NYC Council Discretionary
Funding of Latino Organizations, Fiscal Year 2013
By Angelo Falcón (July 8, 2012)
This past week, the New York City Council and Mayor Michael Bloomberg came to an agreement on a $68.5 billion budget for the city . An always controversial aspect of the city budget involves the so-called Member Items (or more derisively referred to as "pork") that the individual Councilmembers distribute for both capital and expense purposes.
The Council released its listing of expense Member Items that it allocated to community based not-for-profit and other public service organizations for fiscal year 2013. This 258-page report, " Fiscal Year 2013 Adopted Expense Budget, Adjustment Summary / Schedule C (June 28, 2012), " simply referred to as "Schedule C," provides a complete listing of organizations to which member items and special initiative funding have been allocated. The Member Items are sponsored by individual Councilmembers, through the Speaker's List and by groups of Councilmembers (such as the Manhattan Delegation, etc.).
We provide in this NiLP Latino Datanote a summary of the Member Item allocations for Latino organizations from this list. We were able to identify 46 Latino organizations set to receive a total of $1,527,189, or 3,1 percent of the $49,701,895 allocated by the Councilmembers in this way. The breakdown by organization, ranked by amount allocated, is summarized in the table below.
Although it is acknowledged that the Latino population also receives many services from non-Latino organizations and public agencies that are funded by Member Items, it is nonetheless troubling that only 3.1 percent of these discretionary funds goes to specifically Latino organizations. The Latino population in New York City numbers over 2 million or 29 percent of the city's population, and over 42 percent of its poverty population.
Many of these agencies also receive funds through grants and contracts from various city agencies, but while there are suspicions that significant underfunding occurs in this area as well, no such budget data is currently available on Latino city government funding and research needs to be done to document this aspect of the issue as well.
The Schedule C report also lists organizations receiving funding for special initiatives. From these, we were able to identify the following Latino organizations who are recipients:
Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CUNY)
$250,000 to archive, preserve and record Puerto Rican culture
Dominican Studies Institute (CUNY)
$250,000 to archive, preserve and record Dominican culture
Latino Commission on AIDS
$97.000 for HIV Prevention - Evidence-based Behavioral Intervention
Dominican Women's Development Center
$81,333 for the Domestic Violence and Empowerment (DoVE) Initiative
Finally, we list below the individual Member Item allocations made by the current 11 Latino Councilmembers. Please note that this does not include allocations by groups of Councilmembers of which the Latino Councilmember may have been a part, but only of those items sponsored by the specific legislator alone.
As you can see, there is significant variation in the total amounts assigned to different Councilmembers, ranging from a high of $1,034,651 to Joel Rivera of The Bronx to a low of $449,664 to Rosie Mendez of lower Manhattan. There is some debate about the reasons for these variations, but it appears that seniority is an important factor. There is a relatively high correlation of .64 between amount of total Member Item allocations and the Councilmember's length of service. There are, obviously, other factors, probably mostly political, that account for the unexplained variations.
There are many issues involved in assessing the nature and desirability of Member Items on the New York City Council ( also see ), which we do not discuss here. For a full discussion of these issues, we recommend the recent report by the Citizens Union of the City of New York on this subject, " Creating A More Equitable And Objective Discretionary Funding Process In New York City (May 2012) ." More detailed and a broader analysis of this issue from a Latino point of view remains to be conducted as well.
For more detailed tables from those in this Datanote, please contact me at afalcon@latinopolicy.org .
Angelo Falcónis President of the National Institute for Latino Policy (NiLP), for which he edits The NiLP Network on Latino Issues. He recently authored the NiLP report, " Latinos and NYC Council Districting, 2012: An Introduction " (June 2012). He can be reached at afalcon@latinopolicy.org .