Blas in no rush on ticket aide
Mayor de Blasio — who doesn’t always move too quickly himself — said on Wednesday that eight months isn’t such a long time to set up a new office.
The mayor was defending the city’s new $120,000-ayear parking-summons advocate, whose office has barely gotten off the ground despite launching in April.
De Blasio argued it makes sense to proceed deliberately before fully opening a government office up to a potential avalanche of requests. “Do I wish that from the time something’s announced to the time it’s at full strength was faster? Absolutely,” the mayor said at an unrelated press conference in Brooklyn.
“But to be fair, my understanding is they wanted to put together a staff, train them, get them ready and then turn on the on-switch — at which point, they would assume thousands and thousands of calls, and e-mails would start coming in. They wanted to be ready to handle that at a very big volume.”
Motorists in the Big Apple are issued about 7.8 million parking tickets annually, of which roughly 2.4 million are disputed, records show.
The mayor’s explanation doesn’t fully account for the delay — because it wasn’t until last month that parking advocate Jean Wesh hired his first staffer.
Department of Finance officials said two more staffers are coming on board, but possibly not until early January.
An administrative assistant will also be hired, bringing the total personnel costs to $419,000.
Finance officials said Wesh so far has reviewed just 274 parking summonses since his hiring — an average of about 1.5 per day. He’s managed to get about 60 percent tossed, they said.
Traffic to the new office has been sporadic in part because there’s no Web site informing drivers of its existence. A hotline that was promised within “weeks” in May has also failed to materialize but will be tied to the 311 city phone service.
Finance officials said the Web site and hotline will be ready by the end of the year.