Budget Justice Testimony
On March 19, 2020, Queens State Senators were to have a New York State Budget Forum where Queens residents could testify. Due to coronavirus, the forum was cancelled but Queens residents could still submit written testimony. Mine follows.
My name is Danielle Brecker, I live in the Dutch Kills part of Long Island City in State Senate District 12. Thank you for taking the time to read the testimony I prepared for the now cancelled Queens New York State budget forum.
Everyday in Dutch Kills I am surrounded by the juxtaposition of the economic disparity that we face throughout our state.
Public housing communities including Queensbridge houses, the largest public housing community in our state and North America, are in total disrepair, neglected for decades, and now under the real threat of being privatized. Residents often go without heat, hot water, working elevators, and live with pests, mold and lead paint. A few blocks away, shiny luxury towers rise on the Long Island City waterfront — development often subsidized by tax incentives.
Much of Long Island City is built on land that will flood with rising sea levels due to climate change or anytime there is heavy rain. Yet the landmark climate act passed and signed into law last year in New York state remains unfunded.
The expansive Sunnyside Yard where the Economic Development Corporation proposes to build an entirely new community is nearby to shelters for those, often families with working parents, who do not have homes and collapsing infrastructure from transit to sewers. The Sunnyside Yard development will no doubt include tax breaks for developers and investment in infrastructure by the city, state and federal government. It seems wrong that our state may fund investment in a new community but is currently unwilling to fund the needs of our existing community.
I could go on outlining the economic inequality and needs in western Queens but now a new crisis, the pandemic coronavirus, is upon us and it lays bare the inequality, the injustice in Queens and our state.
This current crisis not only exposes the most dangerous effects of our extreme inequality, with so many living without adequate health care, wages, housing, child care, and more. It also shows how deeply dependent our collective well-being is on the well-being of any one of us.
Now is exactly the moment to take the lead in building stronger, healthier communities by raising revenue and investing where it matters. To tax the wealthy to fully fund critical healthcare services and provide a social safety net for working families. To protect Medicaid and guarantee paid sick days to working people. And it is time to scrap Governor Cuomo’s two percent spending cap: the scale of our response to a crisis should not be limited by an arbitrary limit on our ability to ensure the health and well being of all New Yorkers.
This moment calls for us to reassess our priorities as a state and put the needs of our communities before the profits of billionaire CEOs and corporations.
With my testimony, I ask you to please fight for Budget Justice at this critical moment as we fight the impact of the coronavirus pandemic. And to continue that fight so we can solve the crisis of severe economic inequality in our state and be prepared for future crises such as climate disasters.
Thank you.
