Mayor Eric Adams: Good to see you all. Sorry for the delay. We had a bit of an emergency that was happening. Today I am holding hearings and bill signings on five bills that help struggling homeowners, give young people a voice in juvenile detention, supports our families and children in shelters, and provides support for our gun violence interrupters. We know that many New Yorkers are struggling right now. Rent is going up and borrowing from one of the most prophetic voices, "The rent is too damn high," and we need to do something about it. People are worried about whether they can keep a roof over their heads, and we know that homeowners are struggling to pay property taxes despite making good faith efforts. We want to give homeowners some relief. That is what we are doing with this bill. I'm really proud of this bill.
Intro 524, lowest interest rates applicable to installment agreements for the payment of property tax arrears. We know what it's like and we hear it all the time and I'm sure my councilmember colleagues were here from their homeowners and throughout their districts that this is an extremely important problem and this is our way of taking the many layer approach to addressing it.
Intro 436 creates a Juvenile Justice Advisory Board — public safety is key. Standing here next to the public safety chair, Councilwoman Hanks, she talks about it all the time. How do we find that balance? Since coming into my office, one priority has been ending the gun violence in our city, but we know that we can't do this alone. Our crisis management system and our violence interrupters are doing the sacred work on the ground. Day in and day out, they are working with our communities and they are continuing to contribute to making them safe. We want to ensure that they are performing at their full capacity. We want to see how we can duplicate their efforts through the city and help improve their work, and these two bills help us do that. Intro 439 requires the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice to evaluate the performance of criminal justice programs that receive funding. Intro 756 provides training and support for nonprofit service providers participating in the city's crisis management system.
Now last, we want to also make sure that our children in shelters are protected. Last night, we know thousands of children slept in shelter beds and the average family experiencing homelessness now stays in a shelter for the better part of two years. No one can be expected to thrive mentally and emotionally if they don't know where their next bed, paychecks or next meal will come from. Too many of our families and children in our shelters have fallen through the cracks when it comes to mental healthcare.
So today, we are going to ensure that they have the support they need, and that's Intro 522. It ensures a mental health worker at the 30 largest families with children's shelters for onsite and telehealth. This is real partnership on the part of the City Council and I really want to thank Speaker Adrienne Adams, Councilmember Hanks, Williams, Stevens, Bottcher, and Carr; my commissioner of ACS, Commissioner Dannhauser; Howard, and Niblack, and Director Logan; as well as the following advocates: Mike Perry, True 2 Life; Malcolm White, True 2 Life; Christine Quinn, Women in Need; and Hannah Tager, Women in Need.
We want to now open the floor up to the public for questions before the end of the bill. No questions. Always good to see that. So I want to now just hear from our councilmembers. There have been real partners in this area, and I just really want to thank them for their commitment and dedication to getting this right. I want to call on now Councilmember Hanks, sponsor of Intro 756 to make a few remarks.
City Council Member Kamillah Hanks: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning, and thank you so much, Mr. Mayor. Really happy to be here. It's my first bill of 2023. So I want to thank Mayor Eric Adams for signing this important piece of legislation and for recognizing the need to support the city's crisis management system. Having founded my own not-for-profit years back, I can understand and appreciate the challenges in running an organization while delivering the much-needed services to our community. That's why I'm proud to be sponsoring Intro 756, which will provide capacity building, crucial training, and operational support to our CMS providers.
This bill represents a significant achievement in strengthening our crisis management system and creating safer communities for all New Yorkers. Investing in their capacity and operations will ensure that they have the tools they need to reduce gun violence and to promote conflict resolution. I want to take a moment to thank the crisis management team from my district, True 2 Life for the incredible work that they do in my district every day. The work of Malcolm Penn and Iron Mike are transforming lives of young people every day. I just want to take this moment out to acknowledge them and my team and everyone that's behind me, my colleagues who are just having incredible bills today. Thank you.
Mayor Adams: Thank you. I want to bring on Councilmember Williams, sponsor of Intro 439 to say a few words. She's not here. You want to say something on behalf of her?
City Council Member Althea Stevens: I can.
[Laughter.]
Mayor Adams: We'll see which other bill. I also want to bring on Councilmember Bottcher, sponsor of Intro 522 to say a few words. Councilman?
City Council Member Erik Bottcher: Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'm so excited to be with you here for the signing of my third bill, which will put mental health services into every family shelter in New York City. This is going to make a profound difference in the lives of the 13,000 families with over 22,000 children who slept in our shelter system last night. Right now, only nine of the city's 247 family shelters have onsite mental health services. That's not acceptable to me and I know it's not acceptable to you, Mr. Mayor. So this legislation is going to address a major failing of our system. Look, our system has failed so badly on the issue of mental health, so badly. We have a two-tiered mental health system. We have a system for people with insurance, with good insurance and people of means, and we have a system for everyone else.
I'm someone who has benefited from this system. I spent a month in a mental health hospital when I was 15-years-old following a series of suicide attempts. That treatment that I got at Four Winds Hospital is why I'm alive today, but that treatment is unavailable to most Americans, especially people living below the poverty lines and people of color. So I'm so proud to be able to make use of the position I have today to make sure that everyone gets access to mental health services. I want everyone to know that this bill is an example of government working. It started a year ago at a panel discussion held by WIN, the largest provider of shelter services for women and children in New York, hosted by Christine Quinn, the CEO, where she identified a major problem that they're facing.
Over the past year, we worked with WIN and other nonprofits and crafted this legislation. We negotiated this legislation with the administration, and the administration pointed out, rightfully, the logistical challenges with having physical staff in every family shelter. So this legislation embraces the innovative youth of telehealth in reaching all shelters. I want to thank Speaker Adams, Deputy Speaker Diana Ayala, and Linda Lee, chair of the Mental Health Committee. I want to thank my staff for working so hard on this and all the staff at WIN who are here today, and Christine Quinn, the CEO. I want to thank the mayor's administration and I want to thank you, Mr. Mayor, for your leadership on the issue of mental health and for helping us achieve a society where no one goes without the services that they desperately need. Thank you so much.
Mayor Adams: Thank you. I really thank you for your comments, councilman. I don't think there's a greater a part of what we do than when we could revisit some of the painful experience that we have went through and able to use our roles as lawmakers to come back and fix some of the problems that we personally experienced. I thought your comments were extremely powerful, and I thank you for sharing because I'm pretty sure there's those out there that's going to hear them and realize that there's opportunities. So I really thank you for that. We can't do anything without going up to the Bronx, Intro 436, Councilmember Stevens.
Council Member Stevens: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you for acknowledging the Bronx, because we always in the house. So when I worked with youth, many of them felt like their voices weren't heard or the candidates that were running didn't take their considerations into forethought when they were running. So today I'm here to tell our young people your voices matter, and you have elected a person who fights for you and make sure that your voices are heard. I'm so excited to be here today and passing Intro 436 with my colleagues to create a juvenile justice advisory board to ensure that juveniles involve youth and their families have a seat at the table when decisions are being made.
It is so important for actions of our agencies and administration to be afforded by the lived experience of our friends, neighbors, and especially our young people. Although I'm proud to be passing this bill, it's just the first step for us to look forward to working with our advisory ward to develop new preventative measures. We must get to a place where we are investing in our young people on the front end so we're not investing in them on the back end. So I want to take this time to thank our speaker, Adrienne Adams, for seeing the vision in this bill, our committee staff, my staff, and also our Mayor Eric Adams, who also have been fighting for young people throughout the city to ensure that their voices are heard and we are taking everything into consideration. Thank you so much.
Mayor Adams: The borough that will be never forgotten under this administration, actually we got two Staten Islanders here today. You know that? [Laughter.] So I want to turn to [inaudible].
[Laughter.]
What am I going to do with you?
Council Member Stevens: Well done. Well done.
Mayor Adams: We want to bring on our good councilmember, Councilmember Carr, sponsor of Intro 524. Good to see you.
City Council Member David Carr: Thank you. It's a great day for Staten Island and the whole city with the passage of Intro 524-A. I just want to begin by congratulating my colleagues who have seen legislation signed into law today by the mayor. Intro 524-A puts an end to a longstanding dilemma that's existed really since we've been setting interest rates for nonpayment of real property taxes. Do we set a high rate and try to deter and punish tax scofflaws, or do we set a low rate so that we can help struggling homeowners who maybe had a bad year, maybe they're not making what they need to stay in their home? Maybe there's some legitimate reason why they're in tax arrears. Do we set a low rate to help them get out of the hole? Those options have been mutually exclusive, but that ends today with the signing of Intro 524-A.
Finally, the Banking Commission will be able to recommend and the Council will be able to adopt a separate rate for those who are in property tax payment plans and are making good faith efforts on those payments to get themselves out of the tax arrears hole that they've been in. So finally, instead of them being dumped on and being able to just never get out of this tax debt, it's going to be finally easier for them to get out of that hole and then move on with their lives and be in good tax standing with the city. Then we'll be able to set a separate rate for those who are not doing that and who are not good actors. So I want to thank Justin Brannan, the chair of the finance committee, Speaker Adams, all of the staff at the Council, my team, the minority leader's office staff, the finance division, and now, of course, finally the mayor for the collaboration engagement of his administration throughout this process and making sure we had the right bill come to the floor and be signed today and, of course, for his personal support in making this happen. Thank you so much, Mr. Mayor.
Mayor Adams: Thank you. Thank you. Now sign some bills?
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