Town Hall Recaps Accomplishments, Addresses Shortcomings
Photos by Lindsay Bu
Residents settled into seats, as preparations for the Town Hall meeting began.
BY LINDSAY BU It was a good night for becoming informed, and for posing questions to those who have the power to effect change. Following a Community Resource Fair, which touted complementary flu shots and smoke detectors, along with the chance for city departments and advocacy organizations to hand out information, City Councilmember Corey Johnson hosted and moderated a Town Hall meeting on the evening of
Wed., Jan. 13, at the LGBT Community Center (208 W. 13th St. btw. Seventh & Eighth Aves.). Dozens of local residents attended the standing room only event, which began with introductory comments from each of the 14 panelists representing city and federal agencies — including the Office of Emergency Management, the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) and the Department of Education. Johnson then explained the format: he would ask a few general
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Commissioner Julie Menin of the Department of Consumer Affairs discussed the extension of paid sick leave to over a million New Yorkers.
questions to specific agencies, then would read questions that were submitted by the public. The submission process entailed having audience members write their concerns on index cards, which were distributed at the entrance of the room before the meeting’s 7 p.m. start time. However, the system — perhaps installed to maintain order and ensure that Johnson could run through the questions in a timely manner — seemed to falter at a few instances throughout the night: passionate audience members would shout out follow-up questions from their seats, or rip out pages from notepads and walk up to Johnson to submit more questions. To this, Johnson would politely, firmly, state that people should hand their questions to the staff members that were collecting them. The first of Johnson’s own questions was posed to Julie Menin, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs. He asked her to elaborate on the new “big picture items” that New Yorkers were introduced to in the 2015. “We are thrilled to be the agency that implements and enforces the paid sick leave law, which extended paid sick leave to over a million New Yorkers. Since we’ve been implementing this law, we have reached 1.3 million dollars in restitution and fines for over 9,000 employees,” Menin said. Regarding the NYC Transit Ordinance, Menin explained that, “the law went into effect in January…any company, business, or not-for-profit that has 20 or more employees must provide commuter benefits to their employees. So this is the use of pre-tax money, and it’s not costing the employer more.” When asked to talk about some
of the disparities in healthcare seen across different NYC neighborhoods, Mary T. Bassett, Commissioner of the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, noted unfortunate statistics. “This city is a city of neighborhoods, but it is also a city that is deeply segregated by income,” she said. “[In] the neighborhood of Brownsville in Brooklyn, which is one of the poorest neighborhoods in our city, the life expectancy is 11 years shorter than [those of] wealthy neighborhoods, like Murray Hill and the Financial District.” Pressing further, Johnson asked, “What are some of the things that you are doing in some of the neighborhoods, that have seen greater disparities when it comes to some of these endemic issues, to actually try and decrease these disparities?” “What we are doing,” Bassett explained, “is ensuring that we focus our most intensive programs — the ones that rely on people because those are our most expensive programs — in the neighborhoods where the need is greatest. We have a program, for example, called ‘Healthbox,’ which gives people an added amount of money that they can spend at farmer’s markets, and we’re working particularly in low-income neighborhoods…ensuring that we have been promoting access to health services in these communities.” On the thread of increasing general efficiency and access to services, some departments and agencies have taken on initiatives to embrace user-friendly smartphone applications, which they promoted throughout the night. Reading from an audience member’s index card, Johnson asked the MTA’s Assistant Director of Government & Community Affairs, Zachary Campbell, to respond to a situation that many New Yorkers face, when “you could wait forever and not have a bus show up, or a bus finally does show up and you see a sign at the front that says ‘Next Bus Please.’ ” “All bus service is scheduled according to ridership of the route, and once we see an uptick in ridership, we will increase service accordingly,” Campbell said. “There are also other tools that customers can use that are really, really helpful. If you haven’t downloaded it, we really strongly suggest the Bus Time app — it has every bus in the city, in real time. You can also text the code at the stop if you do not have the smartphone.”
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