JUST Talk

Commentaries on Local Justice by Bill Martin

Month: January 2023

Broome County’s ARPA Bonanza: Who Captured the $37 million?

January 25, 2023 / / 0 Comments

Published online at Binghamton Bridge, Jan 24, 2023

What would you do if someone gave you an unexpected $37 million? A once-in-a-lifetime bonanza?

That was the delicious dilemma faced by the Broome County Executive and Legislators when the Federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) was passed in March 2021. ARPA allocated $350 billion to municipal, county, state, and tribal governments to assist in COVID recovery. COVID had eliminated jobs, impoverished families, overwhelmed public health services, and destabilized the mental and physical health of youth, adults, and seniors alike. ARPA monies were intended to address the public health, economic, and housing needs arising from the epidemic. ARPA guidelines for spending were flexible, but emphasized prioritizing vulnerable groups and equitable economic recovery (Federal guidelines are here).

How did Broome County spend the money? We don’t know. Neither the press nor county government has provided a list or tabulation of funded projects. When the local Press and Sun-Bulletin newspaper reported on the use of $163 million in ARPA funds across the Southern Tier, Broome County had only one, unspecified commitment mentioned.

Binghamton’s $46 million in ARPA: where did it go?

The City of Binghamton was no clearer on how it was spending its $46 million.  Like the county, the city did not hold any community public hearings, get public input, or provide any transparent accounting. Thanks to investigations by community activists we now have the details on a new website, #bingamtonslushfund, which tracks the city government’s ARPA decisions.

It’s not a pretty picture. The group’s conclusion: ARPA dollars were recklessly laundered into a slush fund controlled by the Republican mayor and city council members.  They then funded pet projects unrelated to COVID, from a parking garage to a luxury housing project downtown. Judge for yourself by looking at the funded projects detailed on their website here.

Broome County’s $37 million: where did it go?

Paulus Housing Project Johnson City $4.7m in tax rebates

County finances receive far less attention by the press and community groups.  A freedom-of-information request to the county asking for ARPA expenditures was submitted in September 2022.  It finally received a response in January 2023.  It may be downloaded here.

The summary results? While lots of groups were funded, no substantial money went to address the health impacts of COVID, the local housing crisis, or the mental and physical health aftermaths of COVID.  In the midst of the fentanyl/tranq epidemic exacerbated by COVID isolation and poverty, we cannot fund, for example, the community-based initiatives other cities and counties have launched.

Who were the big winners?  Developers and the Sheriff–and a distant third group, county parks.

Here are some of the developers’ pet projects, all charging commercial, market rate rents:

Sparc Corp JC Oakdale Mall                                                      $7,170,000
19 Avenue B Housing Project & Phoenix/Huron                $2,800,000
Conifer & LeChase (IBM proje3ct) apartments                   $1,000,000
Paulus Development (JC EJ building) apartments                 $750,000
SEPP Group Endicott apartments                                              $670,000
K Mart Plaza                                                                                $1,000,000

None of these projects are contingent on providing the numerous living-wage jobs and low-income housing we need. Indeed as has happened in both Binghamton and Johnson City, they are likely to decrease affordable housing for poor and Black residents as gentrification and expensive housing projects continue to proliferate around new SUNY downtown buildings–and displace existing lower-rent housing.  As reported in the SUNY campus newspaper Pipedream, “BU has acquired over 30 plots of land throughout Broome County to expand the school, demolishing the 50 single-family homes and apartments in them.” Lacking customers due to gentrification driven by the SUNY Nursing school, the last supermarket in downtown Johnson City closed, driving people to overwhelmed, nearby pantries. Faced with public debate over the impacts and cost of student housing, SUNY Chancellor John King in a visit to Binghamton this past week coldly asserted this was the cost of “economic development.”

50 Front St Luxury Apartments
$16.8m tax rebates

And most of the ARPA projects already have been underwritten by   state, county, or municipal funding . The most egregious diversion of public funds? Up to thirty years of tax exemptions through so-called PILOT agreements provided by local development agencies as reported by the press. In Broome County these have granted property and sale tax rate reductions and exemptions, most notably for one luxury housing development after another.  As recorded in cost-benefit analyses by the Broome County Development Agency, these include $4.7 million in rebates for the EJ Victory Building in Johnson City (156 apartments) and, in Binghamton, rebates worth $7.5 million for the Ansco building on Emma Street (100 apartments), $16.8 million in tax abatements for the owners of the “50 Front Street Luxury Apartments” (122 apartments, opening with the highest local rents), $3 million for Chenango Place on Court Street (94 apartments), $6.5 million for the gated, luxury student apartments next to the SUNY Downtown Center (127 apartments), and another $9.4 million rebate to the developer of the Oakland Mall—to mention but a few. ARPA adds more fuel to the bonfire elimination of corporations’ tax bills, while, like new, tax-exempt SUNY and hospital operations, increasing demand for more city services.

Up on the Hill: The Sheriff’s $ 7 million

Pushed aside and out of sight, where will the homeless and people with health problems go? For far too many the jail has emerged as the county’s major substance use and mental health “treatment center.”  And that’s what the county funded from ARPA, giving $7 million to the Sheriff for unspecified purposes.

The Sheriff has a $42 million budget, with the jail accounting for $32 million. Why the additional $millions? The need for road patrols surely did not increase under COVID.  Nor did jail numbers.  Indeed due to lower crime and criminal justice reforms the jail population has been dropping for years. Built and expanded to incarcerate 600 persons, the local jail population rarely exceeds half that number. Last month there were fewer than 300 local residents in the jail (and only 52 convicted of a crime). The number of Correctional Officers had also fallen proportionally.

And yet an additional $7 million was allocated from ARPA funds.  Democratic and Republican County Executives and Legislators have for decades privileged the jail. But what are the $7 million being used for? A hiring boom for up to 38 more Correctional Officers is apparently underway according to the press. How is this justified?

This is a costly commitment, for correctional officers are expensive. Of the 46 county employees who earned over a $100,000 in 2021 (the last posted year), at least 32 are correctional officers (and all but 5 of the 46 are employed by the criminal justice system). The highest paid employee? District Attorney Korchak. Its the cost of making Broome County, of all 62 state counties, the county with the highest jail incarceration rate.

Elite Capture

It is too late to turn back irresponsible ARPA spending: although ARPA funds may be spent over 5 years, over $32 million of the county’s $37 million has already been spent. We can–as has the community group working on the City of Binghamton ARPA funds–press local officials to hold public hearings, account for their decisions, and reallocate remaining and future county monies to meet community needs.

As the story of county use of ARPA and Broome County Development Agency funds demonstrates, however, the problem is deeper and long-standing.  Corporate and political elites–all too often an interlocking web of developers, real estate interests, and lineage politicians–have long captured county and city funds.  Overturning this corporate/political complex, and allocating public funds to real human needs like housing and health, will require an equally long-term community struggle.

Ansco “Sophisticated Luxury Living” $7.5m tax rebates

Policing Kids: Revisiting School Officers 2023

January 10, 2023 / / 0 Comments

Recent and continuing community protests in the aftermath of a school police officer knelling on the neck of a young Black man brings to light yet once again the dangers and costs of placing officers in local schools (see video here, fuller story here, and local news reports here and here and protest here at a school board meeting). Immediately below is a reprint from May 2019 that details the history, costs, and research findings on “School Resource Officers”. In this case the cost of the school police officer involved? $99,000 in 2022 (before overtime and benefits), twice the average cost of a Binghamton school teacher.

And here are some questions one might ask about police in schools, including the alliance between the Binghamton Police Department and the SUNY-Binghamton Police Department.

Broome’s Schools & the Cost of Fear, May 4, 2019

How can we best educate Broome county’s kids and protect them from harm?  The choices are tough for parents, teachers, and school principals. Do we spend

thin funding on more teachers or nurses?  Or a guidance or a mental health counselor? Or when it comes to safety, hardening the schools against armed attack and hiring armed police? Unfortunately fear, and not a rational calculation of where dangers lie, drives today’s calculations.

Fear is a powerful motivator.  In the Cold War years, children were drilled to “duck and cover” under their classroom desks to avoid the effects of Soviet atomic bombs.  Today students and teachers practice turning off lights, locking classroom doors, pulling down window shades, and huddling quietly in closets to hide from active shooters. Surprise lockdown drills have become the norm, reproducing a climate of insecurity and anxiety. One in three parents nationwide fear for the safety of their child at school, fed by lurid media coverage and politically calculated calls for more state security.

Living in fear imposes costs and choices.  Most prominent is the cost of police in our schools. In Broome County, as across the nation, the number of armed School Resource Officers (SROs) and civilian security staff has grown steadily.  What does this cost?  And has this reduced, prevented, or increased harm to our youth?

There is neither transparency nor much discussion here. School, city, and police budgets provide little help.  Incomplete responses to freedom of information requests to local towns, police departments, and the county, in addition to a survey of press and website listings, produce an incomplete total for Broome County schools of $1.3 million per year.  It looks like this:

  DistrictSchool Resource OfficersNon-sworn civilian monitors
Binghamton$190,000$170,000
Vestal$108,000?
Chenango, Maine-Endwell (Broome County Sheriff)$108,000—
BOCES, Catholic Schools, Harpursville, Susquehanna Valley, Windsor; (District Attorney Cornwell’s Program)$664,000?
Johnson City0?

These are very incomplete figures, given that SRO costs remain hidden in many budgets, and even these tabulations do not include in most cases civilian security staff, costs of “hardening” school facilities, staff training, consultant fees, drill practices, etc.

For many of our elected representatives this is not nearly enough. State legislators, led by our Senator (and former Undersheriff and current police officer) Frederick Akshar, have long advocated putting armed officers in schools. Senate Bill S1330 cosponsored by Akshar proposes that the state directly fund a force of retired police officers in all public and private schools outside of New York City—while raising school security officer (SRO) pay over 60 per cent.

The cost? Close to $200 million a year.

As an employment program, adding 4,000 part-time retirees to the state payroll is impressive. Nationwide, we’ve seen billions now spent on policing and hardening schools. Yet glaringly absent are other resources:   14 million students go to a school with a police officer but no counselor, nurse, psychologist or social worker.

Even more critical is the simple fact that adding armed police to school hallways does little to protect youth from the dangers they may face.  As multiple reports by security firms,[1]  research scholars,[2] and the Congressional Research Service[3] tell us, deaths in schools from active shooters are a minuscule subset of school fatalities, less than 5 percent,[4] and an even smaller percentage of youth homicides or suicides by firearms.[5]  Shootings in and around schools are also exceedingly rare. Students know this: their fear of attack or harm while in school has been falling for over two decades.[6] Students in schools do face harm but from sources armed police can do little to prevent or resolve:  transport accidents, suicide, bullying, and hate crimes among other causes.

Indeed armed police may exacerbate these problems. They certainly increase the danger of kids ending up in what is commonly called the school-to-prison pipeline. For what we do know is that more policing in our schools is associated with more detention and arrests, particularly of African-American and Latinx students.  Incidents previously addressed by teachers, principals, and parents are increasingly turned over to retired police officers, who by training rely upon force and the criminal justice system.  Recent protests against Binghamton High School security staff beating down a Black student on Court street, and the strip searching of four young Black girls at East Middle School highlight the problem and the fear some students have of the police and security staff.

Indeed, as local statistics and national surveys indicate, policing in schools reinforces racial disparities, with racially dipropionate rates of detention and arrest feeding directly into the prison pipeline.  African-Americans, for example, compose 10 percent of Broome County’s students, but account for 43% of juvenile detentions and 50% of those on probation supervision. Where are the precursors?  In the Binghamton School District, which spends the most on armed and private security, African-American students are suspended at 2.5 times the rate for white students and suffer a 26% drop out rate.  County-wide, African-American are 10 percent of youth but 43% of juvenile detentions and 50% of those on probation supervision.

It is simply too costly a system: too many police in schools, too many poor, disabled and students of color channeled into the criminal justice system, and too few counselors, nurses, and mental health workers in our schools to really help kids resolve the conflicts and troubles of growing up in these difficult times.

Twenty years ago DARE, the police program in schools to prevent drug use, was shown to be a total failure and it collapsed.  We should do the same to its successors, and end, finally, unaccountable mass policing in our schools.

References

[1] Stephen C. Satterly Jr., “Report of Relative Risks of Death in U.S. K-‐12 Schools” (Safe Havens International, August 1, 2014).

[2] James H. Price and Jagdish Khubchandani, “School Firearm Violence Prevention Practices and Policies: Functional or Folly?,” Violence and Gender, March 19, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1089/vio.2018.0044.

[3] Authors Redacted, “School Resource Officers: Issues for Congress” (Congressional Research Service, July 5, 2018).

[4] Authors Redacted, 18.

[5] Price and Khubchandani, “School Firearm Violence Prevention Practices and Policies,” 2.

[6] Lauren Musu-Gillette et al., “Indicators of SChool Crime and Safety 2017” (Washington, D.C: U.S. Department of Education, U.S. Department of Justice. Office of Justice Programs. Bureau of Justice Statistics, March 2018), 105.

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