CPD IN THE NEWS

Ana Maria Archilla the co-executive director of Center for Popular Democracy, said that at first progressives "were worried about the political implications."

But "when Randy could say it in rural Wisconsin, in Paul Ryan, territory,” she continued, activists felt they had made a breakthrough.

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Nearly 4,000 immigrants in the Washington region face deportation every year without a lawyer, according to a report that calls on area governments to follow the lead of New York and Los Angeles and provide funding for legal aid to immigrants.

The Center for Popular Democracy, a national nonprofit organization, analyzed thousands of deportation cases at immigration courts in Baltimore and Arlington and found that immigrants were far more likely to prevail if they had a lawyer...

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New York Daily News - April 17, 2014, by Errol Louis - New York is about to embark on a historic building boom — and that has touched off a furious new round in a long-running battle about how to protect the health and safety of the workers who create the city’s glittering skyline. This month alone, two men have fallen to their deaths while working on midtown buildings under construction — a grim reminder that the skyscrapers we boast about come at a high cost, and sometimes a tragic one.

We’ll see many more projects get off the ground in the months ahead. The de Blasio administration is set to announce plans this week to rebuild areas devastated by Hurricane Sandy, and in early May will unveil a larger plan for building or maintaining 200,000 units of housing.

That’s a lot of work to be done — and thousands of men and women needed to engage in one of the most dangerous professions in America.

In 2011 and 2012, a staggering 1,513 construction workers died on the job nationwide, more than in any other industry, according to Public Citizen, a national think tank. Thirty-six of them were in New York City.

“You literally see people who are not making a ton of money losing their lives to grow the economy of this city,” says Jose Duffy, a policy advocate at the Center for Popular Democracy, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit group.

“These are people literally dying because employers aren’t putting in basic safety regulations.”

At the center of the current fight is Local Law 240, also known as the Scaffold Law, which allows construction workers who get injured or killed on the job to sue the companies that hired them. The law was passed in the 1880s as New York began constructing the world’s first skyscrapers — and losing workers maimed or killed as the structures went up.

The construction industry has been trying for more than a century to shrink or repeal the law, and allow firms to avoid or limit liability if they can prove that an accident was the fault of the dead or injured worker. Industry lobbyists duly prowled the halls of the statehouse this year.

Lawsuits are a less-than-perfect way to force the industry to take safety seriously, but there aren’t many alternatives. Public Citizen estimates it would take the Occupational Safety and Health Administration more than 100 years to inspect every New York State construction site even once.

So workers sue when they get hurt on unsafe job sites, and insurance companies charge building companies hefty premiums in exchange for paying the claims of those killed or injured workers. A recent report by pro-industry researchers at SUNY’s Rockefeller Institute estimates that the law costs New York $150 million in economic output and 12,000 jobs — expenses imposed by insurance companies, which charge construction firms.

Duffy’s group, in turn, issued its own report this week attacking the methods and motives of the Rockefeller Institute study.

While the political battle goes on in Albany, people like Walter Cabrera are caught in the middle. Speaking through a translator, Cabrera, who came here from Peru a decade ago, told me how his supervisor had him work on a defective scaffold at 240 West Broadway in 2011.

The rig didn’t have hand rails, and Cabrera ended up falling and injuring his knee, wrist and elbow. Three years and two surgeries later, he remains unable to work and is in the process of suing the company that hired him.

While Cabrera waits out the legal process in his Jackson Heights apartment, the building he helped construct — a swank Tribeca condo now called 1 North Moore — has a penthouse that listed at $8 million and units that sold for $5 and $6 million, according to curbed.com.

It would be unthinkably immoral to build the city on the injured backs of disabled immigrant workers. Until there’s a better alternative, it looks like the Scaffold Law is here to stay.

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LA Times - March 23, 2015, by Zahira Torres - California lawmakers must strengthen financial oversight of charter schools to stem cases of fraud and mismanagement that have already cost taxpayers $81 million, according to a new report from several advocacy groups.

The report by the Center for Popular Democracy, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment Institute and Public Advocates Inc., said state and local leaders rely too heavily on self-reporting through whistleblowers or audits paid for by charter school operators. Local leaders also lack the staff and training to monitor charter schools and identify fraud, according to the report.

But the California Charter Schools Assn. offered a swift rebuke of the report in a two-page statement that said the authors offered dated examples of fraud and did little to prove that systemic problems exist.

The report pointed to cases that revealed $81 million in misused funds at charter schools over the last two decades, but said those do not reflect the true cost to taxpayers because weak financial controls allow fraud and mismanagement to go undetected.

Last year, the Los Angeles County Board of Education revoked the charter for Wisdom Academy of Young Scientists after auditors found that administrators funneled $2.6 million to the former director, her family and close associates.

“Given the rapid and continuing expansion of the charter school industry and the tremendous investment of public dollars, California must act now to reform its oversight system," the report said. "Without reform, California stands to lose millions of dollars as a result of charter school fraud, waste and mismanagement.”

The report said more focus must be placed on the state's 1,000-plus charter schools which received $3 billion in public funding last year.

Charter schools are publicly-funded but privately managed.

The California Charter Schools Assn. released a two-page statement Tuesday questioning the accuracy of the report and the authors' intentions. The group said it agreed that public dollars should be used appropriately, but argued that the report offered few examples of fraud.

In those cases, charter schools closed or made large-scale changes that helped prevent fraud in the future, according to the association.

"While we don't presume to understand the motives behind this report, we do know that California is a state where the charter school sector, authorizers and legislators have come together to put into place real solutions," the group said in the statement.

Recommendations in the report include mandating audits that would be specifically geared toward preventing fraud; requiring charter schools to set up internal risk management programs that would conduct annual fraud risk assessments; ranking charter audits by level of fraud risk and denying requests for new charter schools that do not commit to fraud controls.  

The report did not study oversight policies or make recommendations for traditional public schools.

"To assume that there is greater risk at charter schools than school districts, particularly in light of all the real time oversight on financial reports, is simply unfounded," the charter school association said in its statement.

Kyle Serrette, director of education at the Center for Popular Democracy, said many public school systems employ internal auditors and have developed policies to help prevent fraud. But he said public schools should face the same scrutiny.

“There is no proactive system to monitor for fraud, waste and abuse,” Serrette said about the charter schools studied in the report. “California set up a system that prosecutes fraud rather than prevents it.”

He added, "We want to be able to detect the sheep from the sheep in wolves' clothing.”

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