The Value of Community Benefits Agreements

Barclay Center

By Roger L. Green

On Thursday March 11, 2010 numerous dignitaries and civic leaders gathered at the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn to celebrate the groundbreaking for the sports arena for the Nets basketball franchise and the Barkclays Center.

This event was possible because of the historic Community Benefits Agreement that was jointly sponsored by the Forest City Ratner Development Corporation, eight non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) and community based organizations.

Five years ago, while serving in the New York Assembly and representing the neighborhoods in which the arena and the Barclays Center Complex were to be sited, I felt compelled to explore a new model for community development entitled Community Benefits Agreements.

A Community Benefits Agreement is envisioned as an instrument that would encourage cooperation between major developers and local NGO’s towards an outcome that enhances corporate responsibility and progressive community development.

During a meeting with Bruce Ratner and Bruce Bender of the Forest City Ratner Companies, I proposed that a working group be formed to review the success of the Community Benefits Agreement covenants that had been organized by the owners of the Los Angeles Lakers and the Jobs for Justice Coalition during the development of the Staples Center Arena.

A few weeks later my office issued a memorandum that outlined the following outcomes for our proposed Community Benefits Agreements:

• Minority and Women owned business participation covenants.
• Opportunities for African American and Latino investment participation.
• Opportunities of African American and Latino to co-develop the project.
• Workforce Development covenants.
• Post construction opportunities for minority businesses in the areas of procurement and sports marketing.
• Affordable housing for working families
• Enhanced services for children and youth.
• Evolving out of this vision was the formulation of the first legally binding Community Benefits Agreement within the State of New York.

As a result of the leadership of the eight NGO”s (see CBA post) with the progressive cooperation of Bruce Ratner the Community Benefits Agreement was co-signed on June 27, 2005.

Since the historic Community Benefits Agreements for the Atlantic Yards project was adopted, growing numbers of additional neighborhoods have sought to replicate this initiative.

In addition, the newly elected comptroller for the City of New York, John C. Liu, has announced that he will be forming a task force to review the relevance and challenges associated with Community Benefits Agreements.

The DuBois Bunche Center for Public Policy will also be reviewing how Community Benefits Agreements might be incorporated with the New York City Chapter.

I encourage you to review the Community Benefits Agreements document on www.duboisbunche.org and to articulate any ideas or concerns to our center’s public policy email address: dbpolicy@mec.cuny.edu.

Roger L. Green, is the executive director of the DuBois Bunche Center for Public Policy at Medgar Evers College. He is also a former member of the New York State Assembly.

In Brooklyn, A City Councilman Stands in the Midst of Haiti’s Crisis

Mathieu Eugene’s election to the City Council three years ago was widely celebrated not only in New York, but as far away as his native Haiti. He became an instant celebrity in New York City’s emerging Haitian community and beyond, receiving congratulatory calls ranging from his friends on Brooklyn’s Nostrand Avenue to Haitian President René Préval.

But in recent weeks, following the devastating earthquake in Haiti, Mr. Eugene has learned that celebrity can come with high expectations. As the first and only Haitian American elected official in a state with one of America’s largest Haitian populations, his office has become the bull’s eye for an unending torrent of calls and visits from the distraught, the bewildered and the desperate.

“On the day that the earthquake happened, someone called me and told me to watch television,” Mr. Eugene said. “Then, I saw the tragedy. It was so horrible. And people started coming to my office from then on. They came in crying, yelling. I didn’t close my office until three in the morning and it’s been that way since. Since then, I haven’t rested. I never seem to sleep. I’ve been running from one meeting to another. Sometimes all you can do is listen. ”

People have poured into his office on Linden Boulevard in Brooklyn, he said, for every conceivable request related to the crisis. Some have come seeking sought information to determine whether their loved ones were living or dead. Others have come seeking assistance to get to Haiti to look for relatives. Still others came simply to grieve.

The time since the earthquake has amounted to a period of tortuous pain, the Councilman said, because he has been inundated by requests and pleas from his fellow Haitians, desperate for any form of assistance. “They come to me because I’m the only Haitian American that they have ever heard of in the American government,” Mr. Eugene said. “People come to me hoping that I can resolve their problems. And I want to do anything I can, even though they bring problems that I can’t possibly resolve.”

Some, he said, “want to go to Haiti to bring their loved ones home,” Mr. Eugene said. “They know that their relatives have been sleeping in the streets and they want to go and get them. This has been heartbreaking.”

The Councilman, who is also a medical doctor, is frustrated, he said, by the poor state of Haiti’s infrastructure, making it excruciatingly slow to get medical assistance to people who he said will surely die without its timely delivery. “Disaster can happen anywhere. But the worst part of this is that the country was not in the position to give any significant first response,” he said. “The country couldn’t provide the kind of aid to the people who were in trouble. And it’s still very difficult.” He added: “There are people dying not because they have to die. They are dying because the doctors don’t have the supplies they need.”

But his most searing concern, he admitted, is that after the telethons end, the fund raising ceases and the army of good-will volunteers departs, the world’s attention will likely fade from Haiti.

“This is my biggest fear,” he said, adding that he is trying to establish an organization to ensure that there is continued international awareness of the conditions in Haiti and to develop continued sources of international financial support. The outpouring of good will has been extraordinarily heartening, he said. But it’s crucial that it continue.

“I’ve been talking with people in Washington, to my colleagues in government at every level. I’m trying to create a permanent structure in the Haitian community to work together with our friends, who are not Haitian,” he said.

“No matter what, we have to keep the unity,” he said. “We have to keep working together.”

By Jonathan P. Hicks

The Impassioned Life of an Evolutionist

Percy Ellis Sutton, 1920-2009

It seems that nearly everyone in New York has a Percy Sutton story. Mine goes back more than 20 years. A group of students from the University of California at Berkeley made a trip to New York City during a school break and had become smitten with Harlem. Of course, they had heard of the legendary Apollo Theater and were familiar with the weekly television program “Showtime at the Apollo.” I called Percy Sutton’s office, asking an aide if she could recommend someone who might provide a tour for the group of Mr. Sutton’s young fraternity brothers. Within minutes, the chairman— as I and many others called him – came on the line, insisting that it wouldn’t do for anyone other than he himself to provide the tour for these young members of Kappa Alpha Psi.

The next day, there was Percy Ellis Sutton, parading a half dozen young men through every inch of the famed theater, from the stage and dressing rooms through the hallways adorned with the photographs of the famous entertainers who had played the theater’s stage. Mr. Sutton’s acquisition of the landmark theater was fresh at that time, and he played the role of the proud father. But of all the points of interest, he seemed to take particular pride in the newly refurbished, elegant restrooms. Pointing to the exquisite fixtures, he said that a spectacular public restroom was a crucial part of his vision for the theater. “It’s important for people to come in here, right here in Harlem, and feel they are in a place that offers them the best,” he said. “I want people to come here and feel like they are somebody.”

It was vintage Percy Sutton. His was a blend of elegance with the common touch and a passion for the everyman and everywoman. Of course, there has been much in the way of public tribute to the chairman – one of New York City’s most prominent business and political figures — since his recent death at the age of 89, with accolades coming from all quarters, from President Obama to the brothers in barber shops in Harlem. He has been lauded as the passionate civil rights lawyer who represented Malcolm X, as the longest serving Manhattan Borough President, as a history-making candidate for mayor in 1977. He was well known as the purchaser and restorer of the vintage Apollo Theater, the broadcast pioneer who was the founding chairman of the Inner City Broadcasting Company. He was also the elder statesman in a group of Harlem politicians who were known as the “Gang of Four.” It was a group that included David N. Dinkins, New York City’s first African-American mayor; Basil A. Paterson, the labor lawyer and former New York secretary of state; and Charles B. Rangel, the United States Congressman.

But none of that quite captures the passion of Percy Sutton, which was anchored in a desire to enhance the dignity of his fellow African American brothers and sisters (he would always use those salutations in addressing people). The tour, and his insistence that he conduct it personally, was an indication of his hands-on commitment to the generations that would come after him. Certainly anyone in his office could well have walked the students through the theater. Percy Sutton was, after all, a renowned businessman constantly working on deals to expand his broadcasting empire. But Mr. Sutton looked at it as an opportunity to connect with his young brothers, to share his own history and that of the theater – and the community of Harlem – that he loved so fervently.

The characteristic that I admired so much about Percy Sutton was his ability to take on new challenges and, indeed, new careers, as he moved from one period of his life to the next. He seemed always to evolve from embracing one professional zeal to the next. He went from lawyer to legislator in Albany to the borough presidency. When he lost the Democratic nomination for mayor in 1977, he plunged forthrightly into broadcasting, becoming a major spokesman for the need for black ownership in radio. I recall speaking with him over dinner when he was in his 80s, where he even talked about his desire to spend more time writing poetry– and even writing rap lyrics.

Yet, no matter how forward looking he was, he never seemed to forget his roots steeped in a devotion to civil rights that he inherited from his father in his native Texas. It was a history that led him to get arrested in the Freedom Rides of Alabama and Mississippi in the 1960s. It also fueled his desire, at the age of 80, to get arrested in a protest to raise awareness about the death of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed immigrant from Guinea who was shot to death by New York City police officer in the vestibule of his Bronx home.

He had sternness, cloaked in a veneer that was utterly debonair. Mr. Sutton said that when it came to matters related to civil rights and race relations, he considered himself an “evolutionist, rather than a revolutionist.” It was critical, he said “to keep the lines of communication open with those with whom you disagree.”

By Jonathan P. Hicks