Corey Johnson blasts ‘serious dysfunction’ in de Blasio administration
Mayor Bill de Blasio kept his head buried in the sand on Friday amid reports that his core leadership team on the pandemic that has killed more than 20,000 in the city had devolved into backstabbing and petty finger-pointing.
The mayor’s “See no evil, hear no evil” approach — evidenced in his terse, “I don’t know why I wasn’t informed, but I wasn’t informed” response to a question about backbiting among himself, Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, NYC Health + Hospitals CEO Mitchell Katz and NYPD Chief of Department Terence Monahan — was met with a sharp rebuke from Council Speaker Corey Johnson.
At an oversight hearing on City Hall’s response to the COVID-19 outbreak, a fed-up Johnson said, “New Yorkers deserve better.”
The speaker further decried the “serious dysfunction playing out behind the scenes” in the mayor’s office “at a time when New Yorkers desperately need to have confidence in their city government.”
“That confidence is being eroded daily by leaks and agency-vs.-agency infighting. The future of this city is literally hanging in the balance. Enough is enough,” Johnson fumed.
The speaker is probing de Blasio’s decision to put NYC Health + Hospitals, which runs the public hospital system, in charge of the city’s new coronavirus-testing program, instead of the Health Department, which has handled similar responsibilities in the past.
The mayor admitted at his daily coronavirus briefing on Friday that he hadn’t spoken to Dr. Barbot for a “couple of days,” and Dr. Katz acknowledged he hadn’t talked to her in three days. Barbot was not on the briefing call.
Meanwhile, Councilman Antonio Reynoso (D-Brooklyn) ripped into de Blasio at the oversight hearing for the communication breakdown.
“There is a public display of discontent of Barbot so much so that the mayor, during a pandemic, is not communicating on a daily basis with his leading health expert,” he said.
“Just thinking about that really scares me about what he is doing.”
On Wednesday, The Post exclusively reported on a heated exchange that erupted between Barbot and Monahan during a phone discussion in late March about getting surgical masks for cops as the coronavirus crisis mounted and infections started to spike in the NYPD’s ranks.
Monahan asked Barbot for 500,000 masks, but she said she could provide only 50,000, the sources said.
“I don’t give two rats’ asses about your cops,” Barbot told Monahan, according to sources. “I need them for others.”
On Friday, the mayor claimed ignorance, even though Monahan had told The New York Times that he immediately reported the confrontation to the mayor’s office and that Barbot called him to apologize.
“I don’t know why I wasn’t informed, but I wasn’t informed,” de Blasio said when asked by The Post about Monahan’s call.
Still, de Blasio knew enough about the dispute to intervene and get masks to the police.
De Blasio also claimed he hadn’t seen a photo of homeless men sleeping inches apart on the stairs of the Bellevue Men’s Shelter — even though The Post, NY1 and other outlets published the image online a day earlier and in print Friday.
Instead, he insisted his effort to get the homeless out of the subways during the pandemic was a “historic success.”
Councilwoman Carlina Rivera (D-Manhattan) lamented that the administration’s internecine warfare had spilled out into the public eye.
“I am disappointed that our two health-related agencies have had their infighting exposed in . . . media outlets,” Rivera said at Friday’s hearing.
“I am disappointed that the de Blasio administration decided that the middle of a pandemic was the best time to institute a bureaucratic reshuffling that potentially creates new and unnecessary obstacles for the critical, complicated and sensitive work of contact tracing.”
Councilman Ritchie Torres (D-Bronx) then ripped Katz for the city’s slow response to the pandemic.
“If we knew that there was a highly infectious virus that spreads widely and rapidly and has the potential to strike New York City with catastrophic consequences, if we knew that back in January, February or even March, why are we beginning the process of building a contact tracing team right now?” he said.
Katz defended the response, saying city health officials were “doing excellent contract tracing in February, March and onward.”
The city has just 200 contract tracers who map the spread of the virus among New Yorkers.
To reopen, the city will need to increase that number to 5,000 to 8,000, according to Dr. Ted Long, a Health + Hospitals executive who will be leading the massive tracing endeavor.
Additional reporting by Lorena Mongelli