De Blasio’s Plan to Create 100,000 Jobs: Find 40,000, and Keep Eyes Open

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/15/nyregion/bill-de-blasio-job-creation-plan.html

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With his feet planted in the election-year present, Mayor Bill de Blasio gazed far into the future on Thursday and projected that his policies would create tens of thousands of new private-sector jobs with good salaries over the next 10 years — including jobs that might be created under future mayors in sectors of the economy that do not yet exist.

The plan he unveiled at a Manhattan news conference was born of a pledge made in February in his State of the City speech to create 100,000 jobs. His economic development team spent the intervening months finding ways to make good on his promise — and they came up with a glossy full-color book, “New York Works,” with 114 pages, listing 25 job-creation initiatives.

“There’s 100,000 jobs in here,” Mr. de Blasio said, holding up the book.

But many of the initiatives do not include estimates of how many jobs they would create, and those that do total only about 40,000.

Mr. de Blasio dismissed questions about the discrepancy as “disputatious.”

But James Patchett, president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, who joined the mayor to speak to reporters Thursday, said that the package of measures should be considered a framework rather than a defined set of policies and programs.

“This is a pathway for the 100,000,” said Mr. Patchett. “The reason it’s not in the plan,” he added, referring to the missing job numbers, “is because this is our current estimation of how to get to 100,000. This is a 10-year plan. Technology evolves very rapidly.”

Mr. Patchett said the city would have to be nimble, citing a $30 million initiative to promote the cybersecurity industry that was projected to create 3,500 jobs. “It may be that our vision for cybersecurity in two or three years needs to change radically to focus on other industries,” he said.

Other initiatives (several of which were underway) include a plan to promote the creation of freight distribution centers in the city (2,000 jobs) and a $750,000 expansion of a program that connects health care providers with technology companies (1,100 jobs).

Many initiatives are long on jargon and short on specifics. A proposed suite of “programmatic interventions” to promote the craft beer and alcohol industry contained no estimate of cost or the number of jobs created.

In a news release, the city highlighted the designation of a night-life ambassador, modeled on similar positions in London and Amsterdam.

Asked how many jobs that position would create (other than the ambassador job itself, which did not count toward the total because it would be a public-sector position), Mr. Patchett and the deputy mayor for economic development, Alicia K. Glen, said that they did not know.

“Night-life ambassador is not the biggest job driver,” Mr. de Blasio quipped.

“We do have a number,” Ms. Glen said. But later in the day a spokeswoman was unable to provide an estimate for jobs that would be directly created by the ambassador’s activities.

Officials said that they were taking a rigorous approach and would count only jobs directly created by city action. To be counted, the jobs must pay at least $50,000 a year — or be expected to pay that much eventually.

Ms. Glen said that the plan was projected to cost about $1.35 billion, almost entirely in capital spending, over the 10-year period — but added that the number could change. Tax incentives would also be used to spur job creation, she said, but she was unable to provide a price tag beyond $300 million in tax subsidies designated for a life sciences hub.

Mr. de Blasio said the job plan reflected his philosophy that “the role of government is to make smart investments that build a better society.”

Despite the current economic boom, Mr. de Blasio said, New York needs to dedicate tax dollars to creating jobs to ensure that the city becomes a center for emerging fields like cybersecurity.

“Private-sector folks do key off of government signals and government actions and government investments,” he said. “We do not think that if private-sector dynamics were left to their own devices, we would get there in a highly competitive economic world.”

Jesse Laymon, the policy director of the New York City Employment and Training Coalition, a nonprofit group, noted the difficulty in determining whether jobs were created as the direct result of government programs. “The aspirational part was believing that these jobs were all going to be jobs that wouldn’t have existed without city intervention,” he said.

Indeed, the city has added an average of about 100,000 private-sector jobs a year over the last three years, and the unemployment rate, at 4.3 percent, is near a 40-year low.