Kat hints at NYC bailout
State ‘help’ on migrant costs
Now that she’s been elected to a full term, Gov. Hochul is more open to discussing how state taxpayers may help the Big Apple with its $1 billion migrant crisis — after insisting it was a federal problem during the campaign.
Hochul revealed Friday that Mayor Adams asked for emergency aid from the state after apparently being rebuffed by the White House.
“Not officially, not officially,” she said in response to a question from The Post. “But we told you we’d have conversations about this in the next budget. We just haven’t had the official conversation.”
Hochul added that she told Adams the state “would be as helpful as we need to be.”
The governor’s remarks in Puerto Rico, where she’s attending the annual Somos political conference, followed Thursday’s revelation that the city will be closing the controversial and costly migrant tent city on Randall’s Island and replacing it with rooms at the Watson Hotel in Manhattan.
Adams spent about $750,000 building the tent city and an earlier one, at Orchard Beach in The Bronx, that was relocated due to potential flooding and community concerns. City Hall has refused to release operating costs and expenses associated with the two projects and their dismantling.
On Friday, two residents of the tent city — which provides three meals a day, laundry service and a cushy lounge with couches, flatscreen TVs and Xbox video game consoles — estimated that about 300 migrants were living there.
“They are going to send us to a hotel where it will just be you and another person in each room,” Venezuelan migrant Jesus Miguel Hernandes, 35, told The Post. “It will be much better to have more privacy and more tranquility.”
Last month, Hochul got exasperated during a news conference when the subject of paying for the city’s migrant-related costs came up as she was trying to fend off surging Republican challenger
Lee Zeldin. “We really are looking for a federal response to this — to take ownership of a crisis — and we’ll be there to help but this belongs to the federal government,” she said at the time.
On Friday, Hochul said upstate cities would start welcoming migrants once they received work permits, which takes at least six months after they apply for asylum.
“I’m getting calls from all over the state,” she said. “Mayors are saying to people, ‘Come here, come here.’ ”