Transcript: Mayor de Blasio Appears Live on Inside City Hall

June 25, 2019

Errol Louis: Welcome back to Inside City Hall. We are just two days away from the first presidential debate that’s going to be held down in Miami. Mayor de Blasio will be taking the stage on Wednesday. He joins us now to talk about that and a lot more. Welcome, Mr. Mayor – very good to see you.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good to see you, Errol.

Louis: You put out something on Twitter today, I think it was intended in jest but – sort of a dialogue, text dialogue between you and your son, Dante, about how you should prepare. I assume you were joking.

Mayor: It was Dante’s idea and I went with the flow. You know, Dante is actually a champion debater – 2015, I think it was, state policy champion debater.

Louis: Okay.

Mayor: And at one point it was like, you know, hey, what do you think? And he said I got an idea I want to send you something, let’s do a thing right? So, then it became a fun thing. But he actually has been advising me because he is a very big believer in keeping it simple, keeping it clear, and that’s the trick. I mean you get 60 seconds per answer. It’s not a lot of time, huge audience – for me, a chance to make a first impression on the American people. But it’s all about being real, real clear, and luckily I got something to talk about because we have done a lot here that matters.

Louis: Inevitably the temptation or the political logic – and you’ve been a political consultant, you know how this works – the political logic is that those who are polling in the lower numbers will attack those we are polling in the higher numbers in part to say something that will get you in the news cycle, the national news cycle for a few days or to draw a sharper contrast and, sort of, draw yourself closer to the people who appear to be in the lead. Is that part of your consideration?

Mayor: No, I’ll tell you something. I’ve heard people argue the opposite that you know, you got a popular candidate at that moment and we’ve seen tremendous volatility in this race. We’ve seen things move constantly, month by month. But there’s another theory that says don’t attack a popular candidate because their support base won’t like it. I don’t look at it either way. I say if you disagree with someone express your disagreement. Maybe it is the New Yorker in me, but to say exactly what you feel. The situation with Vice President Biden – I wasn’t looking for that, I don’t think anyone was looking for it. I was shocked twice in the course of a week or so – the Hyde Amendment and then the James Eastland comment. And so that’s my pattern. If someone says something that I disagree with it I’m going to call it out. If they don’t, that’s great. In the end I think we all want unity for sure. But the primary process and you’ve seen a lot of them Errol, I mean – I like to say the country is going through an identity crisis on questions like immigration, who we really are as a country.

But the Democratic Party is going through an identity crisis, too. Are we the party of 2016 that too many people thought was the party of the elites, the party of Washington, D.C.? Or are we a grassroots party, a progressive party, the party of working people? There are real different views of that amongst these 20 candidates who are going to be in the debates. And I think part of the reason you have debates and part of the reason you have primaries is to decide who we are as a party. And I am going to push very hard on that because, you’ve seen me do it before in this job, I think correcting the drift that the Democratic Party has gone through in recent decades is part of how we change the country and change our city ultimately to get better federal policies that will help New York City. But it begins with getting it right in the heart and soul of the Democratic Party so that’s what I will be listening for.

Louis: Okay. Let us talk about some things closer to home. I heard you – I overheard you taking some issue with our last segment about your new NYCHA Chairman.

Mayor: I did.

Louis: And I did want to ask you about it anyhow. What about our report did you not like?

Mayor: I think there is two elements. I don’t think it was purposefully misleading but I think it was misleading. One is to say that this RAD program – so RAD was developed during the Obama administration to recognize the fact that the Congress, which has been Republican dominated, at least in the House, Republican dominated over many decades, was not putting new money into public housing to keep up with the age of public housing, the needs of public housing. Public housing was chartered by the federal government and then largely abandoned from the Reagan administration on. And so the Obama administration said we’ve got to do something here. And RAD was a way to bring in private financing but maintain public control and maintain the rights of residents. So the ownership of the land remains public, the ground rules [inaudible] rent is 30 percent of your income, that continues. Your rights as a resident continue. I think it is very dangerous when people say, oh, but, you know, private entities are taking over or taking control, it’s just not accurate. We, the public, maintain control.

The other point was in the previous report, oh, we are going to tear down buildings. We are not tearing down buildings. We are developing new buildings to create revenue so we can fix all the other buildings and we can create some affordable housing in the mix. If there was ever a public housing building that was decrepit for an example –

Louis: But you don’t want to go to any extremes on this, right? I mean, you have to look at the housing stock, it’s 172,000 units. Some might need to be demised and some might not, right? Some were destroyed by –

Mayor: With a [inaudible] with a ground rule. You know the history, I know the history – Chicago, St. Louis, [inaudible] New Orleans, things get knocked down and replaced. I don’t buy that approach. If we ever said here’s a building that just can’t work anymore, you build a new one first, you know, you make sure there is room for people already. And the RAD makes this great example for us – here in New York, Ocean Bay Development in the Rockaways. As it was being rehabilitated from within, residents were moved from apartment to apartment and when it was all fixed they went back to their own apartment. No one was displaced. Go talk to those residents and they will say –

Louis: No, no, it’s ideal. I mean some of that is the peculiarities of that big open space out there which you don’t have in all five boroughs.

Mayor: Fair but the point being, the goal that we’ve – and the belief structure we have as an administration is you do not take away people’s housing and say oh, we will get back to you one day. You have to give them an alternative right now, right here. And I say before you – if there ever was a situation where you have to tear something down, build the new thing first, let people be in that. Then you tear down and fix up the new one.

Louis: I got to ask you about it. I mean how is it that Greg Russ gets named as the chairman? He says he’s not going to move here, he’s never set foot in an apartment. Did he present any kind of a plan and if so how did he do it without ever having gone into NYCHA?

Mayor: Yes, Errol I appreciate the question but I really have spoken to this and I will speak to it now. I want you to hear me loud and clear. Nationwide search, two federal partners, the U.S. Attorney’s Office and HUD – a lot of agreement on what we were looking for – someone who had a proven track record of innovation and change in difficult circumstances. Remember Greg Russ spent a big part of his career in Chicago, a big part of his career in Philadelphia. I get why people are saying, oh, Minneapolis, it’s not as big. Hold on, he also spent major parts of his career in two of the biggest housing authorities in America. And trying to deal with transformation in very tough circumstances, he understands how to use the RAD program but protect residents’ rights at the same time. He is exceeding knowledgeable – I mean, this is literally a public housing career lifer, this is what he’s devoted his whole life to. And we looked back at the people who have been chairs at NYCHA over many administrations, it really has rarely been someone who had the level of expertise that Greg Russ has. So, when we put all the pieces together we said this is someone who has the right philosophy, has the right experience, shares our values and most importantly, Errol, was willing to take on an incredibly tough job. Plenty of good people out there –

Louis: Well, look this is not charity on his part, right? He’s being paid more than you are.

Mayor: No, but it’s an incredibly tough job. It’s a thankless job.

Louis: I really am not trying to be a wise guy or anything but it’s like, if it was a car that you are taking in to get fixed, you’d want the person to look at first, right, before they charge you top dollar to fix it?

Mayor: His entire career, which we were able to study very carefully, is in public housing. When you see someone’s track record over decades you have a pretty damn good idea. We talked at length. I’ve talked to him and so did all the others in the process about his philosophy, about what we were trying to achieve, how would he do it? This was a month’s long process and I have put a whole lot of time into the issue of how to improve and address NYCHA in the last few years, more than I would argue any other mayor has in a long, long time. And I have also put my money where my mouth is, $4 billion in investment before the federal settlement which could add another up to $2.2 billion.

Louis: Let me just ask real quickly. The City reports that Assemblyman Robert Rodriguez put forward a bill, I think Kavanagh was the Senate co-sponsor there, to exclude luxury condos and co-ops from a widely used tax abatement and use that to get $600 million to in turn bond out about $3 billion that would be dedicated to NYCHA. Now according to the Assemblyman, he says your administration helped kill the bill because you have a tax reform commission that’s looking at other aspects of co-ops and condo taxes and that they are supposed to issue a report at some point. So I guess it’s a two-part question. Is that what happened? And if so when will we see the report?

Mayor: No, that’s not, that’s not right. The fact is that we will see a report this year from the Property Tax Commission, that that’s been in the works now for quite a while, working closely with the City Council. We are talking about overhauling the entire property tax system in New York City while trying to keep the revenue about stable. But there’s so many inequities and there is so much lack of transparency in our property tax system. And the discussion that we heard from leadership in Albany and we felt it too was, there’s a lot of different ideas out there but if we start working on one, what does it do to everything else? Should we be trying to treat all of these issues together? That idea may end up being a very promising idea. But I think the universal view was you can’t take, like, one piece out of the, you know, the tower or the whole tower could come falling over. We have to figure out property tax as a whole.

Louis: Okay. We’ve got more to talk about, Mr. Mayor. Stand by, we are going to take a short break, we’ll be right back with Mayor de Blasio.

[…]

Louis: Welcome back to Inside City Hall. I’m once again joined by Mayor de Blasio. And Mr. Mayor, I want to get through a huge bunch of local stuff that’s going on here. We’ve seen City numbers saying 12 cycling deaths in the city so far this year compared to 10 in all of 2018. We’re about to add e-bikes and e-scooters. Transportation Alternatives says that Vision Zero is in crisis. I wanted to get your response.

Mayor: Look, this has been a very painful time and my heart goes out to all the families involved. It’s been horrible. We do not take it lightly. We have to keep fighting with everything we got – more enforcement, more bike lanes which are on the way, a whole host of things. I disagree with that characterization though, I have to be honest. It’s five years in a row that fatalities have gone down and Vision Zero is growing.

We just added the ability to have school speed cameras at 750 schools – it’s a sea change from where we were just months ago. The enforcement activities keep increasing, the physical changes to streets and intersections keep being added all the time. That just makes us safer. So, no, I definitely disagree with that characterization. We’re going to do more and more and this is yet another call to arms and we’ve had situations like this before where we had to go ever deeper with Vision Zero. It’s a living, breathing idea. It keeps growing and it will.

Now, on the other part which is very real to me about the e-bikes and e-scooters – you know, we’ve got half-a-year to figure the e-bikes, we’ve got longer on e-scooters. I’m in the safety first camp. We have some really big decisions to make about how to keep people safe and I want all the mobility and all the options we can have but I want safety even more and I’m very honest about the fact that if you talk to seniors in this city, particularly in Manhattan, they’re really worried about how intense the flow of all sorts of vehicles has become particularly in the bike lanes. So, we’re going to have to figure out how to calm that down as – motor vehicles, cars, trucks are the number one challenge when it comes to protecting people.

But you know if you got an e-bike or an e-scooter and it goes 20 miles an hour or more, that can also be a problem. I want to bring those speeds down as much as possible physically – real physical limitations – and figure out where they should be in the scheme of things on our streets.

Louis: Let me switch topics – Gothamist and WNYC did an investigation finding substantial levels of lead contamination in four different public elementary schools. In several classrooms, they say, dust samples showed lead levels more than 100 times the City’s current safety standard and they point out that lead testing or remediation in public schools is actually not required unless renovations are being done, I wanted to get your response to that?

Mayor: It’s done – thank you for raising it, Errol. The testing is done annually for all the classrooms that have younger kids, kids under six. We take it real seriously, we want to protect every child. This report does not conform with what we know. And I have to say to the journalist, I appreciate they want to protect sources but they’re not telling us which schools they are so we can go and check ourselves. Apparently, they did their testing without a certified expert or engineer – technician, I should say. We do our testing with certified technicians. So, I don’t know what to make of their results but I would be the first to order additional testing if they’ll tell us which schools they’re talking about, and so far they’re not.

Louis: Would let you them or another news organization, you know, pick a random sample and go in and do the test with them?

Mayor: We’re going to use the certified technicians we use because that’s the right way to do things. There’s been a lot of concern in other circumstances – were we using the right kind of certified technicians on lead? It’s very important we do that. But I’m saying, we can’t – we can’t not know where the schools are. If they believe there’s a danger, they need to give us a –

Louis: They report there are 30 public elementary schools constructed – well, they contacted 30 public elementary schools constructed before 1960. I mean – and that was the year the lead paint ban was passed in New York City. If you just took every old building [inaudible] 1960 building and examine those –

Mayor: We’re doing them every year anyway and we will, and we’re going to make sure all of our custodians – it’s the end of the year – they’re going to look carefully at all these spaces but again, I’m just begging a question. I believe they’re doing this in the public interest but they got to figure out a way if they think something is wrong – I think the morally right thing to do is tell us where it is so we can fix it.

Louis: Well, you have an inspector general, you have people within your administration that can take anonymous complaints [inaudible] –

Mayor: We would welcome it. It can be as anonymous as you want. I just want to know what schools they’re talking about.

Louis: Okay, alright. They’ll probably get back to you. You delayed leaving town last week because an 11-year-old boy was shot on Schenectady Avenue in Crown Heights. That brings the increase in shootings in the 77th Precinct, where I live, to – up 71 percent compared to last year. And homicides are up 600 percent at this point. Seven so far this year compared to one last year. There’s actually a community meeting going on at the precinct as we speak, and I was wondering if there’s a specific plan to curb violence in that neighborhood.

Mayor: Definitely. More officers are going to be put out in the precinct, a number of different anti-crime strategies – clearly some of this is gang and crew related and we have tools to take down gangs. It takes, as you know, building up a case but we’re going to be very, very aggressive. There’s definitely a problem we have to address aggressively. It does not conform with what we’re seeing in the rest of the city. As you know murders are down substantially citywide. Shootings are almost even with last year.

So, this is a localized problem but we take it very seriously. And we’re going to keep sending more and more officers, more and more strategies at it until we see change. It’s not an acceptable state of affairs.

Louis: We’re talking about Queens North – that’s about eight precincts – murders are up 50 percent compared to the same period last year. Shooting victims are up 100 percent – 22 versus 11. Same question – is there a plan and I guess linked to that, do you have any plans to endorse in the Queens District Attorney race? This would be the last minute.

Mayor: Right, no. No plans to endorse. And on that question – again, we have seen places where we see sudden bursts of problems. We send cops at them immediately. We address with additional strategies. I mean that’s what precision policing is all about. That’s what CompStat is all about. When you see something – maybe it’s a gang that is suddenly more active, you got to cut it off at the knees in every way you can. If you see a place that needs more visible police presence, you send in more cops.

Sometimes with neighborhood policing, it means deepening the relationship to the community, get more information to stop the problems at the root. We’ve proven that we can do it. The NYPD is doing an amazing job over and over, when they see these focal point areas, going in and addressing them. But the – look, I don’t take any of this lightly. We have to be on it every single day. The overall reality, though, proves something is consistently working – the fact that we thought that we were at the all-time low in murders in the last couple years and now once again we see the number going down further citywide, that’s very encouraging.

But if you’re in a couple of these areas that need additional help, what matters most to you of course is you want to see your community safe. It’s our job to achieve that.

Louis: Here again on the endorsement – you have some of your rivals for the Democratic nomination for president, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, they’re making endorsements. Is the – how is it that they have more insight into this or think that have –

Mayor: Well, it’s not more insight, it’s people make a choice on whether they want to get involved in a race or not. I’m choosing not to be involved.

Louis: Is this race – well, certainly a number of candidates and a number of the people supporting them have said that this race is sort of a critical step in the national movement for criminal justice reform, that it’s kind of an important place where these issues are going to be fought out. Do you agree?

Mayor: I think New York City is an important place for criminal justice reform, and I do believe that there’ll be real changes in Queens under any circumstance. And we’re going to push for those changes too. I mean we – I can tell you the Mayor’s Office has a lot of influence in this equation as does the NYPD. We want to see additional reform. So, I expect you’re going to see changes no matter who wins.

Louis: Okay, we’ll say goodbye for now. We’ll wish you the best of luck down at the debates. We’ll see you down there. We’re trying to get someone down there [inaudible] camera.

Mayor: Thank you – alright, see if you can get someone.

Louis: It’s not as easy as it should be.