Tag Archives: Mayor de Blasio

Pettiness On Parade

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Mayor de Blasio will be leaving office soon. His term in office has not been without some pretty major scandals (generally ignored by the media). In March 2019, The Federalist Papers reported that the Mayor’s wife, Chirlane McCray, was given $850 million for a mental health program she was spearheading. The second major scandal involved the horse-drawn carriages in Central Park.

The article reports:

The program, ThriveNYC, has fallen far behind its goals and appears to be a massive failure for the city.

But even in spite of that the city has decided to increase the budget of the program which is expected to spend $5 billion in the next five years.

The program was set up to screen 78,000 new mothers for post-natal depression. What actually happened between 2016 and 2018 was that slightly more than 28,000 patients were screened and 570 were offered help. Narcan kits were also handed out, but there are no statistics saying how many were used. When an attempt was made to acquire a budget, they received two budgets with very different numbers. No one seems to know exactly how the money was spent.

There was also the matter of the horses in Central Park (article here). In early 2014, Mayor de Blasio announced that he was going to put a high priority on removing the horse-drawn carriages from Central Park. After all, asking horses to pull carriages in a world of automobiles is cruel. Animal rights groups backed him up. Well, not so fast. It seems that Steve Nislick, chief executive officer of a New Jersey-based real-estate development company, Edison Properties, has an interest in removing the horses–Edison Properties owns multiple properties in the area where the stables for the horses are located. New development of those lots could be quite profitable.

Now to today’s scandal. Mayor de Blasio wants to break the Trump organization’s contract to run the Ferry Point golf course in the Bronx by Nov. 14 – a move that could cost the city over $30 million. As if the city didn’t have enough financial challenges.

Red State reported yesterday:

Former President Donald Trump got a reprieve from the city’s efforts to evict his company from the Ferry Point golf course.

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Debra James granted the Trump Organization a temporary stay from Mayor de Blasio’s effort to break the company’s contract to run the Bronx course by Nov. 14 – a move that could cost the city over $30 million.

After the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, de Blasio ended contracts for Trump’s company to operate the Central Park Carousel, the Wollman and Lasker ice rinks in the park, and the Bronx golf course.

The city’s Parks Department quickly picked new operators for the ice rinks and eventually found a new company to run the the carousel. It also awarded a new license for the golf course to a Georgia-based company, Bobby Jones Links.

The Trump Organization sued over the golf contract, maintaining in court papers that the deal was nixed over politics.

Judge James granted a stay…

Stay tuned for more foolishness out of New York City.

 

This Is Really NOT A Good Idea

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Living in New York City is not cheap, but it is supposed to be glamorous. If you look at realtor.com, you can find a 500 or 600 square foot apartment for about $2500 a month. Then on top of that you pay city, state, and federal income tax. It’s a pretty pricey place to live. At those prices, you expect a few benefits. Many buildings have doormen. You are close to restaurants and entertainment. Central Park is beautiful. The museums are great. But New York City is changing. Crime is up. The homeless population is up. Many areas of the city are simply not appealing because of changes in the law that make peeing in the street not a crime. One partial answer to this is a return to the ‘broken windows’ policy of Rudy Giuliani. Unfortunately Mayor De Blasio is heading in the other direction.

The U.K. Daily Mail posted an article on Friday reporting the following:

Mayor Bill de Blasio on Friday revealed a plan to buy properties around the city and turn them into permanent affordable housing, after moving more than 10,000 homeless people into hotels during the COVID-19 pandemic and shaming rich residents who have left the city as ‘fair weather friends’. 

At a press conference on Friday, he did not say which type of buildings the city had its eye on and the city is refusing to give more details, citing ‘privacy concerns’.  

De Blasio only said there was an ‘opportunity to get creative’ now when it came to finding housing for New York’s homeless. 

It presents a stark scenario for landlords or building owners who may be struggling to collect rent from current tenants, many of whom – both commercial and residential – have absconded.  

The homeless-in-hotels scheme set up by de Blasio is one of many components to an escalating downward change in the city.

Before the Mayor gets too wrapped up in the homeless-in-hotels idea, he might want to look at a recent Fox News article detailing a similar program in San Francisco.

The article at Fox News notes:

Police arrested two adults accused of operating a low level meth lab at a San Francisco hotel designated as a safe shelter for people on quarantine, at risk for COVID-19, or without housing.

The call came in about a strong chemical odor coming from a hotel room and officers responded to the Civic Center Motor Inn about 2:30 p.m. on Saturday.

The U.K. Daily Mail also notes:

Many of New York’s wealthy residents fled months ago – taking their disposable income and their tax dollars with them – and there are fears they may never come back.

Crime is on the up but de Blasio has stripped the police force of $1billion in response to Black Lives Matter protests.

Some retailers and restaurants have been forced to close permanently and those who are hanging on face continuously changing and difficult rules, like having to sell ‘substantial’ amounts of food to customers to avoid crowds gathering.

De Blasio and Cuomo are enforcing checkpoints to stop tourists from 35 COVID hotspot states from entering the city without quarantining for 14 days too.

Earlier this year, it emerged that 139 struggling hotels are taking in homeless people to avoid deathly COVID-19 breakouts in shelters. The effort is being mostly paid for by FEMA, but 25 percent of it is coming from the city’s shrinking budget. It brings some cash to the struggling hotels which were decimated by the pandemic. 

Through the program, they take $175 per person, per night which – with more than 13,000 homeless currently being housed in hotels – is more than $2.275million, according to anonymous city sources who have been quoted since May. 

Please follow the link to the article at the U.K; Daily Mail for further details on the Mayor’s idea.

I suspect in the very near future, you will be able to buy a condo or rent an apartment in New York City at bargain-basement prices.

This Really Shouldn’t Surprise Anyone

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Breitbart reported yesterday that at least 250 convicted and accused criminals freed from New York’s Rikers Island prison have been rearrested 450 times thanks to Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s (D) jailbreak directive.

The article reports:

Of approximately 2,500 defendants sprung from Rikers early because of COVID safety planning, at least 250 have been arrested again since, according to Michael LiPetri, chief of Crime Control Strategies for the NYPD. [Emphasis added]

Chief LiPetri tells NBC New York the NYPD did not object to releasing older defendants, nor those with underlying medical conditions. But he says the consequences of the larger-scale release of prisoners are now showing up in the arrest data, with those 250 re-offenders being arrested 450 times so far during the pandemic. [Emphasis added]

What did they expect? How much transition assistance was provided to these prisoners when they were released? Were there halfway houses available to them so that they had a place to stay as they transitioned to life outside prison?

The article concludes:

While the mass release of convicted and accused criminals in New York continues and violent crime surges, Mayor Bill de Blasio is vowing to cut NYPD funding. The reduction in funding for the police would come as murders have jumped 160 percent over the last week and burglaries are up 402 percent.

As businesses and residents leave the city because it is becoming too dangerous, Mayor de Blasio will have to increase taxes further to meet his budget obligations. That will be the straw that broke the camel’s back as far as driving out the remaining honest residents and business of New York City. A little common sense applied to policies regarding criminals is needed.

We Need To Learn From The Mistakes Made In New York

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New York has had a very high percentage of deaths from the coronavirus compared to  other states in the nation. This is not by chance–it is the result of bad decisions made at the beginning of the pandemic and throughout the crisis. Yesterday The National Review posted an article detailing the decisions that exacerbated the outbreak.

The article reports:

Cuomo made three breathtakingly bad moves in March that in retrospect amounted to catastrophe. First, Cuomo failed to call for, and even actively discouraged, informal social-distancing measures in early March. Next was the delay in mid-March in ordering formal closures when the virus started rampaging through his state. Third was his March 25 edict to long-term care facilities that they must accept infected patients, which caused a mass deadly outbreak among helpless, trapped, elderly New Yorkers.

The article notes:

Like de Blasio, who as late as March 10 was on MSNBC telling New Yorkers that most of us were at little to no risk and that the coronavirus was much like seasonal flu, Cuomo persisted with his don’t-scare-away-the-tourists happy talk well into March, the critical month. On March 1, the day New York State logged its first confirmed case of the coronavirus (a health-care worker who had just returned from Iran), Cuomo assured everyone that, although one of his own daughters had called him in a state of panic, there was no need to be afraid. “The facts defeat fear. Because the reality is reassuring. It is deep breath time. . . . This is not our first rodeo with this type of situation in New York,” Cuomo boasted, adding, “Excuse our arrogance as New Yorkers,” but the state was fully prepared. “We don’t even think it’s going to be as bad as it was in other countries,” he said. “We’re going to have a special effort for our nursing homes, et cetera, congregate facilities where senior citizens are being treated.” He further boasted that the state had broken free of federal restraints about testing: “Now we are actually in control of the systems ourselves. And as New Yorkers we like control.”

Summing up, Cuomo said, “Once you know the facts, once you know the reality, it is reassuring and we should relax because that’s what’s dictated by the reality of the situation.”

On March 6 Cuomo insisted, “The overall risk level of the novel coronavirus in New York remains low” and said, “We have more people in this country dying from the flu than we have dying from coronavirus.” As late as March 8, Cuomo, instead of advising people to stay away from the subway, advised New Yorkers to seek out less-crowded subway cars, the mass-transit equivalent of saying, “Let them eat cake.”

The coronavirus was an unknown entity, and I don’t blame Governor Cuomo for his original missteps.  However, I do believe that Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio were slow to acknowledge and react to the danger. Contrast this with President Trump who had the foresight to stop air travel from China. Leadership matters.

What Is Going To Happen To Nathan’s?

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The following video was posted at The Gateway Pundit today:

The video reports:

Part of the law requires New York City officials to teach New Yorkers how to make healthy, environmentally conscious food choices by banning “problematic” items such as hot dogs from city menus.

The NYC Green New Deal “will cut purchases of red meat by 50 percent in its city-controlled facilities such as hospitals, schools, and correctional facilities.”

The Green New Deal also looks to make New York City “car-free” by 2050.

When Mayor de Blasio signed New York City’s crazy Green New Deal into law, he reiterated Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s outrageous and untrue claim that “we only have 12 years” left to save the world from permanent climate change.

Since the ban on hot dogs only applies to city-controlled facilities, I guess Nathan’s will still be able to stay in business. All kidding aside, the banning of hot dogs and red meat is just a smidgen of what radical environmentalists would do if they came into power on the federal level. Thank God Mayor de Blasio only has the power to mess up a city.