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Three city councilors want to block businesses in Syracuse from collecting, storing, and sharing customers’ biometric information through proposed legislation that exempts financial institutions. Credit: Michelle Gabel | Central Current

Syracuse’s Living Wage ordinance, meant to help the wages paid to workers for companies that contract with the city keep up with rising costs of living, has not been properly enforced for about a decade, a new report from City Auditor Alex Marion found.

Marion’s report, the first audit or review of the local ordinance since 2016, found that the many carve outs and exceptions that the law makes diminishes the number of workers it can apply to. 

The advisory board meant to hear workers’ complaints who claim not being paid a fair living wage has also not met for the past decade, meaning that the city does not have a public process by which it hears cases of non compliance with the ordinance. The city, Marion wrote, has also failed to establish proper procedures by which to track compliance.

The report comes at a time when the cost of living is rising in Syracuse. The median rent for a one bedroom apartment in the city has risen upward of almost 20% year over year since at least 2023.

The latest living wage notice posted by the city, calculated yearly using a formula that accounts for annual increases in the Consumer Price Index (CPI), shows that the hourly living wage for an employee with health benefits will be $16.41 starting Tuesday, almost a full dollar more than upstate New York’s minimum wage. That number jumps to $19.37 for hourly workers without health insurance.

“The ordinance has not lived up to its potential,” Marion wrote. 

That is partially due to a lack of enforcement and a general lack of understanding what employers the ordinance applies to, and workers’ rights under the local legislation.

“It’s a little sad this is a lifeless living wage because we found that we could not determine the companies to whom it applied to based on how the city kept its contracting records,” Marion said in an interview with Central Current.

Marion’s report highlighted, above all, a need for the city to prioritize an overhaul to the ordinance, and ensure all city workers, not just its contractors, get paid a living wage.

“You still can’t live in Central New York on the minimum wage without requiring some level of public assistance,” Marion said. “Our tax dollars via our procurement abilities should not be going toward subsidizing poverty wages. That was true 20 years ago. That is still true today.”

City officials said in a memo to Marion reviewed by Central Current they concurred with his audit’s findings. Primarily, they wrote in the memo, the ordinance was never fully implemented and it excludes too many employers to be widely applied.

“The administration supports an open dialogue with the common council to discuss which ways in which the legislation could be amended to achieve its intended goal,” Chief Administrative Officer Corey Driscoll Dunham wrote in the memo.

How the ordinance works

The goal of the legislation was to ensure city and Syracuse City School District contractors and subcontractors are paid a wage high enough to avoid reliance on government assistance to afford living in Syracuse, Marion wrote in his report.

The ordinance was voted into effect by the Common Council in 2005, spurred by local efforts to address a stagnant statewide minimum wage, Marion and Deputy Auditor Kyle Madden said. At that time, the minimum wage had just been increased from $5.15 to $6 after a period of five years with no adjustments, according to New York State Department of Labor records. 

Marion said that when negotiating the ordinance, business leaders, members of the council, and labor unions, made key concessions to employers, resulting in several exemptions. These include:

  • The ordinance does not apply to a business that employs fewer than five full-time workers for each week in the preceding 12 months.
  • It also only covers “non-professional services” contracts that exceed $20,000. Non-professional services include jobs like landscaping.  
  • Workers already covered by a union contract negotiated with the city of SCSD.
  • Construction and building service workers already covered by New York state’s prevailing wage laws.
  • Contracts shared with other governments, including Onondaga County and New York state. 

Marion said that the exceptions hurt seasonal businesses and ultimately make it difficult to discern who the ordinance applies to. At one point, he said, airport workers running the parking garages were a clear example of workers who’d benefit from the legislation. But the city hasn’t had full oversight of the Syracuse Hancock International Airport since 2017. 

“At a certain point you look around and you say, okay, so to whom does this apply?,” Marion said.

The ordinance allows the city to suspend or terminate a contract and consider other penalties for non-compliant companies. 

To enforce this, the city needs to designate a department or officer who can review payroll records for contracting companies who would fall under the living wage ordinance. That party was also tasked with compiling a yearly report detailing the contractors that were subject to the ordinance, cases of non-compliance, and how the city handled those cases.

Those tasks were taken on by different departments throughout the years, Marion said, including the Office of Management and Budget. Other city records show that at one point the Department of Finance would issue general notices to contractors about the ordinance’s existence. 

“There’s not a singular person in charge of that right now,” Marion said.

Marion wrote in his report that the city has failed to meet their own compliance requirements. 

“No rules, regulations, or procedures were ever established to investigate complaints or track compliance,” the auditor wrote. 

City officials have also struggled to keep consistent standards for compliance reporting, Marion wrote in the report. 

“Missing documentation and inconsistencies in file naming conventions are common, and multiple contract numbering schemes were being used,” the report states.

The ordinance also created a nine-person Living Wage Advisory Committee with four appointees recommended by the council, two by the mayor, two by the Greater Syracuse Labor Council, and one by the CNY Labor Religion Coalition, a now-defunct group. That committee — meant to review the city’s enforcement of the ordinance, and advise the council and mayor about improving enforcement — has not met since 2014 and no new appointments have been recommended since. 

Auditor’s recommendations and city response

In his audit, Marion recommends the city make the ordinance apply to all contractors and city workers regardless of job title, duties, or employment status. To do so, Marion called on the Department of Personnel and Labor Relations to conduct a review of all hourly salaries and ensure the city is paying fair wages.

“This measure will help make the city an employer of choice and make it easier to fill already difficult-to-fill roles,” Marion wrote.

Enforcement of the new ordinance and proactive communication with contractors, he wrote, would also be delegated to the Office of Management and Budget. That same body would compile the annual reports described in the ordinance. 

Marion also recommended reconstituting the advisory committee and an annual public meeting on the living wage ordinance be set up by the council.

Additionally, the auditor wrote, the city should change the formula by which it calculates a fair wage. He recommended using the ALICE calculation, first devised by the United Way of Northern New Jersey, which he said accounts for workers who live above the federal poverty wage but do not qualify for public assistance.

“Moving to a broader calculation would ensure more low-wage workers have additional financial security,” he wrote. 

Lastly, Marion also recommended the city streamline its financial records, system, and contract management, and payment processes for better accounting of business documentation. 

City Chief Administrative Officer Corey Driscoll Dunham wrote in a memo in response to Marion’s audit that the city is willing to find ways to improve the legislation. In some procurement cases, the city has less oversight of contract management because it conducts purchasing through Onondaga County. The city, Dunham wrote, will continue working with the county to enforce laws like the living wage ordinance. 

She also noted that the city recently conducted a compensation study for its non-union employees to address recruitment and retention. Driscoll Dunham wrote that this is a show of interest in providing better wages to city workers. 

Workers in parking enforcement, city lifeguards, and part-time seasonal park workers, Marion said, would benefit from these recommendations. 

“Seeing some of our job postings out there, just having a sense of what we pay different titles… some of our lowest paid employees are not making the living wage,” Marion said in an interview. “That’s something I think the council could rectify right away.”

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Eddie Velazquez is a Syracuse journalist covering economic justice in the region. He is focused on stories about organized labor, and New York's housing and childhood lead poisoning crises. You can follow...