room hi my name is linda ellsworth and i'm sick welcome to the human scale city this is a weekly show where we'll take you on a tour of new york city's wonderful neighborhoods and ask ourselves and you how can we save them from destruction and keep them affordable for those who already live there as you probably know from your own neighborhood our city government is letting the real estate industry run amok we're going to meet with community activists politicians and urban experts to help us figure out what we can do to fight back we'll show you video and photographs of the neighborhoods we're talking about we're going to learn how the rules of the game favor real estate interests and how those rules can be changed to favor a human scale city so today we're going to talk about campaign finance reform and we have two guests so all the names and front ferguson salloum and he's running for mayor he was city councilman when we your city councilman from columbia university law school where he was a harlan this stone scholar so we want to talk about new york's campaign finance law is it as good as it's made out to be or is it not i don't think so i think it fails  and its core mission which is to prevent deep pocketed conflict of interest from dominating our campaigns and also doesn't do much to help grassroots campaigns in the city wide levels so that it's  in my opinion it's a myth that we have the best system in the country i think there were better systems like seattle maine and vermont and i think we need to overhaul our system is just fails and it's going mission why is it considered such a model  think it's a sound system and i don't think it's perfect i think sells right but i what i think it does is it encourages candidates to raise money from a broader group of donors and rely more on small donors and candidates and almost any other city or state in the country and while some candidates especially for mayor still rely on large contributions more than we'd prefer it does require especially city council candidates to raise small donations from a diverse set of people and when you compare the system to new york state candidates candidates from the city raising smaller contributions and from my more diverse group of people right and that's because the state's campaign finance system is different from the cities in the city if i give one hundred and seventy five dollars to a candidate the city gives a to reach thousands city residents have to contribute the campaign with a reasonable from the grassroots support but then you know that the nd step is two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in matching money which is very hard to do you're talking about thousands of donors so that's it's a two step process and the nd step is totally unfair but it is such a run for mayor you have to raise two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a month to get matching money you have to raise two hundred and fifty i'm not sure why it's so i know i do think it's all agree we need some type of threshold for number of donors to show their candidates are serious when they want to run for office but i do agree that if we make sure that candidates are getting donations especially mayoral candidates from a broad side of the city from different geographic areas as long as they're getting a lot of those donations and they don't necessarily need to raise high dollar amounts and i think it would open the system to more serious candidates to care about people from all across the by just having a number requirement through different geographic areas of the city tell us quickly so people can get an idea out of the current people who are running for mayor how many of them qualify for public money at  how many candidates when it's not for four or five candidates for mayor booker but i'm looking at these these are this is the contribution limits for each office and i noticed that for mayor the met the contribution limit is four thousand  hundred and fifty dollars for city council is two thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars for someone like me this is a high limit i can't imagine contributing that money to anybody no matter how much i support them for me you know two hundred and fifty dollars is kind of fairly the lower likely concerned about participation in the program and we've seen several public financing systems across the country to get very low participation because not enough candidates feel like they can win under the system a way of compromising a little bit is to have somewhat higher contribution limits in new york city's are fairly high i do think now as you mentioned some people think that's a weakness in the system because especially candidates for mayor are allowed to get matching funds but then also rely on people that can give almost five thousand dollars and so other programs like seattle's which we'll talk about in a few minutes i think have lower contribution limits there is some danger that they might get less participation the new york city system will have to see well that brings us to channel's democracy vouchers which is a new innovation in campaign finance that the city of seattle voted in after a ballot initiative which i find very interesting because we don't have ballot initiatives here in new york like we that new york city and how we can develop a real model of the political system because we don't there are certain things we on the pend on the state for one of them is the ability to to put a chart of the vision commission together and put these things on the ballot lobbying reform democracy vouchers right all of those things are are are possible you're actually we did it with term limits back in one thousand and eight was a big millionaire who financed that campaign and put people on the streets to get this thing that you're you know that is a huge kind of effort that in the grassroots basis it's hard to do it's hard to mobilize you have to pay those firms that you hired to some people out to get the signatures and we don't have that right on the state level either into a state is going to mean let's now look at a short video from seattle that explains democracy vouchers there's been an ever growing concern with just how money flows in politics and the different influences that are at play and i think people just generally feel like the system is broken and study came out from the same institute's island institute that the way that money flows in seattle is that candidates typically spend most of the time dialing for dollars and not talking to voters really in order to win you have to raise a lot of money and you have to spend a lot of time talking to people who will give you money in a democracy about your idea or was something that had never been tried before the concept of the democracy is twofold it's really about putting the power back in the hands of people so i'm a voter i get for twenty five about in the beginning of the year that now makes me a donor i'm not just a voter but i'm not a donor so i have for vouchers that i can give to any candidate of my choosing i give them all and give one and so that where else to incentivize candidates to come talk to me at the door because if they can come in talk to me about the issues i care about and make a compelling case for why i should support them i can give them these vouchers that didn't have to be for candidates who maybe not who don't have like a strong donor base to become more viable to run a competitive race i think that's the other thing we see is that in the cities where you don't have campaign on any kind of public campaign financing you have about of similar people who are tied to and we made a commitment early on that we wanted to really elevate from there's a time where young people and women folks who don't feel like they have access to the real short time when i'm asked i mean really at the end of the day we have five weeks to get it on the ballot and we had to raise money to do that we were fortunate enough to have additional funding come in to help support field after that's what we're going to go out and talk to their community members and culturally appropriate languages to have community forums we went into election day  like i can't believe you are that we go on and be that we won by such a strong margins so this is a real democracy voucher well i printed it out but every you voter in seattle even if they've moved away apparently gets four of these and they give them to the candidate their choice so let's talk about what is interesting about why this might be interesting in new york and why it might be problematic so let's start with the interesting part that well i totally on board with this with this plan i'm excited about it's really about democracy it's it oh wow was average people to have the same amount of cards they should have as people who are multimillionaires it's also equitably distributed throughout the population as as the video pointed out most of the big donations come from rich white neighborhoods this would allow people in poor communities to participate it forces candidates to engage them i mean  candidates to engage with regular folks instead of wealthy donors i mean most look i'm doing on a campaign finance system in new york city people running for city wide office spend an inordinate amount of time talking to wealthy folks who are self interested that's how they raise their money it's an outrage and the system that we have in my pin is totally ineffective it doesn't promote democracy it doesn't promote giving people an equal voice this is significantly  well and if it does then i think it's it would be interesting to implement some type of system like that in new york we just don't know how it's going to work out and there's a few questions i mentioned earlier seattle how much lower contribution limits to new york city will candidates participate in the program and will they get enough money from the ballot or as we don't know that yet will enough people use their voucher is will people understand what it means and give them to the candidates of their choice we think there's a fairly high trance that they will but we're really excited to see how it works this upcoming fall in the following election and maybe take some lessons from that and see how it can be implemented elsewhere well congratulations to the people of seattle for taking the st step i think this is an amazing thing to just jump in and do it and you know i'm kind of sympathetic to the idea of try it you know it wasn't me saying house is working it's a major plank of my platform for mayor it's one of my top reform initiative one of the things that i find interesting about this is that the same law that put this into place also put in a couple of other rules in seattle one of them was said if you're doing business with the city you can't give no money at all to that even though doesn't zero a man or if you  have hired a lobbyist you can't get money at all and so i find that a real startling contrasts new york city exists it's a situation we also have a law that says that you can't give more c if you're running for mayor and you're doing you're not running for mayor if you want to give money to a candidate for mayor you can give four hundred dollars if you're doing business with the city so this is a printout of his current reelection campaign i printed out the st three pages the top donor gave nine thousand nine hundred dollars i was air in love oh it's from metro electric princip i also notice that every highlighted name here is from big real estate or from big real estate legal counsel or big real estate spouse or big real estate lobbyist we have rudin management and family giving for the maximum contribution you know it's a total of like two million twenty five thousand dollars now i notice that rooted in bones many properties in midtown which is being under consideration for rezoning so how is that legal under our under our law guests like how does the how what's the loophole there that allows that to happen or maybe if there is no loophole i don't know i can't really speak specifically to the to the donor is an issue here because i haven't fully seen this list but i do think that it's important when you have these doing business contribution limits to clearly define what counts as doing business and i do think it's challenging to make sure that it's a  understands who qualifies and who doesn't and then once you pass that bright line to make sure that it's in force fairly certainly so for those of you who don't know a bright line means it means like a very clear solid rule that everybody just gets it simple well here's the campaign finance law the printout of the two pages that is explains what does it mean doing business with the city and i've highlighted this page or this section right here and i'll just point out that the department of housing preservation and development has discretion to decide who is doing business with the city they should consider the significance of the affordable housing program and the degree re of discretion of city officials and determining which actions transactions and agreements shell or shell not constitutes business dealings that must be a huge loophole for the real estate industry to just say well i'm doing affordable housing so that doesn't really count as doing business is that what that means so what do you think that means if you're a lawyer i think it's pretty clear that you know the law says that anybody who has a you learned action before the city is doing business with the city but then there's this look all right city scandal and cotch started this program and it was it was weak then i voted for in the council saying it's better than nothing but it is it is totally ineffective right terms of of the the issues that you just ways that i mean donations which fall within the doing business act but you know one hundred dollars to pretty much everybody adding up to a considerable song and that's just one staffer from capitol hill and i'm in seattle this is you can't even do that like that's just ruled out it is unbelievable to me that we have a campaign finance system in this city that allows lobbyist to bundle money they should be contributed to being to begin with capital you know the guy you just raised he's bought fifty thousand dollars for the blogger that we candidate can raise matching public funds which is part of what helps to amplify small contributions i don't quite understand why i'm going to be different rules for the mayor's race as opposed to the council well they're so they're never spending that this thing here is designed the way it is we could this basically maintains the status quo when this was that this was not designed by accident these through these limits that there go through the roof and the four thousand nine hundred and fifty book people sat around the table newspapers will say it's expensive you know it's outrageous what they're trying to do because this will really bring democracy to new york city i mean i mean there's no perfect system but they had to build a huge coalition looks like to the failed on their  about democracy watches i'm going to very liberal crowds very conservative crowds and when i explain that democracy values people vigorously nod they get it yeah they get that the system is corrupt and they were this thing if we went on if it got on the you've got the other side of it right which is i remember reading once might have been during the bloomberg era that like twenty five percent of new yorkers are employed in real estate and i know i mean right that it's a significant industry yeah and then you've got all the people who own valuable now right so like some part of people is really mad about corruption but the other part of people knows that they benefit from the system you still have a real estate industry in this city i mean i think i also think that in the long when i think about well i'll say i think the law is a good idea centrally what you said is instead of providing candidates with just over half of their spending out in public money it allows them to basically spen almost only public money and they can raise only small donations and then they're matra bolam out and that's their entire universe of spending whereas right now they're incentivized to raise more larger private contributions for mayor that might be close to five one thousand dollars and for city council candidates it's a little bit lower we definitely support this law and i'll be testifying in favor of it next week i think the promise that it has is to allow rely mostly on small contributions which candidates for mayor are necessarily doing right now i don't think by itself this bill will likely fundamentally change the system as it doesn't lower the contribution limits and candidates are still able to reduce those big contributions so the ones that can do that might continue to do it i do think that this bill in combination with perhaps slightly lowering the limits or requiring candidates to raise money from different parts of the city like i mentioned before that could have a real effect generate you know fifty dollars contribution one hundred dollars contributions and you still need to reach you still need that threshold two hundred and fifty thousand dollars matchy money to get at you money at all so i think it's it's a small tweak