Press Coverage

Councilman Ben Kallos is expected to introduce legislation today that would allow residents to get information on the locations of vehicles towed due to temporary parking restrictions by accessing the Department of Transportation's website or calling 311. 
Currently, according to Kallos, that is only possible for vehicles taken to impound lots for regular parking violations. When vehicles are moved to a surrounding block due to construction without the owners' knowledge, the police may have no record of it, Kallos said, and owners are told to search surrounding blocks or contact construction crews who may have left.

Helping people find their towed cars is the idea behind a proposal being made in the city council.

Imagine this scenario: you park your car legally and when you come back, it’s gone!

“A lot of people first think their car got stolen,” City Councilmember Ben Kallos said.

Kallos said then imagine you see a temporary “no parking” sign, either resulting from a TV shoot or street fair.

“So you can either try to touch base with your precinct and see if they’ve got a list of where it might be, or you have to resort to walking around the neighborhood until you find your car,” Kallos told WCBS 880’s Peter Haskell.

If your car has been moved, Kallos wants the new location entered into a single database.

“Call 311, go on a website and you’d be able to find out where’s my car,” he said.

Council Member Ben Kallos, whose East Side district has been significantly affected by the subway construction, feels businesses need more than just easy access. "While the Second Avenue Subway will be beneficial to our residents, construction has been disruptive in our community, affecting small businesses and residents alike," he said. "Many small businesses have closed, and those that have stayed open have seen up to a 30 percent decline in revenues." Kallosproposed an idea for providing financial relief to these businesses through city grants, but his proposal has not seen movement.

Council Member Ben Kallos has long been advocating for more efficient government, especially now as chair of the Committee on Governmental Operations. In the last few months, he said, the legislative process has sped up. "I think that we have a lot more legislation being introduced and a lot of legislation that's passing, and having the support of a drafting unit is really helping the Council adjust to a new pace of things where legislation and the legislative process and our city is really moving quickly so that it can be more progressive as soon as possible."

Kallos is on the same page as NYPIRG's Russianoff and Citizens Union's Fauss. "What's interesting is with everyone criticizing Albany, one of the things it does do right is it has a legislative bill drafting commission," Kallos said.

It is a City Council in transition, moving toward more transparent and efficient procedures. Kallos said he will continue to advocate for increased funding for the independent bill drafting unit until all bills can be drafted there. Till then, the existing committee counsels will continue to play a major role in the drafting process.

A Manhattan councilman is calling on Mayor de Blasio to do more to combat illegal hotels, saying they pose a threat to tourists and neighbors alike.

In a Feb. 16 letter to the city’s Department of Information Technology, Upper East Side Councilman Ben Kallos urged the agency to provide more public information on complaints about illegal hotels and apartment owners that use sites like Airbnb and requested that 311 create a specific category for people to lodge complaints.

SBS supporters say M15 ridership would not have increased if passenger travel times were not reduced. If that were true, the corollary must also be true. That since ridership on the M15 was lower in 2013 than it was before SBS began, travel times must have increased with the introduction of SBS so it has not been successful. The logic cuts both ways.

The truth, according to the Straphangers Campaign, is that the M15 bus route with its SBS feature is the most unreliable route in the entire city. Local Councilman Ben Kallos stated that complaints regarding M15 service are among the heaviest grievances he receives.

City Council Member Ben Kallos staged a State of the District event on Sunday, February 8, to highlight his accomplishments and present his goals for 2015.

Since his election in November 2013, said Kallos, he has proposed and gotten passed four local laws and two resolutions. With fellow Council Member Jimmy Vaca, he introduced and secured passage of a local law that mandates online publication of all items currently in the City Record. Two other laws “improve transparency, efficiency, and participation in our city;” the fourth will make City laws available online.

Kallos reported that he secured $35 million of the $110 million needed to complete the East River Waterfront Esplanade project, which is connecting two miles of public space along the East River.

He is also one of 24 Council Members involved in participatory budgeting, a process that allows community members to decide directly how tax dollars are spent. He allocated $2.7 million toward selected projects.

Said Kallos of the time remaining in his term, “With two years, 10 months, 19 days, 10 hours, 30 minutes and about 40 seconds left, we’ve got so much more to get done, in precious little time.”

With the data available these days, there is no shortage of app ideas and app makers. In cities like New York, which have a robust civic technology community, hacknights to dive into government data and solve civic problems are held on a regular basis.

While the creation of apps, and the push by civic technologists for even more data, is common, getting those apps picked up and used by cities and citizens is a different story. There are a variety of roadblocks, many involving government regulations not designed for the 21st century.

Bureaucracy is set up to say "no" to disruption. Often, mechanisms are in place to protect a city from fraud and corruption. But in a time when technological advances far outpace the speed of government, innovation can be stifled and frustration rampant.

So how do you prepare the next wave of civic innovators to deal with the "no" machine? Furthermore, how do you create and design a project that will not only benefit citizens, but also get a "yes" from government and its constituents?

Until recently those answers have been hard to come by for people without government experience. But the GovLab at NYU is working to change that. On March 2 the GovLab Academy will offer an eight-week course on civic tech for local elected officials and their staff members. The class will meet online every other Monday and include one-on-one coaching sessions.

Without the satisfying pull of a lever or the little sticker that says “I voted,” mailing in an absentee ballot can leave a voter a little uncertain this his choice will actually count—and Councilman Ben Kallos is looking to change that.

Mr. Kallos is introducing legislation today that would require the Board of Elections to provide a secure website through which New Yorkers could track their absentee ballot—from the moment the city receives the request for a ballot until the moment the vote is counted.

“The tracking system we’re asking for is something the Board of Elections should have in place for their own internal tracking purposes, and we’re asking them to have it in place not only for themselves but for the general public,” Mr. Kallos told the Observer.

One in five Americans votes via absentee ballot, but last year some 250,000 of those ballots were rejected, Mr. Kallos said. Others never get the ballots, or are told they don’t qualified. And still those who mail them in are often left to wonder if they got lost in the mail on the way to the Board of Elections.

“This tries to fix all that,” Mr. Kallos said.

Civitas’ study also outlines long-term projects that would dramatically change the look of the East River Esplanade.

Those plans include reconstructing Pier 107 into a large multi-use cove-like structure that sticks out into the East River and turning the pedestrian bridge that connects Thomas Jefferson Park to the Esplanade into a land bridge that is integrated with the two parks.

"I definitely think this is the start of something special,” Bologna said. "If we all work on this together we can create an amazing waterfront park."

Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, who hosted the unveiling of the study, lauded Councilman Ben Kallos and Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito for securing $35 million for immediate repairs.

But more needs to be done to bring the East River Esplanade up to par with waterfront parks on the west side, she said.

“I know to the credit of the mayor he put in some money but we need much more,” she said. “It’s small steps, that’s how it starts.”

When City Councilman Ben Kallos proposed a taxi-hailing app that would allow New Yorkers to summon yellow and green cabs from their phones, he hoped to help city-licensed taxis compete in a market increasingly impinged upon by ridesharing services like Uber and Lyft.

Ironically, his plan already has the support of at least one rideshare start-up, and it's the city's biggest cab drivers union, the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, that remains lukewarm on the proposal.

Some cities have banned apps that allow people to hail rides online. Kallos is suggesting an approach that's more carrot and less stick.

"Uber disrupted the marketplace," he says. "When you turn on your phone to hail a vehicle, if it works, you keep using it. And people want to be able to hail yellow-and-greens."

That's why Kallos proposed a bill in City Council in mid-December that would require the city's Taxi and Limousine Commission to create its own e-hailing app; cab drivers could choose to opt in and use the app if they wanted to pick up more riders. Along with the app, the TLC would also be asked to create an API, or application program interface, which would allow third-party apps to use the city's information on local cabs.

New York City Councilman Ben Kallos plans to introduce legislation today aiming to ensure that city high schools fulfill their legal mandate to distribute voter registration forms to graduating students, in part by instituting a tracking system to be used by the Department of Education.
 
Kallos, who will be joined by Council Members Linda Rosenthal and Fernando Cabrera, said the Young Adult Voter Registration Act already directs both public and private high schools to have voter registration applications available on campus and to hand them out with diplomas upon graduation, but that it has gone largely unimplemented since its passage in 2004.
 
Under his legislation, schools would maintain a stash of voter registration forms in several languages and distribute them to students. The Department of Education would then be required to track how many forms make it back to the city's Board of Elections each year, and to submit annual reports to the City Council. 
 
“The current law just requires that they put voter registrations with diplomas and mail it to the kids. One hundred thousand go out a year, and 100,000 kids do not register to vote,” Kallos said, also noting that in the time since he began helping students register to vote in 2012, he has never called a campus that reported having forms on hand. “We’re just trying to improve it and make sure we’re actually following it,” he said.