A Position Paper
by Howie Hawkins
Green Party candidate for Mayor
Recent policy and planning documents in Syracuse call for a "śnew urbanism" a city of neighborhoods that are rounded communities with homes, schools, shopping, parks, and public amenities all within walking distance.
If Syracuse is to truly be a city of neighborhoods, the neighborhoods also need a vibrant civic life. That requires physical public spaces for neighborhood civic activities and a neighborhood-based city government.
The Greens call for a new city charter that creates citywide structure of grassroots democracy rooted in and responsive to the neighborhoods. It would incorporate the following elements to establish a participatory democracy based on the neighborhoods:
Neighborhood Assemblies: Each of the city's 25 or so historical/cultural neighborhoods should have its own neighborhood government, a Neighborhood Assembly with a voice and a vote for all neighborhood residents. Neighborhood Assemblies would be empowered to plan neighborhood development, guide the administration of city services in each neighborhood, and compel city departments to respond to neighborhood needs.
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Neighborhood Councils: The Neighborhood Assemblies should elect officers to a Neighborhood Council which is responsible for implementing the decisions of the Assembly.
Neighborhood-Based City Government: The citywide government should come from the neighborhoods with Common Councilors and the members of the school board and other citywide boards and commissions elected by the Neighborhood Assemblies. These neighborhood representatives would serve on the Neighborhood Council.
Proportional Representation (PR): In order to give all political philosophies and ethnic communities their fair share of representation on Common Council, a system of proportional representation should be established. Under our current winner-take-all system, the winner of a plurality of votes takes office and the voters supporting other candidates, often the majority of voters in a district, get no representation in that district. Under proportional representation, every party gets its proportionate share of representation. For example, a party receiving 20 percent of the vote would get 20 percent of the seats on Common Council. Every voter gets representatives from their party in proportion to the support their party has among all the voters.
A mixed-member system of proportional representation should be established for Common Council because it incorporates neighborhood-based representation into an overall system of proportionality. In the mixed-member proportional representation system the Greens propose, half of the councilors would be elected by neighborhood districts, the other half would be elected at-large, and the overall composition of the Council would proportionally represents the voters' support for each party.
Instant Runoff Voting (IRV): For the election of district councilors, neighborhood members of city boards and commissions, and other single-seat offices like the Mayor, Council President, and Auditor, elections should be conducted by the Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) method. With IRV, voters rank their choices on the ballot in order of preference: 1, 2, 3, and so on. It takes a majority of votes to win. If no candidate wins a majority in the first round, an instant runoff election is held by eliminating the last place candidate in the first round and transferring that candidate's votes to their second choices. This process continues until a candidate receives a majority of votes.
PR and IRV enable voters to vote for their real preferences, unlike the current winner-take-all system where voters often feel compelled to compromise and vote for the lesser evil between the two major party candidate in order to prevent election of the other major party candidate they see as the greater evil.
Public Campaign Financing: Our public elections have been privatized. Private campaign financing is legalized bribery of elected officials by big money interests. Syracuse needs a Clean Money campaign finance system: equal allotments of public campaign financing for all ballot-qualified candidates who agree not to accept private money. It would cost each taxpayer a few dollars per year to fund. That's a small price to pay for fair elections.
16-Year Old Vote: The youth of Syracuse should be enfranchised at age 16 for the Neighborhood Assemblies and for local elections. This reform will engage youth in the civic life of their neighborhood and city and help instill a lifelong habit of political participation. The schools should help with voter registration. Suffrage at 16 will make high school civics education more relevant.
This rest of this position paper will discuss on these proposals in more detail.
Historical Background
Syracuse is the birthplace of the Iroquois Confederacy, one of the oldest democracies in the world and whose principles of federation the US Constitution incorporated at the urging of Iroquois leaders and colonists like Benjamin Franklin. It would be fitting for Syracuse to adapt the Iroquois principles of participatory democracy based on the confederation of clans and nations into an urban participatory democracy based on the confederation of neighborhoods.
Early European settlers in Syracuse governed by their village meeting of all enfranchised adults, much like the New England Town Meetings that were the cradle of American democracy. As Syracuse grew, a representative structure was established based on neighborhoods. Each ward elected a Common Councilor, a County Supervisor (legislator), a Commissioner of Education, and a Ward Constable. By the 1920s, there were 19 wards in the city and 19 neighborhood ward representatives on Common Council, the school board, and the County Board of Supervisors (predecessor to today's County Legislature).
In 1935, a new city charter destroyed this neighborhood ward system of representation. It replaced the 20-member Common Council (19 District Councilors plus Council President who was elected at large) with a 10-member council based on five large districts and five at-large councilors (including the Council President). The school board was reduced from 19 district members to seven at-large members. Community policing, where the same officers patrolled the same neighborhood beats under the guidance of the elected Ward Constable, was soon lost with the elimination of the elected Ward Constable.
The 1935 charter was pushed through in the name of efficiency. Reducing representation doesn’t save much money. That was the justification for the reduction of the Onondaga County Legislature in 2001 from 24 to 19 members. That change cut the people's representation by over 20 percent, but only saved taxpayers less than 1/60th of 1 percent of the county budget.
The 1935 charter change had two more pernicious effects. It enabled the moneyed interests, particularly city contractors and developers, to dominate city politics. With campaign financing, these business and real estate interests could more easily influence 10 councilors representing large constituencies than 20 councilors representing ward neighborhoods. A candidate in a ward could readily conduct a door-to-door campaign at minimal expense. Candidates in large districts required money for mailings and advertising and came to rely on business donations to finance their campaigns. Business interests increasingly dominated the political process at the expense of the working people of Syracuse.
The other detrimental consequence of the 1935 charter change was forestalling the election of blacks and Jews, who were concentrated in the 15th ward and on the verge of electing members of their own ethnic groups. The de facto racial discrimination of the 5 at-large and 4 large district representation scheme for Common Council was the basis for the lawsuit against Syracuse to re-establish district elections for Common Council that was considered by the local NAACP in the 1990s. Whether or not intentional racial exclusion can be proven, the result of the 1935 charter changes was that no blacks or Jews were elected to local office in Syracuse for four more decades. The current structure continues to make it difficult for people of color to elect their proportionate share of representation. The current winner-take-all system tends to under-represent ethnic minorities on Syracuse Common Council by creating 9 out of 10 white-majority districts when about 40 percent of the city is people of color.
While Syracuse was diluting the votes of blacks and Jews with charter changes at the local level, the federal government was undermining their communities through federal housing policy. The Roosevelt administration used color-coded maps for Syracuse and other US cities to plan the destruction of city neighborhoods populated by Jews, blacks and foreign-born whites by denying them access to federally-backed home mortgages. "The result," writes Emanuel Carter, professor of Landscape Architecture at the SUNY School of Environmental Science and Forestry, "was the conscious destruction of American cities which, by almost any measure, are the clearly the worst in western civilization."
In Syracuse, this redlining set the stage for the deterioration of the 15th ward's housing stock, followed by its dissection by interstate highways and depopulation by "urban renewal" that dispersed the people of the 15th ward to new neighborhoods on the near south, west, and east sides, which in turn then faced further redlining by the banking and real estate interests.
It is time for a new city charter than re-empowers our neighborhoods, particularly the low-income and ethnic minority neighborhoods, so they have the power to determine their own development and compel responsiveness from city government. A neighborhood-based city government will foster a vibrant civic life based on participatory democracy at the neighborhood and citywide levels.
Neighborhood Assemblies
Syracuse is too big to be governed by an assembly of all its citizens, but it is not too big to be governed by a federation of citizens' assemblies.
The foundation of democracy in Syracuse should be the Neighborhood Assembly, a neighborhood government where every resident has a voice and a vote like a New England Town Meeting. The Neighborhood Assembly would meet several times a year to make the basic policy decisions for the neighborhood. A Neighborhood Council consisting of the District Councilor, School Board Member, Constable, and other officers elected by the Neighborhood Assembly would meet more frequently to implement the policy decisions of the Neighborhood Assembly.
Among the Neighborhood Assemblies' powers and features would be:
Planning: Neighborhood Assemblies would put the details into the city's Comprehensive Plan, neighborhood by neighborhood. They would have the power to plan the types of development they want and the right to veto developments they do not want, within a citywide framework of enforcing civil rights and non-discrimination laws and environmental regulations.
Neighborhood Officers and Citywide Commissions and Boards to Guide the Delivery of Services: Neighborhood Assemblies would elect neighborhood officers corresponding to each of the city departments that deliver services to the neighborhoods, including Schools, Public Works, Police, Citizens Review Board, and Parks, Recreation, and Youth and to each municipally-owned enterprise, such as the public power and cable utility and municipal bank proposed by the Greens. These neighborhood officers would form citywide boards or commissions to guide the delivery of services by each department. Some neighborhood officers would have the power to issue citations for code and quality of life violations and compel city departments to respond accordingly.
Participatory Budget Planning: Neighborhood Assemblies would hold hearings and votes to prioritize their preferences for city tax rates and spending and for the projects and programs they want for their neighborhoods, in a manner similar to the "participatory budget" process pioneered by Porto Alegre, Brazil, birthplace of the World Social Forum.
District Councilors: Each Neighborhood Assembly would have the right to elect, instruct, and recall a District Councilor to Common Council.
Neighborhood Constables and Community Policing: Syracuse should to go back to electing neighborhood Constables just like we still elect the County Sheriff. The Constable would be neighborhood's link to community policing by the Police Department and would serve on a citywide police commission to set broad policy for the Police Department.
Neighborhood-Based School Board and Community Schools: We should go back to a Commission of Education composed of members elected from neighborhood districts. The at-large system has led to the domination by the more affluent neighborhoods to the detriment of the schools in the low-income neighborhoods. As Syracuse transitions to community schools, each neighborhood needs its advocate on the School Board. Community schools should be expanded public spaces, housing meetings of the Neighborhood Assemblies, an office for the Neighborhood Council, and city services delivered in the neighborhoods, particularly recreation and mentoring programs for the youth after school, evenings, weekends, and summers.
The Neighborhood Assemblies would correspond to the 25 or so real city neighborhoods, the historical/cultural neighborhoods that residents recognize. That would mean an average size of about 6,000 residents, but in practice the range would more like 3,000 to 9,000 residents to correspond to the city's real neighborhoods, all well within the optimum range city planners have found for face-to-face communities and the optimum range political scientists have found for face-to-face direct democracies. Several maps have been drawn up by different agencies as part of the process of developing the city's Comprehensive Plan that could be used as a starting point for determining the boundaries of the Neighborhood Assemblies.
The Neighborhood Assemblies would be empowered neighborhood governments and would replace the 8 sectors of TNT (Tomorrow's Neighborhoods Today), which are merely advisory and too big for inclusive, participatory government.
The process for establishing the Neighborhood Assemblies could begin immediately while a charter reform committee prepares a detailed proposal for a referendum for a new city charter. The first step would be to transform the eight TNT sectors into 25 or so Neighborhood Assemblies with broader powers than the TNT sectors.
Neighborhood residents would determine their exact boundaries of their Neighborhood Assemblies. For example, there is a 27-neighborhood map drawn up by the city Department of Engineering and used by the Post-Standard for its "What the Mayor Ought To Do" series based on questions from residents in each neighborhood. That map has a "Far Westside" neighborhood that covers what residents there refer to as two neighborhoods, Tip Hill and West End. Let the residents decide whether they want to function as one Neighborhood Assembly or two. Or to take another example, the University Neighborhood between Euclid and Colvin Streets is separated from the South Campus (Skytop) complex of students who are temporary residents. The residents of South Campus may decide they are really part of the adjacent University Neighborhood or the University Hill neighborhood a few blocks away around the SU central campus where the other students live.
The city should help the neighborhoods organize their assemblies with help publicizing meetings, a model set of bylaws, a Robert's Rules summary sheet, a parliamentarian to assist with process, and so forth.
Proportional Representation (PR) and Instant Runoff Voting (IRV)
Citywide boards and commissions can function well to represent neighborhood interests through district-based representation elected by IRV. By contrast, Common Council, where laws and broad policy are set, needs PR to represent the diversity of political philosophies as well as ethnic communities in Syracuse.
Mixed-member PR combines the advantages of both district and at-large representatives. It is the type of PR used in such countries as Germany, Venezuela, and New Zealand.
In Syracuse, half of the councilors would be elected by Neighborhood Assembly districts and the other half would be elected at-large. Each voter would vote twice, once for his or her district councilor by IRV and once for the party of his or her choice. Proportional representation on the Common Council would be achieved by finding out how many from each party won district seats and then adding candidates from each party's list of at-large candidates to make the overall composition of the Council reflect the proportion of votes each party received in the party vote.
All neighborhood-based officials, as well as single-seat citywide offices such as Auditor, Council President, and Mayor, would be elected by IRV.
PR and IRV would turn the two-party duopoly into a multi-party democracy. Every political philosophy would get its fair share of representation reflecting its support in the electorate. Voters would be able to vote for their real preferences instead of for the lesser-evil compromises that the current winner-take-all system encourages them to make.
Voter turnout would increase because every vote would count. Under the current winner-take-all system, most districts are perennial one-party districts with little competition between the parties. The result is a foregone conclusion and many people don't vote because they don't think they can affect the outcome. Under proportional representation, every vote counts toward your party's share of representation.
Voter turnout is higher in countries with proportional representation compared to countries with winner-take-all systems. Women, ethnic minorities, and minor parties elect more representatives in countries with PR systems than those with winner-take-all systems.
Many US cities currently use IRV, including Ferndale MI for mayor and city council, San Francisco CA for mayor, Oakland CA for city council and mayor, and Vermont for governor and other statewide offices. It is used to elect some national offices in Ireland, Great Britain, and Australia. PR is used to elect New York City community school boards and the Cambridge MA city council. It was used to elect the New York city council in the 1930s and 1940s and many other US cities in from the 1920s to 1940s. Unfortunately, it was eliminated in many of these cities to prevent the election of blacks. It should be restored so ethnic minorities as well as diverse political viewpoints get their fair share of representation and power.
Using IRV for single-seat district and citywide elections will insure that the candidate elected is the most preferred candidate when three or more candidates run for the office. The problem with the current winner-take-all system is that a plurality of votes wins the office and in a three-way race that winner can be the least preferred candidate. The two most preferred candidate could split the majority of votes and enable the least preferred candidate win the office with a plurality of votes. IRV eliminates the possibility of such 'spoiled' elections and insures that the winner is elected with a majority of votes and is the most preferred candidate.
A multi-party democracy would bring the real debate and decisions out of the party caucuses and into public view. Under the current system, the amendments, compromises, and deals are made in the party caucuses. Consequently, the Common Council meeting itself is usually a Kabuki dance, a ritual that renders the decisions quickly with rarely any debate. A recent example was the narrowing down of the living wage ordinance. Why amendments such as the exclusion of non-profits contracting with the city were made was never debated or explained, just announced. The decision and debate, if there was any, took place inside the Democratic Caucus and out of public view.
Syracuse is likely to have four or five parties represented on a proportional Common Council, as most industrial democracies with proportional representation do. The Democrats and Republicans correspond to the conservative big business parties. Working Families corresponds to the social democratic and labor parties. And the Greens correspond to the Green and Left parties. The Libertarians or Conservatives here might also win representation.
Whatever the party composition of the Common Council, a multi-party democracy will require cross-party coalitions to pass legislation. That will bring much of the debate and decisions out of the party caucuses and into public view as different coalitions form around different legislative proposals. Also a larger Council with more voices, including neighborhoods with particular interests, will bring more debate into the Council meetings and public view.
Some will no doubt suggest that a 50-member council is unwieldy and will lead to legislative gridlock. But the evidence is quite the contrary. It is the two-party US model that leads to gridlock due to narrow partisanship. Every issue becomes a mud-slinging partisan struggle, a zero-sum game where one side’s gain is the other side's loss. In a multi-party system, coalitions are fluid. Because today's opponent on one issue may be tomorrow's ally on another, it doesn't pay to be narrowly partisan. Many cities around the world have city legislative bodies of 50 or more members and gridlock is not a problem.
A 50-member council in Syracuse will take longer to hold its meetings because more councilors can speak and more debate will move from party caucus meetings to public council meetings. But with a Common Council that now often holds 5-10 minute study sessions at noon, followed by 5-10 minute voting sessions at 1 pm, that would be the public's gain.
Are there enough civic-minded people to fill the increased number of political offices these proposed charter changes require? We have no doubt that there are. The recent Democratic Primary for the 4th District Council seat provided evidence of that. All three candidates – Khalid Bey, Steve Coker, and Tom Seals – have much to offer the residents of the 4th District, but only one could serve in office. Before 1935 charter changes, the some 80 city-based officials were elected every two years. If we go back to neighborhood-based city government, and add proportional representation, citizen participation will increase and civic-minded people will step up to serve in office.
Public Campaign Financing
Our politicians are the best money can buy. They often sell out to the highest bidder.
There is no doubt moneyed special interests dominate local elections. For example, by July 1997, four months before the mayoral election, 180 companies had contributed to Roy Bernard's mayoral campaign, one-third of which had contracts with the city worth more than $10 million ('Hopes of City Work Drive Political Donations' Syracuse Herald American, July 20,1999).
Syracuse needs a voluntary system of public campaign financing: equal allotments of public campaign financing for all ballot-qualified candidates who agree not to accept private money. The amount of public campaign financing to each candidate should be sufficient to inform the voters of their candidacy and platform through the mail and, for citywide offices, broadcast advertising.
New York City has a system of matching funds that is partial public financing. The states of Arizona, Maine, Massachusetts, and Vermont have adopted voluntary public campaign financing for state elections in recent years that cost each taxpayer a few dollars per year to fund. The result of all of these public financing systems has been more candidates and more competitive elections. Candidates have more time to talk to voters and attend forums because they don't have to spend a lot of time raising private donations.
It is time for public elections in Syracuse to be publicly financed.
16-Year Old Vote
The youth of Syracuse should be enfranchised at age 16 for the Neighborhood Assemblies and for local elections.
Our youth often work and pay taxes at age 16.They can drive at age 16. They are often treated as adults by the criminal justice system at age 16. They can enlist in the military at age 17. But they can't vote until age 18, at a time when many youth do not register to vote and begin to participate because are their lives and place of residence are in such flux in the transition after high school to work, the military, and college.
We should encourage a lifelong habit of political participation by engaging the youth in politics while they are still in high school, where the schools can make it easy to register to vote and where civics classes will take on real-life relevance if the youth are enfranchised at age 16.
Implementation
Some of the changes we propose require state legislative approval. The state legal precedents are contradictory on the question of municipal systems of PR and IRV, with some indicating municipal home rule and others indicating the needs for state legislative approval.
Other changes may be enacted by city ordinance, such as public campaign financing. Still others require city charter changes, such as the changes we propose in the composition of the Common Council and the incorporation of Neighborhood Assemblies into the structure of city governance.
A Charter Review Commission will be needed to work through these legal details. Forming one in cooperation with the Common Council’s charter committee will be one of my first initiatives as Mayor.
1 - Emanuel Carter, "Onondaga Creek – A Catalytic Corridor," Introduction to Onondaga Creek Corridor Studies, SNUNY School of Environmental Sciences and Forestry, http://fla.esf.edu/people/faculty/carter/A.pdf.
2 - This city planning and political science literature is reviewed in Kirkpatrick Sale, Human Scale (New York: Cowan, McCann, & Geoghegan, 1980)