NYCivic Is Three Years Old Today,
199 Articles Posted on Homepage.

By Henry J. Stern
February 4, 2005

Today is New York Civic's third birthday.  We began this work on February 4, 2002, the Monday morning after I left the Emerald Empire.  In three years, we have written 199 articles and 36 Q's (short pieces).  The articles, short and long, are collected on our home page, www.nycivic.org, which allows Google searches of all our articles.  How they do this at no charge is remarkable; Moby tells me it is advertising revenues, but Sergei Brin and Larry Page have certainly performed a public service in spreading knowledge.
 
Civic organizations, of which we are one, have various concerns.  Some are advocates for particular agencies or programs.  Some fight government spending as a matter of principle.  Some support local betterment, occasionally to the detriment of the general public good.  Some fight economic development; others promote it.  Some are allies of the political machines; others oppose incumbents and support insurgents.  When their side wins, the program changes, and old opponents of the regime become admirers, as long as their names are called properly on roll calls at board meetings.

In our judgment, civic organizations and community boards include some of the New Yorkers most interested in government in a spirited, authentic and legitimate way.  Occasionally, they act like co-op boards, highly self-interested with relatively little concern with outsiders.  Most times, groups of volunteers know what they are doing and make valuable contributions to decision-making on local issues. In contrast, some of the old elected local school boards, recently abolished, were cesspools of corruption, patronage and favoritism. They had the power to hire and fire people, and to spend money, and thus became the focus of power plays by unions, non-public schools, and ethnic organizations, all competing for control.   Although the appointed community boards earned public respect, and won additional powers in the latest City Charter.  In contrast, the elected school boards were held in such disregard that last time there was an election, only 3% of the voters showed up at the polls.
 
Just as fish in a river gather at the mouth of a sewer for nourishment, where public funds are involved, eager hands and hungry mouths assemble to partake of the bounty.

Grotesque Abuse of City Funds
In Campaign Finance Program
That Council Refuses to Modify
 
With regard to abuses of the campaign finance law, some of which we discussed yesterday, there is one instance in particular that cries out for more public attention than it has received.  A Conservative Party candidate for a City Council seat in a heavily Democratic area of Brooklyn, who was a Democrat two years ago and received a total of 368 votes in the election, qualified for public financing and spent his city subsidy, in good part, by hiring his immediate family as campaign staff.  The family was also among the contributors whose gifts enabled him to receive matching public support.
 
Another problem that has come to light is the hiring of friends and associates of the candidate as consultants on housing and transportation in districts where there is no genuine race.  Candidates must file official statements of need in runaway races in districts where there is, in fact, not a scintilla of need for public funding because there is, in fact, no competition.  Some candidates use their city subsidy to publicize themselves in anticipation of future races for higher office.  These varied abuses of the process were reported by the Campaign Finance Board itself in its annual report, a relatively undiscovered document which casts a searchlight on some of the shabbier practices of local politicians.
 
The principal evil in the current framework of public financing is that it is the City Council itself that adopts and amends the law under which the CFB operates.  This is the equivalent of permitting the television and telephone industries to pass the laws which govern the powers and procedures of the Federal Communications Commission?  In the barnyard, it is the classic case of the fox sent to guard the henhouse.  The house is fine, but the hens are devoured.
 
The honest, unpaid members of CFB can easily be frustrated by the scheming, self-serving manipulations of $90,000-a-year part-time officeholders who, on the pretext of achieving fairness, have manipulated the well-intended and honorable cause of public financing into a sweet and lucrative honey pot, a modern technique for officials to gorge themselves and their retainers at a long, wide, deep trough filled with money raised by our taxes.  The trope of the trough, with its connotation of porcine indulgence, gluttony and lack of restraint, is highly appropriate in some of these cases, where insatiable greed exemplifies the arrogance of power and the insolence of office.  Our role is paying for it.
 
We discuss here the political and personal behavior of elected public officials, men and women, some of whom went to law school, who, despite good breeding, good education and good manners, appear either to have been absent the day of the lesson on ethics, or to have forgotten what they learned.  They nod under the influence of ambition, which we know is an intoxicant as powerful as alcohol, numbing judgment and restraint just as alcohol and drugs numb the senses.