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Q&A

CORE's engagement in the budget process

1:39:32

·

5 min

Linda Tigani discusses CORE's involvement in the budget process, both for its own budget and in promoting budget equity across city agencies. She outlines CORE's plans for engaging with city council and other stakeholders on budget-related matters.

CORE is in conversation with OMB and will brief City Council Finance on budget requests
Tigani emphasizes that CORE is still in a launch phase and building out its organizational structure
CORE plans to respond to requests from the city council speaker and committees on racial equity matters
An upcoming event is planned to bring together community and government to discuss budget equity measures
CORE offers to provide data and insights from community engagement to support council members in agency hearings

Nantasha M. Williams

1:39:32

Cool.

1:39:34

Will CORE be engaging in the budget process in relations to its own budget?

Linda Tigani

1:39:41

We are currently in conversation with OMB and we're also gonna be briefing City Council Finance on what requests we're making for the executive budget and then what potential requests are coming down the line.

1:39:55

I do want to reiterate that CORE is very much still in a launch phase.

1:40:00

We had to redo our organizational chart, build out more roles.

1:40:05

There are plenty of compliance roles in city government.

1:40:09

For example, language access or disability access, EEO, or just being able to fulfill all of the reports that come out of city council.

1:40:17

So we've had to create a chart that allows for a strong infrastructure so that our community organizing and engagement director who managed to work across all five boroughs just themselves with of course the support from the team, but they have a really big job and they're responsible for robust engagement and they have taken on language and disability access.

1:40:44

And so part of the work is to take that off of their plate so that they can solely focus on community as we have goals to reach more New Yorkers in the next cycle.

1:40:57

We've reached 4,212 with a staff of six.

1:41:01

We are hoping to reach over 5,000 New Yorkers in the next cycle since we have some more staff.

Nantasha M. Williams

1:41:08

Thank you.

1:41:10

What about your engagement on the budget process as a whole?

1:41:14

I know you and I have been having conversations around budget equity, so I don't know if you just want to talk a little bit more about how you envision playing a role in the budget process as a whole.

Linda Tigani

1:41:23

Yes, so our fifth charter mandate according to chapter 78 and our section, indicates that CORE is to respond to requests from the speaker of council and council committees on matters related to racial equity.

1:41:40

We're going to be sharing some feedback with city council finance when we meet with them about some concrete questions.

1:41:49

We are also planning for a forthcoming event, which we're hoping to share with the public in the next week that will bring together community and government, so both elected officials as well as city agency staff, to think through what are measures and processes that we can put in place to assess the degree to which our New York City budget is equitable or is integrating equity into the decision making process.

1:42:18

We do make ourselves available for all city council members to talk through potential pieces of legislation as well as any key hearings that are coming up and happy to share with them our data and what we've learned through community equity priority engagement process to ensure that they have what they need to talk city agencies during their upcoming hearings.

Nantasha M. Williams

1:42:41

Yeah no I appreciate that as a person who talks to your office pretty frequently but you know I feel like these things should be codified like there should you know it should be that certain things happen for certain bills and things to be passed whether it's you know some type of racial impact statement on our bills or even you know racial impact statements or thoughts on our budget.

1:43:07

It is quite interesting to me how you know even here at the council we do not provide oversight on the budget with an equity lens.

1:43:18

You know it's typically focused on these like big issue areas respective agencies whether it's over time as an example, but we don't really go deeper into the micro of like well how is this agency actually spending resources across the boroughs, across different demographics for something that's not you know I would say like a sexy topic like catch basins, you know for areas communities of color that you know live in areas that typically flood.

1:43:55

There has been some some thoughts and studies around the fact that catch basins in certain communities aren't cleaned as as expeditiously as other communities.

1:44:05

I mean I think that level of analysis is very important because most of the issues that I feel people have in the city have to do with quality of life.

1:44:13

Like people just want to go home and you know sleep well and they want to be able to sustain themselves and then the course of that they're interacting and interfacing with so many components of our city, again that aren't just you know having to do with NYPD as an example, which is very important that I think that the work that you're doing, that we're doing I guess around budget equity is going to be important and shout outs to Jimmy too who has been really helpful in that thinking as well.

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CORE's staffing and expansion plans

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True cost of living measure and community feedback on costs