Editorial Roundup: New York

New York Post. March 22, 2023.

Editorial: Bloomberg buys ads supporting Hochul’s agenda: Good

Ex-Mayor Mike Bloomberg has donated five or so of his many millions to a group running ads in support of Gov. Kathy Hochul’s budget proposals.

We hope it reaches New Yorkers who may not realize what is going on — and how vital it is to pass Hochul’s initiatives.

Progressives thrive in darkness.

They refuse to make necessary changes to the no-bail law or allow for more charter schools in New York City, even though the majority of the public backs those measures.

Rather than argue, they hope voters just don’t notice.

Bloomberg’s ad spending will cast some much-needed light on the problems.

On charters, lawmakers are following orders from the state’s teachers unions, which spend millions year after year on their own “public information” campaigns and on donations to pols (and also deliver vast non-monetary support in elections).

On crime, it’s the left’s organizing power that moves Democrats, dominating low-turnout primaries so that legislators who know better still fear to stand up against the madness.

So kudos to Bloomberg for telling New York what’s happening.

And let’s hope that many of the people who watch these ads call their representatives and tell them to stop standing in the way of sanity.

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Wall Street Journal. March 22, 2023.

Editorial: Albany’s Toxic Rent Control Plan

New York’s ‘good cause eviction’ plan would crush property values.

Are progressives in Albany trying to make New York unlivable for anyone but the super wealthy? Their latest push to extend rent control to nearly all apartments makes you wonder.

The state Senate and Assembly last week released budget proposals that include tenant protections aligned with what they call a “good cause eviction” standard. Don’t be fooled. Their plan has nothing to do with preventing landlords from evicting tenants in bad faith, which landlords already can’t do. It’s destructive rent control by another name.

Under the Democratic plan, rents on market-rate housing would be effectively capped at 3%, or 1.5 times the consumer-price index in the region where the unit is located, whichever is higher. If landlords raise rents above this rate, they couldn’t evict tenants who refuse to pay. Only owner-occupied buildings with fewer than four units would be exempt.

But what if landlords need to raise rents above the cap to cover the cost of repairs, rising taxes or insurance premiums? They’d have to spend thousands of dollars on legal costs to justify the increase to local housing courts, which are currently jammed with tens of thousands of cases dating back years.

One immediate effect would be to reduce the property value of apartment buildings across the state. This is what happened to rent-stabilized apartments after Democrats passed a law in 2019 that eliminated owners’ ability to raise rents when units become vacant or when the tenant’s income exceeds $200,000.

New York Community Bancorp this week agreed to assume deposits and many assets of failed Signature Bank, but it notably declined to buy Signature’s $11 billion in loans against New York City rent-stabilized apartments. “It’s toxic waste,” one investment banker told Bloomberg News. “From an investor point of view, these are dead assets.”

Progressives’ new rent control plan would make all multifamily housing loans in the state toxic. It would also lead to an erosion in living conditions as owners skimp on maintenance and kill investment in new supply. A recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that apartment buildings with regulated rents have lower levels of maintenance and more code violations.

We’re told progressives in the Legislature hope Gov. Kathy Hochul will support their rent control plan in budget negotiations if they agree to zoning reforms she is pushing. The trade’s not worth it, but never underestimate the capacity of Democrats in Albany for economic destruction.

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Albany Times-Union. March 19, 2023.

Editorial: The Regents’ test fail

The state Board of Regents is considering lowering the threshold for passing standardized tests. This has nothing to do with real education.

By the time a child graduates from preschool — if not sooner — they’ve no doubt learned that they can’t fit a square peg in a round hole. If only years of trial and error, and common sense, could convince New York of the same thing: High-stakes standardized testing, especially in lower grades, isn’t a fit in a modern educational system.

The latest evidence that the state Board of Regents still hasn’t absorbed that lesson came this past week, when a committee recommended that the state should make it easier for students to pass the standardized tests given in math and English in grades three through eight. It was the bureaucratic equivalent of a frustrated toddler trying to force a mismatched peg into the wrong hole.

The scoring committee’s reasoning is that so many children’s learning was so delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic that far too many have been unable to demonstrate proficiency on the tests. Scores in 2022 have been much lower statewide than they were in 2019, and there’s concern that the effects will linger for years.

This is a whole new level of bureaucratic myopia. It goes beyond the intellectually deficient and pedagogically flawed practice of “teaching to the test” that high-stakes testing engenders. What the Regents propose here might be called “testing to the test” — ensuring that test results reflect as positive a picture of schools and student progress as possible. If an extraordinary event like a pandemic sets back student progress, well then, let’s just change the definition of proficiency!

The whole purpose of education is to help students prepare to be full participants in society. That shouldn’t become secondary to passing tests that fail as meaningful measures of the progress students need to make.

This is not to say that there isn’t a role for tests. Designed locally, they can help teachers measure how well students are absorbing their lessons. Standardized tests can help colleges and graduate schools vet and pare down large numbers of applicants. But most teachers and colleges don’t rely solely on a test score to assess progress or eligibility. And they don’t design tests for the sake of ensuring that students pass them. To do so is to render the very notion of proficiency meaningless.

We understand the driving forces here — the desire to measure student progress and the adequacy of their schools while not demoralizing children by failing them on a mass scale.

Yes, student progress suffered across the nation during the pandemic. A recent report from state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli found the learning loss was twice as bad in New York than the national average. That’s a huge challenge that needs to be addressed by educators and lawmakers who are right now looking at how much funding to provide for public education. Mr. DiNapoli, for one, suggested that schools use billions in unspent federal pandemic relief funds to catch students up now, before the deadline to spend it runs out.

The task of helping students make up for those lost years will no doubt be complex and multi-faceted. But to fudge tests that many educators and parents already view skeptically isn’t an answer.

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Auburn Citizen. March 16, 2023.

Editorial: Ban on menthol cigarettes in New York worth fighting for

Gov. Kathy Hochul appears to be fighting an uphill battle to ban the sale of menthol cigarettes in New York state, but we believe the pros of such a ban would outweigh any cons, and we’d like to see it happen.

Hochul’s state budget proposal would seek to end the sale of all flavored vaping and tobacco products as well as raise the tax on a pack of cigarettes to $5.35.

Hochul didn’t start this fight. Advocates have been pushing back for years against the inequitable marketing of menthol cigarettes, their connection to teen smoking, and the harm that they cause — especially in Black communities.

Extensive research has shown that menthol flavoring entices young people to try smoking and many of them then become addicted. Menthol smokes have historically been heavily marketed in minority communities, and the decades-long result is that 85% of Black smokers smoke menthol cigarettes.

The American Heart Association of Central New York said that for decades, Big Tobacco companies blanketed Black and brown communities with slick advertising pushing menthol cigarettes and purposely lowered their prices for Newport cigarettes in low-income neighborhoods.

Today, the Heart Association said, Black cigarette smokers are nearly 11-times more likely to use menthol cigarettes than white smokers, and Black Americans suffer from the greatest share of tobacco-related deaths out of any racial or ethnic group in the Unites States.

A big opponent of the ban has been convenience store owners, who say that a retail sales ban would simply push smokers to shop at tribal lands, neighboring states or illicit street sales, with not only jobs being lost in the process but millions of dollars in tax revenues for counties.

Others have argued that overburdened law-enforcement agencies will be tasked with enforcing the ban and that Black people buying and selling cigarettes on the secondary market will become targets for the police.

Advocates of a menthol ban say that enforcement would be limited to brick-and-mortar retail stores and not individual purchase, use or possession.

Budget plans released this week by the Assembly and Senate both include the increased cigarette tax but not the menthol ban, but a state budget is still a long way from being passed, and public health advocates say they’re prepared to continue lobbying for a ban.

We’re skeptical of claims that this change would have a major impact on jobs and tax revenue, and any minor impact should be weighed against the health care savings, including costly Medicaid expenses to county governments, that will come with fewer people using these products.

With an overriding goal of saving lives, we believe a menthol cigarette ban in New York is worth fighting for.

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Advance Media New York. March 16, 2023.

Editorial: Let the sun shine upon secretive CNY school boards

News organizations, schools and civic groups mark March 12-18 as Sunshine Week to highlight the importance of government transparency in a democracy.

The name is a riff on a line written by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in 1913: “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”

But corruption and crime aren’t the only things that thrive in the dark. Incompetence does, too. Government agencies and officials often try to hide their mistakes and avoid accountability.

We suspect that is why we see so much secrecy from two local school boards who hired superintendents and then paid them lots of money to go away.

The Baldwinsville school board has bought out two of its last three superintendents — the latest one after a viral incident involving crowd-surfing and a charge of driving while intoxicated — and paid the third to stay away from work. In Sandy Creek, the school board placed its superintendent on leave last fall and then quietly replaced him in January, with no public explanation, notice or discussion.

Both boards met in executive session — that is, out of public view — to discuss the separation agreements with their outgoing superintendents and the appointment of their successors. The state’s Open Meetings Law allows boards to discuss disciplinary actions in private. We believe they are keeping too much secret from the public.

The Baldwinsville school board voted in public session to approve a separation agreement with the crowd-surfer, Jason D. Thomson, without public discussion and without disclosing the full amount. Syracuse.com reporter Elizabeth Doran had to file a Freedom of Information Law request the next day to find out it would cost Baldwinsville taxpayers a total of $214,000 to get rid of Thomson.

B’ville taxpayers are furious with the board’s lack of transparency. “The amount of hush-hush and behind-closed-doors discussions is ridiculous,” one said.

The school board surprised everyone again last month, calling a snap meeting to appoint a new superintendent — the interim leader they had passed over a few weeks before in a contentious board meeting.

We have even less insight into the Sandy Creek school board’s decision to replace Superintendent Kyle Faulkner. The board has been silent on the reason for Faulkner’s leave and abrupt “retirement.” Again, Doran had to file a FOIL request to find out what he’s being paid to disappear: $73,613.75, his regular salary rate, on top of the $50,000 he was paid since going on leave in the fall.

We wish these two school boards were outliers. They are not.

A 2021 study of 20 school boards across the state by the New York Coalition for Open Government, a citizens group, found that 70% of them improperly met in executive session to discuss the public’s business. Many school board members just don’t know the law. Others are getting bad advice from lawyers who are more concerned with avoiding lawsuits than in government transparency.

Paul Wolf, president of the group and a lawyer himself, believes New York has an open government crisis. The coalition wants the state Legislature to create an independent entity to enforce the Open Meetings Law; mandate annual training in the OML and FOIL for all elected officials; and require governments to pay a plaintiff’s legal fees if the government entity or official is found to have improperly conducted public business in secret. (The law already allows judges to award legal fees in FOIL cases.)

Those are reasonable proposals. But we shouldn’t have to pass laws compelling elected school board members to conduct the public’s business in public. We have to believe these people ran for these unpaid school board positions out of a desire to serve their communities. They steward school budgets in the tens of millions of dollars. Making tough, sometimes unpopular decisions, comes with the territory.

We call on school boards across the region and across the state to make openness and transparency a priority this week and every week of the year.

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