Citizens of New York City: Engage today

Municipal elections take place next year, but the most important phase of selecting the next mayor of New York is happening right now — and we all need to get involved. This week, the Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club convened the first of what will be many forums sponsored by various civic, educational and political organizations for candidates to talk about themselves and how they would run the city. There will be dozens of these candidate cattle calls over the next few months, along with fundraising parties.

Aside from the politicians themselves, hardly anybody attends more than a few of these events, but they are one of the miracles of democracy. As candidates schlep from one forum, fundraiser and debate to the next, a two-way exchange is taking place: Candidates are learning about what’s on people’s minds and making promises about how they intend to govern.

Before you know it, somebody will be getting sworn in on the steps of City Hall on New Year’s Day in 2022. What started out as momentary commitments, half-baked ideas or crowd-pleasing punch lines will suddenly become the law of the land, affecting everybody in New York.

Savvy operators like my friend Allen Roskoff, the president of the Jim Owles club, know that the typical New York politician starts out with only a handful of fully-formed ideas — and that it’s never too early to educate them about areas of city life they may know nothing about.

“It’s actually a really good time to try and get your concerns, your ideas, your proposals on the table, in the candidate’s mind,” Mayor de Blasio told me recently. “There’s plenty of space, still, in the candidate’s platform. Very few candidates by this point have a perfectly delineated platform.”

At this point in 2013, de Blasio was one of a dozen or so candidates running for mayor. He didn’t reach the front of the pack until the final 90 days of the Democratic primary campaign — and what helped him get there was the steady accumulation of insight into what voters were demanding.

“I think I did something like 60 or 70 of those forums, and I’m very glad I did,” he told me recently. “Because you learn a hell of a lot. And it makes you have to own up to your beliefs.”

Starting in January 2013, I moderated or asked questions at 13 different mayoral forums and debates. At the first one, co-sponsored by the Daily News and Metro Industrial Areas Foundation at St. Paul Community Baptist Church, candidates were wordy and rambled a little bit — but were visibly attentive, listening closely as community residents pressed them for specific commitments to develop affordable housing.

A few weeks later, we did a follow-up forum at Central Synagogue in Manhattan. The theme was public education — and the candidates were noticeably more focused, ready to roll out detailed ideas.

Week by week, active New Yorkers forced the candidates to get better. A forum by the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce nudged candidates toward thinking through ideas about outer-borough economic development; an event at Queens College was attended by students demanding promises to keep CUNY tuition low.

By the time we reached televised debates in August — the point at which most voters start paying attention — candidates were fully locked in on a broad range of policies. De Blasio was promising to build or preserve 200,000 units of affordable housing and was vowing to end stop-and-frisk policing by the NYPD.

He had also made a little-noticed commitment to ban horse-drawn carriages from the streets of New York.

As our city begins to emerge from the worst horrors of the pandemic, the term limits law requires that the mayor, controller and most of the City Council will leave their positions. That leaves the rest of us with the job of preparing the next crop of candidates.

The time is short. For a generation, New Yorkers had most of a year to sort through candidates before casting votes in a September primary. But thanks to changes in the electoral calendar, the next Democratic primary for mayor will take place in June 2021.

We all need to help the candidates start thinking beyond slogans and crowd-pleasing talking points.

“Tax the rich” is not an economic development program; neither is “cut taxes.” When it comes to public safety, promising to defund the NYPD is no more of a guarantee than a return to broken windows policing would be.

Every New Yorker should keep an eye out for mayoral forums, or consider contacting candidates directly by email, social media or phone. (It’s not as hard as you might think.)

Don’t wait to tell these folks what you want. Shaping the future of New York starts long before Election Day.