NYC must implement equal benefits law
Eric Johnston, PlanetOut Network
Tuesday, November 9, 2004 / 04:56 PM

Though New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration is promising to appeal, a judge's ruling on Monday means the city will begin implementing the city's Equal Benefits Law (EBL).

The law requires contractors doing business with the city to provide employees' domestic partners with equal benefits as married spouses. That includes such things as health insurance and bereavement pay. The law applies to all companies with city contracts worth more than $100,000.

The city council passed the EBL in May. Mayor Bloomberg vetoed it, but the council overrode the veto by a 41-4 vote. The Bloomberg administration tried to fight the law, but Justice Faviola Soto ruled the city must enforce it.

"It's time for the mayor to stop fighting this pro-family legislation and start enforcing it," said Alan Van Capelle, the executive director of Empire State Pride Agenda, a statewide civil rights organization that has backed the legislation for years.

Implementation of the law could mean providing thousands of people with new health benefits. Because many of the city contracts involve national companies, the law could have a profound impact across the country in the same way as similar groundbreaking legislation passed by other major cities, including San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle.

"It's an important victory for same-sex partners," Democratic City Council Member Christine Quinn told the New York Times. Quinn, a lesbian, was a prime sponsor of the bill.

Bloomberg supported the Equal Benefits Law when he was running for mayor. He changed his stance after taking office, saying the procurement process should not "push social issues." He also cited concerns that the law might decrease competition for contracts, resulting in higher costs to the city. New York City pays about $3 billion a year to contractors.

The law applies only to businesses that sign city contracts after the law takes effect, not current contract holders, according to Quinn.

The city's lead attorney, Michael A. Cardozo, issued a statement saying the city will appeal Soto's ruling. In the meantime, the judge's order takes effect immediately, and a spokesman for the mayor said the city would work to implement the policy during the appeals process.

"The City Council clearly articulated the will of the people of New York City by overwhelmingly passing the measure, and now a court has insisted that the mayor follow the will of the people," said Van Capelle. "Rather than fighting it, the mayor should be trying to find ways to ensure that tax dollars will never be used to support discrimination or undermine the values of this great city."


Bloomberg Ordered To Honor Gay Partner Law
By Doug Windsor, November 10, 2004

LINK

(New York City) A state Supreme Court judge has ordered New York mayor Michael Bloomberg to put the city's Equal Benefits Law into effect immediately.
The legislation was passed by city council in May. The following month Bloomberg vetoed it saying the law would hurt the city. Two weeks later council overrode the veto by a 41 - 4 vote.

The law would require contractors that do more than $100,000 of business each year with NYC to offer benefits to the partners of gay and lesbian workers equal to those the companies give heterosexually married couples.

The legislation would make health coverage available to tens of thousands of additional people in the New York City region and because many companies which do business with New York are national corporations it could also provide same-sex benefits to hundreds of thousands of people across the country.

When city council overrode the mayor's veto, Bloomberg went to court saying he would not implement the law until the legal process had been exhausted.

Monday, New York Supreme Court Justice Faviola Soto ordered Bloomberg to implement the law immediately.

A spokesperson for the mayor said the law would be put into action while Soto's ruling is appealed.

When he ran for mayor Bloomberg backed the measure but once in office changed his mind, saying that city money should not be used "to advance social issues." He also cited a decrease in competition for contracts and a resulting increase in the cost of services.

Gay civil rights advocate Matt Foreman resigned from the NY Human Rights Commission last month to protest Bloomberg's legal action against the benefits law.

Foreman was appointed to the Commission by Bloomberg.

Foreman, who is also executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in a letter to Bloomberg and Commission chair Patricia Gatling said that he felt as a matter of conscience obligated to resign.

© 365Gay.com, All Rights Reserved

See also:

Dignity For All Schools Act is Passed by NY City Council, Overriding Mayor Bloomberg's Veto

Gay & Lesbian Students in Our Nation's Schools are Not Protected; NY City Council Passes 'Dignity In All Schools' Legislation

VOLUME 3, ISSUE 346 | November 11 - 17, 2004

LEGAL


Court Advances Equal Benefits Law:
Judge sides with City Council to block Bloomberg's bid against contractor partnership measure
By ARTHUR S. LEONARD & ANDY HUMM

LINK

Ruling from the bench on November 8, New York Supreme Court Justice Faviola Soto ordered New York City to begin implementation of the Equal Benefits Law, a measure passed over Mayor Michael Bloomberg's veto earlier this year.

The ruling came in response to an Article 78 motion filed by the City Council that sought to order compliance on the part of the city's Law Department.

A court ruling a few days earlier, also by Soto, rejected a motion by the city's corporation counsel, Michael Cardozo, to impose a temporary injunction on the law's enforcement. Cardozo has promised appeal of the November 8 Article 78 ruling and may be back in Soto's court as early as November 11 to appeal the earlier refusal of injunctive relief.

The law, which by its terms went into effect on October 26 but which the Bloomberg administration has been refusing to implement, requires that all new contracts worth more than $100,000 between the city and private businesses go only to businesses that provide benefits for domestic partners of employees equal to those provided to spouses of employees. That means that if a city contractor provides insurance for employee's spouses, they must offer it on the same basis for domestic partners, but the law does not disqualify potential contractors who don't provide benefits to any of their employees. The law will apply only to contracts awarded beginning October 26, so its effect would be phased in gradually as old contracts come up for renewal or the city awards contracts for new purposes.

City Councilwoman Christine Quinn, a Chelsea Democrat who is a lesbian and was the chief sponsor of the law, is outraged that Mayor Michael Bloomberg is pressing his legal attack on the law's validity and refusing to implement it.

"I fail to understand why the mayor is doing this," Quinn said, "wasting taxpayer dollars fighting an important piece of civil rights legislation. It is bad enough that he changed his position on the bill and then vetoed it, but when will he stop fighting the rights of domestic partners?"

Under Soto's order, the city must begin implementing the bill immediately unless it can get a stay of the decision, either from Soto himself or from an appeals court.

According to news reports on November 9, Soto responded to the city's earlier request for an injunction by arguing that the law was presumptively valid and constitutional and that the arguments made by the city were not sufficiently strong to justify halting its implementation.

Bloomberg had argued that the city should not use its contracting power to force private businesses to adopt domestic partnership benefits, and that implementing the law might deprive New York of the ability to accept the lowest bids on contracts. The city already forces its contractors to comply with a myriad of rules and regulations, including wage and hour requirements, and the mayor has not indicated why this kind of policy should be treated any differently.

Quinn noted that Bloomberg earlier signed the Living Wage Law that also places constraints on contractors in furtherance of social policy. Repeated calls to the mayor's office asking whether he felt that the city's prohibition in the 1980s on contractors doing business with South Africa was illegal have not been returned.

News reports from San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle, where similar laws have been in effect for several years, do not reflect any problems in their implementation, as some officials in those cities testified at City Council hearings here.

A more serious argument against such a law on the municipal level is that federal laws governing employee benefits would preempt the City Council from legislating on this subject. This legal argument has yet to be fully tested in its ultimate forum, the U.S. Supreme Court. The San Francisco equal benefits ordinance was subjected to several attacks in the lower federal courts, and its application has been cut down to benefits that are not subject to preemption under the federal Airline Transportation Act and Employee Retirement Income Security Act. A more limited equal benefits measure in Portland, Maine, was also scaled back as a result of litigation.

National gay rights groups have found that thousands of employers around the country adopted domestic partnership plans in order to be able to bid on San Francisco contracts.

Because New York City's size dwarfs the other cities that have adopted equal benefits laws, the ordinance here is expected to have a much more far-reaching impact, and, given the amount of large contracting the city does, will require the corporation counsel's office to develop new procedures for evaluating the qualifications of potential contractors.

Some notion of the scope of New York City contracting can be gleaned from the November/December issue of CityLaw, a newsletter published by the Center for New York City Law at New York Law School. The issue features a list of the top 100 New York City contracts for the fiscal year 2004. The largest contract, for nearly $500 million, went to a Queens construction company that is the general contractor on the upgrading of the Newtown Creek Water Pollution Control Plant in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The smallest of the top 100 (actually a tie between several local construction companies) were $17 million contracts dealing with maintenance and management of various properties throughout the five boroughs seized by the city for tax delinquencies. The overwhelming majority of the top 100 contracts went to firms located within the city limits, suggesting that the law will offer significant benefits for New York gay and lesbian couples.

Tom Smith, president of the citywide Stonewall Democrats, said, "I don't see why he [Bloomberg] is appealing what is clearly a matter of equal pay for equal work. This is an economic justice issue. If he doesn't see us as equal citizens, perhaps he should think about taxing us less or think about getting out of the business of government."


A Quinnipiac University Poll released Wednesday shows voters approving of Bloomberg's job performance by a 49 to 39 percent margin, up from a 44 to 42 split after the Republican National Convention, which he personally funded to the tune of $7 million. Among city voters, approval for Pres. George W. Bush, whom Bloomberg endorsed, is at 28 percent versus 68 percent who disapprove. Bloomberg narrowly leads most of his prospective rivals for the mayoralty in 2005 by roughly 41 to 36 percent margins except for former Bronx Borough Pres. Fernando Ferrer who would beat the mayor 45 to 40 if the election were held today.