WE ARE THE CAVALRY with DREW WARSHAW

GIL BELAVAL: Hello. My name is Gil Belaval, or if you wish, Gilberto Belaval. And you are listening to Point of Learning with my friend Peter Horn. Little background: for nearly 25 years, I was employed by Connecticut State Government. I am interested to hear about Drew Warshaw's plans for the state of New York as he campaigns to be the state's next comptroller. Enjoy the show!

NOTE: The following AI-generated transcript is raw and unedited. It will contain errors, but I’ll clean it up soon!

On today's show, Drew Warshaw, who is campaigning to unseat the current New York State controller.

My boys go to our local public school, and here in New York City, one out of every seven. New York City Public School students. They don't go home at night because they don't have one. They're homeless. And you have one guy sitting on $300 billion. And instead of investing that money in homes that New Yorkers can afford, he's giving it away to hedge funds and private equity managers. We have to end that.

Vying to be the state's chief financial officer, Drew wants to invest in a different set of priorities.

Somehow we find the money to pay for missiles and bombs and aircraft carriers and foreign wars. Somehow we can find the money for that, but somehow we can't find the money for housing. We can't find the money for food assistance. We can't find the money for our public schools, but we can find the money for bombs, missiles, and aircraft carriers. And this is again where I just feel like we've lost the plot. If you're sitting on power and you're sitting on money and you have the opportunity to do something differently, we've got to do it differently.

And he knows democracy depends on all of us.

The cavalry is not coming. The cavalry is us. We are the cavalry. And we need to go get our power and our money and start using that power and that money for the working New Yorkers who don't have it.

I first met Drew Warshaw last summer at an informal meet and greet at Fitz Books and Waffles here in Sunny Buffalo. I was immediately impressed not only by his vision for how government, specifically the office of the New York State controller could be excellent, but also by his humility about not having all the answers and wanting to learn about the challenges people in Buffalo and throughout Western New York were facing. Having seen him greet and listened to voters several times since then, I invited him to guest point of learning as part of the civic project that faces all of us. Learning how to revitalize a democracy, amid daily, sometimes hourly threats from the Trump administration. Bottom line, Drew Warshaw and his candidacy give me hope, something positive to support and contribute energy to. Energy I might otherwise expend screaming about the day's headlines into a pillow or a martini glass.

In the conversation that follows, I can't pretend to be an unbiased interviewer, and I want to spread the word about Drew Warshaw to everyone in New York State who can vote in the Democratic primary on Tuesday, June 23rd. The suggestion here though, for anyone anywhere in New York and beyond, if you're running low on hope, is to find your Drew. Find someone who believes government can, in fact, be excellent and has a vision for how to make it so. We're about to get into my conversation with Drew, but first a few quick biographical points. A lifelong New Yorker, Drew Warshaw, grew up one block south of East Harlem, where he saw firsthand the stark differences that uneven distributions of power and wealth entail. He has decades of experience leading in government, nonprofits, and the private sector. He spearheaded the rebuilding of the World Trade Center in the oughts and went on to expand renewable energy and affordable housing across the country.

For the last five years, Drew has focused on the affordable housing crisis as chief operating officer and then co- CEO of Enterprise Community Partners, where he helped create and preserve more than one million affordable homes. One of his proposals for the Office of State Controller that has garnered a great deal of local attention is to create the largest affordable housing fund in the country, $20 billion, half of which would be earmarked for areas outside of New York City. Just last week, I got to sit in on a round table where Drew listened to local housing experts from across Western New York speak about the specific challenges and possibilities of this region. As I heard one of them say into his phone after the meeting, "Yeah, Drew Warshaw, he's the real deal." Let's get into my conversation with Drew, recorded March 29th. You are running as a Democrat to unseat Democratic incumbent, Tom Donapoli, who has served as the New York State Comptroller since 2007.

I'll flag here not for the last time that this is a primary election that we're talking about, so it will take place on Tuesday, June 23rd. But Denapoli has been in the job for 19 years and he's a fellow Democrat. Why are you running?

Yeah, that's exactly right. And when I saw he was running for a sixth term, I think five is enough. I am running because we are in a moment in New York where New Yorkers can no longer afford to live in New York. And we have a statewide official who's been sitting up there for two decades who has an ability to change that and do something about it. And for the last 20 years, he's done it one way and things have gotten worse. And I have a very different vision for how we would use the massive amount of money and the massive amount of power for the working New Yorkers who have less and less of those two things. And that is why I'm running for New York State Comptroller.

There's six offices. Two of them are federal, they're senators, but there's six offices that all citizens of New York State have the opportunity to elect candidates for. The state level offices, people know governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, probably the one people hear and know least about is the office of comptroller that you're seeking. So how do you describe what the office is and what those powers are that the comptroller has that people may not be aware of?

Sure. I mean, in the simplest terms, the state comptroller's job is to manage New Yorker's money, to manage our tax dollars and a quarter of a trillion dollars that New York State spends every single year. And the other part of the job is that he is the chief investment officer of the third largest pool of public capital in the United States of America, $300 billion of our New York state and local public pension fund that New Yorkers fund into with our property taxes and state income taxes. And one person oversees that $300 billion. He's the third largest investor in the whole country. And what I think is so extraordinary is that in the financial capital of the world, no one has ever asked and answered a very simple question. How is the chief investment officer the third largest in the whole country? How has he performed?

We can quantify his performance. And it's normally hard to quantify an elected official's performance. I don't know, a Congressperson or a state senator, state assembly member, is it how many bills that they introduce or sponsor or how many they pass, but what if they're bad bills? Or what if they're in the minority and they just don't have the possibility of getting their bills into law? It's really hard to quantify an elected official's performance. It's really easy in this case, and no one has done it in 19 years, and we finally did. And it turns out the third largest investor in the United States of America who invests New Yorkers own money, has underperformed his own market benchmarks by 39%, 39%. And he has paid hundreds of Wall Street bankers, $12 billion in fees over that time of taxpayer funded fees. He has literally made these people millionaires off of the backs of New York taxpayers and public school teachers and nurses and social workers and frontline government workers.

He's made the millionaires and they have not even done their job. They have not beaten the market net of those billions of dollars of fees that he continues to pay them year after year after year. And it has cost taxpayers not just those $12 billion in fees. It has cost us $59 billion of higher property taxes and state income taxes. Why? Because we are the ones who've had to make up for Tom DiNapoliz and his bankers under performance. We've had to bail them out because the state pension fund must be fully funded. By law, has to be fully funded. So when investment income is not what it should be because our chief investment officer is not good at his job, we have to be the ones to make it up because we are the investors in that fund. We are the ones who ensure that it is fully funded.

And DiNapoli for years has gone around and bragged about the fact that we have one of the best funded pension funds in the nation. And he's right, we do. What he leaves out is that it's the law. It has to be. So the real question isn't, is it fully funded? Mickey Mouse could be state controller and it would have to be fully funded. The real question is, how is it funded? Is it funded through investment income because he's a good investor, but now we know he's not. Or is it funded because the taxpayers of New York and the public school teachers of New York and other frontline government workers have been the ones to make certain that it is fully funded? And it turns out over the last 19 years, that is the greatest story that has never been told because no one has ever challenged him and decided to run against him.

And incredibly, no one has ever scrutinized his record and realized that unfortunately he has actually underperformed the market by nearly 40%.

So I have a question for you on follow up while we're talking about how the pension funds have been invested. I have a listener who works in private investment, so I won't share his name or his firm, but he's very interested in your plans. But he has this question about pension investment saying more or less private equity and other private funds such as those that Danapoli has invested in, right? They charge high fees for sure, but many have historically delivered strong net returns. So are you, Drew, arguing that the net returns are overstated or that the risk or opacity outweighs the benefit of those returns?

All of the above. So let's speak very specifically. Tom Donapoli pays 371 different private equity managers. Okay. So right off the bat, that's insane.That is malpractice. And your private equity friend, I am sure would agree that maybe there are a few private equity managers who can beat the market net of their fees. There aren't 371 of them, and he pays them more than a billion dollars of taxpayer funded fees. And the two things I would say is historically, and study after study has proven this, that these private equity managers on balance do not outperform the market index net of the high fees that they charge. That's one. And two, let's say there are a few that do. One, they don't do it year after year after year. They might have a good year, then they might have a bad year. Then they might have a good year, and then they might have a bad year.

And are we to expect that Tom Donapoli and his team up in Albany know who they are, know how to pick the needle out of the haystack if you even believe that there are needles there. What I mean by that is if you believe there are even private equity managers who can beat the market net of those fees, are we to believe that the people up in Albany know who they are and know that over years and years and years, which ones to swap in and to swap out? I think that is frankly the height of arrogance. I don't believe that I know how to pick which ones are good and which ones aren't, and I don't think we need to try. And we have tried. Tom Dapple has tried for 19 years to pick the pickers. He has tried to pick who can actually outperform.

And he has failed at a historic level. He has failed to the tune of 39% and he has cost taxpayers dearly in the process in the middle of an affordability crisis. He has made these guys millionaires, millionaires, paid them $12 billion in taxpayer funded fees to underperform the market by 39% and cost us an additional $59 billion in higher taxes just to make sure that pension fund is fully funded. And that is a record of failure and I'm not going to try and replicate that.

And so would your proposal be to shift many very small investors such as myself thinking about retirement plans rely on something like index funds. Would your solution be to move to something like that so that you follow, so that you follow kind of a basket of funds that basically track the best things that the market can provide, but it's not like individually hand selected by individual managers or in this case 371 of them or what is your counter proposal?

Peter, that's exactly it. We would invest the way everyone is told to invest. We would diversify across a set of practically free index funds and we would take the market return instead of trying to beat it net of these billions of dollars of fees and that is investing 101. And so I want to be very clear about what we would do. We would fire the 664 Wall Street investment managers because remember the 371 is just private equity managers. Then he has the hedge fund managers and all these other guys who are sucking up taxpayer dollars. So I would fire all 664 of them because if you and I didn't do our job for 19 years, we'd be fired, right? We wouldn't be made millionaires. And so we're going to fire these guys who aren't doing their job and we're going to replace them with practically free diversified index funds, which is what every financial advisor across the country says we should be doing with our money.

It's no different with the public pension fund. And these Wall Street guys in Tom Donapoli want to make it sound way more complicated than it is. It's not complicated. It's just a larger pot of money. That's all it is. The way to invest it is the same, is to pay as low a fee as you possibly can to expose yourself to these different asset classes, diversify yes, absolutely that matters. But once you do that, don't pay the Wall Street middlemen, just cut them out. We don't need them.

I want to back up a moment in time because I believe it's the earliest document or the earliest images, certainly this first video of you that's on your website, is you, I think, in college talking about campaign finance. I feel like campaign finance gets to the center of so much that is broken and busted and systematically screwed up about our political system, but it's also a very difficult issue to make compelling or sexy. I have a lot of artistic friends, some are songwriters, for example. I was like, "Can we do a sexy campaign finance song? Can we sell the importance of this issue?" I would like for you to talk a little bit about campaign finance, the role it played in your political awareness because part of the reason I wanted to talk with you is that you are not just campaigning for a particular office right now.

You had at some points in the story of your life, these inflection points where you said, "This is an issue that matters and maybe I can do something about it. " I wonder if campaign finance plays such a role in terms of your history and especially how you're thinking about it now as somebody in the difficult role of trying to raise money to fund a campaign.

Yeah, you have it right. Campaign finance reform, as non-sexy as it is, happened to have been the issue that as a college kid drew me into the world of politics and policy and government. As a 19-year-old, I could not understand how public officials, public officials were elected through a system of private financing. Those two things just didn't compute for me. And I cared a lot about a lot of other issues that were going on in the world. And what occurred to me is that, well, if we could change the way in which elected officials get their power and get into office, then you might be able to change what they do once they're there. And certainly the campaign finance system that we had and frankly has gotten worse because of Citizen United and the Supreme Court, but even the one that we had back then, what was very clear to me is that these incredibly powerful and monied interests were controlling outcomes.

And what I mean by that is that they were controlling who got elected and what they would do once they got elected. And that just felt very wrong to me as someone who just believed that power and money was there for the people who didn't have power and money.

It was something that simply didn't compute with me. And so I started an organization called Democracy Matters. It was a nonpartisan student organization. And honestly, it was actually quite a popular political organization on Cornell's campus. I think because we were suffering from a lot of the things that I think we're suffering from today, there were college kids who didn't want to be a part of the college Democrats or college Republicans because they were tired of the partisanship. They were tired of the zero sum game, you're either with us or against us type of approach. And maybe campaign finance reform didn't light them up right away, but I think they liked the fact that there was a group of people who checked their partisan hat at the door and just wanted to see regular people getting elected to office in a regular way that didn't rely on irregular, massive sums of money from millionaires and billionaires.

And that seemed to sync with a lot of us. And we ended up going to Albany and lobbying for a public financing of campaigns bill. And what is sort of extraordinary and a bit poetic, I am blessed to be in the first class of statewide candidates to participate in the state's new public matching program. And so I am able to, and fortunately we have qualified, I am able to participate in a public financing campaign program that will match any small dollar contribution up to $250 six times. So just the math of it is someone were to write me a $250 check, I would get $1,500 from the state. If a couple were to do that each, I would get $3,000 from the state. So all of a sudden, small donors can start to look like big donors. And to me, that is a far more democratic way of electing our public officials.

And I think we'll ensure that one, we get better outcomes once those elected officials are there. And importantly, we'll actually have some competition. So I would never be able to run for state controller and primary, a guy who's been there 19 years, who literally has never had a primary the entire time he's been there. And I think fundamentally, one of the reasons he has never had a primary is because of this public financing program didn't exist. This public matching program is new for the first time this cycle, and it is doing what it is supposed to do, at least at the outset, which is encouraging competition, encouraging a healthier democracy, and hopefully when we win, we'll encourage better outcomes.

I was pleased to read on the platform on your website about FAIR, which is an acronym standing for fairness and accountability for immigrants rights. So it's a tough call on any given day to decide which Trump policy is most inhumane, but the treatment of immigrants has been near or at the top of my list for months now. So I was pleased to see what you call the fair plan there. Can you tell us about it?

Yeah, sure. Appreciate you asking about that. Unfortunately, I don't get enough questions about this issue. And just to take a step back, this issue, and by this issue, I mean, how we treat our most vulnerable New Yorkers and our neighbors and our immigrants is very personal to me. When I was working in the Spitzer administration, which was my first job in government, I helped lead an effort to try and get a basic driver's license to undocumented immigrants who were already driving, who were already in New York and couldn't get a basic driver's license. And at the time, of course, later in 2019, they passed a law, the Greenlight Law that allowed for that very thing. So 12 years earlier, we were fighting for that basic piece of paper and we fought the Bush Administration and we knew we'd have to fight the Bush Administration. What we didn't anticipate is we had to fight Democrats here in New York.

We had to fight people like Tom DiNapoli who came out against it. And so this is an issue that I have long fought for and fought back then, the Department of Homeland Security, and the state comptroller today could fight the Department of Homeland Security again, and he refuses to. And so one of the things that this fair plan calls for is one for the state legislature to pass and the governor to sign the New York For All Act, which has a host of provisions. Basically the gist of is that New York and its municipalities and counties and agencies cannot collude with ICE, cannot use our public tax dollars to subsidize Donald Trump's private militia that is terrorizing our neighbors and are kidnapping our neighbors and are coming into our streets and our towns and our communities, literally today and every day, and terrorizing them. And the incredible thing about this is we actually don't need the legislation to do some of the things that the legislation calls for because the state controller, Tom Donapoli, already has the ability to audit the 14 counties and municipalities that we know today have signed agreements with ICE, with Donald Trump's private militia to use our public tax dollars to subsidize their terror.

And he has refused to audit any single one of them. And when I'm New York State Controller, whether this New York for All Bill passes or not, one, I'm going to certainly be loud and supportive of it, but two, we're going to use the power we already have. We already have the power to deal with the Trump administration forcefully and clearly, and he has abdicated that power. And to me, that is totally unacceptable in a moment where the federal government has come into our streets and our towns and our communities and using our tax dollars to do it. And the chief auditor, who's supposed to be the watchdog of how our money is spent, refuses to audit a single one of them. And you talked about campaign contributions, and whether there's a one-to-one connection on this, we'll never know. But it turns out that Thom Dinapoli has taken $2 million in campaign contributions, 9% of all campaign contributions that he's taken since he was appointed state controller from law enforcement associations.

So I don't know if that's why he's refusing to audit a single one of these 14 agencies that have these agreements that at least we even know about. If he did an audit, we might know that there's other activity that's going on. And we've heard stories from other towns and other communities where ICE is colluding with law enforcement agencies. Whether there's a direct connection or not, we don't know, but right now he has the power to do something about it and he's not. So one of the things that this fair plan would do is not just support legislation, but use the power we already have to make sure that our public tax sellers are not subsidizing Donald Trump's reign of terror and his private militia. Another thing, something just to shift gears a little bit is our nonprofit organizations, these are our frontline organizations that care for the most vulnerable New Yorkers, and these nonprofits never get paid on time.

And what I mean by that is they don't get paid on time by the government agencies that they do work for. And to me, and I was on the board of a nonprofit up in East Harlem called Union Settlement for years, and we struggled with this too. We literally couldn't meet ... Well, we couldn't meet payroll, our monthly payroll, without getting a bank loan. And so we had to pay this bank all these fees and this interest payments, all because government couldn't figure out how to pay us on time. And the stake controller is the one who does that. And so part of the plan, this fair plan, is to make sure that our nonprofits are paid on time and we will create a working capital fund and we will make sure that if the Department of Health or the Department of Education or any of these agencies that are contracting with these nonprofits doing the hard work every single day, if they are late on their bills, we will make sure that these nonprofits get paid.

And we audit these agencies, right? So we have the ability to go to them and say, "Hey guys, you're late." I And now you owe us because we've been able to pay these nonprofits on time.

These are two great examples. Both the auditing ... Well, I guess they both relate to auditing, but to audit for the purpose of transparency and accountability, which is part of the fiduciary responsibility of a comptroller to make clear to say, "Hey, here are the ways that you can see that my office is working in the best interests of the public. In terms of transparency, auditing is one of the ways that you can do that, but then also ensuring that these nonprofits get paid on time." These are two ways that you are using latent powers of the office. They're there, but they haven't been deployed, at least not in the past couple of decades, and not for the public facing purposes that they have been. Part of what's so exciting to me when I hear you talk about things like that is that it demonstrates a kind of competitive creativity about how we can use the powers of government that are there in some ways as a check against of the damage that's being done very publicly at the federal level.

So again, I know you're running for a state office, again, the primary, June 23rd, but we operate in this federal context where we are seeing for malicious purposes, in my judgment, for malicious purposes, great creativity being exercised in using latent powers or assuming powers, aggrandizing powers, irrigating powers to the federal government for the abuse of people to grade human personality and human livelihoods. You are trying to meet it at the state level with plans for creative applications in a positive direction. And that's really exciting because it's something that I regret that more Democrats don't seem to be taking an energetic enough stance on. And so it's part of what is very interesting to me about your platform. I wanted to double click for just a second,

For example- Sorry, just real quick, just on that point, because I do want to be very clear, because you have it exactly right. I am not calling to expand the powers of the New York State controller. I'm calling on us to use them, just to use them. He has enough power. He has enough money. We just need to use it. And for the last 19 years, we haven't had someone in that seat who has that level of urgency and imagination to take the power and take the money that he's been sitting on, that he treats like a lifetime appointment to use that money and use that power for the New Yorkers who do not have those things, for working New Yorkers, for immigrants, for consumers, for the people who wake up every day and they go to work and every day they go to work and they're told it's not good enough because they can't even afford their home.

They can't afford their utility bills. They're getting jacked up by these utility monopolies. And just my boys go to our local public school and here in New York City, one out of every seven New York City public school students, they don't go home at night, Peter, because they don't have one. They don't have one. They're homeless. One out of every seven New York City public school students, they don't get to go home at night. And you have one guy sitting on $300 billion and instead of investing that money in homes that New Yorkers can afford, he's giving it away to hedge funds and private equity managers. And we have to end that.

Sorry, you can double click on what you wanted to. I think this is the point. We just need to use the power we have. We have it. We have it. We just need to use it. We need to get people into these positions who know what time it is. And Thom Dinapoli doesn't understand what is going on out there and how New Yorkers are struggling just to get by. And he's taking that power and that money for granted. And I think that's a crime. I think you got to get gone. If you're not going to use the power and the money that you have for New Yorkers who don't have those things, you got to go. And after 19 years, he'll be there 20 years by the time this is over. What are you planning to do in the next four years that you have not had the opportunity to do for the last 20?

It just doesn't pass the smell test.

Hello, friends. It's Gil back again. I can remember one night years ago sitting after dinner with friends and family in the woods of Vermont listening to Peter talk about campaign finance reform as the key to improving our political system. It was maybe the first time I thought this guy actually has some decent ideas if only once in a while. You probably agree, or at least you agree that he has good taste and guest. Anyway, there are lots of ways to support this show. I've given a couple of times in the past to the point of learning, but Peter thinks too long in the past. But I humbly suggest that offering my formidable vocal talents to this show is more than an adequate contribution. What if I throw in a song? Peter would like me to sing Nissen Dorma from Turnda.

Gil, are you even going to mention that there's a button on the show page to learn about supporting point of learning?

How about something from Bad Bunny.

So we're sitting in a moment where, and again, I don't mean to keep going to the federal government, but it's some of the headlines that grab the attention that we've just paid, I think it's a French company, $1 billion not to build wind turbines. You've worked in renewable energy, specifically solar. You have a great deal of experience. I wanted to ask you about your thoughts. It seems to me that Governor Hochul is moving to alter and delay what can be considered a landmark climate law in 2019, which I should say a number of local organizations, including Push Buffalo, did a lot of grassroots advocacy to try to get that 2019 law over the line. Well, one of the things that it does is just call for gradually decreasing greenhouse gas emissions by certain deadlines. I wonder if you have thoughts about the climate legislation and what could or should be done.

Yeah. And also part of that legislation, it calls for redistributing revenue to utility rebates for the New Yorkers who can least afford to pay them. And so we're losing that with the pullback of this legislation. And I think it's a great example of you have a law that was passed by Democratically elected legislature in 2019, so seven years ago. And the New York State Controller, and why I come back to this position, is because every year this piece of legislation was not implemented for seven years. It wasn't implemented. And you should have had the chief auditor of the state banging on the door of the governor and saying, "You have a legal obligation to implement this democratically enacted piece of legislation." And so seven years later, now all of a sudden at the 11th hour, the governor's pulling back on this and is basically saying that, "Well, we have no choice because if we implement this now, then really terrible things are going to happen." Well, we had a choice in 2020 and in 2021 and 2022 and 23 and four and five, and we did nothing.

And the state controller didn't have anything to say about that. And if he did, no one heard it because he's not using that platform the way it needs to be with a level of energy and urgency and the voice that he has. So to me, I think in part, we are where we are, not only because of the governor's own pullback and inability to implement the legislation that was signed by her administration, but because we don't have the watchdogs out there saying, "Hey, wait a minute, this thing was supposed to be implemented yesterday and it still isn't." So this is a manmade crisis. I don't even think it is a crisis because they're talking about a bill or a piece of legislation that hasn't even been implemented as the source of our rising electricity rates. The source of our rising electricity rates are these broken utility monopolies and the inability of the state regulator who the controller is supposed to be auditing to do its job and to make sure that these utilities like National Grid and Rochester Gas and Electric, NYSEG and others are doing their job.

And I was up in Rochester a bunch of months ago and Rochester Gas and Electric has proposed a one year 36% electricity rate increase one year. And I spent eight years in the renewable energy industry fighting these utility monopolies who are totally broken. And that is a public emission of failure, right? I mean, that is mismanagement to the T. If you have to propose a 36% one year increase to the price of what you produce, you're doing something really, really wrong. That is an emission of failure and the state regulator ought to call them out. And if they're not, the person who's supposed to be watching that regulator, which is the state controller, ought to do the same. So when I'm state controller, we are going to audit these guys through and through. We are going to propose a very different model for how these public utilities spend the public's money, and you're going to have someone in there who actually has experience in dealing with these utility monopolies for the first time.

This is the part that I wanted to double click on because I just don't, and maybe it's because for the past 20 years, there's somebody who hasn't been doing a lot of auditing or at least sharing what the audit was that he was doing. But if you just give us an example of how this would work or what the benefit would be. The comptroller has the remit to audit anything that touches state money, and so somebody could do it, but then what happens when you do? And is that a public facing report that comes from that or how does the fact of an audit change things or potentially change things?

So these audits are public facing and they're on the controller's website. The real question as an auditor, to me, it's like a three-part question. What do you choose to audit? How do you audit it once you choose it? And then what do you do with the recommendations once you've issued them? That's like fundamentally the three stages or the three key questions. And in terms of what we would audit and how we would audit, one of the things I want to do, and I've been talking about with local community-based organizations, is I want to hear from them. I want to hear from them what they think we should audit. And importantly, for the communities that are most impacted by the state government, I want to hear from them what questions we should ask. I want them to help design these audits because I don't know everything about every issue, and the auditors in the comptroller's office don't either.

But the people who are most impacted by these agencies and by this state spending and these government programs, they have a pretty good idea and I want to ask them and I want to take their answer seriously. So in terms of what we audit and how we audit, I want to do it differently and I want to do that with our community. So that's one. And then two, once we do perform these audits and develop these recommendations, the historic practice has been you publish it on the website and you basically say, "Okay, we did our job. Let's go on to the next thing." And that's, as you could hopefully tell, that's not how I do things. And if we are serious about recommendations, if we truly believe that they have an opportunity to help working New Yorkers, then we need to be very loud about those recommendations.

And when they are not implemented, we need to be loud about that too. Now look, I think the first instinct has to be one of partnership. I'd love to try and partner with the governor, with the agencies, with the legislature to see if we can't just do these things together. I think that's ideal. And I think in a lot of ways, we could use the resources of the comproller's office in partnership. There are 3000 people who work for the state controller. I mean, this is an enormous resource that could be deployed on behalf of New Yorkers, but if the recommendations that we feel strongly about are not being implemented by our partners and government, then we need to be very loud about it. So one of the things I plan to audit that's never been audited is the New York State and New York City building codes.

These are the two codes that govern construction all across New York. And these are the silent killers of affordable housing. They are gold plated, they have not been modernized, and they drive up the cost of construction of housing that New Yorkers can afford and of everything for that matter. And then there's also the part about enforcing the codes, which particularly in upstate cities, as I've traveled the state, in places like Buffalo and in Syracuse and in Binghamton and Rochester, we don't have nearly the type of code enforcement for landlords who are not keeping up their end of the bargain to the renters who are paying their rent and not getting a home in good service and good repair that they deserve. But one of the things I would do is we'd audit the building code. So how do you do that? We would propose a new building code that reduces the cost of construction we believe by about 15%.

And we would do literally a compared track change version from that model building code to the existing codes of the state and the city of New York. And we would go to the governor and the legislature and we'd go to the mayor and the city council in New York and we would say, "You talk a lot about affordability and we're with you on that. Here's something you could do very concrete and we've done all the work for you. We've literally done, we've showed exactly which provisions of the code would need to change to reduce the cost of construction, to build more of the things that New Yorkers need and put your money where your mouth is. " If you really believe in this, adopt these codes. So now, do I have the authority, the unilateral authority to force them to adopt it? No, I don't.

I don't. But do I have the voice and the power and the ability to push them really, really hard? Yeah, we do. We do. We just need someone who's willing to do it.

You could get their attention. That's good. And it is helpful to understand this, to understand the mechanism. So you could understand how to make elevators more efficient, for example, but you can't decide that that's going to change. There's still separation of powers and would still need to be a legislative move to change the rigs in order for that to happen. Look, and I very much appreciate your time and I know that I have just a few more minutes of it before you have to move on to your next thing, but I have to ask you, especially given the horrors of the new Middle Eastern war, the war in Iran that is spreading throughout the region, I have to ask you about New York state level investments in Israel. I read some reporting last summer from the New York City based platform, The City, that New York State Pension Funds owns $340 million in Israeli bonds that were purchased by Denapoli.

So that's 50% more than 229 million in all other foreign government bonds in its portfolio. And according to this article, the State Pension Fund also owns 230 million in Israeli stocks, has committed over one billion for private equity investments in Israel. So I should clarify that I had to read some reporting about these investments rather than assess them for myself because the Excel spreadsheet downloadable from DiNapoli's office is not, shall we say, user-friendly. So first, do these numbers seem basically correct to you? And then how do you think about foreign investments? Because I know that this is a very charged. It's a very charged issue specifically as regards Israel in these days when the Netanyahu government seems to be expanding its incursion into Lebanon as well as Iran. How do you think about it?

Well, I think we should get out of it and Tom DiNapoli won't and I will. And so just another point of distinction and contrast, and that's a choice. And he's made the choice to frankly bring politics into investing. How did we get $368 million invested in the state of Israel? Why do we think that happened? It happened because of politics. It's like as clear as day. We can all say it. We can all admit it. And that's why he did that. And he thought it was good politics and we should not be using politics to drive our investment decisions. The idea that we have that high a concentration in one single country makes no fiduciary sense. He talks about his fiduciary duty a lot. Tell me where it makes any kind of sense to have that level of concentration risk in one single country. So we will get out of it.

We'll get out of the investments in Saudi Arabia and Jordan and Canada. Those are the four countries that he's decided to pick to invest in.

And we have no business in investing with our politics and we're going to get out of that. And I think you bring up such an important point because somehow we find the money to pay for missiles and bombs and aircraft carriers and foreign wars. Somehow we can find the money for that, but somehow we can't find the money for housing. We can't find the money for food assistance. We can't find the money for our public schools, but we can find the money for bombs, missiles, and aircraft carriers. And this is again where I just feel like we've lost the plot. We've lost the point. And if you're sitting on power and you're sitting on money and you have the opportunity to do something differently, we've got to do it differently. And that's part of what motivates this campaign is we have a state controller who has made his choices over 19 years and soon to be 20 years, and New Yorkers finally have a choice, finally have a choice for the first time, literally in a generation in 20 years to do this different.

And my hope is just they know enough about the fact that we even have this choice. And that's why I appreciate you even having me on your show is part of this is letting New Yorkers know that there's a massively powerful office that most New Yorkers don't know about, and that there's a choice for the first time in 20 years. And so I really hope that we can seize that choice in less than three months, we can make it. We can make it differently. I hope your listeners will follow us on social media at Drew4NY, D-R-E-W, F-O-R-N-Y. We are on Instagram. We are on Facebook. We are on Blue Sky and X and TikTok and the whole thing. And we update every single day, Drew for NY and drewwarshaw.com, if they want to sign up, if they want to volunteer, if they want to make a small dollar contribution that can be matched six times by this state, they can help us defeat this 19-year incumbent and someone unfortunately who stands for the status quo and stands for the same.

And we have got to be doing this differently. If we keep doing the same thing over and over again, if we keep electing the same people over and over again, then we will get exactly what has gotten us into this mess in the first place. We've got to do it differently. The cavalry is not coming, Peter. The cavalry is us. We are the cavalry and we need to go get our power and our money and start using that power and that money for the working New Yorkers who don't have it.

That's it for today's show. My great thanks to Drew Warshaw for taking the time to talk. If you're eligible to vote in the New York State Democratic Primary, it's Tuesday, June 23rd, 2026. Polls are open from 6:00 AM to 9:00 PM with early voting from June 13th to June 21st. If you'd like to learn more about Drew or support his campaign, which does not require you to be a registered Democrat in New York, check out drewwarshaw.com. You bet there's a link on the show page. Thanks as always to Shayfer James for intro and outro music and in today's show for use of his 2023 single Cavalry. I'll link to the official video for that song, which slaps, though the video features no shots of the featured Fiddler, who sometimes refers to himself in the third person on his own podcast. I just got to see Shafer play in Sunny Buffalo, amazing.

And there's a good chance you can see him not far from where you are if you act fast. Tour dates at shayferjames.com. Finally, thanks to you for listening, rating five stars, and reviewing this show in your podcast app. If you have a friend who really needs to hear about Drew, share this episode right up. It will mean most coming from you. To learn more about supporting this show, punch that button on the show page. Point of learning is written, recorded, edited, mixed, and mastered by me here in sunny Buffalo, New York. I'll be back just as soon as I can with another episode all about what and how and why we learn. See you then.