Fair Share Begins with Fair Planning

Tools for Integrating Public Policy

Testimony to City Council Sub-Committee on Landmarks, Public Siting and Maritime Uses

Elena Conte, Organizer for Public Policy Campaigns

Good afternoon. My name is Elena Conte and I’m the Organizer for Public Policy Campaigns at the Pratt Center for Community Development. Thank you for the opportunity to revisit the issues that many of us had hoped would be taken up more fully by the Charter Revision Commission last fall. Voter approval to expand the map and text for facility siting to include some waste and transportation facilities run by private, state, and federal entities was an important step in the right direction. It was a clear signal that the New Yorkers recognize both the basis in principle of Fair Share, and the need for updated methods that will enable the City to make more equitable and informed decisions.

There is tremendous need for improvement. Our testimony focuses on:

• current consequences of inadequate Fair Share methodology and the lack of a holistic planning approach
• ways to update both the Criteria and the Fair Share Guide for City Agencies to reflect current standards;
• ways to ensure that the City’s decision-making process can benefit from both new technology and existing data;
• the need to connect Fair Share decisions to a more comprehensive approach to planning for the City in general.

Marine Transfer Stations – Reneging on a Fair Share Commitment

We’d like to take this opportunity to strongly urge the Mayor and Department of Sanitation to restore funding for the retrofit of Marine Transfer Stations in this year’s capital budget. Delaying funding for Marine Transfer Stations in Manhattan and South Brooklyn – the locations that currently do not transfer any waste – effectively guarantees that the communities that are currently overburdened by waste transfer stations and their attendant negative health impacts – in the South Bronx, North Brooklyn and Southeast Queens –will remain that way. This runs contrary to the framework for balance and equity passed by this body in the 2006 Solid Waste Management Plan and delays relief so far into the future as to remove any accountability by the administration for failing to deliver on its commitment. In the meantime, asthma rates in the overburdened communities remain among the worst in the city. This proposal demonstrates how easy it is for privileged interests to thwart hard-fought, collaborative plans for equity and highlights the underlying issues that make Fair Share reform so desperately needed. And the failure of NYC to sustainably handle its own waste has opened the door to proposals for waste-to-energy facilities which, if they advance, would undoubtedly be subject to siting battles.

Giving Fair Share Teeth

NYC’s Fair Share criteria and procedures are out of date and out of touch. They are based on limited 20th century tools that are now insufficient in their ability to understand existing burdens and protect against future burdens, especially environmental ones. Originally geared toward a social service issue, ever since the Criteria went into effect in 1991, we’ve been reverse engineering Fair Share to address environmental impacts without the tools for doing so.

Currently, agencies are required to measure the impact of facilities by virtue of a loose examination of their geographic distribution among neighborhoods. Agencies are narrowly required to examine the compatibility of a proposed facility or expansion with existing facilities in the immediate area. They are also required to examine how facility sitings impact vaguely-defined “neighborhood character” – language that perverts the intent of Fair Share by justifying the further concentration of facilities in already-burdened areas. In actual agency practice, Fair Share criteria have been rendered practically meaningless in achieving their intended results.

There are a number of straightforward, obvious changes that would strengthen Fair Share requirements. These include:

• updating the Fair Share Criteria Guide for the first time since1998 to utilize new informational tools like PLUTO, 311 data, census data, and Community Health District Profiles
• closing loopholes that enable agencies to suggest new and expanded facilities outside of the annual Statements of Need process.
• expanding the facilities required to be listed in the Atlas of Facilities to include all polluting facilities and infrastructure, including power plants, highways and other categories excluded from the recent Charter change.
• updating mapping guidelines to enable use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as part of the analysis.

These changes and more could be incorporated specifically into the Fair Share process without a Charter change were the Mayor to charge the appropriate, willing and progressive agency with promulgating updated rules. However, the underlying issue of incorporating public health considerations into a variety of decisions, including a community’s ability to plan and advocate for itself extends beyond Fair Share alone - and could be supported more directly by the Council through legislative action.

Public Health in Fair Share and Beyond

Contemporary environmental and public health science, as well as common-sense holistic thinking, demands that we understand that polluting facilities have public health impacts, and that these ought to be taken into account if we are to make smart public policy. The tools we now have available to us—sophisticated data collection, electronic mapping, and spatial analyses—all employed by the City of New York in various ways—can be brought to bear in Fair Share analysis to ensure more socially equitable distribution of polluting facilities. We’re now able to examine not only the geographic distribution of facilities, but also the geographic concentration of public health impacts and to juxtapose that with extensive demographic data on other types of social vulnerabilities. Data can help distinguish real environmental justice claims from NIMBYism and fair planning decisions help facilitate growth in a sustainable way. And equitably sharing the environmental and public health burdens of New York City’s growth ultimately gives all of us a stake in reducing those burdens.

NYC has much to learn from ways that other cities are integrating health information into their development decision-making and the ways that Health Impact Assessments and similar models are being used elsewhere to gauge and track environmental impacts of development and inform siting decisions. Perhaps the most noted example of a municipality explicitly declaring the connections between planning decisions and public health outcomes and creating a mechanism to link the two is San Francisco’s Healthy Development Measurement Tool (HDMT). In effect since 2007, the HDMT establishes a set of metrics to evaluate the extent to which land use plans, projects, or policies will advance human health in San Francisco. These elements include: 1) environmental stewardship;, 2) sustainable and safe transportation,; 3) public infrastructure; 4) social cohesion; 5) adequate and healthy housing; and 6) healthy economy. Each element is accompanied with measurable objectives and data sources, looking at more than 100 different types of indicators.

A Pratt Center review of these indicators simplified them, and found that fully half are now collected in the same or similar metric or scale in New York City as in San Francisco; the remaining half could easily be extrapolated from the rich and extensive data already available in NYC. The difference is that in NYC we are not effectively even consulting this data to when making decisions, let alone requiring that the insights from available data be meaningfully taken into account to guide our choices.

New York lags behind other cities in both the availability and accessibility of this data, as well as in our lack of accountability of decisions to data. To perform our review, the Pratt Center had to sift through dozens of different websites, a considerable effort even for a trained professional staff. For a member of the public at large or a community group, relevant public health data is effectively rendered unavailable by agencies’ hoarding of information gathered at taxpayer expense.

The data that should inform planning decisions ought to be publicly available in an easy-to-access format in one place, and collected and disclosed at a scale that is meaningful to communities. This trend is supported by the emerging practice of Health Impact Assessments – an analysis that uses a variety of techniques to investigate the public health impacts of a proposed policy, project, or program. Popular in Europe, these analyses are increasingly being performed in the United States, with close to 100 having been carried out to date ; six states have introduced or passed legislation requiring or supporting them, with the greatest leadership coming from California and Minnesota. And their application extends beyond siting decisions – for example in Los Angeles, an HIA of a proposed Living Wage Ordinance revealed that the measure could be modified to include an insurance provision to reduce mortality more effectively than a wage provision alone.

Recently, NYC has made important strides moving in this direction. Through an initiative from the Center for Disease Control, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has launched the Environmental Public Health and Sustainability Tracking Portal. Yet the Portal still relies on City agencies to voluntarily update and send current information, the set of users remains limited and perhaps most importantly, the information available there is still segregated in the “Public Health” realm and there is no direct way to connect information available there to environmental disclosure documents required by the City or State Environmental Quality Review acts, as part of the Fair Share analysis required by Charter, or any other decision-making process by local elected officials, for that matter. The progress made by DOH supports the feasibility of performing Health Impact Assessments in NYC by making them cheaper and easier to perform.

But leadership by the Council is necessary to speed progress in this arena and to keep New York competitive with cities on the West Coast and in the U.K. Improvements hinge on:

• Facilitating, and where necessary, mandating the disclosure of all available data into the Portal.
•  Expanding the mandate and functions of the Portal to include tools that allow for the data housed there to be easily applied by agencies and the public to siting and development decisions.
• Developing a “warning system” for environmental burdens, based on measurable indicators tracked over time. This could be based on the pioneering work of the Cumulative Impacts Screening Method being developed by Environmental Justice experts Manuel Pastor, Jim Sadd, and Rachel Morello-Frosch.
   

Going deeper to Comprehensive City Planning

New York has fallen behind other cities, such as Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, London, and Porto Allegro by failing to build equity, transparency, and accountability into its planning process. Connecting Fair Share to a comprehensive city planning framework would provide both an overarching “vision” of the city, and early indication of growth areas and sectors, and concomitant demands for increased infrastructure such as sewage treatment plants, sanitation facilities, and bus depots, for example. Without a comprehensive planning framework, the benefits and burdens of New York’s growth will continue to be distributed based on communities’ relative privilege and power. Equitable decisions about development, preservation, and the location of noxious uses will never be priorities in managing growth, and the most vulnerable New Yorkers will continue to pay the highest price for keeping our city globally competitive.

A citywide planning framework built on the foundation of established City Council policies and community-based plans and created through a participatory process will go a long way toward ensuring that decisions made about development are transparent and rooted in public policy. With a planning framework in place, for example, zoning can be more clearly and directly linked to planning; economic development proposals can more directly and transparently connected to economic development goals; and the public and decision-makers will have a powerful tool in place to examine private, state, and federal proposals in light of citywide goals.

We look forward to working with the Council to advance these goals.

NOTE: This testimony was prepared by the Pratt Center for Community Development. It does not necessarily reflect the official position of Pratt Institute.