Good Government

The first time I walked into New York City Council Member Ben Kallos’s District Office, I immediately recognized the layout: A pair of long tables occupied by laptop-facing 20-year-olds wearing jeans and hoodies...

“How do you like our startup office?” Kallos asked me, as he welcomed me into his glass-enclosed office with a smile.

Kallos is one of New York City’s newest members of the city council. He is a lawyer and former business owner who represents part of Manhattan’s Upper East Side as well as Roosevelt Island. But his experience as a coder–he’s worked with MySQL and PHP–is shaping his time on city council as much as any of his other credentials. Thus far, he’s proposed a host of open government bills and used technology to make his own work more open and accessible.

“We operate using Agile. We use Trello for task management. We do standing check-ins,” says Kallos. “So we’re using all the best practices of the world’s most nimble startups to run our government offices.”

Mayor de Blasio and other elected officials would be required to disclose debt repayment plans under a newly drafted City Council bill that Councilman Ben Kallos (D-Manhattan) is hoping to pass before the end of the year.

Kallos, who represents the Upper East Side, has criticized de Blasio in recent days for refusing to disclose his plan to repay about $435,000 in debt he owes to Kramer, Levin & Naftalis, a law firm that represents several clients with business before the city and which defended de Blasio against federal corruption charges going back to 2015.

Council Member Ben Kallos, a Manhattan Democrat, has been an evangelist for improving municipal digital services, particularly through open source software. “The fact that we're in the 21st century and so much of the government still requires a paper application is a problem,” he said in a phone interview.

Kallos, who is term-limited out of office at the end of this year, has repeatedly expressed frustration at the meager progress in civic technology solutions under the current administration. “Mayor de Blasio rolled out a lot of dashboards, but at the end of the day, 311 still doesn't work,” he said, pointing to a City Council oversight hearing on Tuesday on the NYPD’s apparent mishandling of 311 complaints. He was optimistic that an Adams administration could make major strides, and reiterated the expert consensus that the city needs an agile in-house team of software developers to create and consistently improve digital service platforms, rather than relying on major technology firms to deliver a finished product.

“If Eric approaches this with a Big Tech mindset, spending millions of dollars to launch something that is ready on day one with a big bang, then we're gonna have healthcare.gov all over again,” Kallos said, citing the Obama administration’s botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act’s enrollment portal. “We can do this inexpensively, we can do this scalably. And we can do it in-house so that we can keep making

Ben Kallos attends a ribbon-cutting on the East River Esplanade in April 2019. His monthly First Friday event will be held in-person this week for the first time since the pandemic began. (Jeffrey WZ Reed/New York City Council)

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — For the first time since the pandemic began, a local lawmaker's popular monthly forum will be held in-person again.

City Councilmember Ben Kallos's "First Friday" discussion — held, as the name suggests, at the start of each month — will return 8 a.m. Friday.

Rather than over Zoom, it will be held at Ruppert Park. (In case of rain, it will go virtual, but forecasts currently call for clear skies.)

To participate, residents must RSVP online. Questions can also be submitted in advance on the RSVP form, or by email to questions@benkallos.com.

Kallos has held the forums each month since he took office in 2014. Speaking to Patch earlier this winter, Kallos said he hoped whoever succeeds him — now likely to be Julie Menin — would continue the tradition.

City Councilmember Ben Kallos, widely seen as the architect behind the city’s 8-to-1 matching funds program, said the generous public support helped to blunt super PACs influence and allow more candidates the get their messages out and compete.

“We wouldn't have had the field that we did,” Kallos said. “That story repeats over and over again.”

CFB chairman Fred Schaffer downplayed the role of super PACs in this year’s election at the CFB meeting on Thursday, pointing to the outlay of $109 million in public funds.

“The support provided to candidates through the campaign finance program surpassed the amount spent by the outside groups," Schaffer said, "helping all the candidates who qualified get their story and vision for the city out to voters.”

NEW YORK - New York City's Board of Elections has come under increasing scrutiny after the independent organization mistakenly counted more than 100,000 test ballots and included those numbers in the primary night and early voting totals.

"They're doing a horrible job," said Councilman Ben Kallos. "They have one job, and it's to count votes."

While the Board has apologized for the mistake, calling it human error, it's not enough for many, who are demanding reforms

City Council Member Ben Kallos, a Manhattan Democrat, is introducing legislation to create a temporary poll-site task force that would examine measures to improve access to poll sites and to make them more efficient. The task force would be charged with studying the functioning of poll sites in the 2020 elections, the cost of running them, and the possible effects on the health of voters, and would recommend locations and the number of sites for future elections. 

“I hate task force bills and I think that they're mostly useless, but this is the one time I think it's the only path forward,” Kallos said in a phone interview, reluctantly acknowledging that the Board of Elections is not really under the jurisdiction of city law despite the fact that it is funded in large part through the city budget.

17. Ben Kallos

Chair, New York City Council Committee on Contracts

Ben Kallos ( Jeff Reed for the New York City Council )

New York City Council Member Ben Kallos has put a spotlight on the challenges nonprofits face as chair of the Council’s Committee on Contracts. One of his priorities this past year has been pushing the city to restore funding to its Indirect Cost Rate initiative, which aimed to help human services organizations cover administrative and overhead costs. The Upper East Side elected official is now running to serve as Manhattan borough president.

Have you ever wanted to work in city government? If so, Councilmember Ben Kallos (D-Yorkville, Lenox Hill) has some good news; he has introduced a bill to make it far easier for you to find opportunities.

Today, Kallos introduced legislation that would require the city government to notify the public about any new job position or vacancy. The job posting would have to stay up for at least 14 days before the agency started interviewing candidates.

Section 2604(b) (3) of the New York City Charter bans City employees from leveraging their position for personal gain or influencing the hiring of close relatives or peers. However, some City agencies – particularly the New York Board of Elections (BOE)- have circumvented this law by keeping new opportunities hidden from the public, ensuring that their friends and relatives will be the first to apply.

A New York Times article from last October highlighted just how rampant cronyism and nepotism are within the BOE. It pointed out, among other things, that the administrative manager is the wife of a councilmember, and the official overseeing voter registration in the City is the mother of a former representative.