New York

Mayor Adams Says Migrant Influx Will Cost New York City $12 Billion

Published

11 months ago

August 9, 2023

Mayor Adams Says Migrant Influx Will Cost New York City $12 Billion

For a year now, Mayor Eric Adams has been sounding the alarm about a humanitarian crisis like few New York City has seen before, as tens of thousands of migrants arrive from the southern border.

On Wednesday, he made yet another plea for federal help and cited a staggering new cost estimate: $12 billion to house and care for the newcomers over the course of three years.

By way of comparison, the city’s most recent annual budget is $107 billion. This year, the mayor said, the city will spend more on migrants than the annual budgets of the Fire, Parks and Sanitation Departments combined.

The city could have more than 100,000 migrants in homeless shelters by 2025, the mayor said, about twice the number of newcomers who are currently living in the city’s homeless shelters.

City officials had previously projected that it would cost $4 billion through the next fiscal year to process and care for the migrants who have arrived in the city since the spring of 2022. Of the 96,000 new arrivals, more than 50,000 are staying in homeless shelters, the city has said.

Officials said they had raised the estimate as migrants continued to arrive in the city by the thousands.

“If we don’t get the support we need, New Yorkers could be left with a $12 billion bill,” Mr. Adams said in a speech from City Hall. “While New York City will continue to lead, it’s time the state and federal government step up.”

Mr. Adams repeated a call he has made many times over the last year: asking the federal government to declare a state of emergency, provide emergency aid and create a “decompression” strategy that would slow the flow of migrants to cities like New York. He also called on President Biden to give migrants work authorizations.

The mayor added that Gov. Kathy Hochul should develop a plan to help distribute arriving migrants throughout the state, to ease the burden on the city’s shelter system.

“We need additional resources now,” the mayor said, adding that the city was running out of “money, appropriate space and personnel” to properly care for the migrants.

For nearly a year, Mr. Adams has been saying that the shelter system is at its breaking point, and he has made concerted efforts to stop migrants from coming to New York. Three weeks ago, New York began distributing fliers at the southern border telling migrants that living in the city is expensive and that there is no guarantee they will receive help should they come, even though the city is required to house those who ask.

The mayor also instituted a rule requiring single adult migrants to reapply for shelter every 60 days. And he asked a judge to relieve the city of some of its legal obligations to guarantee people shelter.

The city is currently housing 107,900 people in shelters, including 56,600 migrants, according to Anne Williams-Isom, the deputy mayor for health and human services — by far the most ever recorded.

The arrival of migrants, including a recent influx of families with children, has overwhelmed the city’s shelter system, Ms. Williams-Isom said. Between July 24 and 30, 2,300 migrants arrived in the city, she said.

In an effort to house the newcomers, the city has opened 194 sites, including 13 humanitarian relief centers, which are operated by the public hospital system. Officials said they had reviewed 3,000 sites as potential places to house migrants.

The system has faltered in the past — last year, some homeless families were forced to stay in an intake office overnight, instead of being immediately moved into shelters. But it broke down completely last week after the city’s main intake center, operated by a company that used to provide Covid testing for the city, began turning people away.

About 200 migrants, mostly men, many from Africa, slept on the sidewalk outside the Roosevelt Hotel, around the corner from Grand Central Terminal. Last Thursday, after the Legal Aid Society wrote to the judge who is hearing the city’s request to waive the shelter guarantee, notifying her that the city was violating the migrants’ right to shelter, the city found beds for all of them.

City officials used the moment to renew their pleas for more financial help from the state and federal governments.

“When the doors are closing in Denver, when the system is full in Chicago, people say, ‘Let’s go to New York City because we know that New York City will provide migrants with food and shelter and the things that they need,’” Ms. Williams-Isom said last week.

Some migrants that were served by DocGo, the company that now oversees the Roosevelt Hotel intake center, have said they were lied to about the resources they would receive. They said the company, which is under a $432 million no-bid contract with the city to provide case management, medical care, food, transportation, lodging and security, made false promises that it would help them find work and assist in their asylum cases.

Andy Newman contributed reporting.

New York

We Counted 22,252 Cars to See How Much Congestion Pricing Might Have Made This Morning

Published

7 days ago

July 1, 2024

Press Room

We Counted 22,252 Cars to See How Much Congestion Pricing Might Have Made This Morning

By Ana Ley, Larry Buchanan and Francesca Paris

Ana Ley spent more than 12 hours at M.T.A. board meetings last week. Larry Buchanan, Francesca Paris and 25 of their colleagues spent the morning counting more than 22,000 cars.

July 1, 2024

Today would have been the first Monday of New York City’s congestion pricing plan. Before it was halted by Gov. Kathy Hochul, the plan was designed to rein in some of the nation’s worst traffic while raising a billion dollars for the subway every year, one toll at a time.

A year’s worth of tolls is hard to picture. But what about a day’s worth? What about an hour’s?

To understand how the plan could have worked, we went to the edges of the tolling zone during the first rush hour that the fees would have kicked in.

Here’s what we saw:

Video by Noah Throop/The New York Times; animation by Ruru Kuo/The New York Times

You probably wouldn’t have seen every one of those cars if the program had been allowed to proceed. That’s because officials said the fees would have discouraged some drivers from crossing into the tolled zone, leading to an estimated 17 percent reduction in traffic. (It’s also Monday on a holiday week.)

The above video was just at one crossing point, on Lexington Avenue. We sent 27 people to count vehicles manually at four bridges, four tunnels and nine streets where cars entered the business district. In total, we counted 22,252 cars, trucks, motorcycles and buses between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. on Monday.

We wanted to see how the dense flow of traffic into the central business district would have generated money in real time.

Though we can’t know that dollar amount precisely, we can hazard a guess. Congestion pricing was commonly referred to as a $15-per-car toll, but it wasn’t so simple. There were going to be smaller fees for taxi trips, credits for the tunnels, heftier charges for trucks and buses, and a number of exemptions.

To try to account for all that fee variance, we used estimates from the firm Replica, which models traffic data, on who enters the business district, as well as records from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and city agencies. We also made a few assumptions where data wasn’t available. We then came up with a ballpark figure for how much the city might have generated in an hour at those toll points.

The total? About $200,000 in tolls for that hour.

Note: The Trinity Place exit from the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, which would have been tolled, is closed at this hour.

It’s far from a perfect guess. Our vehicle total is definitely an undercount: We counted only the major entrances — bridges, tunnels and 60th Street — which means we missed all the cars that entered the zone by exiting the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive or the West Side Highway.

And our translation into a dollar number is rough. Among many other choices we had to make, we assumed all drivers had E-ZPass — saving them a big surcharge — and we couldn’t distinguish between transit buses and charter buses, so we gave all buses an exemption.

But it does give you a rough sense of scale: It’s a lot of cars, and a lot of money. Over the course of a typical day, hundreds of thousands of vehicles stream into the Manhattan central business district through various crossings.

Trips into tolling district, per Replica estimates

Queens-Midtown Tunnel	50,600
Lincoln Tunnel	49,200
Williamsburg Bridge	27,900
Manhattan Bridge	24,000
Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel	23,100
Queensboro Bridge	21,700
Brooklyn Bridge	17,100
Holland Tunnel	15,400
All other entrances	118,000
Total	347,000

Note: Data counts estimated entrances on a weekday in spring 2023. Source: Replica.

The tolling infrastructure that was installed for the program cost roughly half a billion dollars.

The M.T.A. had planned to use the congestion pricing revenue estimates to secure $15 billion in financing for subway upgrades. Many of those improvement plans have now been suspended.

Methodology

We stationed as many as five counters at some bridges and tunnels to ensure that we counted only cars that directly entered the tolling zone, not those that would have continued onto non-tolled routes.

Our count also excluded certain exempt vehicles like emergency vehicles.

We used estimates of the traffic into the district to make a best guess at how many of each kind of vehicle entered the zone. Most of our estimates came from the traffic data firm Replica, which uses a variety of data sources, including phone location, credit card and census data, to model transportation patterns. Replica estimated that around 58 percent of trips into the central business district on a weekday in spring 2023 were made by private vehicles, 35 percent by taxis or other for-hire vehicles (Uber and Lyft) and the remainder by commercial vehicles.

We also used data on trucks, buses, for-hire vehicles and motorcycles from the M.T.A., the Taxi and Limousine Commission and the Department of Transportation.

For simplicity, we assumed all vehicles would be equally likely to enter the zone from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. as they would be in any other hour. We could not account for the other trips that a for-hire vehicle might make once within the tolled zone, only the initial crossing. And we did not include the discount to drivers who make under $50,000, because it would kick in only after 10 trips in a calendar month.

New York

Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 30, 2024

Published

1 month ago

June 3, 2024

Press Room

Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 30, 2024

-
Jury Deliberation Re-charge
SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK
COUNTY OF NEW YORK CRIMINAL TERM
-
-
PART: 59
Χ
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK,
-against-
DONALD J. TRUMP,
DEFENDANT.
BEFORE:
Indict. No.
71543-2023
CHARGE
4909
FALSIFYING BUSINESS
RECORDS 1ST DEGREE
JURY TRIAL
100 Centre Street
New York, New York 10013
May 30, 2024
HONORABLE JUAN M. MERCHAN
JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT
APPEARANCES:
FOR THE PEOPLE:
ALVIN BRAGG, JR., ESQ.
DISTRICT ATTORNEY, NEW YORK COUNTY
One Hogan Place
New York, New York 10013
BY:
JOSHUA STEINGLASS, ESQ.
MATTHEW COLANGELO,
ESQ.
SUSAN HOFFINGER, ESQ.
CHRISTOPHER CONROY, ESQ.
BECKY MANGOLD, ESQ.
KATHERINE ELLIS, ESQ.
Assistant District Attorneys
BLANCHE LAW
BY:
TODD BLANCHE, ESQ.
EMIL BOVE, ESQ.
KENDRA WHARTON, ESQ.
NECHELES LAW, LLP
BY: SUSAN NECHELES, ESQ.
GEDALIA STERN, ESQ.
Attorneys for the Defendant
SUSAN PEARCE-BATES, RPR, CSR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter
LAURIE EISENBERG, RPR, CSR
LISA KRAMSKY
THERESA MAGNICCARI
Senior Court Reporters
Susan Pearce-Bates, RPR, CCR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter

New York

Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 29, 2024

Published

1 month ago

May 31, 2024

Press Room

Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 29, 2024

SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK
COUNTY OF NEW YORK CRIMINAL TERM
-
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK,
PART: 59
Indict. No.
71543-2023
CHARGE
-against-
DONALD J. TRUMP,
DEFENDANT.
BEFORE:
4815
FALSIFYING BUSINESS
RECORDS 1ST DEGREE
JURY TRIAL
X
100 Centre Street
New York, New York 10013
May 29, 2024
HONORABLE JUAN M. MERCHAN
JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT
APPEARANCES:
FOR THE
PEOPLE:
ALVIN BRAGG, JR.,
ESQ.
DISTRICT ATTORNEY, NEW YORK COUNTY
One Hogan Place
New York, New York 10013
BY:
JOSHUA STEINGLASS, ESQ.
MATTHEW COLANGELO,
ESQ.
SUSAN HOFFINGER, ESQ.
CHRISTOPHER CONROY, ESQ.
BECKY MANGOLD, ESQ.
KATHERINE ELLIS, ESQ.
Assistant District Attorneys
BLANCHE LAW
BY:
TODD BLANCHE, ESQ.
EMIL BOVE, ESQ.
KENDRA WHARTON, ESQ.
NECHELES LAW, LLP
BY: SUSAN NECHELES, ESQ.
Attorneys for the Defendant
SUSAN PEARCE-BATES, RPR, CSR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter
LAURIE EISENBERG, RPR, CSR
LISA KRAMSKY
THERESA MAGNICCARI
Senior Court Reporters
Susan Pearce-Bates,
RPR, CCR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter