NYC comptroller sees dollars in gay weddings

BY PAUL SCHINDLER

As gay marriage equality advocates scramble to win a vote in the state Assembly prior to the Legislature’s recess later this month, City Comptroller William Thompson is offering an important argument to buffer their case.

New York State stands to gain $184 million in increased economic activity during the first three years that gay marriages are legal and also realize nearly $118 million in fiscal savings. New York City will account for $142 million of the total economic boost to the state’s economy.

The biggest contributor to the economic surge from gay marriage is accounted for by weddings and related activities, by both New York and out-of-state couples, while the fiscal savings result primarily from reduced Medicaid and related government health expenditures on gay or lesbian individuals no longer eligible for assistance should they marry.

“New York City and New York State are losing money right now by not moving forward,” Thompson said of the legislative drive for marriage equality, put on the front burner when Governor Eliot Spitzer introduced his “program bill” at the end of April.

Thompson spoke at a press conference in early June at which he and Marcia Van Wagner, deputy comptroller for Fiscal & Budget Studies, presented his office’s findings. The comptroller recognized Gary Parker, co-president of Brooklyn’s Lambda Independent Democrats, for coming to his office to urge that the economic and fiscal impact study be undertaken.

“Marriage is not only a legal institution, it is an industry; it is an economic engine,” Parker said. “Marriage equality is not only good for members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community; marriage equality is good for everybody.”

Framing the debate in economic terms is novel and sure to snare attention among some legislators trying to come to or justify their view on the Spitzer bill. Alan Van Capelle, the executive director of the Empire State Pride Agenda, who makes weekly visits to legislators in the capital—and has been working closely in recent weeks with Assemblyman Daniel O’Donnell, the out gay Upper West Side Democrat who is the chief sponsor of the Spitzer bill in his chamber—carried a copy of the report on his rounds Tuesday.

The Democratic conference, which holds 108 of the 150 seats in the Assembly, has been weighing whether to bring the bill to the floor this month. Typically, Sheldon Silver, the Lower East Side Assembly speaker, requires a comfortable margin over 75 among his Democratic colleagues to move legislation. The most recent word from O’Donnell, which came last week, was that he had lined up 73 Democratic votes (including newly elected Upper East Sider Micah Kellner), with 14 of his party colleagues still undecided. At the Wedding March three weeks ago, O’Donnell predicted that Silver would want between 80 and 82 Democrats to move the measure, and that action, if it is to come this session, would happen no later than June 14.

At least four Republicans support the bill, but they are not considered in the speaker’s gaming.
In gauging the economic boost provided by weddings, Thompson’s office looked to the experience in Massachusetts, where roughly half of the total number of couples who identified themselves as same-sex partners in the 2000 Census have married. (That percentage may seem high, but the Census data very likely undercounted same-sex partners, many of whom might be unwilling to identify themselves in that way in a government survey.)

In estimating the number of out-of-state couples who would travel to New York to marry, the study looked to tourist data on where visitors to the city and state come here from and assumed that Massachusetts, which bars out-of-state gay couples from marrying there, would remain the only other state giving gay and lesbian couples full equality.

Thompson’s office recognized that some out-of-state couples who travel here will do so only to secure a license and perform a ceremony, while holding their celebration back home, while others would plan a full-scale New York wedding.

The comptroller took pains to emphasize that his assumptions were uniformly conservative; for example, the study made what some would say was a highly debatable estimate that gay and lesbian couples would spend less on average for their weddings than straight couples would.

The nearly quarter of a billion dollars in wedding-related economic activity was offset by about $65 million in increased employer benefit expenditures for the greater number of eligible spouses. Thompson noted, however, that many of the city’s leading corporations already offer domestic partner benefits, so for them the matter would be a wash.

On the fiscal side, some portion of the benefit would come from sales taxes on the wedding-related activity and from the so-called marriage penalty on personal incomes. The preponderance, however—fully $110 million over three years—would come in the form of reduced Medicaid expenditures. That estimate was based on a survey carried out in California regarding the percentage of such assistance to recipients who identify as same-sex partners.

Yetta Kurland, a civil rights attorney, and her fiancé Elizabeth Koke, a performance studies graduate student at NYU, who are Chelsea residents, were on hand to say that unless the law is changed soon in New York, they plan to take their wedding dollars, and those of their families and other guests, to Massachusetts for a marriage celebration there.

Harley Diamond, who works for the city Housing Authority and lives with his husband Jonathan Lovett, a postal service employee, in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill, recalled that when the couple traveled to Toronto on President’s Day in 2006, there was a long line of Americans at City Hall waiting for licenses.

Predictably, marriage equality opponents have gone on the attack since Thompson’s announcement. A release from an Albany-based group, Coalition to Save Marriage in New York, dismissed the comptroller’s report as “a piece of advocacy…based on little more than guesswork” and “littered with dozens of ‘assumptions’ and ‘estimates.’” The group’s release asserted that gay marriage in Scandinavia (where it does not exist) has led to an increase in out-of-wedlock births, and it even invoked the loss of New York manufacturing jobs to North Carolina, which it said resulted from the sort of “devil-may-care attitude toward the employers of our state” that Thompson was exhibiting.