Blaz reins in his ‘agents’
MAYOR DE BLASIO’S “agents of the city” are losing their badges.
Hizzoner said Monday night that the five private sector pals he’s made honorary City Hall employees — minus the pesky conflicts of interest forms real city workers have to fill out — will no longer be exempt from transparency rules.
Going forward, de Blasio said correspondence between the five “agents” — a designation that his lawyers made up — and him or his staff will be made public, which is standard procedure.
The mayor, who made the announcement in an interview on NY1’s “Inside City Hall,” defended the controversial decision to keep their emails under wraps by saying he followed legal guidelines but admitted, “This has become a distraction.”
But he is still refusing to hand over their old emails because he said they were written under the belief that they would be private.
Most correspondence between members of city government and the public is available under Freedom of Information laws, but de Blasio has argued that the agents are exempt because he leans so heavily on them for advice.
His lawyers backed his theory up, saying that as his close pals, the agents served a role similar to his top City Hall aides, whose correspondence with the mayor is exempt from disclosure because the law allows for private deliberations between staff. Others disagree. Several media outlets have sued the city to get the mayor to release the emails between his office and the agents. The case is pending.
Several emails were released recently as part of that court case, including ones that show agent Jonathan Rosen engaging in policy discussions with the mayor’s top staffers, despite the fact that he has clients with business before the city.
De Blasio has said he never lobbied him on behalf of his client.
The mayor’s decision to stop making the emails secret was a good step — and they “should never have been shielded” in the first place, said Dick Dadey of the good government group Citizens Union.
“The scheme proved to be not worthy of a defense, and the mayor wisely made a change of policy,” he said.
De Blasio said now that they’re public, he’ll tell his pals, “Choose your words wisely and act accordingly.”