NEW YORK—City Council questioned the success of the mayor’s Center for Economic Opportunity (CEO), established in 2006 to combat poverty, at a hearing on Monday. To evaluate CEO’s success or failure thus far, the council first had to establish what exactly its purpose is.
CEO representatives met with mixed expectations.
Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez expected CEO to know, after six years of research and analysis, how much money it would take to fill the gap between the current resources and growing need resources in the city—even if this figure could only be obtained in an “ideal” world.
CEO could not provide the answer, but Director of Poverty Research for CEO Mark Levitan did hit on one big-picture answer during the course of his research. Councilman Brad Lander praised Levitan for being the first person to prove Obama’s stimulus money saved hundreds of thousands of Americans from falling below the poverty line.
“Where were the headlines?” asked Lander, who said this news didn’t make a big enough splash in the media when Levitan released his study in March.
Levitan showed that the poverty rate increased 0.3 percent from 2008 to 2009. According to his projections, the poverty rate would have increased 3 percent without the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) stimulus funds.
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