Write the Mayor to tax Millionaires not our children
IMANI HOUSE
Last night, we learned that Mayor Bloomberg plans to close FDNY Engine 220, which is located at 530 11th Street in Park Slope. Engine 220 is one of 20 fire companies, including 8 in Brooklyn, that the mayor is proposing to close as part of this year’s budget. Engine 220 is also the engine that keeps much of Park Slope and Windsor Terrace safe, including my family.
If the Bloomberg Administration is allowed to proceed with this closure, response times at fires will increase dramatically in our community. Arrival of the second truck – necessary to get water on the fire – would go from 4:08 to 5:24 (a 30% increase). An extra minute to get an engine company to a fire can be the difference between life and death. I stopped by Engine 220 last night, and heard three stories of lives they had saved by quick action in the last month alone.
The fight to save Engine 220 begins right now. Email Mayor Bloomberg and demand that he restore funding for Engine 220. If you send him an e-mail, we’ll stay in touch with you in the coming weeks about further actions.
The rest of the budget picture
The closing of Engine 220 and 19 other firehouses is just one example of how Mayor Bloomberg has his priorities in all the wrong places. Closing these 20 firehouses would save $55 million, while the City's 'rainy day' fund has $1.9 billion on reserve. The mayor supports giving a new tax break to millionaires and billionaires (by opposing the extension of the existing NYS millionaire's tax), which will cost over $4 billion annually, and also supports increasing spending on consultants by over $100 million.
Meanwhile, he is proposing to eliminate over 6,000 teaching positions, close fire companies, reduce library hours, cut home care for seniors, and eliminate tens of thousands of child care slots, summer jobs, and after-school programs.
The City Council has already worked with the mayor to reduce spending by over $5 billion – but the cuts he is proposing now would do deep damage to our future. My colleagues in the Council and I will continue to work with the Mayor to find places we can reduce spending, as there is no doubt that the City is facing a challenging budget situation, due to a significant loss of State and Federal funds. Some amount of cutting is unavoidable.
However, we can avoid many of these cuts just by extending the existing millionaire's tax (rather than allowing it to expire, and giving a tax break to people who earn over $1 million per year). Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver recently re- introduced State Assembly legislation to extend the millionaires' tax, rightly calling it “a moral imperative.” I could not agree more.
If you agree, please send a message to the Mayor.
The human impact these cuts have was brought home sharply for me last week, when I visited a Boys Town residential program in our community. One of the boys was going to be reunited with his family the next day, after a year in the program following a juvenile arrest. He felt the program had worked for him, and was looking forward to going home. I asked him what public policy lessons I should take back to City Hall, thinking that he would praise the “family home” style program. Instead, he was very clear:
“You shouldn’t have cut my afterschool program. When I was playing basketball in the school gym, everything was fine. Then you closed my afterschool program, and I had to start playing ball in the park instead. That was when all my trouble started.”
When faced with the choice between providing safe afterschool programs for this young man (which would, in this case, have saved taxpayers many thousands of dollars), and asking millionaires to forego a tax break, it hardly seems like a difficult decision. Please join me in asking Mayor Bloomberg to show his support for a millionaire’s tax extension.
Brooklyn’s Fair Share of Public Safety
Fire company closings aren’t the only place where spending for public safety in Brooklyn has been short-changed. Yesterday, at my request, the NYC Independent Budget Office release a report on District Attorney funding over the last 30 years – which shows that the Brooklyn’s share of total funding has dramatically declined since 1980. This is despite the fact that Brooklyn has had a +15% increase felony in arrests, compared to a -20% drop in Manhattan over the same period.
The IBO’s numbers make it clear that Brooklyn and the other outer boroughs have been severely underfunded and that our share of felony and misdemeanor arrests has grown dramatically even while our share of funding has declined. The full study is available at http://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/may162011letterall.pdf.
One bright spot in this year’s budget is that – thanks to the leadership of City Council Finance Chairman Domenic Recchia and Councilmember Lew Fidler, and some of the data from this report (which was shared earlier with the Administration) – the City has agreed to add $2.5 million to the Brooklyn DA’s budget. I know that Brooklyn DA Joe Hynes will put it right to work preventing crime.
My First Local Law: allowing reduced alternate-side parking
One other bit of good news from City Hall, despite the bleak budget picture: my first piece of legislation was signed into law by the mayor this week.
Local Law 30 enables communities who wish to do so the opportunity to reduce alternate side parking from two-days-per-side- per-week down to one-day-per-side-per-week (so long as cleanliness ratings in the community board have been and remain high). This change will not only minimize the sense of dread that that all drivers feel on a day when alternate side parking is in effect, it will also reduce unnecessary car trips, thereby decreasing air pollution, since in many neighborhoods a good portion of the daily traffic consists of people looking for parking.
I was pleased to sponsor this law, along with Councilmember Sara Gonzalez, which builds on the success and leadership of Brooklyn Community Board Six, whose district manager Craig Hammerman has helped to lead the way on this issue. Just last night, Brooklyn Community Board Seven (Windsor Terrace and Sunset Park) – which has been keeping its streets clean and requesting the same treatment for years – voted to become the first community to take advantage of the new law.
Please take a minute to let Mayor Bloomberg know how strongly you feel about saving Engine 220 and let him know that we should extend the millionaire’s tax rather than sacrifice so many common goods. We’ll stay in close touch as budget negotiations continue over the next month.
Brad
Serving the neighborhoods of Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Park Slope,
Windsor Terrace, Borough Park, and Kensington
456 5th Avenue, 3rd Floor * Brooklyn, NY 11215 * 718-499-1090
