neighborhoods that our city government, not just the health department, but all of us, need to prioritize in order to make the investments that will produce the best health possible for those communities.

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Janae Pierre: That's Michelle Morse, interim health commissioner of New York City. Thanks for listening to NYC NOW from WNYC. I'm Janae Pierre. We'll be back tomorrow.

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