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| BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE | ||
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As President of the Borough of Manhattan, C. Virginia Fields has focused on such issues as education, family life, housing, elder care, and the various and complex economic matters that confront residents of Manhattan. She has campaigned for the inclusion of funding from the MTA for a Second Avenue subway system; lobbied for $2 million in funding to improve public schools; co-sponsored a bill -- which recently became law -- to ban the sale of realistic-looking toy guns; developed Manhattan’s first lead-safe house for families with children who suffer from severe lead poisoning; advocated for insurance for the uninsured; and brought attention to the flaws of the new Electronic Benefits Transfer Program.
Ms. Fields moved to New York in 1970 to pursue a career in social work and eventually served as administrator for the Children’s Aid Society, supervisor of social services for the New York City Work Release Program, and consultant for the national board of the YWCA. In addition, she is a former district leader and chair of Community Board Ten. In 1989, she was elected to the New York City Council. She has served two terms as a council member and has earned praise for creating affordable housing, encouraging economic growth, preserving programs for young people and seniors, revitalizing schools, and defending public safety.
The following is the text of a keynote address given by C. Virginia Fields at Baruch’s School of Public Affairs on January 29, 2000, to participants in the school’s City Council Seminar Series. The series, aimed at potential City Council candidates and others interested in New York City government, was co-sponsored by the NYC 2001 Political Education Leadership Coalition.
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I am delighted to be here sharing my experiences as you consider running for the New York City Council. To succeed in that goal, you’ve got to have energy, and you’ve got to be ready to go out there and do what’s necessary. You’ve expressed an interest and a desire to be a part of what I think is the most important contribution anyone can make, and that is the contribution of a public servant -- especially one who is elected.
My background is in social work. After obtaining my master’s degree, I went on to a career in social work. It was out of my experiences as a social worker that I decided to run for City Council. As a social worker with administrative responsibilities, I was always trying to implement decisions that other people we re making. I was concerned about never having enough after-school programs for children, a critical service for a single mother or working parents who needed a safe environment for their children until they could get home. After dealing with all of the other emotional problems in a family, they often found that an after-school program was the key component that they needed. I continued to see after-school programs defunded, and I wanted to know, "Who makes these decisions?" I noticed there were never enough services for senior citizens, and I asked, "Who is making these decisions?" That led me to the City Council, the group that makes the decisions about local budgets.
After years of working on the other side, trying to implement decisions made by those who seemed to lack an understanding of people’s needs for certain kinds of services (e.g., enough sanitation services to clean up one street), I decided I wanted to run for the City Council. I wanted to be part of the decision-making process that influenced the budgets that helped determine what services a community receives, how a community looks, whether a community thrives or survives, whether a community suffers because of a lack of resources and investment in its neighborhoods. My initial concern was the district in which I first ran, Central Harlem before the redistricting. The district later spread more to the West Side and parts of East Harlem, but when I ran, it was still Central Harlem. One of the biggest problems we had was deteriorated housing, city-owned housing. One of my first tasks was to eliminate property abandonment by creating new housing and by getting city programs that already existed to function more effectively in that community. Within a two-year period we saw a turnaround. That was my decision -- my focus -- and I used government to make it happen, while at the same time addressing broader, citywide issues.
Having said that, I want simply to say again that I cannot think of a greater contribution any of us can make than to be a public servant, some-one who goes in there with a focus, using government to make a difference in every aspect of our lives, making sure that that is our agenda -- nothing for self. Public service is not about me; I’m a servant of the thousands of people who elected me borough president. You will be a servant of the thousands of people who will elect you a City Council member. It is about them; it is not about you. If you go in there and use that as the guide, government can make a difference. Your communities and your neighborhoods will be served by government, and partnering with other entities, including those in the private sector, you have a marvelous opportunity to use government to perform public service and to make a difference to human life. So I am delighted to see all of you, and I do hope that all of you will invest in yourselves or in the candidates whom you’re supporting to provide this wonderful service.
I have been asked to say something today about adopting the city’s
budget. Someone once said that the process of adopting the city’s budget is like making sausages: if you knew what went into it, you would never want any part of it. Well, that’s only half true. There’s no question about it:
budget making does take a strong constitution. It takes a willingness to research volumes and volumes of fine print; it takes a capacity for enduring a schedule of meetings, hearings, and caucuses that would test the stamina of any athlete and try the patience of any saint. And in the end, it requires an ability to navigate a final process of adoption that sometimes makes you wonder if the Almighty is playing with the fast-forward button on the divine remote.
But again, that’s still only half of the story. The budget-adoption process -- the annual six-month process that the mayor sets in motion each January with the release of the financial plan for the coming fiscal year -- is enormously rewarding and important in spite of all of its burdens, all of its headaches, all of the painstaking time and stamina that’s required. It’s a process that puts you at the center of the life of the greatest city in the world. It gives you the experience of helping to shape a $30-billion-plus government budget that is the fourth largest in the nation. Only the budgets of the United States, California, and New York State are larger. It gives you an opportunity to really make a difference for your constituencies and your communities in ways that I spoke of earlier. Because even though the title of today’s forum, "Getting Your Projects Funded in the Budget Process," correctly refers to the power of numbers, it’s also important to remember that a budget isn’t just about numbers but, indeed, about people. I have said over and over that our budget makes a difference in how our community looks.
In fact, the budget can make a difference in who lives and who dies. It might sound dramatic, but if we do not have enough prenatal programs in our community, it might lead to more infant mortality for our constituents. If we do not have enough health care services, especially in communities where public hospitals are the primary source of care, then people are not going to receive preventive care early enough to make a difference. There are many diseases that must be addressed early to be addressed effectively, and that means adequate services. So the numbers in the budget translate into programs for youth, for our seniors, for our institutions, for our culture, for our transportation systems, for all of our city services. The organizers of this forum, the NYC 2001 Political Education Leadership Coalition and Baruch’s School of Public Affairs, are right on target in focusing on the budget-adoption process.
Based on my eight years in the council and my two-plus years as Manhattan borough president, I want to stress two points that I believe are important to all legislators, from the smallest town council to the United States Congress. First, in order to get what you want, you have to build coalitions. Coalition building is all-important. Second, knowledge is power. To illustrate the first point about the importance of coalition building, I’ll give you an example based on an issue that I worked on as a member of the City Council. Six years ago the budget presented by the mayor included substantial cuts in funding in an institution very important in my district, Harlem Hospital. At first I was told by many people, including the speaker of the council, that the prospects for restoring that funding were doubtful for two principal reasons. First, the City of New York was looking at revenue shortfalls, not surpluses. Second, the city administration was very vocal in its criticism of the public hospitals. So the public hospitals did not appear at first glance to be necessarily an issue that many council members would choose for a difficult dispute with the mayor. However, it was an issue that was important to me and to the constituents whom I served. So I began a process of coalition building.
My allies at first were council members in all of the boroughs who also had public hospitals in their districts. Coalition building obviously has to be with people who have the same interests and the same needs. But in working with the council you will find that your number-one priority might not be the number-one priority of your colleagues, even when it is an issue in their districts. They might have identified five-day-a-week collection of sanitation at all of the New York City Housing Authority developments and at the schools as their priority. So you’ve got to make sure that you get on their radar screens and impress on them the idea that this is an important issue in their district.
So my first allies were council members in all of the boroughs who had public hospitals in their districts. As the council held hearings and I took a closer look at the budget figures, it became evident that all the public hospitals -- not just Harlem Hospital -- were in major funding crises, and cuts were being imposed across the board. Under the rules of the council -- then and now -- restorations of spending to the budget are debated and adopted in Budget Delegation Caucuses and then brought to the speaker. So all of the delegation members of that borough get together and more or less decide the priorities for that particular borough. In Manhattan, of course, that process could be very different from Brooklyn or Queens. But every borough delegation gets together in its caucus to come up with their recommendations. (Obviously, the next speaker of the City Council may very well change those rules, but they may continue to be the rules that you will work under.)
In any event, because I had reached out to council members in all of the caucuses, the budget cuts to public hospitals citywide became an issue that each of the borough delegations brought to the speaker. Once all of the borough delegations got together, the issue went to the speaker. By working together with advocates in the health care field, we were able to convince the speaker to put the matter of re-funding public hospitals on his own agenda, and he pushed it successfully in budget negotiations with the administration.
That example also illustrates my second point, and that is simply that knowledge is power. It was very important for me to know which council members had public hospitals in their districts. It was very important for me to be able to speak to those council members about the impact of proposed budget cuts. It was very important that I know what advocacy groups were out there and what relationships they had with other council members. Because now I’m not the only one talking to council members; those health care advocates are talking to their own council members, and collectively they are talking with still other council members who might need to be influenced on these decisions.
In the City Council -- in fact, in any legislative body -- members who get what they want in the budget process are members who are armed with the facts. There are lots of sources for gathering the information you need in order to succeed. There is the City Council’s excellent staff. But keep in mind that the staff works for the City Council speaker first, and the rest of us as members come second. That’s not a put-down; it is just a fact. They are there to make sure that the speaker gets what he needs in order to move forward in the budget process. And then they provide wonderful information to us individually, as well as through our delegations. So you need to be able to get information on your own. And one good way to do that is to cultivate sources in addition to the various advocacy groups that I mentioned, who have tremendous information.
Another important way to get knowledge and information is to cultivate sources in the city agencies that provide services in your district. That has not always been easy over the last six years, because many of the agency leaders have not been so willing as they were in the past. But we hope that with a new administration, those who work in the agencies will be more open to discussion. Here’s why: Say that a city agency -- perhaps Sanitation -- has been asked by the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget to take a cut. Months and months before that budget cut is presented to you as a council member, the effects of that budget cut have been worked out in each sanitation district in the city, so they already know the impact those cuts will have in your district. And if you’ve done your homework and you have cultivated your resources, you should be able to get -- even if it’s off the record -- a completely accurate picture of how a citywide budget cut in sanitation services translates into fewer pickups and reduced street cleaning in your district.
The Independent Budget Office and outside observers like the Citizen’s Budget Commission, too, are enormously important sources for information. So you’ve got the advocacies, you’ve got the citywide agency that deals with that particular issue in your district, you’ve got the Independent Budget Office, you’ve got the Citizen’s Budget Commission, and you’ve got various other budget advocacy groups that are also interested in your issues. These are all important sources of information.
At this point I’m going to do a commercial for the borough presidents. Once upon a time, as all of you know, there was a Board of Estimates where the borough presidents, as members of that body, voted on the city budget. But in 1989 the United States Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Board of Estimates violated the one-person-one-vote requirement, and a new City Charter was adopted abolishing that Board of Estimates. Now the borough presidents still have a role to play in the budget process. Each borough president receives capital and expense funds from the city budget to spend on what we call "borough needs." More to the point, each borough president has a Budget Unit. And this week my Budget Unit began the job of lifting the hood on the mayor’s preliminary budget and stripping it down. In about six weeks they will prepare a report analyzing the impact of that preliminary budget on the Borough of Manhattan, agency by agency.
When I was on the council I always treated that borough budget report essentially as my debater’s handbook during the budget-adoption process. And as borough president, I now make a point of working closely with the Borough of Manhattan’s delegation to the council through the entire budget-adoption process. After the elections of 2001, I may have the good fortune of working with many of you. I’ll be the only borough president left from the present five borough presidents, so I may be a little ahead of the curve and may have to do some mentoring with Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. But I’ll do it, because I think it’s the right thing to do.
I want to close by saying that, yes, I served on the council for eight years, and I can tell you that council service is a tremendous experience -- an experience where the more you put in, the more you get back. The resources are there and the opportunities are there. It is up to you to go out there and make sure that you understand the process. In my very first year, council member Bob Dreyfus took me under his wing. In my first budget process I was totally carried, because I didn’t understand a thing that was going on. I assumed there must have been a much more organized and systematic process for making decisions about a $30 billion budget, and I never saw it, I never felt it. I was totally frustrated. The next year I was on top of it, because I spent the necessary time talking with the right people, talking with independent sources, gathering my information, and making certain that no budget would ever pass again without my fully understanding the process. It isn’t that difficult, but it does take time.
You need the knowledge; you need to coalesce. In addition to what you will be able to do through coalitions, you will be able to work directly with the speaker on any individual projects in your own districts, and this goes on and on and on. At a time when so many people are disillusioned with public service, it’s certainly good to see people like you who are willing to do the hard work necessary to make yourselves good candidates and become good council members. I look forward to working with you, whether you run, whether you help others get elected, or whether you’re here just as good, concerned citizens. This is something, as I said, that we all must do.
| QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS | ||
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Question:
What are the strengths and weaknesses of a budget process dominated by the mayor
and the City Council speaker?
C. Virginia Fields:
Certainly one of the strengths that we see in the budget process after the Charter change is that the City Council has a stronger role in adopting the budget. Whether you recognize it or not, we now have a process in which the mayor presents the budget and the council adopts the budget. I think that there are many changes that we should make to try to strengthen the hand of the council, but the council has the power now to make changes in that preliminary budget, to vote on items that differ from those that the mayor might present.
One of the changes that I have advocated and still support is that the council should have the ability to change the city’s revenue estimate. Presently the council must accept the revenue as estimated more or less by the mayor and must work within the figures that he presents to the council. So if the council sees needs for things that might change that revenue amount, they do not have the ability to effect that change. That’s an area that I think needs to be looked at. There are 51 council members broadly representing this entire city, and I believe that their voices should be heard on that. That suggestion notwithstanding, I think that the process of the mayor’s presenting the budget and the council’s adopting the budget has moved us much further along toward a process that can work. With some tinkering and perhaps a few changes, we can make it work a little better.
Question:
What suggestions do you have on how council members can get more up to date
and accurate information on the impact of the budget on their districts?
Ms. Fields:
That is one of the reasons why I have assigned my budget staff to work on the budget from the minute the mayor releases the January plan -- the preliminary budget -- to analyze it agency by agency. In doing that, they use many resources, like the Independent Budget Office; they meet with agency heads, with various advocates, and so forth, because we want to provide as much information as possible to council members. As a former council member, I know we never have enough resources to do it ourselves. So we have two opportunities just from among our own colleagues: from within the council itself and from the offices of the borough presidents. We have meetings (the borough board meetings), where we discuss the budget and come up with our recommendations, and in that way we move jointly with them. So that’s one of the things that I think we can do: we can use our staffs within the office of borough presidents to do the work that council members need. That’s essential because their budgets simply don’t provide enough staff to that for individual council members. In that regard, I consider myself a resource for the council members of the borough where I serve as president. And I think all borough presidents probably do the same thing. We may do it in different ways, but we’re the foot soldiers for the council members in our boroughs.
Question:
Is there anything that you would like to impart to potential council members
now that you are in a higher position and looking back?
Ms. Fields:
I guess that leads me back to what I started with, which is that I consider public service perhaps the most valuable contribution any of us can make. Looking back on my years as a council member, I think I did it. I think it is important to use that position for the good of the district that elected you and to use government to achieve your goals. Sometimes, of course, it’s important to team up with the private sector, but government alone can do a lot to make a difference.
And make it count while you’re there, because with term limits, eight years pass by so quickly. Because there are so many useful resources helping you to identify needs very early, you will not have to spend as much time as some of us had to do trying to negotiate what to do, how to do it, and what goes first. We are here; use us as resources. Use those of us who have been in the council and are now in other positions, or who may even be out of government, so that those eight years will count and you can really see a difference. At the end of the day, if you’ve made a difference in the life of one constituent who can stand up and say "I am better off," or "I have better housing," or "my health care is better because of what you did," that’s really what it’s all about.
Thank you.
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