Vax, cops, guns — and bucks
Mayor lays out goals in last State of City speech
The city will create new bike lanes on two East River bridges — and close some lanes to vehicular traffic — as part of a plan to expand its network of bike lanes throughout the five boroughs.
The initiative would open bike lanes on the Brooklyn and the Queensboro bridges and is one of several new policies Mayor de Blasio unveiled Thursday night as part of his final State of the City address.
De Blasio, who’s tenure will end in December due to term limits, focused most of his speech on how he intends to spur the city’s post-COVID-19 recovery, but that was overshadowed in large part by his administration’s plans to alter the two iconic East River crossings — changes that are sure to enrage motorists who use the spans.
“We’ll have space on the bridges devoted solely to clean transportation,” in the prerecorded speech. “These are the kind of changes that allow us to move out of the era of fossil fuels and the era of the automobile and into a green future.”
The new bike lane plan aims to convert the innermost Manhattan-bound car lane on the Brooklyn Bridge into a two-way bike path by the end of the year. The path will be separated from the two other lanes of car traffic by concrete barriers.
It represents a drastic shift for the historic span, which now has a combined pedestrian and bike promenade that’s often packed with tourists, pedestrians and vendors — crowded conditions that often create havoc for cyclists.
The timeline for completion of the Queensboro Bridge project is less clear, but is likely to proceed beyond 2021 and into the next mayor’s tenure.
That plan would convert the bridge’s already existing bike and pedestrian lane on its northern edge to a bike-only lane and move the pedestrian walkway to that bridge’s southern roadway.
While making a splash with his bridge plans, de Blasio focused much of his final State of the City address on the city’s recovery in the face of a bumpy vaccination rollout and the dire fiscal conditions caused by COVID.
The cornerstone of the city’s recovery agenda will be vaccinating 5 million city residents by the end of June and having the entire municipal workforce back on site by May.
“The return of city workers across the five boroughs will be a signal to the world that the comeback is happening right here, right now, as New York City vaccinates millions of New Yorkers,” de Blasio said in his address, entitled “A Recovery for All of Us.”
To do that, de Blasio said he would immediately recruit 2,000 new members of the city’s vaccine corps, which already employs 3,900.
He vowed to provide tax breaks to small businesses hard hit by the pandemic with a $50 million rental assistance program for up to 17,000 small businesses in the arts, entertainment and food services industries. The credit would enable businesses with revenue below $1 million to receive a 6% tax break on rent this year.
The city Test and Trace Corps, which has been instrumental in tracking the virus, will be converted to the Public Health Corps, which de Blasio said will employ about 4,000 full-time, permanent employees to connect people to health care in neighborhoods hit hardest by COVID.
In his final year at City Hall, de Blasio also suggested he would spend much of his time addressing police reform and crime.
One initiative under that umbrella will be named after his mentor, former Mayor David Dinkins, who died last year. The David Dinkins Plan would grant the Civilian Complaint Review Board the authority to launch investigations without being prompted by an individual complaint and would guarantee that it has “timely access” to police body camera footage.
As the city reels from an alarming uptick in gun violence, de Blasio plans to create the NYC Joint Force to End Gun Violence. It will draw its members from the NYPD, “cure violence” groups and district attorneys’ offices — to identify people involved in shootings and “create cleaner lines of communications between anti-gun violence groups and police.”
Predictably, de Blasio also renewed calls for the state to tax billionaires.
For years, he’s been demanding the state institute a tax on its most wealthy residents, which sparked feuding between himself and Gov. Cuomo early in his tenure.
While less realistic in his early years at City Hall, a wealth tax now has much more chance of becoming a reality, given the more left-leaning state legislature and the state’s floundering finances. Gov. Cuomo has argued against such a tax for years, but more recently said it could become necessary.
“New York City will push for a billionaires’ tax,” de Blasio said. “The billions of dollars raised from these progressive taxes will go into investing in New York City’s schools, working families, and a recovery for all of us.”