Mayor de Blasio ditched the nuts-and-bolts of city governance during his State of the City speech on Tuesday, focusing instead on lofty rhetoric about preserving democracy and creating the fairest city in the country.
He ticked off 12 steps to make the city more fair — including a number of initiatives that have been operating for years — and 10 points to boost democracy, which he referred to as “our mission.”
“It is our mission to define what a fair and just society looks like… to take that quintessentially American egalitarian spirit and make it come alive again,” de Blasio said at the Kings Theatre in Crown Heights.
“We have to be keepers of that flame,” he added. “We, in fact, have to be the antidote to the sickness that is gripping our nation.”
On fairness, de Blasio cited ongoing efforts of neighborhood policing and building affordable housing, as well as a recent push to start public school at the age of 3.
He didn’t mention that full realization of the so-called 3-k initiative depends on hundreds of millions of state and federal dollars that have never been promised.
Other items intended to boost fairness are a tax on the wealthy the mayor pushed throughout 2017 without any luck, and the same jobs plan he announced during last year’s speech.
The mayor also committed to investing more resources in the city’s public housing authority, even as dozens of NYCHA residents protested a lack of investment that has led to frequent heat outages this winter.
“We’ve been fighting this battle for the last 10 years. It didn’t just start now,” Vernell Robinson, 55, of Carlton Manor Houses in Far Rockaway, told The Post prior to the mayor’s speech. “We want the people to know what state NYCHA is in. It’s not just freezing, we’re living in deplorable conditions.”
De Blasio’s plan for boosting democracy includes initiatives that are meant to make voting and running for office easier for city residents.
At one point during the 70-minute speech, a man heckled the mayor over his comments about working to make the city’s jails safer for correction officers and inmates, shouting “You gotta do more! You’re not doing enough!” before being escorted out.
At the start of the speech, de Blasio honored a host of municipal employees — including Joe Caggiano, the longest-serving sanitation worker.
He also honored NYPD Officer Ryan Nash, who shot and subdued a suspected terrorist who used a truck to mow down pedestrians on a bike path in Lower Manhattan on Halloween.
Public Advocate Tish James said de Blasio’s speech should have had more local flavor – addressing potholes in Queens ahead of lofty, national issues.
“[There was] a significant focus on national elections, I wanted to focus on local issues. I wanted to focus on what’s happening in Queens, I wanted to focus on what’s happening in Manhattan and Staten Island and The Bronx,” she said.
“I wanted to focus on potholes. We’ve got huge potholes in the city of New York, what are we doing about that? I wanted to focus on issues that every day New Yorkers care about and I didn’t hear enough about that.”