Last week, Onondaga County Democrats and Republicans each released their own proposals for new County Legislative districts. Both parties recommended big changes to the current map, but they disagreed on several major details. These disagreements show that we need to slow this process down and apply New York State’s newly enacted non-partisan standards to achieve a fair outcome.

Take the dispute over the district encompassing the rural southeastern portion of the County. The Democrats’ map groups the southeastern towns of Lafayette, Fabius, Pompey, and Tully with the southwestern towns of Skaneateles, Otisco, and Spafford. But David Knapp, Chairman of the County Legislature, insists that this would “disenfranchise rural voters” because “the needs of someone in the lakeside community of Skaneateles are not the same as those of a resident in agrarian Lafayette.” Instead, the Republicans grouped those southeastern towns (Lafayette, Fabius, Pompey, and Tully) with small portions of DeWitt, Onondaga, and Manlius.

But it’s not exactly clear what that fixes. The needs of the suburban residents of the Village of Manlius aren’t obviously closely aligned with Apple Valley either. The point seems to be that the southeastern towns should have their own district, and if that means padding their small population with densely settled slivers of the Towns of Manlius, DeWitt, and Onondaga, then so be it. Nevermind that this also ‘disenfranchises’ the people living in those communities, to use Mr. Knapp’s definition of the word.

Or look at the disagreement about how to draw districts in the growing northwestern towns of Lysander, Clay, Camillus, and Van Buren. The Democrats’ map covers those towns with five legislative districts, but Kevin Hulslander, the Republican Chair of the Reapportionment Commission, claims that underestimates the rate at which those towns will grow over the next decade: “We’re establishing seven districts in the towns where the growth is to accommodate for the growth. Map number one [the Democrats’ proposal] includes only five districts. So, at the very core of what our job is here, map number one fails.”

But again, this is not an obvious solution. Demographic trends in Onondaga County are in such flux that it’s very difficult to predict exactly which towns will grow (or shrink!) over the next ten years. The census bureau predicted that the City would lose population between 2010 and 2020, and they were wrong. Cicero had—for decades—been the county’s fastest growing town, but it’s not anymore. If the Census Bureau cannot accurately predict which parts of Onondaga County will grow and how, then it’s very doubtful Mr. Hulslander can either.

Of course, decisions about who deserves representation—Lafayette or Manlius—and which parts of the County are most likely to grow—Van Buren or Syracuse—have partisan implications. The City and several inner ring suburbs are home to more registered Democrats than Republicans, and the opposite is true in the exurbs and rural parts of the county.

What Onondaga County needs are non-partisan guidelines that can ensure a fair process for drawing these legislative districts. Luckily, New York State has provided just that. New legislation directs all counties to draw districts according to existing population figures—not anticipated ones. The new legislation also says that legislative district lines should follow pre existing, broadly understood, meaningful boundaries such as town lines or school district catchments rather than trying to group people based on any individual politician’s idea of which communities are more deserving of representation.

Onondaga County’s Reapportionment Commission and Legislature should take the time to properly review this new law before deciding on any redistricting proposal. We need a fair and transparent process. There’s no rush. Let’s get this right.

City Hall’s “crackdown” on dirt bikes and ATVs demonstrates how an overreliance on policing can crowd out more effective methods of achieving public safety. The crackdown—an annual Spring event—includes more officers patrolling city neighborhoods trying to ticket or tow dirt bikes and ATVs.

Why this specific class of vehicles? As Mayor Walsh put it, “The return of warmer weather is bringing back behaviors that make our streets unsafe and create disturbances to quality of life… dirt bikes and ATVs are dangerous.”

Clearly, Syracuse does have a problem with traffic violence, and it does make us all less safe. Ask anybody who gets around on foot or on a bike or in a wheelchair and they’ll tell you—it’s dangerous just moving around town. Every day brings close calls, and the only reason more people aren’t injured and killed is that so many have been scared from even trying to navigate the streets in the first place.

Look at this problem through the lens of policing, and the solution is to stop rule breakers from doing illegal things. There are laws against driving dirt bikes on city streets, so a police-driven city government will fixate on that rule breaking and try to stop it. They’ll bring out helicopters and raise fines and issue press releases and announce that they’ve taken important steps to improve public safety by dealing with illegal behavior.

This is a campaign against deviance. Dirt bikes don’t fit into the way the streets are supposed to work, so they’re illegal, so the police department will try to remove them and restore traffic to its normal equilibrium.

But anyone who’s experienced traffic violence knows that the normal equilibrium is really unsafe. Too large cars travelling at too fast speeds on too wide streets—it’s all extremely dangerous and it’s all perfectly legal. James Street is so deadly that City Hall’s official advice to cyclists is to avoid it, but when a car driver hit 13-year-old Zyere Jackson out front of Lincoln Middle School in 2019, SPD determined that no traffic laws had been broken.

The real problem is that the streets themselves are built to be dangerous. Engineering standards governing intersection design, lane width, and signal timing all prioritize vehicle speed. The entire street network is designed and built to maximize traffic throughput at unsafe speeds, and that’s what makes the streets unsafe.

All of which is why the cities that have had the best success reducing traffic violence have focused on street design rather than law enforcement. It’s a relatively simple thing to make a street safer with curbing, textured pavement, street trees, or any other of a number of small physical alterations that lower traffic speeds and encourage everybody who uses the street to look out for each other. Those kinds of design changes make the street itself safer, and they would do more the minimize the danger from dirt bikes than increased policing can.

When the only tool you’ve got is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail. Syracuse turns to the SPD to solve a lot of problems, and so those problems get reduced to law-breaking. But Syracuse’s problems are more complicated than that, and they will require more comprehensive solutions. We need to invest more in municipal departments like DPW, NBD, and Parks so that they have the capacity to offer these comprehensive solutions. City Hall needs more tools to make Syracuse safer.

Mayor Walsh’s deal with the PBA pretends that 2020 never happened. It pretends that the City’s situation right now is that same as it was in 2019. It pretends that nobody marched for reform or said anything worth hearing about policing last year.

Headed into arbitration over the police contract, City Hall just wants to get the same terms that they negotiated back at the end of 2019—terms that would add millions of dollars to the police budget for years to come. As the Walsh administration’s lead negotiator put it: “There really, in our mind, wasn’t any reason to go back to the drawing board and start all over again.”

I would think it’d be obvious to anyone who lived through 2020 why a huge increase to the police budget isn’t appropriate in 2021. I would think it’d be obvious why today is different from a year ago and why City Hall had a mandate to go back to the drawing board and get a new deal.

There was a national popular uprising against the common practice of policing in American cities. The Syracuse community participated in that movement and clearly communicated that the problems with modern American policing are problems in this City too.

One of the biggest problems the movement identified is the overwhelming size of police budgets. In Syracuse—a city perennially on the brink of fiscal collapse—20 cents of every dollar goes to the SPD. This extravagance makes it impossible to provide the municipal programs and services the City really needs, and so it is necessary for City Hall to rebalance its budget by committing more resources to the community.

This was a specific, explicit criticism that Syracuse activists repeated for months. Mayor Walsh heard it, but it’s clear he did not listen. It will be impossible to invest in community programs and services if police are taking an ever larger slice of the municipal pie.

The voices that explained all this last year were powerful and eloquent. City Hall needs to pay them heed and negotiate a new agreement with the PBA.

When OCIDA gave Amazon $71 million in tax breaks, a lot of us were left wondering what Jeff Bezos—the wealthiest man on the planet—could possibly need all that money for. Now we have 2.5% of the answer. He’s going to give $1.75 million of that money back to the public as a donation to the new countywide STEAM school that will soon be operating out of the old Central High building.

But that money comes with strings attached. It’s for “robotics and computer science programs” because Amazon’s new warehouse “will depend heavily on robotics for fulfilling orders and Amazon wants to help train the next generation of workers.” And Amazon very pointedly left the A (for Arts) out of STEAM in its statement on the donation:

“We want to inspire the next generation of innovators to explore opportunities in science, technology, engineering, and math, so we’re proud to partner with Onondaga County—which we will soon call home—to increase access to STEM education for thousands of local students for years to come. We hope they’ll join our team at Amazon one day and teach us a thing or two as they build their careers here.”

We’re outsourcing curriculum design to a private corporation that is explicitly and primarily interested in bending public education to serve its own interests. And all it cost Amazon was $1.75 million that we had already given them in the first place.

It’s not hard to imagine this pattern repeating in other areas of local government. Amazon paying for improved bus service to its warehouse even when that money would have a greater impact increasing service on high-ridership lines, say.

The STEAM school is still worth getting excited about, and it’s better that Amazon spends $1.75 million there than on stock dividends or whatever. But in a more just world, Amazon would have just paid its whole tax bill (like the rest of us), that would have covered almost the entire $74 million cost of building the STEAM school, and educators would have retained control over the school’s curriculum.