INTERVIEW: If We Don’t Protect Our Interests, Who Will?

By Reuvain Borchardt

David Greenfield, CEO of the Met Council, political strategist and former Democratic New York City Councilman, discusses the recently passed New York State budget.

The budget just passed — better a month late than never, I guess.

Let’s start with some of the yeshiva funding items. The state will now give $134 million toward school meals to pay for some of the meals not covered by the federal program. This is less than what the yeshiva and other school advocates asked for — which was to have something like $200+million, to cover all students with free meals — but they’re celebrating it as an important, if incomplete, victory.

I think the best way to look at this budget is that, overall, it represents progress on a lot of the issues that are important to the frum community.

As you’ll see when we go through the details, the community didn’t get everything it wanted, but we’re certainly heading in the right direction. One of the mistakes I think we make is to always think about things in terms of just yeshivas. There’s a lot more than yeshivas. There’s yeshivas, there’s food for the needy, there’s folks who work in the real estate community, folks who work in the health care community, and public safety. I’m happy to start with the yeshivas, but I want to think about all five of those categories, a little more holistically.

As you mentioned, there was a push that was made — by people like Maury Litwack of Teach NYS, and Rabbi Yeruchim Silber of Agudath Israel, and other organizations — to get universal meals, and they got the $134 million, which is certainly not enough for “universal” meals. The idea of universal meals is that all students would get it regardless of income. This expansion will help many more lower-income folks. And obviously, there’s an opportunity to expand this in the future. There’s another thing that people have not been focused on that’s huge: the Empire State Child Tax Credit. Back before I was a councilmember, some 15 years ago, I started and ran the organization Teach NYS, and we secured back then an Empire State Child Tax Credit, giving school-age children a 100% tax credit that has provided millions of dollars for the community. This year, for the first time, we saw an expansion that’s going to include non-school-age-children, which is going to significantly help a lot of working-class families in our community.

Also, $73 million was secured for STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering and Math] funding.

The STEM program started with $5 million just a few years ago. That really was Teach NYS’ baby.

That’s right. Credit where due — I started Teach NYS and Maury took it over and pushed it to the next level — STEM funding for yeshivas was all his idea. This year’s budget also includes $70 million in security funding, kept at the same level as last year — $45 million for the Non-Public School Safety and Equipment Security Grant, and $25 million for the Securing Communities Against Hate Crimes program, which can be used for institutions at risk of hate crimes, like yeshivas and camps.

The yeshiva advocates were afraid that reimbursements for mandated services would be cut, but ultimately it was maintained.

Yeah, that’s another good example of where sometimes you have to play defense. And this is an area where Agudah worked very hard. There was a proposal to cut this by 8%, and they managed to restore that to the full funding. That’s significant.

And look, that’s funding that people take for granted. That’s money that yeshivas get to help them pay their day-to-day operational bills for things that the government requires them to do.

I’ll just give another example of where we had to play defense. There’s a program called HPNAP — Hunger Prevention and Nutrition Assistance Program, where the state Department of Health gives funding to food banks across the country. This affects places like Met Council and Masbia, and the food we give out before Yom Tov to hundreds of thousands of people in need. There was a proposal to cut the funding, and we ended up restoring full funding on that as well. Those are the key funding streams that are directly benefiting people in the community.

Now let’s talk about some of the policy issues. Bail reform is the one that held up the budget more than any other, for the second consecutive year.

Yeah, there’s no doubt that bail reform was the first issue that held up this budget probably by a couple of weeks because it was a top priority of the Governor. The budget was ultimately a month late, which is significant, because, for organizations that rely on the government for funding and reimbursements, and even for the salaries of elected officials, they don’t get paid until the budget actually gets passed. And this year, the first big fight was really about a rollback of the bail reform that passed in 2019 by then-Gov. Cuomo.

One of the frustrating things I’ve heard directly from judges is that the 2019 law that passed required them to impose the “least restrictive means” to ensure that a defendant returns to court. That’s a problem because in many cases, the least restrictive means there’s not going to be bail for some of the worst offenders. Basically, we’re using an honor system that repeat offenders are going to come back to court. So the major revision here is that judges will now be able to “consider the kind and degree of control or restriction necessary to reasonably assure” the defendant will return to court. The bottom line is that judges now have discretion for the first time since the 2019 reform, under which they had no discretion to decide to put bail on the worst of the criminal defendant for many serious crimes.

And that’s significant. It’s not everything Gov. Hochul wanted; what she really wanted was to change the law specifically to allow judges to consider whether the defendant being out there in the street is going to be a danger to society, but the legislature didn’t let her do that.

What you’re referring to, allowing judges to consider the “dangerousness” of the defendant, was not permitted in New York even before the 2019 reforms. So in that regard Hochul wanted to go even beyond what the law was pre-2019.

Not really, because while that’s technically true, remember, judges had broad discretion before 2019. So they might have sometimes considered dangerousness even if the law didn’t explicitly allow them to do so.

There have now been a number of rollbacks of the 2019 bail reforms. Can you summarize the state of bail laws now, compared to where they were after the 2019 reforms passed?

We could spend all day with the details, but the bottom line is that the 2019 reforms basically said that almost all alleged criminals, even repeat offenders, can’t get bail. And what we’ve come to now is that criminals who are alleged to have committed serious crimes are now bail-eligible, but those accused of less serious crimes are still not bail-eligible.

The budget bans natural-gas hookups in new buildings. I haven’t yet found a single person in our community who’s happy about this.

People have to understand what it actually is, and the context. Let’s have some “straight talk”:

The budget is $229 billion, and it’s essentially made up of interest groups advocating. Just like Teach NYS argues for more education funding and Met Council argues for more anti-poverty funding, there are other groups that argue for things like the environment, for whom this gas ban is an important issue, because this is a way for them to lower the dependency on natural gas. This has become a national issue for environmentalists, and they worked hard, just like any other interest group, and they got a compromise, that gas hookups will be banned starting in 2026 for new buildings of seven stories or fewer, and starting in 2029 banned for new buildings higher than seven stories. This is only in new buildings. In an existing home, no one’s taking away your gas. If you have a gas stove, you can replace it with a gas stove. But they will be banned in new buildings.

They also passed an increase in the minimum wage.

There was a big push by folks who wanted to increase the minimum wage to somewhere in the $23-an-hour range. The minimum wage is always complicated: obviously people want to help people who are struggling, and give them more money. At the same time, when you have a very high minimum wage, the small business owners are going to say, “You’re making it difficult for us to run our small business.” So there was a compromise: The minimum wage will go up, from the current approximately $15, to $17 per hour in New York City, Long Island, and Westchester over the next few years, and $16 for the rest of the state. Once again, advocacy groups that found this to be important pushed this and the governor compromised — she did raise it, but not to $23.

Hochul had also tried to override local zoning laws and force towns to build more housing units, but she was unable to do that.

There is a housing crisis in New York State, and everybody knows that one of its causes is that anytime you want to build new housing, people try to oppose it. So Hochul came in and said, “I am the state, and the state has the ability to override cities and towns, and I want to force you guys to build more housing which will make housing more affordable.” And the suburbs said, “No way!” That proposal is now dead. She’s going to try to see if she can get it passed post-budget. She has approximately six weeks to try to pass that in a post-budget bill during this legislative session, but it’s going to be hard without the budget leverage.

Any other policy issues in this budget you wanted to discuss?

Sure. For people who work in the real estate industry, the 421a extension for developers did not go through; the FAR cap, which would allow people to build taller and higher buildings, did not go through, either.

And then, finally, in the health care industry, there was a multibillion-dollar increase in Medicaid funding for nursing homes and hospitals. The nursing home increase is 6.5%, which is very significant; it’s the first time we’ve seen a raise like that in many years. And hospitals went up 7.5%. That’s big.

My final question is, where is Hochul now in terms of power dynamics? She’s fought with progressives on some issues like bail reform; she held up her first two budgets to roll back bail reform, and succeeded in getting rollbacks both times, if not everything she wanted. She’s lost not only to the far left — most Democrats opposed her initial pick for chief judge of the Court of Appeals. What is her standing now as far as the state’s executive and leader of her party?

Gov. Hochul just started her first full term in January. There’s no question that she struggled for the first couple of months.

But she seems to have found her footing, and she has some significant victories where other folks, quite frankly, thought that she wouldn’t.

Even on the bail reform, one assemblymember [Latrice Walker] went on a hunger strike to protest Hochul.

There was a push and pull, and while the Legislature got the best of her in December and January, she certainly has gotten a lot of the policy issues she wanted in March and April.

So I think she’s finding her footing. And she’s still building her team. But she’s heading in a positive direction and I think she’s definitely doing well.

Any final thoughts?

At the end of the day, the way government works is really based on interest groups advocating.

I think this budget makes it very clear that where the interest groups were well represented, we did well.

So for example, in the yeshiva world, where we have Agudah and Teach NYS fighting for us, we did well.

In the world of poverty, we at Met Council are fighting for you, and we did well.

In the places where there aren’t as many community interest groups, for example, in the real estate community, they didn’t do well. In the health care community, where they’re more organized, they did well.

I think that the real message is: This is your tax money, the government is spending it whether you like it or not, and you can either be involved or not. The way you, as a reader, are involved is simple — you have to go out and be engaged.

And the minimum that you can do is to vote.

There’s a primary election coming up in just a few weeks in the community; there are going to be several competitive primaries for City Council. And the community needs to show up and vote, because those votes matter.

Folks need to pay attention to the primary on June 27. That’s also going to have an impact on the city’s budget. These numbers are staggering: The state’s budget is $229 billion, the city’s budget is over $106 billion; that’s combined around $335 billion of your money. If you want to have a say, you have to do the minimum, which is to show up and vote.

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rborchardt@hamodia.com