Mayor Eric Adams’ administration is months late in implementing a set of racial justice reforms overwhelmingly approved by city voters at the ballot box in 2022, including producing required plans for addressing disparities in health, education and other facets of city life.
The administration has yet to finalize a voter-mandated annual report on the “true cost of living” in New York City, which is intended to help guide policies on public benefit programs affecting the economic livelihoods of millions of New Yorkers. The first such report was due at the end of March.
Also late is a voter-mandated biennial citywide “racial equity plan” setting forth strategies and goals for all agencies to close racial disparities in health, education, policing and other areas. City officials have yet to release a first draft plan, which was due on Jan. 16, according to the charter rules endorsed by voters.
The delays have been “significant” and “severe,” said Nantasha Williams, the councilmember who chairs the City Council’s civil and human rights committee, at an oversight hearing last week.
“While I greatly look forward to hearing about all of the work that is ongoing, it does not lessen the importance of identifying and tackling any roadblocks that may have or are anticipated to come up,” she said.
The Mayor’s Office of Equity and Racial Justice, which was launched last October and tasked with crafting the city’s equity plan, has released a new timeline with proposed dates for rolling out the reforms. The first draft racial equity plan is now set to be published in November and the true-cost-of-living measure will be finalized next March, according to the timeline.
Sideya Sherman, the office’s commissioner, told councilmembers that the delays were “not a reflection of the seriousness that we see.”
“This is actually the opposite,” said Sherman, who was appointed in October. “We see this as very important and are making sure that we do it correctly.”
Sherman also noted: “This is the first time our city has taken on a racial equity planning process at this scale.”
Ivette Davila-Richards, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office, said the original timeline outlined in the charter was ambitious for “large-scale, unprecedented work.”
“In order to do the transformative work our Charter calls us to do, we must ensure the infrastructure, foundation, and standards set for this work are strong, high quality, and sustainable,” Davila-Richards wrote in a statement. “As we shared in our testimony, a lot of work has been done to approach this with the intention and care it deserves, but that has taken time.”
Still, proponents of the reforms said the missed deadlines undermine trust in government and will result in a slower rollout of proposed solutions sought by voters. They said the initial delays prevented the crafting of racial equity plans in lockstep with the city’s budget process so that agencies and officials could have ensured the goals were adequately funded.
In November 2022, a vast majority of local voters approved three ballot measures aimed at elevating racial justice and equity as a priority in city government. They included creating a new preamble to the city charter centering racial equity as a goal, creating a new Office of Racial Equity and establishing a true-cost-of-living metric that would be used to determine eligibility for a variety of programs.
All three ballot questions garnered about 70% or more voter support.
“It hasn’t been essentially given the prominence that I think it justly deserves, especially in this moment,” testified Jennifer Jones Austin, head of the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies and former chair of the commission that crafted the charter measures, at the Council hearing.
“We have to make sure that as this city moves to build out these measures, they’re not just looking at it as though they’re Band Aids,” she added.
Councilmember Williams suggested that the proposed deadlines might have been overly optimistic. She said initial delays in appointing commissioners for the city agency and commission tasked with overseeing the planning process have created a domino effect, further delaying the rest of the reforms.
The new charter rules required the launch of a Commission on Racial Equity, or CORE — intended as an independent watchdog for the planning process — at the start of last August. But the chair of the commission wasn’t appointed until October and most of the commissioners weren’t announced until May. One seat has yet to be filled by the mayor.
Commission Chair Linda Tigani told Gothamist that she wasn’t concerned about the delays in appointments, though she said it left her commission and city agencies less time to “fulfill the spirit of the charter mandate.”
“CORE was intended to be a commission that would create a forum to bring community and city agencies together to be able to have these conversations about racial equity investment,” she said. “And unfortunately, this budget cycle, we weren’t able to do that. We do look forward to doing that in the future, and we want community to be heard in the budget process.”
Christopher Kui, a former member of the panel that drafted the measures, said the delays were “understandable,” given the need to hire staff and follow city guidelines. But he said he wasn’t closely monitoring the rollout, so he couldn’t speak in detail about the delays.
“Sometimes it is very hard, especially when you try to ramp up something significantly,” said Kui, former director of Asian Americans for Equality and current president of RISE NOW, a nonprofit dedicated to helping low-income people and small business owners.
Residents told the panel they had doubts about the city’s ability to implement the reforms, even if they were passed, according to Jimmy Pan, the group’s former policy director.
“New Yorkers do care about timelines, and it is a matter of whether they trust their government or not,” Pan said at the Council hearing. “As we continue to push timelines back, we’re really asking New Yorkers to trust us more and more without giving them something to work with.”