Howie Hawkins Declares for 4th District Councilor

2009 July 16th

Howie Hawkins for 4th District Councilor
P.O. Box 562, 2617 S. Salina St., Syracuse NY 13205
474-7055, www.howiehawkins.org

Media Release

For immediate release: Thursday, July 16
For More Information: Howie Hawkins, 315-425-1019, hhawkins@igc.org

Howie Hawkins Declares for 4th District Councilor

Outlines Six Reforms and Says He Can Win This Time

(Syracuse – July 16) On the steps of City Hall today, Howie Hawkins declared his candidacy for the 4th District Council seat on the Syracuse Common Council with the following statement:

Six Reforms Syracuse Needs

The Larger Forces Affecting Syracuse's Sustainability

Four years ago, as part of my campaign for mayor, the Green Party presented a statement and graphic depictions of "Sustainable Syracuse: The Green Alternative to Destiny USA" (see www.syracusegreens.org/election2005/sustainablecuse.html).

In that statement, we said, "Destiny may fail economically. What then?"

It looks like "then" may be now. We went on to say:

"An economy dependent on tourism and consumerism is at the mercy of market forces beyond its local control. Between the unsustainable record-level US trade deficit, soaring federal budget deficits, and record-level US consumer indebtedness financed by housing bubbles in many regional US markets, it is not good timing to bet Syracuse's economic future now on tourists and consumers."

I point this out not just to say, "We told you so," but also to underscore three conditions we addressed back then that have only gotten worse in the last four years:
1. The debt overhang dragging down the national economy in which Syracuse tries to revitalize its city economy.
2. The mounting evidence for catastrophic climate change and the peaking of oil production, which will raise the costs – and perhaps the very availability of – food and fuel in the years ahead.
3. The high poverty levels in Syracuse, which a US Census survey in 2005 found to be the third highest overall – and the very highest in the black community – of any central city in the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the US.

Debt, Climate Change, Peak Oil, Poverty … and Syracuse's Future

The debt overhang in the economy – household, corporate, and government – is even greater than it was four years ago. The payments by the 90 percent who are debtors and taxpayers to the top 10 percent who are creditors is why we face a long, slow recovery at best.

What does this mean for Syracuse? The Big Boss isn't going to come in here and save us. Citigroup's cutoff of Destiny's credit is symptomatic of this larger economic picture.

Nor is Uncle Sam going to save us.

The $787 billion economic stimulus, which is only one-third of the shortfall in aggregate demand, pales in comparison to the $12.8 trillion lent, spent, or committed in guarantees to the financial industry and the over $5 trillion committed to overseas wars and military spending over the next eight years by the new administration.

The combination of taxes and inflation to pay for the wars and bailouts preclude any substantial urban policy that will really help us rebuild cities like Syracuse and probably any strong economic recovery nationally for many years.

What this means is that we are going to have to do it ourselves. The city government is going to have to take a much more direct role in developing local businesses.

That means everything from the retail stores that have largely abandoned our neighborhood business districts, to the green industries everyone agrees are central to our city's and region's recovery, to the high-value added production of real material wealth by agriculture and manufacturing, which too many leaders in this community have concluded are not viable here.

But the Greens argue that if we are serious about the sustainability everyone now talks about, we have to be serious about developing a local and regional base of sustainable agriculture and manufacturing, with renewable agricultural feedstocks supplying the raw materials for ecologically clean and sustainable manufacturing.

The high value-added nature of manufacturing is what creates the wealth that serves as the foundation for the service, retail, and government sectors and for the value we can trade for the material things we that we do not produce locally and need to import.

The "eds" and "meds" on the Hill and the regional green tech Creative Corridor are vital and necessary for our economy, but they are not sufficient for economic or environmental sustainability, especially now as the evidence mounts every week for climate change and peak oil.

Climate change and peak oil means that we in Syracuse can no longer take our supplies of food and energy for granted. We should no longer plan on securing food from the other side of the continent and fuel from the other side of the world. Global transportation networks and supply and production chains will become more and more expensive due to climate change and rising oil prices in the coming years.

All this bears obviously upon the high rates of poverty and unemployment in Syracuse. The poverty, and the property degradation and violence that go with it, are a drag on any economic development initiatives. We have to craft programs that raise up the opportunities and outcomes of the many low-income people who are already here.

Why the 4th District Race?

The Green Party has been observing the mayoral and council campaigns. Every politician seems to be a "green" these days. The Greens are gratified to see every candidate now paying homage to ‘green jobs,' ‘the green economy,' and ‘sustainability.' But it will take more than just saying these phrases as if they were magic. What we are not hearing from the candidates are the concrete policies and reforms needed to make them happen.

The Greens would have liked to run a full slate of candidates for mayor and every council seat up for election. We had some excellent possibilities. But, frankly, issues of their job security or their business's survival in this tough economy narrowed down the field to me. We have some excellent future candidates in the pipeline, but this year I will be the Green Party's only candidate.

We looked at the mayoral race as an opportunity to raise issues and put them on the agenda, as we have in the past with the living wage and public power. But more and more we came to the conclusion that the Greens need to win a race so we can keep issues on the table from the inside after the election, not just raise the issues from the outside before the election. We looked at the at-large council races, but the scale of the 4th District Council race seemed to offer a campaign where we could really be competitive. We asked around the district to see what people thought and received a lot of encouragement to run this race.

We do not underestimate the obstacles to winning this race. The district enrollment is two-thirds Democratic and the opponent is a three-term incumbent. But we believe we have a realistic chance of winning by going door-to-door and talking to the voters of the district.

The 4th District also offers a chance to speak to the larger issues Greens are concerned with across the city because the 4th district encapsulates the range of city neighborhoods and issues. The 4th District encompasses Downtown, University Hill, the more middle class neighborhoods of the near East Side, and the more working class neighborhoods of the South Side. It has high concentrations of poverty and unemployment on the Southside right next to the biggest employers with some of the best jobs in the Central New York at the "eds and meds" on University Hill. These institutions are the drivers of the region's economy and most of the 40,000 people who commute into Syracuse work on the Hill.

So let me outline six of the high priority reforms I will advocate during the campaign and hopefully push from the inside as the next Common Councilor from the 4th District after the election.

The first two reforms are issues Greens first raised in city elections and placed on the city's agenda: living wages and public power. But they need more follow through for full implementation. The other four are new reforms that we believe are critical to the economic viability, environmental sustainability, and fiscal health of the city.

1. A Stronger Living Wage Law

We first need to follow through and enforce the law we have. It is shameful that the parking lot attendants had to sue to get their living wage and that the airport workers are still trying to get theirs four years after the ordinance was adopted. Second, the coverage should be expanded to cover all city workers and workers on city contracts, including recipients of economic development tax breaks and grants. Third, we should explore expanding the living wage into a citywide minimum wage, covering all workers, public and private, as Santa Fe, New Mexico has done. Yes, there are legal obstacles to these expansions of coverage. But we should work to remove them, not meekly succumb to them.

Fourth, we need a Community Hiring Hall incorporated into the Living Wage Law, as several cities have done. City residents, and particularly people of color, are grossly underrepresented in jobs with the city and city contractors. The city has no program to increase city resident and minority employment in city departments and with city contractors, except for the police and fire departments where the goal has been 8 percent since the 1970s due to court orders. The city's minority population is approaching 50 percent.

The strengthened Living Wage Law should include a positive program of affirmative action to increase city residents and people of color in jobs with the city and its contractors. The strengthened Living Wage Law should require city departments and contractors to hire qualified workers from a Community Hiring Hall if they cannot meet minority and city resident employment goals. The Community Hiring Hall will provide job counseling, placement, training, and support services to help people qualify, get into, and stay in training programs and jobs. The Community Hiring Hall should also be part of a coordinated Green Jobs program to train and recruit city residents for the skilled workforce of the new Green Economy, especially at-risk youth and ex-offenders.

This kind of stronger Living Wage Law is the fastest, most direct way to begin putting the wealth of the 4th District to work for all of the people of the 4th District. Jobs that pay living wages are the best anti-poverty program with many positive spin-offs. Not only do living wage jobs provide people with enough income to meet basic expenses, they go a long way to help stabilize families and neighborhoods and thus reduce crime, violence, and all the negative things that are now flowing from the streets into the schools to disrupt learning.

2. Public Power

The Greens and other public power advocates were very disappointed that only two of the 10 members of Common Council attended the interim report from Source One, the firm doing the feasibility study of public power. Source One came back wanting to know whether they should really study municipalization, or maybe aggregation (group buying of energy by the city for its residents). The Mayor has not given Source One an answer to that question, but has indicated that he will pass the municipalization vs. aggregation question on to the next mayor and ask Source One to report on the potential for green energy under both organizational models. Meanwhile, none of the mayoral candidates has made public power an issue they will champion.

The Greens are all for green renewable energy sources. That is not at issue. What is at issue is whether we will have a public power utility, which will mean we will have the power to choose green energy and get the lowest cost.

We sense that the politicians are afraid to take on National Grid. 13,000 Mohawks at St. Regis just voted last month to buy out National Grid's distribution system and build their own power station. Why should 137,000 Syracusans be afraid?

The Common Council needs a public power advocate on it to keep pushing this reform forward.

3. Municipal Development Bank

The city should establish a Municipal Development Bank with a business planning department to help plan, finance, develop, and advise community-owned enterprises, including worker and consumer cooperatives, resident owner-operated businesses, and stock corporations where voting shares are restricted to city residents (like the Green Bay Packers).

The bank would spearhead an aggressive program of job creation and business development to create community-owned businesses where the wealth they create is anchored to the community by the ownership structure and the wealth created is distributed widely among the community.

The bank could start immediately developing the retail outlets we need in our neighborhoods, like the longstanding need for grocery stores downtown and now on the South Side with the closure of P&C at Valley Plaza.

But the bank could also play a key role in developing sophisticated green agriculture and manufacturing. The model here is the Bank of People's Labor in Basque Region of Spain. It started in 1956 in Mondragon, a small city of 23,000. By 2007, it had grown into a network of 150 worker cooperatives, 80 percent of them industrial or engineering, with over 104,000 workers. The co-ops form the largest manufacturing base in Spain. It also developed the largest Spanish-owned grocery store chain, which is a 473,000 member cooperative. The whole complex, the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation, had $23.6 billion in sales and $46.3 billion is assets in 2007.

A Municipal Development Bank won't turn things around overnight. But it is a way to start. We should think about this in the spirit of some advice from Andres Duany, the New Urbanist city planner, who said, "What a city requires is slow, patient work by excellent government and many small investors." The people of Syracuse are ready to invest their money and labor in this community. This bank could be a significant part of the "excellent government" that has been missing.

4. Municipal Broadband (Cable TV, Internet, Phone)

Hundreds of US cities have municipal ownership of their broadband utilities and their customers pay 30% less on average for cable TV, internet, and phone. Time Warner's cable franchise is up for renewal. Now is the time to municipalize our broadband utility for (1) lower fees, (2) community control of available channels (from Democracy Now to the NFL Network), (3) quality Public Access, Education, and Government (PEG) programming, (4) universal access to high-speed internet, and (5) up-to-date public access video and web-based media creation centers. Every Syracuse should have first-class, affordable access to internet, cable, and phone communications. The Syracuse economy needs first-rate affordable broadband to progress. The profits now exported to Time-Warner can stay in the community for our own benefit through municipal cable.

5. Neighborhood-based Planning

The key to a Sustainable Syracuse is building the political and economic democracy that gives us the power to build sustainability despite the power of the vested interests that profit from the unsustainable status quo. To exercise this democratic planning power, we need neighborhood-based planning by Neighborhood Assemblies in each of the city's real neighborhoods where residents can debate, decide, and instruct representatives on the citywide Comprehensive Plan and their own Neighborhood Plans. We also need City Planning Department, not to make planning decisions, but to provide expert consultation to city officials and the democratic planning process based in the Neighborhood Assemblies.

As a step toward reforming the city charter to make Neighborhood Assemblies part of our structure of city government, if elected I intend to organize unofficial Neighborhood Assemblies and organize regular meetings with them, perhaps four to six times a year, in each of eight neighborhoods of the 4th District:

(1) Downtown/15th Ward

On the South Side:
(2) Southwest
(3) Gateway
(4) Brighton

On the Eastside:
(5) Outer Comstock
(6) University Hill
(7) University Neighborhood
(8) Westcott

The neighborhoods themselves can decide whether this breakdown makes sense. But the point is to create an institution where neighborhood residents can discuss their views on issues and proposals before the city and Common Council, take up any neighborhood issues or problems they choose, and get organized to fulfill their neighborhood's needs and goals.

6. Progressive Tax Reform

The poorest 20% pay 14% of their income in sales and property taxes while the wealthiest 20% pay only 7% in New York State (Fiscal Policy Institute, 2003). Meanwhile, the city of Syracuse faces a significant recurring annual structural deficit.

We need a more progressive local tax structure to make taxes fair and sufficient to fund city services, schools, and youth programs.

We must Fully Fund Public Schools by reforming the state funding formula and committing to a regular annual increase in the city contribution to the school budget.

We should establish a progressively graduated City Income and Commuter Tax, including a tax on the incomes earned in the city by 40,000+ commuters. Commuters use city services (police, fire, roads, infrastructure) but make no contribution to pay for them.

Coupled to the income tax should be property tax reforms to create a more progressive property tax through Land Value Taxation, which would cut the property tax rate, make it progressive, and stimulate inner-city development by taxing land values more and improvements to homes and businesses less.

It's the Little Things, Too

We have more proposals that are on my website at howiehawkins.org. But I have said far more now than reporters can use and most voters will read.

On the other hand, our problems are not simple and we won't solve them by glossing them over.

In any case, people can go to my website for more. And we invite any other candidates to take up any of our proposals as their own.

Now my supporters and me are going out to hit the doors and talk to the voters of the district for the next 17 weeks.

And we'll probably be talking less about these bigger policy reforms and more about immediate problems on the block: the potholes, the sewer backups, the drug houses, the promised bikeway that still isn't there, and so on.

We take those immediate problems as seriously as we take the larger policy problems. If a District Councilor is not responsive on the so-called little things, the people will have no faith that anything can change on the big things.

So here is one more campaign pledge from me to the voters of the Fourth District. Constituent services will be a high priority. If I'm elected, I will have regular office hours at the Green Party office at 2617 S. Salina St. where people can come in for help with the little things, or the big things.

I intend to work hard for the district's constituents and be an independent voice for the 4th District who is beholden to neither of the established parties or any other outside interests.

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