Ask the Mayor: New COVID Clusters, Schools and More

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. With new coronavirus clusters now showing up in New York City just as indoor dining is scheduled to resume next Wednesday and the public schools are scheduled to complete their reopening by next Thursday. With Governor Cuomo chastising the city for being behind other places in the state on police reform and much more. There's a lot to ask the Mayor about in our Friday Ask the Mayor. Call in my questions and yours for Mayor Bill de Blasio. Our lines are open at 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280, or you can tweet a question. We'll watch our Twitter feed go by. Just use the hashtag #AsktheMayor. Good morning, Mr. Mayor. Welcome back to WNYC.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, Brian. Brian, I understand we have an anniversary here, is this right? 31 years, you have been on the air?

Brian: [chuckles] That's right. That started September 25th 31 years ago today. That's right.

Mayor de Blasio: Well, I commend you and I thank you. I think a lot of people in this town really depend on you and your show to give them perspective on what's going on, so I want to thank you for 31 good years.

Brian: Thank you so much. I see you have a little news to break about outdoor dining. Want to make that announcement?

Mayor de Blasio: Where better to break the news then on your 31st anniversary show. Yes, we have an important announcement. Brian, we've had, in the midst of crisis, some really good and powerful things happen. People innovated and created. That was particularly true in the restaurant industry. We depend on this industry so much in the city. It's part of who we are. It's part of what we love. So many jobs and we want to save these restaurants.

I'm announcing that we will make the open restaurants initiative permanent and year-round. This is something that a lot of folks in the restaurant industry has said, "Could we find a way to build upon this success?" I want us to go for the gold here. I want us to really take this model and make it part of the life of New York City for years and generations to come. This has been, I think, an extraordinarily positive experiment and it's worked.

We're going to take the open restaurant idea, that restaurants can use the part of the surrounding sidewalk and, or if they choose, can use part of the street as well. We're going to make that permanent. We're going to make it year-round. We already have well over 10,000 restaurants participating. Almost 100,000 jobs have been saved. We hope, I believe, this is going to make it a lot easier for restaurants to survive and I think there'll be a lot of participation.

I also want to note just a couple of quick things, Brian. We're going to make the combination of open streets and open restaurants, which has been a huge hit. You've seen on weekends that we've had streets closed off entirely. Restaurants could expand well out in the streets. It creates a festival atmosphere. That also will be made permanent. We have 87 streets citywide participating. We want to continue that and even go farther.

I think this will really help us as an important part of how we recover as a city. Obviously, indoor dining beginning next week. We want to make sure that goes well as well. The bottom line here is that we want restaurants to do well. We want them to be able to use seeding in surrounding sidewalk areas, other storefronts areas if they can come to agreement with the folks in those storefronts as well. We want them to have the right kind of heating over the winter. We want them to be able to enclose their facilities.

That's what works for them. Obviously, with the restrictions on seating or keep them open and heated and then they can be fuller. This is something we're going to get to work on right away, making it happen. We're going to work with the city council. Some of this will require legislation. Other pieces are administrative, but this is a go. We want this to be something the restaurant industry can depend on and just we want to see them thrive in the future. I think this is going to help a lot.

Brian: If you enclose an outdoor dining space, doesn't it become indoor dining?

Mayor de Blasio: Correct. That goes to the capacity levels that would apply to indoor dining. You have a choice. Let's say you have a restaurant, Brian. You have that area outdoors. If you say, "I want to fully enclose. It'll be easier to heat it. There'll be a better atmosphere," great, but you do it with the limits currently in place. Right now, that means 25% capacity. Hopefully, that will grow as we continue to fight back the virus. If you say conversely, "I like it the way it is now. I'm able to fill more seats," then you have to keep it more open for the flow of air and figure out, obviously, a way to keep the heating sufficient as well. That's a choice for restaurant owners. They could do either way.

Brian: Let's take a phone call. Daniel in Bay Ridge, you are on WNYC with the Mayor. Hi, Daniel.

Daniel: Hi. Thank you, Mr. Lehrer. Your Honor, I would like to specifically ask. You have bent over backwards for restaurants in New York City, and yet comedy clubs and small venues that serve food and drink and have proposed the same capacities and same limits are denied. Even the conversation with the Mayor's Office of Nightlife are denied, even returned emails or phone calls, and are denied even, Your Honor, considering us.

It's not that anyone is asking. As Emilio Savone, the owner of the New York Comedy Club, said, no one is asking to cut the line here. We would like to be considered to be reopened at the same capacity as this restaurant. You're not talking about a huge difference. It's one person standing at the front of the place on stage with a microphone and a plastic cover between them and the audience. We want to make a living as well, Your Honor. How do we do that?

Mayor de Blasio: David, listen, I appreciate very much this question. I want to say I think there's a little bit of a misunderstanding here because I said I was asked this actually several days ago in my morning press conference. I said we absolutely want to address the issue of the comedy clubs. That's one of the things to come up next on the agenda. Comedy clubs are a big deal in this city.

I happen to know a lot of people in the industry. I love this industry. It's a part of what makes New York City so special and we need comedy clubs to come back. There was never an intention to not hear those voices. If somehow those meetings didn't happen, I believe you. If you're saying they didn't happen, that's wrong. I want to apologize for that. They should have. I'll tell my team to have those meetings immediately. More important, we have a regular strategic call with our health leadership to go over each and every category.

Comedy clubs are now coming up after we've dealt with a lot of other really big pieces of the equation. Most notably, schools, childcare, the restaurant industry, all the re-openings phase one, two, three, four. It's time to address comedy clubs and figure out a way to do it right. That set of decisions will be made literally in a matter of days and we're going to work with the state as always. I do want to see this industry come back.

Brian: With the positivity rate going up in some city neighborhoods as high as 6%, is it still time for any indoor dining?

Mayor de Blasio: It's a fair question, Brian. We're watching this very, very carefully. I think we have a little bit of a divergence here. We see a set of communities where the positivity level is just plain too high and a very aggressive effort, a lot of presence out in those communities as we speak, educating folks, providing free masks where necessary, doing enforcement. We've had some yeshivas that had to be closed. It's four right now already.

There's a lot of work to do to make very clear that we have to arrest this problem before it gets worse. It's putting people's lives in danger. In the rest of the city, we're seeing extraordinarily low levels of the coronavirus and that continues to hold. I think the big answer to you right now is our overall framework is holding and working. We're going to watch carefully as schools reopen, as more and more people are coming back to work. You're seeing a lot more activity on the streets. We're going to watch all that carefully. Right now, overall, the city is doing very well.

Brian: Reading neighborhood stats from NBC News, the increase in positive COVID cases was largest in the Gravesend/Homecrest area where the positivity rate hit 6% yesterday. Other problem areas include Midwood just under 5%; Edgemere, Far Rockaway, just over 4%; Kew Gardens, just under 4%; Borough Park, 3.5%; Bensonhurst, Mapleton, 3.1%; Sheepshead Bay, 3%; Flatlands/Midwood, 3%; and Williamsburg, 1.6%. Considering the population in most of those neighborhoods and you already mentioned closing some yeshivas, do we have enough Yiddish to speak in contact tracers and will public schools in those neighborhoods where there are cases that numerous still be opening next week?

Mayor de Blasio: There's a very rigorous outreach effort in the community in English and Yiddish. That's everything. That's robocalls, that's sound trucks, a lot of in-person activity. There's a substantial number of Yiddish speakers who have been brought into the effort. Test & Trace has been hiring directly from the community. We're going to keep doing that though. I think this is indicator of something we'll be fighting for a little while here.

We're going to keep bringing on more people who can speak and connect with the community. We have a lot of community leaders deeply engaged with the city government to address this issue. There are people who are trusted in our own community, including doctors and nurses from the community who are really sounding the alarm here. We saw a variation on this problem with measles. Last year, it was addressed with a lot of community support and leadership and participation. I think we'll see the same pattern here.

The second part of your question, Brian, now there's-- From what we're seeing so far in the schools where, remember, all staffs are back in their schools. It's well over 100,000 staff in the schools all over the city, all levels. In the course of this week, with pre-K back, 3-K back, Special Education District 75 back, upwards of 90,000 students coming through the schools, we are seeing continually low levels in schools and we're tracking it school by school.

We do not see a nexus yet where public schools in those particular communities are having issues. A lot of times, again, the kids in a particular public school do not come from the immediate surrounding area. They come from other places, but we're going to watch school by school. We're also doing testing outside some key school locations to keep an eye on the situation very specifically.

Brian: Liz in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hi, Liz.

Liz: Hi, Brian. First, I want to thank you for mentioning all the neighborhoods that are above the Mayor's 3% threshold for reopening. I think that's a really important thing to point out. It's really hard to get that data just for a regular person in the public to know what ZIP codes are above or whatever percentage they happen to be. One, I'd like to ask the Mayor to make that data available.

Some other data I'd love to have be available to the public is all of the cases in all of the schools. That's not something we have accessible to us right now. With regard to testing, 41,000 or it could be just 40,000 of the teachers that were supposed to be going into buildings, as I understand it, have not been tested or we don't have their results. The 100 cases that were reported yesterday could be as many as 400 cases, 300 of which are undetected in the schools right now.

In LA, all teachers and students are going to be tested. I know the Chancellor has said, "Well, we don't have infection rates in LA," but we, parents of New York City, would really like to have the most top-notch, possible test-and-trace program, which they seem to have in LA that is partnered with Stanford. Brian, I have a couple of more things to say, so please forgive me.

Brian: Real quick.

Liz: I'm part of a group called Parents for Responsive Equitable Safe Schools, PRESS NYC. We have a letter campaign going to the Chancellor or the Mayor. Here's what we are asking for. One, an honest reckoning by the Marin DOE that they have ignored and failed the children and families of our school. We need to be shown that their top priority is protecting human health during a pandemic rather than opening school buildings at any cost.

We want to see a commitment to full-remote instruction until they prove schools are safe and provide evidence from experts. In addition to the LA testing model, we want to know that all air exchange rates in all of our rooms and hallways and bathrooms are six or higher, which means every 10 minutes, they're being exchanged. That is absolutely not anything that any classroom teacher or principal knows right now.

Brian: Liz, I'm going to jump in just for time because this is taking a long time and I do want to give other people a chance. Mr. Mayor, Liz has put a number of specific things on the table there, including the very last thing, the air exchange rates and whether you have a standard of six, I think she called it, or air exchange every 10 minutes for public school rooms.

Mayor de Blasio: Okay, there's a lot there. I'm going to go very quickly through it, Brian, but I think it's important to answer these points because I think there's some that are very helpful and important. Some of them are actually misleading. Liz, I do thank you. Obviously, you care deeply about this. I think there are some facts here that are not accurate, starting with a situation in Los Angeles. Los Angeles is all-remote and they say they will be testing people. I respect that, but we don't have evidence of that being something yet fully reaching the levels that are being suggested. I'd be careful to not assume too much and they're working on an entirely different model than we're working on anyway.

Brian: That's their standard, right? Is that before they do reopen, they've announced that they're going to test everybody who had entered the school, is that not correct?

Mayor de Blasio: Again, what I've seen-- and I don't pretend to be an expert on everything in LA. What I've seen is that they are going to be doing all-remote for the foreseeable future and they're really-- I'm not seeing a specific plan to come back. I want to question that entire assumption. Everything someplace else, we all have the tendency as humans to believe things, other places are better.

I would just be careful. They were not even in position to consider in-person learning. Look, on things like ventilation, air exchange rate, this is being governed over by the health authorities of this city who have led the way in bringing the city back from the coronavirus. Everything is done with the Department of Health looking at the standards around the world of what works.

Brian, this is what I think has been lost in this entire conversation. I understand for sure why people are afraid and worried. That's why we gave, for parents, absolute positive choice. You can go all-remote if that's what you prefer. We gave for educators and staff if they had a medical accommodation needs they could apply for. The overwhelming majority of those have been approved.

This is a respectful, humane approach, but it also recognizes the fact that we need to and can make school safe by layering every measure we've seen around the world. We've literally set a gold standard here. A lot of places, most places that have even been successful in reopening schools, do not require masks for every child and every adult. You saw on opening day, even down to four-year-olds, people wearing their masks and wearing them effectively.

A lot of places are not doing the social distancing. We're doing 10 kids in a New York City classroom. Could you have ever imagined that being the norm? That's what we have. Daily cleanings, ventilation, every single room online was checked, rechecked. Outside experts brought in to make sure it's sufficient ventilation. We're going to continue to do all of these measures. In fact, we did have an initial group of 17,000 teachers and staff who were tested and their response on that, the positivity rate, was 0.32%.

17,000 initial test yielded 55 people with positive coronavirus test, which is far below anything we've seen anywhere. We're going to keep doing this. We do put out a lot of public information. Liz, you should leave your information with WNYC. We'll have folks follow up and show you all the Department of Health information by ZIP code, showing positivity levels, the information Brian quoted on these problems in certain neighborhoods.

We put out that publicly and we're going to put that out daily so long as we're having those problems. Neighbors, we're going to highlight it publicly. We want people to see it. The fact is we will be transparent. Next week is when school is up and running full-strength. We're going to be putting out regular reports on the number of cases in schools, but we are seeing actually very few. We're seeing good coordination between the schools and our situation room to identify a case and move on it quickly, get Test & Trace involved.

I just disagree with the underpinnings of Liz's analysis, although I think she makes some good points. The underpinning is, why don't we go all-remote? No, going all-remote will deprive the kids or the city of the education they deserve, including the kids who need it the most. It will exacerbate disparity and it will not help this city and our children to continue to be all-remote. For those who choose it, it is there. I'll tell you, there's a hell of a lot of parents who want their kids in school and we owe it to them to do that and to do it safely.

Brian: Let me follow up with another school's issue with in-person learning scheduled to start in a matter of days. Exactly how many additional teachers have been hired to address the staffing shortage, which was a major contributing factor to the latest delay, and how many more need to be hired by next week?

Mayor de Blasio: Brian, we've got a process now. I've been meeting at the war room at Department of Education daily with the Chancellor's team and they're doing extraordinary work and they're working non-stop. We've got arguably the most complex hiring challenge any city agency has ever faced because of remote and blended in-person, blended at-home, changing numbers.

What happened is what you saw on Monday that every school had the staff they needed, 3K District 75 special ed, 1,800 sites far beyond what any other school system in America has. Just those 1,800 sites would go farther than any school system in America all had the staff they need. That work is being completed now for Tuesday when K-5 and K-8 schools open and for Thursday when middle school and high school open.

What I'm going to do is when we have everyone assigned every seat filled, we'll announce the final number. We want to not have a situation where, as we make these adjustments and we find ways to create effective models and efficiency and one thing or another, we get to a better number all the time. I'm going to announce it when we get to the final thing. The most important reality here is to have every school have the compliment they need for opening. I feel very good about the effort. Lot of effort has been put in. I feel good about the direction it's going in.

Brian: Well, if you won't release a number of how many more teachers you need to hire or get in place by next Tuesday or next Thursday, are the chances greater than zero that you will have to delay in-person school again over staffing?

Mayor de Blasio: There's no reason to delay. That's the easiest way to say it. I'm monitoring it. This constantly talking with the union leadership every day, we're all watching the specifics together because this is unprecedented. It's never been attempted before. I feel very good. The pieces keep coming together hour by hour and we are ready to go for Tuesday and ready to go for Thursday.

Brian: You're saying there's a zero chance that staffing would--

Mayor de Blasio: Brian, the problem, I don't do hypotheticals because we were dealing with the healthcare dynamics and everything else. I'm not going to do that. Honestly, I don't think that's productive.

Brian: I'm just saying there's a zero chance that staffing--

Mayor de Blasio: I'm just telling you what the truth is. The truth is that we are getting the people we need in place, period.

Brian: Sophia in Sunset Park, you're on WNYC with the Mayor. Hello, Sophia.

Sophia: Hi. Thank you, Brian, and thank you, Mr. Mayor, for taking this question. I know we're talking about a lot of intersecting crises here. Early on, the short times out job. I'm calling to ask about a big public plan that could put New Yorkers to work to address climate change can address these intersecting crises that we're talking about here. I'm one of more than 4,000 residents that stood against the billionaires behind the Industry City rezoning that were trying to rezone our place, our working waterfront, and to advance an old business plan that the coronavirus crisis made obsolete.

I'm calling today to ask, he promised to explore alternative community plans like the grid developed by [unintelligible 00:22:55], which envisioned activating our waterfront and a big public plan to confront climate change. Will you keep your word and will your administration prioritize a public waterfront plan? Just one more thing to up the ante. Can you commit to a whole thing next Wednesday's vote on the Steiner Studio, which is near that property?

Mayor de Blasio: Wait. I'm sorry, Sophia. When you made your transition, I couldn't hear you well.

Brian: Her second topic is the Steiner Studios, a location where there's another vote coming up. To listeners who don't know the background of Sophia's first question, the big proposal for rezoning and development of worksite's said Industry City on the Brooklyn waterfront was defeated or died in city council this week. That means thousands of additional jobs if they were ever going to be real will not be coming.

It also means that a certain amount of gentrification that the neighborhood was trying to avoid presumably will not be coming. Mr. Mayor, you had not taken a position on Industry City. You had originally supported the Amazon HQ2 for Queens when that was a similar controversy in the city. How do you feel about this going down and will you commit to the alternative development proposal that some people in the neighborhood had come up with, which is what Sophia is asking about?

Mayor de Blasio: Sure. Let me pull those pieces apart from it. I don't think by any stretch it's the same thing as Amazon. I have real problems with Amazon. I've been very blunt about that and I think they stabbed New York City in the back. It was an entirely different proposal, I think, a lot in it that would have been much more important to the future of the city than anything we were talking about at Industry City.

Obviously, look, we all should be concerned about jobs right now and we should be concerned about the city coming back, but it's also incumbent upon developers to respond to communities and provide public benefits, community benefits that a community can believe in. This was a private application. I really want to emphasize this, Brian. It was not sponsored by the city of New York. I didn't get involved because it was a private sector company coming forward. I believe their obligation was to build community support.

That, obviously, did not happen and the project was withdrawn. I haven't seen the alternative proposal. I'm happy to review it and see what we can do. I can tell you, though, there will not be a rezoning in Sunset Park. There will not be a major land use action there. The timeline has already passed for that. The only one that would have been possible was that private application. Although we certainly want to work with the community and see what we can do to get something started in the next 15 months, we've got a lot of specific major land use actions that we'll be moving and will be the focus.

Those have to, right now, get the precedent. To Sophia's bigger point, which I think is very resonant with what we're trying to do with the Green New Deal here in New York City, we do need to. Although I haven't seen the plan for the community, I imagine I'm going to agree with a lot of it. We do need to reorient so much of what we do in the city to addressing climate change, including the new reality of jobs that green jobs that will be created in fighting climate change.

We should be reorienting as much of our economy as possible in that direction. That's what we talked about yesterday with the Governors Island Center. That's going to be a globally-important research center and focal point for developing new green approaches and strategies. I think this is really important to the future of New York City. Obviously, we want to work with the Sunset Park community on that as well.

Brian: We've got just a few minutes left. Governor Cuomo yesterday referred to you specifically saying New York City is behind other places in the state in coming up with a police reform plan. Here's a few seconds of the Governor.

Governor Andrew Cuomo: Step up and lead. 146 jurisdictions are doing it. Why isn't New York City doing it? The Mayor can lead it, city council president can lead it, comptroller could lead it, public advocate could lead it. If none of them want to lead it, I will find someone to lead it.

Brian: He referred to the problem of rising crime in the city and related it to the slow progress that he sees on reinventing the police. One more tiny clip.

Governor Cuomo: If you don't do it, everybody gets hurt.

Brian: Mr. Mayor, your response to the Governor.

Mr. Mayor: He doesn't have his facts straight. It's just quite clear. Look, if he wants to make personal attacks, he can do that, but he does not have his facts straight. Seven years of non-stop reform. It's time we have an honest conversation about this and stop these games. We, in the year 2018, had a hundred- I'm sorry, 2019- had 180,000 fewer arrests in New York City than the last year of the Bloomberg administration.

We created a strategy to reduce unnecessary arrests while driving down crime. We create a strategy to end mass incarceration. Governor didn't do that. The state didn't do that. We did that. We have an incarceration level in this city now. You have to go back to the 1940s to have so few people in jail. We put in place retraining the entire NYPD, de-escalation training. In the year 2018, there are only 17 instances in which an NYPD officer fired their weapon in an adversarial situation.

17, an entire year for the biggest police force in the country, that came from retraining new strategies. I go through a whole list of things, implicit bias training, creating a police force that's now majority people of color, changing the leadership to bring in people who represent the fullness of this city and represent these values of change. You say, "Okay, what about the last few months?"

Commissioner Shea announced the end of the anti-crime unit that, in many communities, have been faulted for exacerbating tensions between police and community. He said there's a much better way to fight crime and work with communities. Commissioner Shea and our team here at city hall in response to President Obama's call for re-invention ideas, we took that pledge. We ran with it.

We put out a new disciplinary matrix to ensure that whenever an officer does something inappropriate that there were very specific penalties. I fought for years. With all due respect to the Governor, I would like to remind everyone who was fighting for the repeal of the 58 laws so we could provide full transparency on police discipline. That's what I was doing. We finally got that repeal and we've pledged to put out disciplinary records for all existing officers. These are exactly--

Brian: Let me jump in--

Mayor de Blasio: Hold on, Brian. One more point. These are exactly the things that make up profound reform, all in the context of a neighborhood policing philosophy that was revolutionary unto itself. This is what we've been doing all these years. We're going to present all of this to Albany. There's no police force in New York State that has done these many things to create reform and to reinvent themselves. Those are the facts.

Brian: That's not going to satisfy a lot of reform advocates who want more since the movement for Black Lives took shape in its current form this year. Apparently, it's not going to satisfy the Governor who wants every locality in the state to submit plans for a reform going forward, not just what you've done in the past.

Mayor de Blasio: We just announced a new disciplinary matrix publicly, which we put out a profoundly different and better approach to discipline. I have not seen a lot of discussion of it honestly, every one of these changes. When I tell you about the massive reduction arrest, massive reduction incarceration, retraining the entire police force, de-escalation, implicit bias, where are the headlines on all of these things? Is it that no one wants to actually talk about the substantive changes because they're not as interesting as talking about the problems?

All of these changes are real. Again, no police force in New York State comes close to having achieved these many reforms and they do matter. There's more coming. You're going to see it all and we'll present it all to the state. I think the Governor should take his personal feelings out of the situation and actually engage and respect the NYPD in the changes it's made and respect the fact that this administration from day one has been focused on change and reform.

Brian: Now, we are out of time and I know you have to go too. Thank you as always, Mr. Mayor. Talk to you next week.

Mayor de Blasio: Thank you, Brian. Take care.

 

 

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