The
city of Rochester’s in crisis mode. Again.
Rochester
City School Superintendent Dr. Manuel Rivera announced that the district is
facing a $50 million dollar budget gap. One day later, in his State of the City
address, Mayor Bill Johnson said the city will have to cut funding to the
schools unless it sees an increase in state aid.
The concentrated
poverty in the city’s “crescent” neighborhoods — site of the majority of
Rochester’s 57 homicides in 2003 — is threatening to become “a noose around
our necks,” according to Johnson.
And most of this,
he says, can be traced to higher levels of government.
“We see
evidence of what could be called an anti-city, anti-urban bias,” Johnson said in an
interview late last week. “Now, that’s a strong term, and I’m actually trying
to find another way of putting it to the state. But they have no current urban
policy.”
The carving of legislative districts
has left city representatives in Albany — like State Assemblymembers David
Gantt and Susan John — also responsible for suburbs like Gates and Chili.
This “weakens our position,” Johnson says. “It forces us to deal from a
position of crisis.”
The crisis stems from dollars and
cents issues, too. With each passage of the budget, the state waives its
requirement to distribute 8 percent of its annual income-tax revenues to
municipalities like Rochester. (Every year, the waiver is buried deep within
the budget, and is passed as part of the total budget package.)
In raw numbers, this translates to
an additional $140 million Rochester should have received from the state in
2003. Rochester’s budget gap for 2004 is$38.1 million.
“For the [state] legislature, aid to
municipalities has not been a priority,” says Ed Farrell, executive director of
the New York State Conference of Mayors. The NYCOM has been documenting
revenue-sharing shortfalls throughout the state for more than a decade. “When
you look at revenue sharing, I can’t think of any other aid program that’s
actually getting less dollars than it was a decade ago. We’re not even talking
about adjusting for inflation.”
And of all state budget lines,
revenue sharing has a direct impact on each municipality’s bottom line. “Every
city in the state, if they were getting their full allocation of state aid,
would be able to relax the pressure on their property tax base,” Johnson says.
But is there a
problem with the clause “every city in the state”? If New York State lived up to its
revenue-sharing obligations in 2003, Johnson says, it would have provided
almost $3 billion in additional aid to municipalities — cities, towns,
counties, villages. That money has to come from somewhere.
“Look, this state this year is going
to spend over $100 billion [in state and federal funds],” Johnson says. “George
Pataki put in a $99.9 billion budget. There’s no way the legislature is going
to pass that intact. But it’s clearly going to be a nine-figure budget for the
first time in our history. And when you consider that the state’s
municipal-aid obligations are only $3.5 billion under that formula, you say to
yourself, ‘Wait a minute. Of all these things Pataki’s scrambling to do here,
shouldn’t he start with lowering the property tax?’ This is one of the first
criticisms we face from our business and commercial base: that our taxes make
us uncompetitive.”
There’s untapped potential for
development here, too. “It would actually give us a pot of money that we could
be doing things with,” Johnson says. “We would have an ability to undertake
projects like the Performing Arts Center.”
So what’s it going to take to
restore municipal aid? Johnson acknowledges the political risk in fighting
Albany. “Local governments know that you get punished for taking on the state,”
he says.
He also realizes that the state has
to answer to the Bush Administration. “The imbalance of both responsibilities
and payments among different levels of government begin at the top — the
federal government,” he said during his State of the City.
“[People may think] it’s not worth
the political risk of doing this,” Johnson says. “I think with the success of
the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case, maybe this is something that should be
considered.”
Then there’s
the “crescent”: home to most of the metro area’s violent crime, a majority
of the region’s foreclosures and vacancies, and virtually all of the region’s
lead-paint-related health problems. Crescent neighborhoods are also the source
of much of Rochester’s negative publicity, Johnson says.
He would like the city to follow a
“collective advocacy” approach detailed in a recent study by Harvard
University. “If you’re going to have sustainable revitalization in these tough
neighborhoods, it will only come when you’ve got citizens — the people who live
there — taking part in the effort,” Johnson says. “You can’t bring people in.
You can’t take the missionary approach. It just doesn’t sustain itself.”
In his State of the City, Johnson
took this a step further by suggesting that without jobs, the poor residents of
the crescent will have nothing to invest back into their communities.
But where are the jobs going to come
from? And what will they be?
“This
is an extraordinarily complicated subject. And I’m not smart enough to have
already worked out the answer,” he says. “I just know we need to work it out.”
The national dialogue on the
outsourcing of white-collar jobs — sure to escalate during the presidential
campaign — gives us a place to start, Johnson says.
“I suspect we’re going to see some
corrective course that will keep these jobs in the country,” he says. “But we
need to say: Look, we’ve got this increasing class of extremely poor, unskilled
people. We’ve got to create more economic opportunities for those young men
who, if you talk to them, will try to argue they’re nothing but small
businessmen. By selling drugs, they’re fulfilling a demand in the market. And
they’re doing pretty darn well. So we’ve really got to undercut their position
simply by creating more legitimate jobs for them.”
“To learn that 77 percent of Monroe
County’s population once lived in Rochester, and now only 29 percent of the
county’s population lives in the city — well, there’s got to be something bad
that precipitated this,” says Johnson. “When people go back to their old
neighborhoods, they ask ‘What happened? This used to be a wonderful place.’
It’s because the people left behind can’t support this level of development….
We’ve got to get inside people’s heads without fighting them. If public
policies and money were used to create the suburbs, why can’t we have domestic
policies to help restore our cities?”
How
it happened
Several
aspects of Rochester’s steady economic decline can be attributed to forces far
beyond the city’s control. For example, from its inception in 1934, the Federal
Housing Administration encouraged middle-class flight from urban areas through
its insured fixed-rate mortgages. Among the forces:
• The FHA favored the construction
of single-family homes on the edges of metropolitan areas.
• The FHA made it easier for
families to buy new homes than to rehab old homes. FHA loans for the repair of
existing structures were small and of short duration.
• By conducting “unbiased
professional estimates” before making loan guarantees, the FHA “allowed
personal and agency bias in favor of all-white subdivisions in the suburbs to
affect the kinds of loans it guaranteed.”
• Interstate 490 opened in the
1950s. Federal subsidies provided 90 percent of the construction costs.
• After receiving no federal
subsidies, Rochester’s subway system was forced to shut down in 1956.
• RIT moved out of downtown
Rochester and into Henrietta in 1968. Around the same time, Kodak used public
subsidies to expand to Gates.
• Eastview Mall opened in Victor in
1971, hastening the demise of Midtown Plaza and downtown shopping.
• During the 1980s, federal funds
paid for the extension of Route 531 into the western suburbs. Federal and state
money was used to complete Interstates 390 and 590, making it no longer
necessary for people to drive through the city.
• From 1994 to 2004, the value of
Kodak’s property in the city dropped 49 percent.
Sources: “Crabgrass Frontier,” by
Kenneth T. Jackson (1985); Mayor Bill Johnson’s 2004 State of the City Address.
This article appears in Mar 10-16, 2004.
