Eric Adams began his second year as mayor of New York City with his annual State of the City address, which outlined his so-called “Working People’s Agenda.” The address detailed proposals covering everything from public safety to housing and the economy. He then joined Errol for an interview, highlighting some core issues and discussing where things stand with public housing and Rikers Island.

After that, Katie Honan, reporter for the news organization The City and co-host of the “FAQ NYC” podcast, sat down with Errol for a look at how Adams’ address compared to those of previous mayors. And they talked about what we should expect from the Adams administration in 2023. The conversation also touched on the relationship between Gov. Kathy Hochul and Adams, the current state of public housing, and the mayor’s new newsletter and podcast.

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NY1’s Errol Louis has been interviewing powerful politicians and cultural icons for years, but it’s when the TV cameras are turned off that things really get interesting. From career highlights, to personal moments, to stories that have never been told, join Errol each week for intimate conversations with the people who are shaping the future of New York and beyond. Listen to "You Decide with Errol Louis" every Wednesday, wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Note: Below is a full transcript of the episode. The following is a transcription from a third-party service. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases, it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Errol Louis Welcome to You Decide. I’m your host, Errol Louis. Eric Adams is starting his second year as mayor of New York City. He recently delivered his annual State of the City address from the Queens Theater in Flushing Meadows, Corona Park. He outlined what he called the Working People’s Agenda. The address covered everything from crime to the housing crisis to the economy a whole lot more. There was a little bit of attention paid to the migrant crisis, which has been top of mind for the city for quite a while now. The speech was notable for the appearance of none other than the sitting governor of New York, Kathy Hochul was there. We all scrambled and looked back in our history books. I do not know, I don’t think any of the last four governors ever showed up at the State of the City address. Paterson? No. Andrew Cuomo? Of course not. Spitzer, I don’t think he had enough time. He never showed up. Pataki? Across three terms. I don’t think he ever showed up. It’s not done. Anyway, Kathy Hochul did it. It showed the strength of the bond between the governor and the mayor. We’re going to get into the politics of that in a little bit. And then the day after the State of the City, the mayor sat down with me for an exclusive interview. We touched on the speech. We talked about a couple of other items. So let’s summarize all of this and let’s go through it. I thought this would be a good time to take a look at where the mayor is standing and what’s going to happen as he goes into his second year. With me for the discussion is somebody who knows City Hall as well as anybody and better than most. Katie Honan has covered our mayors for a long time now. She’s a reporter for The City News Organization and a co-host of one of my favorite podcasts, FAQ NYC. Good to see you, Katie. 

Katie Honan Thanks for that great introduction, wow it’s very nice.

Errol Louis I’m a fan of FAQ and not just because you used my voice in your introduction, but that doesn’t hurt, does it? Let’s listen. I spoke to the mayor after his speech. You can find his speech online if you really want to listen to the whole thing. I think it ran about 90 minutes or something, but I talked to him the following day and we chatted for about 15 minutes or so. Here’s what we had to talk about. And then out there on the other side, Katie and I will do some analysis. 

Errol Louis Let me ask you about your state of the city speech. It was my general impression, Mr. Mayor, that you were focusing on nitty gritty details of city management, like expanding the composting program, providing better health screening for people living in the city’s homeless shelters, that kind of a thing. Are you consciously trying to make that your brand, city operations? 

Mayor Adams: Actually, and that’s a great question, Errol, because it is not small items. It is items, when you do them upstream, they don’t turn into big items downstream. People often ask, “What is your signature issue like pre-K?” Dyslexia screening. 30 percent to 40 percent of our inmates are dyslexic in jail. 80 percent don’t have a high school diploma or equivalency diploma, so it seems like small items, but they’re not. These are the major feeders to the crises that we faced. And yes, we have some big ticket items that we are facing. Our composting program, 13 million pounds of waste that we are taking out of our sites into where we dump our garbage. That’s an amazing accomplishment and that’s for only a three month period. And so when you do an analysis of what we are rolling out, you’ll see it’s an upstream approach so that we don’t have these downstream problems. 

Errol Louis: Okay. I will tell you today I downloaded my app and I looked at the local composting gadget that popped up on Franklin Avenue. I may start making some use of it. Let me ask you about something that did come up in the state of the city speech where I just wasn’t clear on it. You said that the two biggest ride hailing companies, Uber and Lyft, were going to be emissions-free on a pretty aggressive schedule. I think by 2030, you said. And you said that you would require them. Require sounds like a mandate, like you have some kind of a hook, a regulatory or legal hook to compel them to do this. But you also said that they were either not opposed or they were in favor of it. I just wanted some clarity on that. 

Mayor Adams: Well, first of all, look at what we are talking about. A hundred thousand vehicles are going to go electric, and when you add that to our fleet going electric, when you add that to our schools, new schools going electric, there’s something there. We are really aggressively moving in the right direction. And yes, Uber and Lyft, they have agreed to it. We didn’t have to use a legislative model to get this to accomplish that. That was something that we will always sit down and do if people don’t want to move forward, but we’re excited about the fact that they realize that electric vehicles, clean environment is a thing for the future and we’re excited to get this done. 

Errol Louis: Okay. Look, if you’re saying we’re going to have enough charging stations to service a fleet of a hundred thousand cars in the next seven years, that’s a pretty big deal. 

Mayor Adams: Yes. But it’s something else we’re saying. To have electric charging stations, that’s just fixing one problem. I’m a believer of one solution should fix multiple problems. That’s why we have what’s called BlocPower. This is an organization that trained formally justice-involved young people to install and fix those electric charging stations. That’s a win-win for me, and that’s how we like to get things done. 

Louis: Okay. We shall see. You and Governor Hochul spoke today about the 16 percent decline in subway crime since October. The take home message, if I understand it right, is that fewer than two serious incidents are happening per 1 million rides and that that’s a level of safety that you and the governor and the chair of the MTA are saying riders or the general public should find that to be reasonable, not perfect, but reasonable and manageable. 

Mayor Adams: No, not at all. It’s not reasonable to me. I’m not going to be happy until we don’t have any crimes, particularly felony crimes. We have an average of six felony crimes a day with 3.9 million riders. We want to get down to zero. I want New Yorkers to know that we are going to do everything that’s possible to accomplish that. That’s when we are happy. That’s when we can spike the ball. But let’s be clear on this. The customer satisfaction survey says it all. I’ve said it for the longest that it is not only what we do statistically and safety with the numbers, but how do New Yorkers feel? That customer satisfactory survey of satisfaction or extremely satisfied jumped 18 percentage. Think about that for a moment. In such a short period of time, that’s what I call moving in the right direction. 

Errol Louis: And that’s a good measure, but those people swiping their Metrocard is also a pretty good measure. People are using it. I have noticed that the trains are more crowded these days. People seem to be voting with their feet and their Metrocards. 

Mayor Adams: Yes, without a doubt. And I use the trains often and you know New Yorkers — they are not shy about giving you their opinion. And that is what our state of the city address was about. It was from a year of hearing from New Yorkers. We lean into housing, jobs, care and safety. That’s what I heard over and over. That’s a working-class person’s agenda and that’s what we’re going to improve on. We were successful in Albany. Our theme is, “We got it for you. Now we have to get it to you.” That’s how you make things successful. 

Errol Louis: Okay. Let me ask you an Albany question by the way. You repeatedly praised Governor Hochul. It’s very unusual that the governor even showed up at a state of the city address. She’s in the middle of a pretty tough fight with the state Senate over her choice for who should be the chief judge of New York. I was wondering if you have an opinion about whether Hector LaSalle should be approved and if you could even take yourself back to your state Senate days, would you vote with your conference and its leadership or would you make a different kind of assessment of his candidacy? 

Mayor Adams: I was impressed by his record. I was impressed by how he rose to the level of the judiciary that he rose to. I think that it should go to the Senate floor. Let’s have the debate on the floor. That is what I enjoyed about being in the Senate. You will debate these issues. You will give your colleagues an opportunity to vote or which way they believe it should go. I think it should go to the floor and I’m hoping that we can find a way to allow the full Senate to vote for it. 

Errol Louis: Okay. Does that mean... Because it doesn’t necessarily mean he would be approved. Are you saying you want to make sure that there’s a floor vote or are you hoping the vote will be one of approval? 

Mayor Adams: Well, I think that when you allow the vote to go to the floor, you find out some of the conversations you had within the committee. I think that those senators that want to vote on behalf of the judge can make that determination. I’ve found his record to be extremely impressive. I believe he served well as a judge and I think that we should have an opportunity to air out what are the things that people feel are against voting for him and those things that people feel are positive. And I think it should go to the floor to be voted on by the entire body. 

Errol Louis: Okay, so sounds like you would be a yes if you were back in the Senate. Let me ask you about a different legal question. Has the corporation counsel or anybody else on your staff given you a reading on whether or not the arriving migrants do indeed fall under the existing right to shelter that is New York law? 

Mayor Adams: Well, and they’ll do that. We’ve had several conversations and the corp counsel will deal with all the legal aspects of it. I am clear on what I believe and the corporation counsel would defend any position that we take. I think that when our creators of the right to shelter law, clearly, they did not anticipate 3,000 coming in one week, 800 in one day, 42,000 in such a short period of time. And I think we need to really analyze that. And keep in mind, everyone that has arrived here received the same level of fairness and treatment. We don’t have people sleeping on the streets. I was in El Paso, Texas where people are sleeping on the streets, sleeping in airports. I see what’s happening across the country. We have addressed the needs of everyone that came here. Not only for beds, Errol, we also give them healthcare, food, clothing, educating over 11,000 children. We’re doing our share. It’s time for the national government to step up. And the corporation counsel will make the determination if we have to in any way litigate this issue. 

Errol Louis: As a practical matter, would you really even be able to when a bunch of people show up at the intake center on the East Side for example? Would you really, as a practical matter, be able to ask them a set of questions and say, “Okay, you wait on this line and other people go to this line depending on what the source of your homelessness is?” 

Mayor Adams: No. And that’s why we have a blanket policy that we treat everyone fairly. That’s what we do. But if you have busloads coming in, if you have 3,000... I am concerned that if the border reopens the way it was previously, we can see anywhere from 2,000 to 3,000 people can come into the city. How do we practically ensure in a short period of time that they’re going to be inside a bed somewhere. We may lose one or two of them, so we don’t want to be accused of violating the spirit of making sure that New Yorkers and those who come to this city are treated fairly. And that’s what we’ve done with over 42,000 people that have come to this city. The city has stepped up. It’s time for the national government to do its job, comprehensive immigration reform and deal with the immediate crises that cities like New York are facing. 

Errol Louis:I want to go back to your state of the city speech and talk about something you didn’t include, and I know that always drives people crazy. You got a lot of applause about the speech. It was a great speech, you touched on a lot of things, and I do want to ask you about some of the ticking time bombs that are going to end up in your inbox sooner or later. One of them is at the housing authority, the New York City Housing Authority, where it’s been reported that people are behind on their rent or that unpaid rent that’s not necessarily going to be compensated at the federal level is over $400 million. I think the number is $443 million. It’s a third of the agency’s budget. Is there a plan to deal with that and is eviction and possibly even mass eviction, is that off the table as a solution? 

Mayor Adams: Well, first, we must get leadership over at NYCHA. As you know, Greg Russ has departed. We want to put in place a chair and put in place someone that’s leading there. Leadership matters. And, no, we’re not going to look at mass eviction. That would only aggravate the problem. It is imperative that — NYCHA and authorities and the city and federal government — we all come together and deal with this major crisis for public housing. We’ve invested in public housing, as you know. We invested over $23 billion in our housing plan. First time NYCHA has ever been mentioned in the overall housing plan. I know how important it is for those 400,000 residents in NYCHA, and we are not going to allow mass evictions of those who are in public housing. 

Errol Louis: Are you going to give a mandate to whoever is the next CEO of the agency to do something about this wave of unpaid bills that are going to cripple the budget of the agency? 

Mayor Adams: Yes. We’re going to do the same thing anytime people get into fiscal restraints due to the impact of Covid. There are ways to put people on payment plans. There’s ways to go to our federal government and get the assistance. Our congressional delegation, they have been real partners, Senator Schumer and Congressman Jeffries, the minority leader, and all of our congressional delegation. They’re going to look at this and, as a team, we’re going to come together and come up with a real resolution so we don’t have mass evictions in our public housing stock. 

Errol Louis: Okay. And, Mr. Mayor, the other big ticking time bomb that’s going to end up in your inbox, of course, is Rikers Island. By law, that central jail model is supposed to end in 2027. Your Corrections commissioner has suggested that the count though may be going up and there’s always this open question about what happens to people who really belong in a hospital and not necessarily in confinement. Do you think that 2027 date is realistic and do you plan to try and meet it? 

Mayor Adams: Well, I say over and over again, my plan is to fulfill the legal responsibilities that’s associated with closing Rikers, but I’m never going to do anything that’s going to impact public safety. And if we’re already at over 5,000 population and the predicted amount for borough based jails is a little over 3,000, those numbers just don’t add up. There should have been a plan A and a plan B that if we don’t reach the right prison population, how do we respond? One of the big problems that we are facing is the bottleneck of our court system. No one should be on Rikers for the long period of times people are on Rikers, and then we need to be honest about those that shouldn’t be there in the first place, particularly dealing with mental health issues. Close to 48 percent of the people on Rikers Island are dealing with mental health issues. They need service and care, not incarceration. 

Errol Louis: Okay. I mean, it sounds like if you got 48 percent out of that 5,000, you’d be right in the zone where you could close the place down, right? 

Mayor Adams: That’s right. And that’s why we have to do it right and we need to shift people to the care that they need to make sure that they’re receiving care and not incarceration. 

Errol Louis: Okay. In our last minute, I don’t want us to part without talking a little bit about wellness. I wanted you to give my viewers a quick scan of your day, in particular, how you fit meals into your workday. Are you a sandwich-at-the-desk kind of guy? I mean, from your book it said that that’s what got you in trouble in the first place before you had to change around a lot of your habits. 

Mayor Adams: Well, you know what it is? That’s my next book. I’m going to show people creative ways to get body movement into their day. People think exercise means a gym membership or having to run around the track, and it’s not true. Getting that standing desk, getting off the train one stop before your stop and taking a nice walk, walking upstairs sometimes, finding ways to eat healthy, good tasting food, starting that day with a smoothie. It’s unbelievable how it carries you into lunch. And so there’s so many hidden secrets on how to have a balanced diet and a balanced lifestyle, and you feel so much better after it. I’m now into deep breathing. I’m a whim huff guy, and breathing is a powerful tool that people should utilize as well. Health is wealth and I want a healthy and wealthy city. 

Errol Louis: Okay, don’t take time for the book. Come on and talk about it with us, but we’ll have to do that another time. Thanks a lot for joining us, Mr. Mayor. 

Mayor Adams: Thank you. Take care. 

Errol Louis We’ll be right back with Katie Honan to talk more about Mayor Eric Adams. 

Errol Louis So that was our discussion, and Katie, the mayor really did in his speech, focus on sort of nitty gritty details. In my conversation just now, though, he made it sound as if the small details give you a big outcome. Big bang for the buck. That’s what we want from government, right? We want them to do small, seemingly small things to leverage big outcomes. Is that an excuse or is that a philosophy? Because this is considerably different than what mayors normally do. 

Katie Honan  Right. And I know he said in his conversation with you that we just heard, people ask, what is your signature thing? You know, with Bill de Blasio, it was universal pre-K. And with Mayor Adams, I think he is trying to bring what he thinks, what he’s called efficiency. I mean, he calls his get stuff done, which is now, I think at this point in the year to it, it’s only a matter of time till it really gets played out, hearing it constantly. But he wants to make government work better for the people here. He’s talked about this again, my city portal that’s delayed, that would be a one stop thing for everything you want. I know other cities have it like Chicago, pay our parking tickets, pay your water bill, all in one app. These little things that I think really affect people’s lives. He’s obsessed with rats, which is funny when you hear him talk constantly about rats. But that gets to this larger issue of trash on the street. People see garbage piles. People see just general dirtiness, and they don’t like that. It affects the quality of life and the perception of a city in decline. And that’s the city that the mayor inherited, right? Coming out of the COVID 19 pandemic. And what are the issues? And there’s huge issues, a deadly pandemic, for one, rising crime rates in certain categories, and then you also have these small issues as well, the things that were getting ignored during the pandemic. 

Errol Louis All of that is right on point. I mean, look, you say rats, those of us who have to kill the rats in and around our buildings or on our block, I’m with it, you know, I mean, I’m I’m a soldier in that army, no problem. By contrast, though, I went back and looked, Katie, at Mike Bloomberg’s first State of the City address. You know, the mayors of New York are sworn in on January 1st and then, you know, that first month or so that doesn’t really count. But after a year, they come in with what is, in effect, their real first State of the City address. And when Bloomberg did that, which would have been in 2003, he announced a number of megaprojects, which we now know with hindsight, actually came about and he announced the launch of the 311 phone system that was about to happen, which is really now the front door for citizen interactions with city government. He announced the merger of the Departments of Correction and Probation. That might seem like a small thing, but it’s kind of meaningful. Jail and probation are sort of related. And he also announced that he was going to extend the subway system to the far West Side, which is never done. A first time in, I think in 60 years that the city spent its own money to try and extend the subway system. That’s pretty big stuff. And that’s the kind of contrast that I was thinking of when I was talking with the mayor, is that for Mayor Adams, it’s like, are you going to promise a something big? You know, he’s talked about composting, universal composting. That’s a pretty big deal.

Katie Honan Over the next 18 months, I think. But yeah. 

 

Errol Louis Yeah, I actually used one of those compost bins the other day, you know, took all the smelly garbage around the corner and stuck it in there. It’s a good and necessary thing. Yes, it is a good, I mean, but here again, de Blasio, his first State of the City. So now this is January 2015. He talks about, you know, slumlords and combating economic inequality, raising the minimum wage and stuff like that. But he also announces that the administration is going to create an independent inter-borough ferry system that’s not part of the MTA. And, you know, by God, he went ahead and did it. He also announced, I mean, this never happened, but he was going to build a gigantic co-op city style development he wanted to do by decking over the Sunnyside Yards, which is about 200 acres in Queens. Right. 

Katie Honan And that’s I think that still is in some sort of planning stages. So maybe Eric Adams could push that along at some point. 

Errol Louis I mean. 

Katie HonanThere’s still talk of it at least. 

Errol Louis Then Governor Andrew Cuomo pronounced it dead on arrival, that afternoon, the mayor talked about it that day, and later on they were like, no, we have other plans for that, forget it. It was going to be 11,250 affordable apartments. But talk about that contrast between the grandiose schemes, whether realistic or not, you know, new ferry system, extend the 7 line, deck over 200 acres and create a city within the city. And, you know, the mayor, you know, we have the current mayor and he’s like, I’m going to pick up the garbage and kill the rats. 

Katie Honan Well, and I think to his speech, the major things that he discussed and it had already been discussed, the development of Willets Point, for example, it’s part of the mayor’s housing plan. He calls it a moonshot number of half, 500,000 units of housing. That number, it’s complicated as to how they came up with it. If we change these regulations, then we’ll have a better opportunity to make it easier to build housing, and time is money and that kind of thing. But,he had mentioned it weeks before the State of the City, and then he just mentioned it again in the State of the City and even the Willets Point project, part of that had already been announced under de Blasio. The new part for Mayor Adams was the soccer stadium and the additional units of housing. And even in his speech, he sort of teased to a lot of things as well, or it’s like, stay tuned, I’ll have more. He had a big women’s speech a few weeks ago where there was truly no news at all. You know, they brought a lot of people. They had a baby there. They had all this stuff. But the news of it was, we’re going to convene a panel on menopause and we’re going to make this a menopause friendly administration and city. How do you do that? By talking about it. That’s what he really said. You know, this was also where he talked about other things that become viral things because he’s talking about sexual health and how we should reduce the stigma by talking about it. But are there actual solid plans there? Some would argue that the city’s sort of inflexible work from home policy does not help women at all, and especially working moms and that kind of thing. So a lot of that speech that we sat through in the theater last week, it was stuff that he’s sort of already announced and stuff that he might expound upon later on. But for now, that’s it. You know, I was trying to think back to what he said at his speech last year at the King’s Theater, which was delayed because of Omicron and that kind of stuff. And I could not remember what he said. And I felt and I sat through it. 

Errol Louis There were no. Right, right, right. You were there. There were no big promises. I mean, again, it’s striking. And I don’t know. I mean, we’ll discover in the fullness of time. I mean, when I ask him, hey, what’s your big plan? And he says dyslexia screening, because it’s going to affect all kinds of different things and, you know, lower the jail population some day and so forth and so on. Okay. I mean, if that’s it, that’s it. By the way, when he talks about a moonshot number, any time I hear moonshot, a little a little alarm bell goes off for me, in part because I happen to be older than you, Katie Honan, when John F. Kennedy announced, you know, ‘we will go to the moon this decade’, politicians in particular, the public in general, I think take that to mean that he spoke that program into existence, right.? But it’s like, no, there were thousands of engineers and major coordination between government and private industry. And I think in modern dollars, upwards of $200 billion that was invested in the race to the moon. So it wasn’t the speech that did it. The modern equivalent, of course, is that, you know, I think we’ve had four consecutive presidents: Bill Clinton, George Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump. They’ve all said we’re going to go to Mars. 

Katie Honan Yeah, why?

Errol Louis Because John F. Kennedy spoke the landing on the moon into existence and they wanted something big and grand so they could get a little of that magic dust on them. I mean, that’s really what it is. I mean, I actually interviewed Neil deGrasse Tyson about this, and he’s like, listen, this is not like the Wright Brothers times a billion miles, right? I mean, it’s a whole different level of difficulty here. 

Katie Honan Well, it’s funny you mentioning the, you know, the thousands of NASA engineers doing the work and JFK is just talking about it. I think the real problem within city government is the lack of staffing in some agencies to get all the stuff done right from housing production. You look at HPD and their staffing numbers are incredibly low. You look at not so much sanitation because they seem to be fully staffed, but there are a lot of issues. And of course, the mayor’s not going to mention that. And in trying to make working for the city enticing to people, I don’t know if he’s ready to actually take a hard look at some of his policies and what are the issues that people find, You know, because there is, a mass exodus s an exaggeration and this is a workforce of three hundred thousand people. And maybe you could argue that Bill de Blasio made the city’s workforce too high and now it’s just rightsizing. But those are continued problems, we saw it with the preliminary budget. All these things that the mayor wants to do, it requires people. And even if you’re requiring agencies to reduce the budget on the backs of reducing staff. I asked Jacques Jiha this and he said, well, I mean, those jobs weren’t getting filled anyway, so we’ll just cut them, they reduced the number of vacancies in half. But those are jobs that could eventually institute programs and institute things that are, even if they’re on the small level, what the mayor wants to do. 

Errol Louis  Well, I’ll tell you what, if they’re going to right size the workforce and the headcount by not filling certain jobs or just demising certain positions, they’re going to also have to rightsize their mayor’s management report, because the metrics that are published, and for those who don’t know, the mayor’s management report is mandated by city law under the city charter. And the agencies all have to sort of put out what their metrics are going to be. How do you judge us? And, you know, and it just goes from place to place to place, like with the fire department, it’s response time when there’s a 911 call, with the Agency for Children Services, it’s the number of cases that are resolved successfully in corrections. It’s the number of violent attacks. And so there are all kinds of different metrics. You cannot make those numbers. I mean, we’re already seeing it. You mentioned HPD. I took a look at the Buildings department. The preliminary mayor’s management report just came out and they’re falling behind on their inspections and they’re falling behind on getting approval for major and. Minor renovation projects that require city approval. You know, at some point you’re going to have to say, well, this is the new normal because we’re not hiring these people back and we’re going to do less with less, not more with less or even equivalent with less. 

Katie Honan Right. What the mayor wants to do and he prides himself on being a detail- oriented manager. And I think when he says that, it almost feels like a dig at Bill de Blasio, whose main argument people had for him was he really wasn’t interested in the job. He had national ambitions. He wanted to do all this other stuff. He wanted to talk about books or whatever on Morning Joe. But Mayor Adams is not really being, I think, open and honest, not honest in that he’s lying to us, but I don’t think he’s fully understanding the staffing issue. You just hear it from staffers. The morale is low. How do you get morale high? I don’t know. I mean, it’s difficult. I’ve never been a manager. And there was that adjustment of going back to the office in whatever capacity it was. But I think that is something that is a looming issue within city government. 

Errol Louis Well, there are a lot of these looming issues. The Lyft and Uber thing, I think this is a really big deal, this question of electrifying 100,000 cars. I didn’t follow closely, but Lyft and Uber are publicly traded and this would be, I think it’s got to be by far the biggest initiative of its kind anywhere in the world. These are both global companies. And I was I was really surprised to hear the mayor just say, well, yeah, they agreed to do it. And I’m thinking it’s like, really? Are they joking with City Hall?  Maybe this is going to happen. 

Katie Honan But they don’t own the cars. It’s not like electrifying city buses, right? This is a fleet of cars that are owned by the contractors who work for Lyft and Uber and who often complain about the way that Lyft and Uber don’t pay them as much or are flooding the system so there’s always cars, but it’s to the detriment of the drivers. I don’t know how that is going to work, and when they instituted that cap, people rushed to get their licenses. They’re using their privately owned cars. I don’t know, and I should probably look more into this, but I don’t know if Lyft and Uber even gives you some sort of stipend or anything to a driver. 

Errol Louis No, my impression is that they were either facilitating or otherwise making possible these private loans by which these guys were going in hock to get the cars. And that’s why you see so many Toyota Camrys right now, because it’s like a cheap, sturdy car that will probably last close to five years, in which time, you know, you can it’s time to lease another one. The numbers have got to change, though. If you’re talking about like a Tesla or a Kia, you know, I mean, if you’re bumping it up now to like a $60,000 car, $70,000 car, I don’t think you can do that with Uber driver money. 

Katie Honan No. And then you’ve noted, too, where are you going to have the charging stations? It’s not like people are going to install these things in their homes. They don’t, maybe they don’t have single family homes with driveways and there’s certain neighborhoods. I know in my neighborhood, I have a lot of TLC licensed drivers, whether they’re Uber, Lyft or Green or Yellow Cabs. There’s not. 

Errol Louis Going to stash these. 

Katie Honan Be in Woodside, Queens. There’s you know, you have to drive them to a garage. You know, we as reporters should look more into what is actually going to happen and what it’s going to look like. 

Errol Louis   once interviewed the CEO of Uber. He came all the way into Crown Heights to open up this like a drivers relief center, you know, where they could go and like have a cup of coffee or sit down for a little bit or talk to people about administrative problems. They had. They closed that place up a long time ago. So, yeah, I don’t know if I’m going to get them back here, but you know what I may ask them. Maybe I’ll ask one of these drivers. I take Uber quite a bit, so maybe I’ll ask one of these guys like, you know, what’s. Yeah, what’s the story here? 

Katie Honan Yeah, I always talk to my Uber drivers and when they always give me the nitty gritty of what’s going on, it’s purely anecdotal, but I always just talk to them. 

Errol Louis Yeah, yeah, yeah. Your news organization clearly doesn’t have a ban on quoting taxi drivers. I think the Associated Press used to actually have that. 

Katie Honan Why? 

Errol Louis Because it’s such B.S., right? I mean, how many, how many, especially overseas, how many foreign correspondents have you seen with conveniently on-target comments from an anonymous cab driver? Oh, yeah. In some part of the world that nobody can audit or double check or anything like that name. 

Katie Honan Out in the city. You know, and my colleague, former NY1 colleague of yours, Jose, when he talks to them, they’re on the record at least. 

Errol Louis Yeah, I’ve seen too many of these. Again, it’s suspiciously lazy where they’re going from there. You know, they’re four-star hotel to the airport and the perfect quote rolls out of the mouth of some anonymous cab driver. Anyway, one of the other things that stood out for me is this question of the mayor weighing in on Kathy Hochul political problem. She’s really still in the middle of it. It’s by no means resolved trying to name the next chief judge of the state. This is a power that the governor allegedly has according to the law, but it has gotten really fouled up. She nominated a man, a judge, Hector LaSalle, who was rejected by a committee of the state Senate. The state Senate now says that they won’t take it up. The mayor says that’s. Right. They all ought to vote on it. That’s an opinion. While it sounds like sort of neutral, like, hey, sounds like, you know, like, why don’t you give them a hearing that’s really sort of taking the governor’s side in all of this? 

Katie Honan Really? Yeah. It’s not like he’s encouraging people to vote on Election Day. He’s encouraging the governors, extending this what has been a major political problem for her and their legislators, who say even if you take to the floor vote, it’s all going to pass. If this certainly ends right, if they pull it completely, then she has to just find another judge to nominate. And that is a large problem. I kind of didn’t know why the mayor even responded or brought it up. And he I don’t know if. 

Errol Louis It’s my expert questioning. 

Katie Honan That’s why. Yeah, because you goaded him. 

Errol Louis We squeezed it out of it. Yes. 

Katie Honan Right. But what he gets out of it, I don’t know. Is it political? Does Governor Hochul need Eric Adams more than like, who needs her more right? Politically? Obviously, Mayor Adams wants changes to the bail law, but that ultimately really isn’t on Governor Hochul. Maybe he wants state money from Governor Hochul for the migrants. But again, I always try to see I think Kathy Hochul maybe politically needs Eric Adams more than the other way around. 

Errol Louis Well, I think the mayor needs a couple of billion dollars from Albany. So that in itself might answer the whole question. The governor did show up again, unlike her four or five immediate predecessors, I think, in part because she does need a little political support. And Eric Adams, at least in my conversation, seems to have begun to deliver that. Right. I mean, to sort of say, you know, look, it’s the governor’s choice. You’ve got to treat it with some respect. You don’t just like give it to some committee and then say, you know, stack, the committee voted down in committee and then say, the hell with it. We’re not going to vote on it. You know, we shall see. I think there’s also an element, though, of this has become a one more item in the bill of particulars, this growing issue of Latino empowerment that a lot of the Latino officials in particular have said requires some attention. You know, their point being there are no citywide elected officials who are Latino, no statewide elected officials, nobody senior in the hierarchy of the state Democratic Party. And this is one more slap in the face when it comes to that question. 

Katie Honan Yeah, and there are certainly Latino elected officials who are opposed to LaSalle, but the group really pushing for him, they kind of galvanize behind this idea of this is an element of racism, whether it’s outright racism or less noticeable racism. Why is this qualified Latino man not getting confirmed over? You know, and I wasn’t covering it, so I did not read his court decisions. But I know people who did. There were mixed feelings on how he went in some court decisions and his role in a lot of it. But it really came down to that. But then you hear from you know, I’ve heard from sources who said they told Governor Hochul and this had been reported in other publications as well. They said, okay, we’re cool with everyone, just not Hector LaSalle. So it makes me think politically, who’s Kathy Hochul listening to that she went forward with this in the first place. If it seemed from the minute she even mentioned his name, it was dead in the water. You know, and you could point back to a couple of months ago who was kind of running her campaign. There seemed to be a lot of issues there that have continued as she’s sworn in as governor. Who’s running her campaign? Who is she talking to and who’s she listening to? It was a really last-minute thing when she seemed to realize, oh, I’m in trouble, like Lee Zeldin might run away with this. And when you look at the data on voting, who is the Democratic Party losing? And it is Latino voters, it is Asian voters. So there’s a clear problem with this party that maybe took them for granted in terms of who they thought, Oh, that neighborhood, it’s predominantly Hispanic. We’re going to get them and then it doesn’t happen. 

Errol Louis Well, the outcome of the election certainly gave people a lot of reasons to rethink some basic assumptions about what is the Latino vote. Frankly, it’s getting more varied by the day. Right. 

Katie Honan You know, I think it’s horrible to ever assume any person, based on who they are or where they live or even who they voted for four years ago or two years ago to assume that they’re going to go one way or the other when you’re not listening to them and seeing, you know, what’s different about 2022. A lot has changed between 2018 and 2022 different circumstances, different city, different people on the ballot. So you can’t always presume they’re going to vote for you. 

Errol Louis  Well, and now to the mix. The governor who thought she on some level may have been trying to make some outreach to Latino leadership by promoting Hector LaSalle. And now they’ve got a bit of a mess on their hands. They’re going to have to figure out whether they want to press forward, whether they want to take the state senate to court, whether they want to, by legal means, force a floor vote that they might not win. Right. I mean, I could easily see that as an outcome. Right. She fights and fights and fights. She wins what she wants, which is a vote of the full Senate. And then, you know, either the Republicans don’t come to her aid or she just loses the vote flat out. 

Katie Honan Yeah. To lose two votes seems bad. And I think I thought part of what politicians do is they have a team of people who count the votes. Right. Even if it comes off as a little bit of a threatening way. But you see who’s really on your side and I don’t think she ever really knew who she definitely knew who wasn’t on her side because they were very vocal about it. But I thought that was sort of one of the basic premises of being an elected official. 

Errol Louis Well, I believe she came within a vote of getting him out of the committee. So she was in the ballpark. She just didn’t win that part of the game. I mean, let me bring up a couple of other things. The mayor has a number of what I call ticking time bombs. And it’s not a nice analogy, so maybe I should find something else. But he’s got some stuff piling up in his inbox. And those things are not simple or easy to fix. And yet there they are. So, you know, the first among them is Rikers Island. Right. I mean, it’s a mess. You know, talk about the numbers. You’ll get the mayor’s management report and like, you know, stabbings and all kinds of other bad stuff are going up, even as the mayor is threatened with having the whole system taken away from him. And, you know, they’re putting a lot of time and effort into it. Does he need to weigh in on it? There’s one theory that says that Bill de Blasio made a mistake by making Rikers a big prominent issue because there’s nothing you can do with the jail, even if it’s the absolute right thing. There’s nothing you can do that’s going to make everybody happy. 

Katie Honan  And the contrast between the way Mayor de Blasio discussed Rikers Island and Mayor Adams is really stark, in that part of Mayor de Blasio’s plan was reducing the population at Rikers, detainees there. And then once you reach a certain number, then you can close it, because then you can move to these smaller borough-based jails. Mayor Adams seems to have, I mean, not completely abandoned it because there’s legal loopholes that I think there was even the council bill that prohibited after a certain time any kind of jail facility being on Rikers Island. 

Errol Louis That’s the closure plan 2027. 

Katie Honan So by 2027. But Mayor Adams’ approach and he’s a former police officer, and, you know, people say, well, he’s a cop, this is how he’s going to act. But his approach to the detainees there is so different than Mayor de Blasio’s was. I interviewed him for The City for a sort of year in review. And he said to me that if you’re on Rikers Island, you’re a bad person, which is so false because you haven’t, I don’t know the exact percentages, but it’s a high percentage of people haven’t been convicted of anything. They’re just detainees there. And a lot of cases they can’t make bail. But that is his mentality there. And from the start, he’s been much more supportive of the correction officers who he appointed as a correction officer, the commissioner of D.O.C., and he’s been on Rikers Island where he has completely supported the correction officers in a way that for eight years Bill de Blasio didn’t. And he has asked for what he’s called a plan B on this Rikers Island closure. Obviously, the construction on these roadways, jails is continuing in lower Manhattan. I’ve seen in them in lower Manhattan, in Queens. I haven’t been over by where the Brooklyn spot is going to be or the Bronx, but that is moving forward. Oh, sure. So I don’t know what Mayor Adams is thinking when he’s asking for a plan B, because sometimes they think it might be a little bit late. 

Errol Louis Well, I mean, like I asked him, I mean, he gave the answer even as he was telling me why they couldn’t do it. Right. You know, he says, well, the count is up to 5000 and, you know, we’ve got problems. And so, you know, the assumption behind closure was that we would have the numbers down to about 3000 or 3500. And he says, you know, 48% of them are mentally ill. And I’m thinking this is the solution right there. If 48% of them belong in a mental hospital or some kind of medical facility and not Rikers Island, well, let’s take that 48% out of 5000. And there we are. We’re right around 3000. And closure can proceed. I mean, now, look, I’m I’m a little biased here. I thought Plan A was pretty good, which was just get the juveniles off the island, get the mentally ill off the island, get the people who are actually serving a sentence of a year or less, send them upstate or to one of the nearby, you know, Fishkill or someplace. And then that leaves you about 3000 people who should be in borough- based facilities and you close the island. And that was the logic by which the vote was taken to close. So when people start rewriting history, oh, you know, the numbers are going up. It’s like, well, yeah, the numbers will always go up if you go and grab every mentally ill person who’s acting out on the street and take them to Rikers Island. Yeah, the numbers will, will the numbers will go up. I thought we all agreed, though, that that’s not the right place for them. 

Katie Honan And it actually then makes me all this talk about especially people with mental illness, thinking of the mayor, his plan that was a bit controversial when he rolled it out. He was very upset at the media coverage of it. But I would argue, you know, it’s a very nuanced and complicated process, discussing the mentally ill and what you do with people who are not well and out on the street and could be a danger to themselves and others. It’s very complicated and it wasn’t really explained to us properly. You know, you can’t really explain that. Well, in a rotunda, the rotunda of city hall. But the question of here’s the moonshot, right? We have these moonshot dreams for every single person who needs it should have access to safe and healthy mental health care, whether it’s a treatment program, outpatient in-patient, whether it’s a therapist that you have for 15 years of your life, where you develop a relationship and actually work on these things, if you are given the correct cocktail of medication that can put you in a baseline that you could be much better than you are without it. But that unfortunately is not the reality. And in a city as big as New York City, you know, one of the criticisms of that plan was the mayor wanted to get groups of people to do outreach with the mentally ill and bring them into facilities, but there’s just not the number of beds for it. And that’s what you say. You know, if you have however many percentage of people on Rikers Island should actually be getting treatment elsewhere. Sure. That’s not you know, and my my colleague, Reuvan Blau, he wrote with Graham Raymon from The Daily News, this book about Rikers Island. You just read about how horrific it is there. And if you’re someone who is already experiencing homelessness, if you are poor, if you have mental health challenges going to Rikers Island, you’re not coming off that island better than when you when you left. And then it becomes a cycle. You all want everyone to have access to be safe and warm and have everything that they need. But the brutal reality is a New York City doesn’t have all that. So what happens then? 

Errol Louis Well, I mean, look, one of the things the mayor has talked about and he hinted at it in his State of the City speech was the notion that in a homeless shelter, if you are there for more than seven days, we will give you a full medical workup. Basically, we’ll open a file on you and we’ll find out every single thing that’s wrong with your body or your mind. Right? To me, the next logical step is to do what they do with these concierge health services, which is like create a digital file that lives in the cloud so that anybody who finds you and frankly, you can do it with a biometric scan, you know, check their fingerprints or their eyes or whatever, and then pull up the whole file. Right. So that instead of the information being scattered all over the place or what we see now, which to me is like unbelievable , that somebody is acting out clearly off their meds, whatever those meds may be, and you can’t figure out what kind of treatment they need. They take them to a city hospital and the doctors guess and they say, let’s give them a shot of X and let’s hold them for 72 hours and see if it stabilizes them in just in time to realize it’s like, Oh yeah, this seems to be working. Oh, 72 hours are up and we need the bed for somebody else. Let’s put them back out on the street and we’ll do this whole thing again next week. You know, I’ll tell you, if the mayor can make centralized record keeping or record tracking of some kind such that we can break that cycle, that would be a great thing. That would be a great thing. And that’s, that would be an Adams’ signature accomplishment, that for which he would deserve a lot of praise. And I, for one, would give it to him. You know. 

Katie Honan The My City app you can pay your parking ticket and then check out your latest. Yeah, I mean, there’s just not that consistent care when you speak to people who have gone through this, whether it’s with themselves or a relative or a loved one of some kind, it’s this constant rotating who’s got a bed, where can you go if you don’t have enough? And it goes back to the staffing. If you don’t have enough mental health professionals, it’s certainly not schools. The city published a story last week of the thousands of kids in New York City lost a parent or caregiver during COVID to COVID. They don’t have access to social workers. So you have kids acting out because they’re grieving, but they don’t have the help that they actually deserve. 

Errol Louis Right? The caseload for the social workers were out of whack even before the pandemic. So even worse. So, look, let’s end on this. The other big item in the mayor’s inbox that I did bring up with him is that the, again, thanks to The City, you guys reported it first, 71,000 residents of public housing who are pretty far behind on their rent. I mean, that’s crazy. If it’s up to the level that was reported, $443 million, it’s a lot of money even for New York City. It’s certainly a lot of money for NYCHA, which is, you know, 40 plus billion dollars in the hole and needs every available dollar that it can get in order to fix the locks and fix the roofs and fix the lead paint poisoning and fix the elevators and on and on and on and on. The mayor ruled out mass eviction. I was being a little provocative there. I was like, yes, I know a thousand people was. 

Katie Honan He’s right about the media. 

Errol Louis If there are 71,000 people haven’t paid their rent, you’re the landlord, Mr. Mayor. Are you going to throw these people out or what? You know is basically what my question was or I mean, what I did ask him, I said like, is the eviction off the table? And he said, yeah, it’s off the table. And to me that translates into you ain’t never going to get that money back, right? 

Katie Honan Yeah, I don’t know what the answer is because I guess you can work out a payment plan if there’s some threat of eviction and even understanding why people aren’t paying, maybe there is, you know, unemployment or whatever the issue is. But I don’t know. And I can’t think of an agency that needs money more than the terms of this failing infrastructure. And it’s in, it’s crumbling. And that’s a significant amount of money that could be put back into those capital improvements. 

Errol Louis Yeah, I mean, but there’s an aspect of our work that involves asking the people with power how they intend to deal with problems that we already know in advance are not solvable, not easily solvable and perhaps not solvable at all. So, like we know, you know, you know, when you’re asking somebody about NYCHA, unless they have $40 billion that they can bring to the table, they can only give you a partial solution or a strategy to get through the next 24 months or something like that. Those are difficult questions to ask, but they’re important questions that, I mean, you know, let’s wait. Let’s not kid ourselves if we don’t have a solution. Let’s be clear about that. Whether it’s Rikers, NYCHA, or, you know, mental health, migrants, there’s a bunch of these that are piling up. And I guess that’s what it means to be mayor, right? You got to show up every day and pretend you have solutions to things that you and kid everybody else, or at least everybody in room nine knows that you don’t really have a full solution to. But we still have to muddle through this together. 

Katie Honan To bring it full circle. Maybe that’s why his State of the City was filled with like, I’m going to let you put your banana peels and beans and I’m going to do rats, because those are actually things that he can solve. Those are deliverables. But the larger things, you know, how are you going to hire thousands of social workers for schools? How are you going to fix buildings that need significant capital repairs when you don’t have the money for it? And you know, how are you going to address a cycle of, you know, what is leading people to get incarcerated? Is it because they’re going to schools that aren’t diagnosing their learning disability? And that sets up a cycle of frustration and all this kind of stuff? These are things that take decades to see the results of even, you know, his dyslexia screening, which was something, by the way, I was completely shocked that didn’t already exist. Right. 

Errol Louis Right. 

Katie Honan I spoke to my mom, who’s a retired teacher, and she said, you know, she experienced having kids who clearly were dyslexic and she was reading specials and she would say, this kid is dyslexic. And they would say, we don’t have the money. Maybe, maybe he just has trouble at home, you know, So that seeing a kid and I guess those are the unsolvable problems, you probably see a kid who needs so much help and, you know, nothing can help them. So I don’t know what it is. And Mayor Adams, you know, he comes to be mayor with a lot of life experience that, look, we could be rude to the previous two mayors who were not from New York. Right. So I think being and a local being a native mayor, Adams has a lot of that street cred that a lot of people didn’t have. But at the end of the day, like you said, he has to solve some of these problems or at least present some plans to improve it. And I don’t know. I mean, some of these problems reporters write about, you know, like my colleague Greg Smith, I mean, how long has he been writing about NYCHA and how much have things improved? You know, he worried about lead paint and then he was writing about arsenic in the water things, unfortunately. And that is that is the depressing part of being a reporter. One of the many depressing parts, I will say, but it’s difficult. 

Errol Louis I’ve written about this. I mean, somebody told me about it and I put it in one of my columns that the current de facto policy for the New York City Housing Authority is demolition. By neglect, I mean that if you don’t deal with the major systems. I mean, when we read that a grand total of what two elevator systems were replaced in all of public housing in the last couple of years, that’s telling you, you know, what’s the alternative, that well, yeah, the place is going to fall apart. I mean, that would be true even if you didn’t have a legacy of underinvestment. You know, like it’s 177,000 apartments. You’ve got to keep putting money into it. So we shall see. Anyway, listen, all things Eric Adams, everything going on in the city, if you’re not catching it with us over here at NY1, you should definitely look at Katie Honan. Fine work in The City. And if you get to be a connoisseur of these things when the mayor is getting mad at reporters, there’s a better than even chance that it was provoked by Katie Honan. She’s a provocateur. She has a big smile there. And she still just kind of throw these questions out there, by the way. I mean, I don’t know if this administration is any different than others, but they’re having a problem or they think they have a problem with getting their message out. And I think the problem is that they don’t have control of enough media. Right. So they have their own TV station. They have a streaming service. The mayor personally, @NYCmayor on Twitter is 1.5 million followers, and yet they decided to like start a newsletter to like spam people with a newsletter and they’re doing a podcast. 

Katie Honan  And the ‘Get Stuff Done-Cast’. I said, there’s only one place to go from here, and it’s inside City Hall with Eric Adams. It’s, you know, he can have his own reporters roundtable. I stopped some guy in the street earlier coming out of City Hall. He was carrying a keg. So I joked, ‘Come on, bring that inside’. It was empty. He goes, Who’s the mayor now? Who is it? 

Errol Louis Wow. So. Oh, that’s funny. 

Katie Honan That is that is most New Yorkers. 

Errol Louis That is true. And anyone who would proactively sign up to get a newsletter from city hall probably is looking at The City, The Post, the Times, the News, NY1, City and State, etc. etc., etc. So I’m not sure who he thinks they’re going to capture. The other thing, by the way, I think, look, in the last administration, Chirlane McCray started a podcast, right? Did you ever listen to it? I listen to half of the first episode. 

Katie Honan  I think I did. I think we listen to it in Room 9, but it was right before COVID. So I think then it stopped. But that was like an interview series. I made this joke off-mic, but it would have been funny if Eric Adams really leaned into the podcast and did like a true crime podcast or like he watches, he goes through like, I’m watching, rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’m going to, you know, go through every episode. I would, that would be funny. But his first episode was just the audio clips of the State of the City. 

Errol Louis  I will say without being too, I don’t want to be too defensive about our profession, but I would just say this to people. I’ve joked in the past that podcasts are like jury duty. Sooner or later everybody has to hold one. I mean, they’re proliferating like like rabbits, you know? I would just say it’s not as easy as it looks. I’ve spent a lot of years in this business. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to make it seem like somebody woke me up and I just sat down at a cup of coffee and said, Oh, hey, let’s talk about the beer. There’s a lot of research that goes involves. There’s a lot of, you know, even I mean, I learned from really, really top-notch guys in radio who taught me how do you I mean, down to the modulation of your voice. How do you keep people engaged? How do you make them want to come back? How do you make them want to subscribe? How do you make them want to, you know, buy whatever you’re advertising, you know? And when I see politicians say, Oh, I can do that, it’s like, Oh, really? Okay, give it a try. You know, you never know. 

Katie Honan But I don’t, I don’t know what the future of the ‘Get Stuff Done-Cast’ will be. Will it just be Mayor Adams talking? Will it be regurgitating press conferences from the week before? It’s coming out every two weeks? Or if he’s actually going to do interviews or something? I don’t know what the plan is. 

Errol Louis Well, for whatever it’s worth, and I’ve told him this privately, so I’m not talking out of school here, but the interview of the kind that we just played, this is the kind of thing I did every week with Mayor de Blasio. I think it’s a pretty good format. 

Katie Honan Yeah it is.

Errol Louis You know, I mean, we’ll exchange a couple of ideas. We’ll get some clarification about things like the Uber Lyft thing. I’ll ask you about some of the stuff in your inbox that I know in advance you’re not going to have a 100% solution to, but we need to know where we are and where we’re likely to go. People have a right to hear you think out loud to a certain extent, so they know kind of, you know, strategically and even morally where you’re coming from, what you think is important or not. And we can, you know, sort of be a little entertaining about it. And that’s what we do. You know, I mean, we, I think we do a pretty good job. I hope that they’re not going to spend so much time on the ‘Get Stuff Done-Cast’ or whatever they’re, whatever they’re doing that they won’t have time for us. But I guess you’ll, you see the mayor every day, don’t you? 

Katie Honan I mean, I work from City Hall for the most part, and I see him. I saw him this, I mentioned earlier. I saw him this morning. I was in there early, was coming in to. But it is funny the way he, he does treat different reporters very differently. So I don’t know, for some reason he seems to like me for some reason. I don’t know if it’s.

Errol Louis You’re likable enough. Katie. 

Katie Honan Thank you. 

Errol Louis Isn’t that what Obama said in one of the debates,

Katie Honan Think so, yeah. 

Errol Louis You’re delightful to be with. Thank you so much for coming by. 

Katie Honan Thank you. 

Errol Louis That’s going to do it for this episode of You Decide. As always, thanks for listening. I’d love to hear your thoughts about this conversation or any of the others. You can find me on Twitter at Errol Louis or leave a message for me at 2123793440. You can also email us at YourstoryNY1@Charter.com. And if you’re looking for more analysis of New York politics, you should subscribe to and listen to my colleague’s podcast. It’s called Off Topic/On Politics, and it’s hosted by political reporters Zach Fink, Courtney Gross, and Juan Manuel Benitez. Those episodes come out every Friday. I’ll be back next week. Thanks so much for listening.