NOW HE WANTS TO SAVE CITY BIZ
Blas taps school-build boss as ‘recovery czar’ – but merchants ask: What took so long?
Nearly a year after the coronavirus started slamming the Big Apple, Mayor de Blasio finally appointed a pandemic “recovery czar” on Monday to try to “supercharge” the ailing city.
But local business owners — barely surviving as the city turns into a ghost town of shuttered shops and office buildings — are asking what took so long.
“This sounds like a case of too little, too late,” said Liam Johnson, operations manager for three Ruby’s Cafe branches in Manhattan and Dudley’s on the Lower East Side.
“I think that at the very least, [the mayor] should have appointed individuals who have backgrounds in different business sectors to develop different strategies to keep businesses afloat,” he said.
“And it should have been done six months ago. I think six months ago, before the brunt of the winter kicked in and indoor dining closed again and all these restrictions came into play, that would have been the time to do it.”
At a press conference Monday, de Blasio named Lorraine Grillo, who is currently the chief of the School Construction Authority, as his “recovery czar,” saying she would help lead a weekly “war room” that would include every deputy mayor and officials from key city agencies to coordinate the comeback effort.
Merchants wish the help had come sooner.
“It’s been a disaster, to say the least, not only on an emotional level and physically exhausting, but potentially life-threatening,” Rena Ismail, owner of the eatery Oregano in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, said of the coronavirus and its economic fallout.
“When we were in severely desperate times, it would have been a lot more helpful to have someone like [a recovery czar] in power, where the mayor himself wasn’t overstretched and he was able to give that duty to someone who could have that be their main focus,” she said.
Asked at his press briefing why it took so long to create such a position, the mayor said his administration had been too busy dealing with other “emergency” issues.
“We were focused last year on the emergency reality of turning this city around in the battle against COVID, bringing us back from being the epicenter to being one of the safest places in the country by the summer, creating the biggest Test and Trace corps in the country, opening up the New York City public schools when many cities didn’t dare to and then plans laid out in the State of the City [address] in January,” de Blasio said.
“And now, to bring all these strands together, [I] decided that a czar could really make this thing go
into the next gear.”
De Blasio hailed Grillo as a “hero” for her work in the city’s recovery from 2012’s Superstorm Sandy and in creating space for the city’s universal pre-K program.
Grillo promised to get the city back on track.
“I’m going to draw on my decades of experience in government to cut through the noise to get things done,” she said at the press conference.
“I’m going to fight to make sure our recovery is felt in every borough and every neighborhood.”
The announcement came as The Post reported that many of the city businesses that have managed to survive are barely hanging on.
It also comes after business leaders and owners spent months pleading for help during pandemic restrictions.
Vacancy rates are skyrocketing, and more than 47 percent of small businesses citywide remain closed — while revenue for those that are open has plummeted, according to the Harvard University-run TrackTheRecovery.org.
Councilman Mark Gjonaj (D-Bronx) told The Post on Monday, “It’s more than six months ago that we sent a letter to the mayor asking for a plan to be put in place for the reopening process.
“We knew there would be a day when we would have to be talking about reopening,” he said.
“Lorraine is wonderful, but no title is going to solve this problem.”
Councilman Stephen Levin (D-Brooklyn) called Grillo “super capable” but agreed, “I wish they had appointed her in the fall.”
“It shouldn’t have taken so long to do this,’’ he said.
“But now that she’s been appointed, I wish her godspeed,” Levin said.
Andrew Rigie, executive director of the New York City Hospitality Alliance, also said it was a case of “better now than never.”
“Restaurants have been trying to figure out how they’re going to recover since they were shut down. After 11 months, we need to accelerate the planning and start executing plans immediately, because we’ve already lost too many small businesses, too many jobs, and we cannot waste any time saving those that are left,’’ he said.
Kathy Wylde, head of the Partnership for New York City, said, “This is hopefully a signal that jobs and small-business recovery are going to have equal weight with the health concerns.”
Gino Gigante, owner of the Waypoint Cafe, a videogame and Internet cafe on the Lower East Side, welcomed the appointment, even if it was tardy.
“It probably would have been better if they’d appointed her around September, which was around when indoor dining began,’’ he said.
“It probably would have been good to have a point of contact then, instead of always relying on the mayor or governor’s press conferences.”
Grillo will begin transitioning from her role at the School Construction Authority to her new post effective immediately, the city said.
She has been at the agency since 1994 and has served as its president since 2010.