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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now, we continue our series, 51 Council Members in 52 Weeks. We turn the page from the Queens districts, which were numbers 19 through 32, to Brooklyn, which will be Districts 33 through 48. Brooklyn is the most populous borough and, therefore, has the most city council districts. Settle in for 16 weeks, about four months, of Brooklyn city council members.

Brooklynites, the phones will be primarily for you in this stretch, except, I will note, we'll have a slice of Queens once again next week with District 34, which covers the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Bushwick, but also ventures into Ridgewood. That's the only city council district as far as I could see that's located in parts of two boroughs. That'll be next week.

Remember the context. We are inviting all the New York City Council members roughly in their district number order, all across the year, neighborhood by neighborhood, touching every neighborhood of the city. We're doing this this year because it's a new era in the New York City Council this year. There are mostly new members because of term limits and women make up the majority of council members for the first time ever.

One new member joins me now, Councilmember Lincoln Restler of District 33, which includes Boerum Hill, Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn Navy Yard, Downtown Brooklyn, Dumbo, Fulton Ferry, Greenpoint, Vinegar Hill, and Williamsburg, all are parts of all of those neighborhoods and I hope I'm not leaving anyone out. Thanks for joining our series, 51 Council Members in 52 Weeks. Councilmember Restler, welcome to WNYC.

Councilmember Lincoln Restler: Thank you so much, Brian, and welcome to Brooklyn.

Brian Lehrer: First of all, you may have the best name of any city council member ever. Lincoln Restler. I'll say that's Restler without a W at the beginning, but were you named after Abraham Lincoln?

Councilmember Lincoln Restler: Not specifically. I think my folks just liked the name.

Brian Lehrer: Then tell us a little more about yourself as we ask all the council members. What first got you interested in politics and where did you grow up?

Councilmember Lincoln Restler: I first have to tell you that when my parents and my sister found out that I'd be on your show, they were even more excited than when we won the election last year. It's great to be here. I grew up in Brooklyn Heights where my folks have lived since the 1970s and have spent most of my adult life in the northern part of our district in Greenpoint. I came back to Brooklyn after graduating from college and wanted to get involved in local government and local politics, but I hit a brick wall when we encountered the Brooklyn Democratic machine who wanted anything but young people getting involved.

Along with a number of my friends, we helped found an organization called New Kings Democrats, 14 years ago now, that is committed to advancing integrity and transparency and accountability in local politics in Brooklyn. I was actually the first person from New Kings to run for and win a race for an obscure position called district leader that nobody thought we could win in the backyard of the machine boss. I've also spent much of the ensuing decade working in local government across multiple administrations.

I've had the privilege of helping to design and launch the IDNYC program, the municipal ID card program, and help to expand homeless services equitably across the five boroughs and expand access to safe and affordable banking practices and banking services for low and moderate-income New Yorkers and so much more. It's been a great opportunity to work in local government and learn how to navigate big bureaucracy and solve problems because, ultimately, that's what this job is all about. I hope to bring my experiences and my values to being the best neighborhood problem-solver I can be for the folks in the 33rd council district.

Brian Lehrer: We always ask the council members in this series about the people, the demographics of the district, and how they changed over time. I think when people think of many of the neighborhoods you represent, Williamsburg, Dumbo, Greenpoint, they think of gentrification. How would you describe, demographically, the people of your district and how much has it changed during the course of your lifetime since you've lived there your whole life?

Councilmember Lincoln Restler: Oh, my gosh. I can barely recognize some neighborhoods from when I was a kid. It has changed a lot. We have an awesome district. I am unbiased and have entirely too much Brooklyn pride, but the 33rd has the most dynamic neighborhoods and culture and communities. It's an oddly-shaped, disparate district. It stretches along the East River Waterfront from Newtown Creek in the north through Greenpoint and Williamsburg around through South Williamsburg into Bed-Stuy, where it's a predominantly Hasidic-Jewish community, snaking through the Navy Yard into Brownstone Brooklyn and Dumbo and Vinegar Hill, Boerum Hill, Brooklyn Heights, Gowanus.

It's a disparate district as well socioeconomically. Some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Brooklyn, but we also have seven large public housing developments in areas of tremendous need. As you mentioned, it's been an epicenter of gentrification. We've seen significantly more new housing construction in our district than any other in New York City over the last 15 years.

Unfortunately, many of the promises for new park space, new schools, new critical infrastructure that were supposed to come with the new development have not been followed through on and it was one of the central tenets of our campaign. One of my main priorities as council member is to make sure that the promises made by previous administrations are kept by this one.

Brian Lehrer: What's the essential policy response that you would say is needed to gentrification, especially in the context of the people who get displaced, and the chronic unaffordability and housing shortage crisis in New York City?

Councilmember Lincoln Restler: We can't understate the scale of the problem. To give you a sense, Brian, in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, we've lost 15,000 Latino residents in the last 15 years. The Black population in Brooklyn is shrinking for the first time since the Great Migration up from the South generations ago. People are being forced out in record numbers and they are continuing to just hold on by a thread. In my district, a quarter of tenants pay a majority of their income in rent.

If you go up to the West Bronx, you'll find a majority of tenants are paying a majority of their income in rent. The affordability crisis is the issue that I think is at the forefront of most New Yorkers' minds that are keeping people up at night, trying to figure out how they can continue to afford to live here. In our district, we're focusing on a few key things. One is a piece of legislation that we introduced last week that I'm really excited about, Public Land for Public Good.

When the city is redeveloping publicly-owned sites, we need to make sure that nonprofit developers have first crack at redeveloping them because it's the community development corporations and the local community land trust that are going to prioritize deeply-affordable housing to meet our community's needs. Secondly, we've approved nearly half a dozen new land use actions, new developments in our district, and negotiated them since coming into office that are going to generate hundreds of units of new affordable housing in our community.

Thirdly, we need to do more to organize and empower tenants. One of the trends I'm most concerned about is that we're seeing private equity firms come into New York City and buy up real estate. One group, Greenbrook private equity, has bought 199 buildings across Brooklyn, including dozens in my district, including the one right next door to where my parents lived. They are kicking neighbors out of these buildings and jacking up the rents.

We have been going door-to-door to educate and organize tenants so that they know their rights, but one reality that is unfortunate is that we are a creature of New York State. New York City is a creature of New York State. Many of the tenant laws are determined in Albany. The most important bill that is under consideration right now is Senator Julia Salazar's Good Cause Eviction, which would provide protections against extreme rent increases for every tenant in New York City and I'm strongly supportive of it.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take some phone calls for Brooklyn Councilmember Lincoln Restler, 212-433-WNYC, especially if you're in his district, Williamsburg, Dumbo, Greenpoint, Boerum Hill, all around there. 212-433-9692 or tweet @BrianLehrer. Well, with the start of the school year just a few weeks away, I want to raise what, for the past few months by now, has been the most embattled city council headline issue and that, of course, is the school budget. For a quick recap for our listeners, the Adams administration planned to cut several hundred million dollars worth of funding based on declining enrollment in the city schools.

Same amount per student, but it would mean less for a number of schools. City council passed that budget and a lot of members had buyer's remorse. Parents and teachers are in court now suing to stop the cut saying, "This isn't just a percentage decline based on the number of students. This is going to force us to have larger class sizes, cancel programs of all kinds because they won't have the budget base to keep music teachers, arts teachers, reading specialists, enrichment teachers of various kinds." A hearing on the case in court is scheduled for August 29th. What's your position?

Councilmember Lincoln Restler: Brian, thank you, not only for the question but just how much time you've dedicated on this show to this critically-important issue to educate listeners and New Yorkers. This is complicated. During the budget process, I pushed the chancellor and representatives from the mayor's office on the issue of potential reductions in school funding that were tied to the decline in enrollment.

While the answers were lacking, I should have pushed harder. I should have dug deeper. I should have known better. Unfortunately, I think we were misled by this administration and have been working ever since over these past two months to try to organize with parents and teachers to put pressure on the mayor to do right by our schools. During this pandemic, our young people have suffered extreme learning loss. By some experts' estimates, 22 weeks of learning loss.

Now is not the time to be cutting dual language programs, to be cutting music and art teachers, to be dramatically increasing class sizes. The mayor absolutely has ample resources at his disposal to fund school budgets. He is insisting on imposing $500 million of cuts to our neighborhood schools, exactly where we can least afford them. Despite the city council and the state legislature putting record new funding into the budget, the mayor is insisting on cuts. I am hopeful that he will come back to the negotiating table with us, with the council to do right by our neighborhood schools.

Brian Lehrer: That explicit regret that you just expressed for your initial vote or lack of fight on this issue and the budget process in May and June is very different from what City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams said when she was on a few weeks ago. She was saying the council added money to the school's budget. It's really the funding formula that comes out of the mayor's branch, the executive branch, the Department of Education that's responsible for all of this, and no city council did not miss a beat in the spring. Are you confident that your leadership is 100% on board for this fight?

Councilmember Lincoln Restler: Speaker Adams introduced a resolution just last week to demand that the mayor fully restore the $500 million in cuts to our neighborhood schools and I appreciate her doing so. We as a council, myself included, should have done better here. We should have fought harder here. While I do think the mayor's team misled us and said that these reductions in funding representing 1/10th of 1% of the city DOE budget would not have an impact on neighborhood schools that it simply wouldn't be filling vacant teaching positions, they misled us.

It's our job as council members to get to the bottom of exactly what's happening. That is why we have been organizing and fighting so hard because the cuts that the mayor is insisting on imposing would do real damage to our local public schools and we can't let that happen. I'm greatly appreciative of the plaintiffs who are pushing in court. This decision is one that the mayor can fix today. With the stroke of a pen, with the snap of a finger, he can put the resources where they are needed in our schools. I know that every member, the vast majority of the city council is eagerly pushing for him to do so.

Brian Lehrer: On the mayor's side of this issue as one more follow-up, he says this is unsustainable in the long term. They can put some more money in this year, but there's a state aid formula that has to do with how many students are enrolled. Federal COVID money is going to disappear, so they can't increase the funding formula per student really from what it's been in the past.

This is going to come out of the city budget in other ways. People are going to get hurt one way or another. The most common sense way is to keep funding steady per student. If enrollment declines at a particular school, funding declines percentage-wise to that particular school. What do you say to the mayor and the long-term question?

Councilmember Lincoln Restler: We're really lucky that we have Senator Schumer and a great congressional delegation that secured billions of dollars in funding for our schools in New York and across the country during this pandemic. No other governor or mayor is slashing school budgets in the middle of a pandemic. This is the wrong time to be imposing absolutely unnecessary cuts when the city is flushed with resources on our schools.

We absolutely do need to look at the Fair Student Funding formula and how to make it more equitable and sustainable and work with our state and federal partners to make sure that our schools have the resources they need. I will always fight for more resources for our schools, for smaller class sizes, for more art music programs, and dual language programs that the mayor, for reasons I cannot understand, is insisting on cutting today.

Brian Lehrer: Few more minutes with City Councilmember Lincoln Restler of Brooklyn in our series, 51 Council Members in 52 Weeks, in which we're touching every neighborhood of New York City interviewing all 51 members of city council in this year in which most of them are new because of term limits. Lori in Brooklyn Heights, you're on WNYC. Hi, Lori.

Lori: Hi, and I want to say greetings to Lincoln Restler, my representative. One of the problems that nobody ever really talks much about in Brownstone Brooklyn is that the de Blasio administration kept raising property taxes across the entire area to such a degree that my co-op building had a 28% increase in a single year. Some of the buildings here in Brooklyn Heights have had 40% and even 50% property tax re-increases over the last five years.

Many of our retail strips like Montague have had their property taxes go so high that, now, they can't find tenants that can cover their rent, their necessary rent. This is forcing people who were looking for affordable housing out of our buildings because they can't make the increased maintenance costs on co-ops. We're losing our retirees. We're losing people on fixed incomes. It's having the opposite effect of what was desired.

It's enhancing gentrification, forcing middle-class, poor, and retirees out of the co-ops. We stop raising these property taxes as if, meanwhile, we give great tax breaks to these condo developments. Every single one of these massive condo complexes put up under the de Blasio years is tax-free or near tax-free. Meanwhile, these old co-ops that are landmarked, that are struggling to make the new energy requirements are forced to keep raising their maintenances, which is kicking out our senior citizens and our fixed-income individuals.

Brian Lehrer: Councilmember?

Councilmember Lincoln Restler: Great point, Lori, and thank you so much for calling in. It's good to be in touch. You're absolutely right that a 28% increase year-over-year in property taxes is egregious, it's unsustainable, and it's unacceptable. Please follow up with my office and we will work together with you in the Department of Finance and follow up to make an appeal and to try and push back against it. The property tax system in New York City is totally inequitable. You're right that we have co-ops that are being unfairly burdened.

We also have low and moderate-income homeowners in places like the Northeast Bronx and parts of Southern Brooklyn that are being unfairly burdened while other folks like condo owners as you mentioned are getting a totally free pass for decades. We need comprehensive property tax reform in an urgent way. This is an issue that, I think, is finally bubbling up in Albany and getting more attention. Comptroller Lander has really been leading on this issue and trying to gain some momentum to push for progress in Albany.

I hope that our state legislators and Governor Hochul are going to be ready to dig in on comprehensive property tax reform in the year ahead to make it more equitable and fair. On Montague Street, in particular, it's the main street for Brooklyn Heights. Coming out of the pandemic, we had nearly 30 vacancies on just three blocks. You're right that the high property taxes had been one of the many causes of chronic vacancies. We've made the revival of Montague Street. One of our big priorities come into office this year.

We helped bring in a great new bakery, L'Appartement 4F, with the Brooklyn Heights Association that's selling the best croissant or croissants in all of New York City. Amazing bookstore, Books Are Magic, is coming to Montague Street. We have a number of new restaurants that are opening as well. The vacancies, fortunately, on Montague are quickly activating. We've got a lot of new businesses coming to the strip. Please support our local businesses on Montague and let's keep working to attract great stores.

Brian Lehrer: Eliza in Greenpoint, you're on WNYC with Councilmember Lincoln Restler. Hi, Eliza.

Eliza: Hi, I'm wondering about the new Superfund site that's the largest and most residential under the top of Greenpoint and how you're going to clean that up and how concerned we should be.

Councilmember Lincoln Restler: Eliza, unfortunately, in Greenpoint, we have multiple Superfund sites. Are you referring to Newtown Creek or the Meeker Avenue plumes or the state Superfund site in--

Eliza: The Meeker Avenue plumes.

Councilmember Lincoln Restler: Meeker Avenue plumes. Well, thank you for calling in on that. The Meeker Avenue plumes. For listeners who are unfamiliar with Greenpoint's toxic history, we have many serious environmental challenges, including one of the largest oil spills in the history of the United States that ExxonMobil was responsible for. Meeker Avenue plumes is a new Superfund designation that the EPA designated just this past year, a few months ago.

We are in active communication with our US Senator, Senator Schumer, and our members of Congress, Congresswoman Velázquez and Congresswoman Maloney to help work with the EPA to activate engagement on this new Superfund site. The Meeker Avenue plumes basically are plumes that have spread underground from old laundromat sites. There are serious health risks that we need to clean up and clean up immediately.

It is one of my priorities to start creating a community advisory group in the months ahead so that we can meet with the EPA every month, hold them accountable, and get this new Superfund designation off the ground. As you may know, with Superfund sites, it can often take a number of years to fully get the site cleaned up as we are experiencing at other Superfund sites in our community like Newtown Creek and the Gowanus Canal, but we are going to be working with our federal elected officials to do everything we can to get the Meeker Avenue plumes cleaned up swiftly.

Brian Lehrer: I noticed, by the way, saw it reported on our local news website, Gothamist, that your district became the first in the city to release its own climate plan. Can you give us a brief overview of what's in it?

Councilmember Lincoln Restler: Thanks a lot for asking about it, Brian. As a candidate and as a council member, climate change has been one of my top priorities because there is no greater threat to the people of New York City than climate change. We need international agreements and we need federal action like the Inflation Reduction Act that the president signed yesterday and, actually, at the state level, but there's so much more that we can also do at the municipal level, at the neighborhood level, even on our block.

We laid out a plan with 40-something, 46, I believe, specific concrete initiatives, legislation that we're working to pass, organizing initiatives that we're undertaking to really make a difference to drive down emissions and fight back against climate change in our neighborhoods. I hope this will be a model that can be replicated in other neighborhoods and across the city. We focus on driving down emissions in our plan, driving down emissions from their largest sources, from buildings, transportation, and waste.

Buildings, we're working as hard as we can on oversight on the recent landmark Local Law 97 law that requires large buildings in New York City to reduce their emissions, but we're also bringing together the large landlords from across our district to help connect them to resources and technical assistance to retrofit their buildings. We are advocating for new investments in mass transit, and also working to implement a truly-protected network of bike lanes around our district.

Just right now, the new protected bike lane on Schermerhorn Street in Downtown Brooklyn is being installed as we speak. We're working to sign up as many neighbors as we can for curbside composting so that we can get food waste out of our garbage and drive down emissions from waste. We are prioritizing planting new trees and creating new green spaces and investing our funding in new green infrastructure projects around our district. We are also, as a waterfront district, prioritizing coastal resiliency so that that next big storm doesn't put our neighbors underwater.

Brian Lehrer: Last two things before we ran out of time. One, we're asking every council member in this series, what's the number one thing that constituents have called your office about or somehow contacted your office about as individual constituents since you took office in January? Then as you know, we're inviting everyone to bring a show-and-tell item from your district, something people outside the district might not know about but you'd like them to know about. Give us your answer to each of those.

Councilmember Lincoln Restler: Right. Firstly, we have received thousands of constituent inquiries and requests for assistance over the first seven and a half months in office. Many people are in crisis, facing eviction, lacking heat or hot water in our NYCHA developments. Without a doubt, the number one issue that we hear about from neighbors is garbage. It's no surprise. I think it's true in many of my colleagues' districts as well.

311 released data this morning that I think there's a 36% increase in garbage complaints year-over-year that we're experiencing across New York City. When we came into office, immediately, we released a survey to constituents of how we can try to improve sanitation conditions in our neighborhood. We got back lots of great feedback and released our District 33 cleanup plan that has a number of different components but largely is focused on neighborhood cleanups.

We organize neighborhood trash pickups every other week in different neighborhoods across our district. I hope folks will join us, August 21st, in Bed-Stuy for our next cleanup. We prioritize putting additional resources in this year's budget to garbage pickup. Now, the garbage cans on your street corner should be picked up twice a day, six days a week city-wide. We put additional resources from our budget into manual litter pickup where we work with ACE, a group that employs current and formerly homeless individuals, to pick up garbage in high-needs areas around our district.

Thirdly, we're really focusing, as I mentioned before, on compost signups. A third of the garbage in New York City is actually food waste. If we want to drive down the rat population in New York City, the best thing we can do is get food waste out of our garbage. We're at every farmers' market and every community event signing up as many neighbors as we can to participate in curbside composting so that we can address the right conditions because every neighbor in the 33rd and across the city deserves to live in a safe and clean and healthy community. Garbage has been a top priority in our office.

For show-and-tell, I'd like to highlight the UTB. UTB is short for "under the bridge." When I was a kid growing up in Brooklyn Heights, the waterfront in the Heights in Dumbo was very different than it was today. It was a deactivated industrial waterfront. The area that we knew as UTB is where we might cause a ruckus, so to speak, and have a good time with friends. It is directly under the column of the Brooklyn Bridge, the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, overlooking the East River.

After 9/11, it was closed down for safety reasons and actually remain closed for 20 years. When I was working at city hall, I worked to bring different city agencies together to get that final parcel of Brooklyn Bridge Park open to the public. It's Emily Warren Roebling Plaza, named after the real architect behind the Brooklyn Bridge and the adjacent UTB area. I just want to encourage all of your listeners to go down to UTB. You will not find a more magnificent, picturesque view of the New York City harbor than under the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, so check it out.

Brian Lehrer: A lot of people not from the neighborhood may not even have ever known that Dumbo was not named after a Walt Disney elephant. It stands for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, DUMBO.

Councilmember Lincoln Restler: You got it.

Brian Lehrer: You're saying, "Down Under the Brooklyn Bridge Overpass," you have stuff going on too.

Councilmember Lincoln Restler: [chuckles] You know it. When you talk about neighborhoods that have changed across our district, Dumbo is a wholly different place than it was 20 years ago. We've got a great dynamic community down there and it's worth checking out.

Brian Lehrer: City Councilmember Lincoln Restler, thanks for joining 51 Council Members in 52 Weeks.

Councilmember Lincoln Restler: Thanks for having me, Brian.

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