NO SLACK FOR BLAZ
Faces string of challenges with 100 days left in office
Bill de Blasio is coming up on the final stretch of his mayorship — but the lame duck won’t be able to sit back and relax.
Wednesday marks 100 days left in office for de Blasio, and between the volatile prison conditions on Rikers Island, slow implementation of a street safety program and anxiety mounting over what will happen when, rather than if, another powerful storm hits the city, his work is cut out for him.
And that doesn’t even account for the city’s continuing battle with COVID-19.
Despite various worries on the horizon, de Blasio offered an upbeat outlook for his last three months in City Hall.
“We know what we can do over the course of years, from delivering free pre-K and 3-K for all to driving crime down to an all-time low. But I also know that incredible things can be accomplished in a matter of days,” Hizzoner said in a statement to the Daily News. “We’re going to keep driving up vaccination rates, getting guns off our streets and building an economic recovery for all New Yorkers. There is plenty of work left and not a moment to spare.”
De Blasio, who leaves office on Jan. 1 after eight years at the helm, has tried to point fingers at Albany for much of the trouble overshadowing his mayoral homestretch, including by claiming the volatile situation on Rikers requires a variety of state government action.
Hank Scheinkopf, a veteran political consultant in the city who worked for ex-Mayor Michael Bloomberg, said it’s par for the course for de Blasio to find scapegoats for “his own messes.”
“This is a mayor who takes absolutely no responsibility,” Scheinkopf said. “It’s always someone else’s fault.”
Ten inmates have died on Rikers this year, and conditions at the jail have deteriorated to the degree that lawmakers compared it to a “humanitarian crisis” after a recent visit.
The Correction Department officers union is pleading with de Blasio to hire more staff to deal with the volatile situation, but de Blasio has argued that a piece of state legislation called the “Less Is More Act” will resolve it.
In de Blasio’s telling, the bill, signed into law by Gov. Hochul on Friday, will allow the city to move hundreds of inmates out of the overcrowded jail and into supervised release programs, alleviating the burden on correction officers and making Rikers safer.
But most components of the bill aren’t designed to take effect until March 2022 — begging the question of why de Blasio deems it a critical short-term fix.
De Blasio has also blamed the state court system for the Rikers dilemma, saying as a result of the ongoing pandemic, its limited operations are leaving the city with no choice but to keep sending inmates to the already crammed jail pending trial.
Moving away from Rikers, de Blasio has promised to get the Dangerous Vehicle Abatement Program off the ground before bidding adieu to Gracie Mansion.
The program, which is supposed to allow the city to impound vehicles of drivers who rack up at least five red-light tickets or 15 speeding tickets in a 12-month period, was established by a Council bill the mayor signed in February 2020.
But the program hasn’t launched yet because de Blasio’s administration didn’t set aside funding for it in the last budget. That omission drew intense scrutiny after a three-month-old baby girl was killed in Brooklyn earlier this month by a reckless driver who wouldn’t have had
a car at all if the administration had gotten the program up and running.
De Blasio has blamed the pandemic’s squeeze on city finances for the decision to not fund the abatement program.
He has also again tried to pin blame on Albany, saying that one of the most important ways to improve street safety in the city is for the state Legislature to pass the Crash Victims Rights and Safety Act, which would target dangerous driving and incentivize the purchase of smaller, less dangerous cars.
But street safety advocates say de Blasio could have done more to accelerate the abatement program.
The fact that the program hasn’t launched even though de
Blasio signed the bill nearly two years ago shows he doesn’t take the issue seriously enough, said Danny Harris, executive director of Transportation Alternatives.
“Babies are not safe on Mayor de Blasio’s streets,” said Harris. “And where is our mayor?”
Meanwhile, 2021 is on track to be the deadliest year for traffic fatalities in the city since de Blasio became mayor, according to data compiled by Harris’ organization.
Another pressing issue for de Blasio in his last days as mayor is storm response.
The remnants of Hurricane Ida caught de Blasio administration officials flatfooted when it smashed into the city on Sept. 1, killing 13 residents and devastating entire neighborhoods.
With months left of hurricane season, de Blasio has pledged that his administration will learn from Ida and become better at alerting New Yorkers before storms arrive.
Citywide travel bans and evacuations of residents living in flood-prone areas will also become the norm, according to the mayor.
But de Blasio has said longterm fixes — like making the city’s outdated sewer systems and other infrastructure more storm-resilient — are largely out of his hands.
“That’s going to take [the] city, state and federal government[s],” he said earlier this month. “Because the magnitude is in the many billions of dollars to solve that problem.”