Commission impossible
Underpromise, overdeliver: The advice to many young professionals has long been lost on politicians, in no small part because they run for office by insisting that they alone can fix it. Mayor de Blasio should’ve repeated the mantra before creating a Racial Justice Commission in March and proclaiming it had “the power to put forth permanent, transformative ideas for our government and our city. This moment demands nothing less.”
What the moment delivered in the final days of his administration was a 174-page report with grandiose language and three lackluster proposed City Charter changes on next year’s ballot.
To counteract “centuries-long structural racism,” the first would add a preamble to the city’s foundational legal document that all New Yorkers ought to have safe neighborhoods, affordable housing and whatnot. As the commission members point out, “it would not create a right of action, direct or indirect, to enforce the preamble or related laws” — but it sure would sound nice.
The second charter change would create a city Racial Equity Office, a Commission on Racial Equity and require Racial Equity Plans for agencies to meet targets on combating entrenched disparities. Not altogether a bad idea, but it’s unclear why this needs to be in the charter. De Blasio created a chief democracy officer and otherwise grew his staff apart from the charter.
The final proposal would require the city gauge the true cost of living to correct for poverty measures — including a relatively new New York City government alternative yardstick that accounts for our high cost of living — that supposedly set too-low targets for qualifying for public assistance. The city’s scale, the commission says, “still calculates public assistance as income,” a problem because “this measure classifies many households, especially those with children, as not in poverty when in fact the reason they are not included is because government assistance puts them over the line.”
That’s odd; we thought it was a good thing when Democrats’ enhanced child tax credit lifted millions of children and families out of poverty.