Mayor De Blasio Agrees To Raises For City Council Members - People Are Pissed

Lots of people are upset over Mayor DiBlasio's accepting a recommendation from an independent panel to give 23% raises for members of NYC City Council. This raise would bring their salary up to $138k from $112k.

In exchange for the raises, the City Council members will no longer be able to hold jobs outside city council.

In a news story that I watched on CBS this morning, the react quotes were from two people:

1. An NYC citizen who felt the council members are do-nothings who probably don't deserve a paycheck in the first place
2. The president of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association (the nyc police union) who said that this raise is a slap in the face of police officers who, by comparison, received paltry 1% raises.

After reading the comments in the online version of the CBS story I watched this morning, which essentially echoed the citizen and the PBA president (but in much more angry terms), I felt like I should quickly write down my thoughts.

Here they are:

1. It seems like the people who gave the react quotes and the comment section people completely missed the fact that these raises come with bans on outside employment.

The raise is an acknowledgment of new regulations that would be placed on city council members that would effectively lower their income earning ability.

The $50k/yr (or higher...or lower) consulting gig that they used to work is now replaced with a $25k raise. That's significant.


The public benefits because, in theory, there will be fewer opportunities for conflicts of interest. To me, this sounds like a reasonable compromise. But to those who cannot get past the announcement of the pay raise, this sounds like civil servants enriching themselves at the taxpayers' expense. Why are people only capable of seeing one side of the story?

2. It seems like people are bad at math

Why can't people do math? Why can't PBA president see that there's a huge difference between giving $25k raises to the 51 members of city council (+ a few other elected officials like the mayor, comptroller and DA) and giving a raise to New York City's 50,000 police officers? I'm not saying the cops don't deserve a raise, but we're talking a 3 orders of magnitude difference in the number of people affected.

Quick Math Aside: If 50k cops get an average raise of $500 in one year - that will cost taxpayers $25 million. $25k raises for 51 people will cost $1.3 million. 

If the argument isn't about money, but rather fairness and principle - we have to take into consideration the fact that police officers are allowed to work outside jobs (e.g. bouncers, bodyguards) while carrying their department-issued service weapons. This legislation takes away from council members the opportunity to be employed outside of their city job. So there's that.


In closing, the reactions I saw serve as another illustration of why I hate people (read my post on hating people here). People generally do not think critically about things and they often express their poorly informed opinions as though there aren't any circumstances under which they could be wrong. (Aside: with that said - there is a good chance that this raise could just be bad policy. Why hasn't the baseline expectation for NYC's elected officials *always* been "no outside employment"? Why does correcting a wrong, assuming it is wrong, require a raise?)

In the defense of the people who gave react quotes in the televised CBS NY story, there is a chance that the reporter baited them into giving nasty react quotes by omitting the information about restrictions on outside work (juicer quotes = juicier story). But even if that's the case, the people in the comment section have no excuse. The full story was presented plainly online - the article headline reads: "DeBlasio Agrees To Raises For City Council Members In Exchange For Reforms"

i'm done.

DiBlasio's Vision Zero and 25mph in NYC

The New York State legislature recently passed a measure that gave to New York City the right to enact a citywide 25mph speed limit (it is currently 30mph).

This law is a product of Mayor DiBlasio's Vision Zero, a plan to reduce to zero the number of pedestrian traffic deaths in New York City.

At a recent press conference the DiBlasio administration released the following statement as justification for lowering the speed limit:

"70% of accidents involving pedestrians are the result of speed or the failure to yield" 

This statement is disingenuous as it conflates two concepts. If the speeding statistics were so jarring so as to merit a speed limit reduction, they would stand on their own without needing be paired with "failure to yield" numbers. 

It also strikes me as outrageous that this legislation is considered an appropriate response when the current speed limit of 30mph is largely unenforced in the city.

Not enforcing the speed limit is tacit approval of the speed limit and occasional departures from it. Seeing cars pulled over for speeding with some degree of regularity gives drivers incentive to obey they law rather than to flout it.

Having spent time in traffic court (the NYC traffic violations bureau) studying cases, I can confidently state that police officers, when they enforce traffic rules, give the most citations for failure to yield and for various minor moving violations like failure to use a turn signal. 

To me, common sense says that the primary problems that drive pedestrian traffic fatalities are aggression and distractedness on the part of both the driver and the pedestrian, not driver speed. I will concede that the speed at which a pedestrian is hit will largely determine their prognosis, but under no circumstances will I ever agree that speed (that isnt reckless) alone is the cause of accidents. 

The people who speed in the city are the exception, not the rule. An NYC DOT traffic study that I read recently declared this to be the case on a major avenue in my neighborhood in Brooklyn. This avenue could be an anomaly, but my observations as a pedestrian, cyclist and driver confirm that this conclusion is the case across the city.

On another note, I think that NYC drivers need to unite to ensure that transportation policy reflects our interests. It is far too easy to get support for anti-car legislation in a city where so few residents drive. Maybe I need to be the person to start it.

Photo Credit: NY Daily News

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