Mayor Bill de Blasio: Good morning, everybody. You know, you already see naysayers coming out, suggesting that New York City has seen better days and won't be able to overcome this crisis. You already see people talking about what we may have lost in this crisis. There's no question a lot of pain has happened, an immense amount of pain. There's no question that we've lost people dear to us. There's no question that so many of our small businesses that are struggling are going to struggle to come back. But there is, in my mind, also no question that New York City will come back strong, stronger than ever. This is what New York City does. This is who we are. This is what we've always done. I get very upset when I see people betting against New York City, when I even see New Yorkers putting down New York City. They need to go and read a little bit of history. They need to go and understand how many times this city has been put back on its heels and fought its way back.
Think about what happened after 9/11. A lot of places might never have been able to find a way back after something as horrifying as 9/11. This city fought back. We remembered the heroes we lost, but we were inspired by their example. Think about Hurricane Sandy, worst natural disaster in the history of this city. So literally 9/11, worst attack on the city in our history; Sandy, worst natural disaster in our history. People fought back – those extraordinary efforts at the grassroots to help each other. Just in the hours immediately after the storm hit, the way people came together and helped each other in neighborhoods all over the city, and then the way people fought back and rebuilt, learned lessons, did things better. We will rebuild. We will be stronger. There is no question. That does not in any way minimize or ignore the pain that we are going through now. But it is, to me, so clear who we are, and that we will find a way back.
And it's important to remember even as we grieve, that it is the nature of this place to work together and to build something new. That's always been the history of this city. So, we're going to build something new and we're going to build something better and not just better because it's more modern. We're going to build something more fair. We're going to build something for everyone. This recovery has to have that spirit, that New York spirit, that everyone matters. Doesn't matter who you are or where you come from – everyone needs to be included and we need to build a better and more just society than the one we left behind.
Everyone wants to know about the restart and that discussion is going to happen over these next few weeks. We're obviously watching our health care indicators every day. I'll talk about them again in a few minutes. They will tell us a lot about the timing of what we can do. We're working right now on what each element of a restart looks like and it will not all happen at once and I keep cautioning, restart happens in careful smart phases because the last thing we're ever going to do is allow this disease to reassert itself. We're not going to risk people's lives, we're going to be smart about it, but that work of framing the restart is going on right now and we're going to bring in a lot of people to help us and I'll talk about that. And then we have to focus on these disparities in everything we do. They've been laid bare in this crisis. We have to talk about how we fight these disparities now in the work we're doing now and then in a much deeper, bigger way going forward. The economic and racial disparities that have been made so clear by this crisis, we knew about them before. They've been just – a powerful, painful exclamation point has been put on them by this crisis. It is a clarion call to us to start right now fighting back against those disparities and to build a deeper plan to fight them on a more permanent basis.
We have to look at our basic laws, our basic government structure. We have to look at the whole thing to think about how we can much more deeply ensure a fair recovery. So, I'm going to be talking to you again about some of the initial steps that will help us with the first acts of restarting. I'm going to be talking about the immediate and ongoing effort to address the disparities. I'm going to be talking about a bigger effort to create a vision for a fair recovery that then can be put into action. And I'm going to talk about how we consider the very reality of our government in this moment of crisis and where it needs to take us in the future. And I'm going to bring in a lot of very, very talented people to help augment all we do here at City Hall and our agencies. This is a moment where we're going to invite in tremendously smart, innovative New Yorkers from many, many parts of our city, many different parts of our life of the city, of our economy – bring their brain power, their ideas, their perspectives to help us do all we do. So, the restart is the first thing in our mind. We know it directly interrelates with what we're learning about this virus and its presence in our city and those indicators. We're going to constantly talk about where we stand each day, what kind of element of restart we can think about now, what we have to think about later.
Okay. Let's start with the question of when we restart. We restart when we have evidence. Look, we see some states around the country rushing to restart their economies. I'm worried for them. I'm worried for their people. Some seem to be paying attention to health care indicators more than others. Anybody, any state, any city that doesn't pay attention to those factual health care indicators, that evidence, is running a risk, is endangering their own people. And their whole idea of wanting to rush a restart so we can have an economy again and recover, it could all backfire because if the disease reasserts you're delaying potentially by a long time when you could have that kind of recovery. We won't let that happen here. We will focus first and foremost on the health and safety of New Yorkers protecting our health care system so it can be there for all of us, making our moves when the indicators tell us and then making them piece by piece, testing to see how they're working, making sure that each step we take is a strong foothold before we take the next step. So, that's the when.
How – how do we restart? There's so many open questions and the people we're going to bring together are going to help us answer them with their powerful perspective on the life of the city and the different parts of the city they come from, the different industries, etc. They are going to bring perspective so we can get these decisions right. So here are kinds of questions that we all have to ask, and again, some of these will be things we do earlier. Some of these are things we do later, but here are obvious everyday questions. How do you reopen a restaurant and still do it in a way that protects the customers and protects the people that work there? How do you do that right? What kind of protection will people need? What kind of PPEs will people need to wear in a lot of different parts of the city, a lot of different work that they do, to make sure they're safe? Will they need more? When will they need less? We've got to start to fill in those blanks. How much will we be doing temperature checks or symptom checks on a regular basis? Where? How? They’re clearly powerful tools, they fit our test-and-trace strategy. How are we going to do that? How extensively? Are we going to have enough thermometers? All sorts of basic questions have to be answered to determine what's our ideal, but also practically, what can we get done at any given moment? What kind of cleaning protocols will businesses need as they restart? What kind of social distancing will be required in the business? How many customers can be there at any given time. All of these answers need to be filled in. We have some really good information from around the world of some things we see working better and worse. We're going to borrow from that and use it as we formulate our plans. So, this is all going to move fast because we have to be ready for that moment where the indicators tell us it's time to open up a little. But I want to be clear as no on off switch here. It's not like a – I think people know it but I want to say it for emphasis – it's not like there's ever one jump back to normalcy. It's a series of careful and smart moves, and then you test each one along the way to make sure there's not that backfire. And then when you see things working, you take the next step.
Arts, culture, tourism, which we're so proud of, such a big part of our city, they all will come back strong. We want to figure out the right way to get that started and then build upon that. So, these councils are going to get together immediately to help us frame the restart, but they'll stay with us for weeks and months to come as we build out our actions to open up and then to envision our future and build our future. There'll be one for labor. We have to hear from the folks who represent working people and determine what we need to do for working people. Nonprofits and social services, huge part of New York City life and our economy, often not given the credit they deserve. They're going to have a council. I'm going to be meeting with them because we need that part of our city to come back strong. The faith-based community – we already have extraordinary efforts with CORL, the Council of Religious Leaders, with our clergy advisory board. We're going to bring them together to help guide us in thinking about how we restart the life of faith in this city, but also the crucial role that faith-based communities can play in rebuilding our economy, making sure people are protected, making sure people have what they need in their lives even in this struggle. And education and vocational training, obviously bringing back our public schools strong, bringing them back safely, dealing with the trauma the kids and families and educators have gone through, thinking also about all parts of our education system, how we work with our religious education schools, how we work with private schools, higher education, vocational training. All of them will be at the table to help us think through this restart.
So, we're going to start right away. It's going to be very practical and specific about what we need to do together and then also be part of how we build our bigger plans. So, that's immediate. Another immediate piece, and it'll start with immediate actions the City government needs to take and build out as part of the bigger vision, is a City Task Force on Racial Inclusion and Equity. This will be made up of leaders of the City government focusing on the disparities we're seeing already, making sure that we are addressing structural racism that is obviously present in the realities we're facing with this disease. Making sure we take immediate actions through all the agencies in the City government to address this painful reality. This is a right now thing. Right now, we can start to address these disparities. We're doing it in many ways on the health care front with the plans that we have announced, the community-based testing and the outreach programs, the community-based health clinics, many other things we’re working on right now. But I want to make sure that every agency of the City government is moving in that same direction urgently.
The task force will be led by our First Lady, Chirlane McCray, and by Deputy Mayor Phil Thompson. And this is based on ideas that they have both developed in the last few days to address the immediate disparities, but also to make sure that we address these disparities more thoroughly in our recovery plans ahead. We will be naming a group of leaders from the administration who focus on and represent all communities of color in this city. And again, they will think about immediate things that need to happen that work with the community-based health clinics and providers, how we can work right now with minority-owned businesses and obviously deepen our M/WBE efforts right now, how we can support essential workers. This task force will focus on those issues, but also build out and help us think about the bigger structural changes we need to make going forward.
So this is where I want to talk about the concept of a fair recovery. The crisis has laid bare so many things that are broken in our city and in our country. There have been so many amazing acts of heroism. Let's praise the good, the heroism from our health care workers, our first responders, the incredible things people have done for each other, the community, the amazing discipline and strength of New Yorkers with social distancing and shelter in place. There've been many heroic positive stories, but also extraordinarily painful and clear inequalities. So we see it over and over again. We see working families who've been brought to their knees in a matter of weeks and there's not enough safety net there for them. And we finally are seeing some progress from our federal government, but our federal government's always been behind the curve, not dealing with the reality and only coming up with very partial solutions. So for so many working families, this has been a devastating time. We see the federal government focusing on the wealthy and corporations before working people. It's painful to acknowledge how much of the stimulus discussion the beginning was about big business, not small business, and about a pay day for those who are already wealthy and privileged, not those who are struggling, and the federal government here in this case, it's been consistently the case, not only behind the curve, but the focus has been all wrong. Our federal government was much quicker to bail out the airlines, $58 billion, than to focus on cities and states and working people. These contradictions are now clearer than ever and they're more unacceptable than ever.
Thank God our focus was on health care equity, saving our public hospitals, creating a guarantee of health care and making sure people could get insurance or if they couldn't get insurance, had the right to health care through NYC Care, building up access to free mental health care across the board, through Thrive NYC. These acts of equity are serving us right now in this crisis. They're reminders of how much more we have to do as well – and fighting for economic fairness, $15 minimum wage, paid sick leave, rent freezes. The things that we have done to try to bring a beginning of fairness and equity in the city, we need to do even more now.
The only comparison is the Great Depression and I heard those stories from my older relatives and when they spoke about the Great Depression, it sounded like it was yesterday. It was so vivid. It was so intense. The challenges they faced, the pain that they overcame somehow. But it's also clear in those stories and I bet a lot of you have heard them too, and it's very much a New York story, when you talk about how our nation fought back through the Great Depression, it was very much through the leadership of great New Yorkers like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Fiorello LaGuardia – giants that we can only think of with awe and in our time we look to them for inspiration. Well, they did not say, let's just rebuild what was happening that day before the stock market crashed in 1929, I want you to remember this. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Fiorello LaGuardia and all the other great leaders in the New Deal, they did not say, we just want to go back to that horribly unequal, volatile, unfair world of 1929. No, they said we're going to build something transformational and different. That was the New Deal. They re-imagined what government could be. They re-imagined what it could mean for people and they very much made clear that it was not going to be government for the few, by the government for the many.
They were doing things at the time that people said were impossible, but they made them happen and we all have benefited generation after generation from it. We have to find the ideas for our time. We have to dream new dreams and we need great thinkers to help us do it. And so I'm appointing today a Fair Recovery Task Force. And this is an extraordinary group of New Yorkers, each of whom has contributed to this city and really profound ways. They bring different perspectives, different ideas, but all have a common thread. They have devoted so much of their lives to building a better New York City, and a fairer society.
First, Patrick Gaspard. Patrick is a New Yorker through and through, born to Haitian parents, grew up in New York City, went to our public schools, served in the Obama administration. Now President of the Open Society Foundation, one of the most important philanthropies on earth. Someone who served right here in City Hall, loves this city and believes things can be created and has been part of it all over the world.
Dick Ravitch, former Lieutenant governor of New York State, a legend. Dick Ravitch is one of the people that help this city survive the fiscal crisis of 1970's. One of the great innovators who saw us through, he helped save the MTA in the seventies and eighties. He is someone who time and time again has seen what others could not see and helped us not just to come back but come back stronger. His extraordinary experience will bring so much to this group.
Jennifer Jones-Austin. Jennifer to someone I have such appreciation for. She was the co-chair of my transition when I came into City Hall. She helped us build this administration. As CEO of the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies, she's a leader in this city in so many ways in our nonprofit sector, in the work of social justice, in the work of the faith community and her family – four generations. She is the fourth generation of faith and social justice leaders in her family. She understands what it is to run a large nonprofit and she understands how crucial those extraordinary nonprofits are to the city. She brings amazing perspective to this effort, and her co-chair in that transition off in that transition effort seven years ago.
Joining us as well, Carl Weisbrod. Carl has done it all for New York City and most recently served as the Chair of the City Planning Commission in my administration. He has served in one form or another in city administrations going back to the time of Mayor Lindsay, he is legendary for the work he did, taking a symbol of so many things that were troubled about New York City, Times Square and turning it into something strong and vibrant. He knows what resurgence looks like, played a crucial role in bringing back Lower Manhattan after 9/11 as well. I think one of the most respected leaders in government and civic life over the last half century in this city.
Henry Garrido leads our largest municipal union, DC37 AFSCME, the people who do so much of the work that keeps this city going. Henry is a thinker and a change agent and a visionary. I have had many a long conversation over the years with Henry and he's always looking over the horizon. He also comes from the immigrant experience, his family from the Dominican Republic. He fights for working people and believes we can do much better for working families. And he also has the extraordinary experience of running a huge organization that's there to serve and uplift working people. Henry brings a great mind and a great spirit to this effort.
Maria Torres-Springer, Vice President for United States programs at the Ford Foundation. Maria is someone who in her 15 years of public service to our city hit the trifecta, if you will. She's lead three agencies – very few people have done this and done it so well. She led at various times our Economic Development Corporation, our Small Business Services Department and our Housing Department. She understands what it's like not only to run these large organizations, but to serve people who need the help now. Folks who need affordable housing, the folks in our small business community who are going through so much now and need a helping hand. And she certainly understands what it means to foster economic strength, but from a perspective of fairness, child of Filipino immigrants. I remember when I first talked to her, the passion with which she spoke about helping working people and immigrants. She's going to bring that passion and all that experience to this group.
Liz Neumark, CEO of Great Performances, she is an extraordinary New York City entrepreneur, a great New York City story. She started a small business to turn to into a much larger business. Now employs so many people all over this city, a New York success story, but not someone who just kept her success to herself. What Liz did was said, how can we turn business into an engine for change? She's led to efforts to empower people, to train people, to bring them into industries that previously they didn't have an opportunity to participate in. She's worked tirelessly to fight hunger in this city. She's a great example of someone from our business community every single day. Ask the question, how can we take our New York City businesses and make them agents of positive change in our city? And she has proven it over and over again that it can be done and it must be done.
And finally, Fred Wilson, Fred is a legend in our technology community. Some consider him the godfather of the New York City tech scene. He was an early stage investor in many of the New York City tech companies that are thriving today. He's someone who really had a profound vision, one of the first to have the vision of New York City as a great international tech hub. And now that vision has come to be true but his true passion is making sure that our kids get computer science education. I've worked closely with Fred. I've been so impressed by his generosity, but also his extraordinary entrepreneurship and his drive. He created the Computer Science for All initiative, that now has been one of the most successful elements of our initiatives at Equity and Excellence in our public schools. Because of Fred, every child in New York City public schools is now getting computer science education, and he led that effort and now will bring that same drive and ingenuity to this group.
So an amazing collection of New Yorkers bringing so many different talents, so much perspective. This group will come together quickly and I'm going to ask of them that they come up with an immediate product to frame our work. Now it's going to be a preliminary product. They're all very, very talented, but I'm going to ask them to, in addition to their very busy day jobs, take some time to come up with a preliminary recovery road map by June 1st. This is not going to be the final word. This is going to be the first outline of how we build that smart recovery, that recovery, that will work, that recovery that will be fair. I'll expect that preliminary road map by June 1st but then their work will continue on in the months ahead.
Finally, we need to look at the bigger changes and I've talked about what it's going to mean, that long road ahead, dealing with things like the inequities in our health care system, dealing with the challenge that New Yorkers faced still finding affordable housing, the profound issues that working people face, the huge issues of protecting this city and our ability to serve people going forward. And obviously the questions that we'll come back to the fore shortly of how we fight global warming and what this role of this city is in. I'm going to expect this group to work on all of these things in the months ahead. Remember, we have 20 months to build this long-term fair recovery. I'm going to depend on them to help in every phase of that. But the last piece of the equation is the structural question of our government and everything that our government is built to do and what we need to do going forward. So the fourth thing I will do is I will plan in the days and weeks ahead to formulate and announce a Charter Revision Commission.
The announcement will come when we've put together the team that will do this work. And again, this is something that will happen in the weeks ahead. First, we need to move, deal with the more immediate matters, but I think it is the right time for a Charter Revision Commission because if ever there was a moment, a breakpoint moment in the city's history, this is it. And it's time to look anew at everything we do and see what works, what doesn't work, what about our city government structure might be outdated or less effective? What do we need to build a fair recovery? The Charter Revision Commission will hold hearings all over the city and again, hopefully someday soon there'll be public hearings again, where people come in person and anything they have to do in the short term, if they need to do it virtually, they will. But I want this group to really think about the big picture of how our government works, how it serves our people, where we could need to go for the future.
So those are four pieces, four building blocks to building the strategies to get us through some of the immediate decisions and on into that broader fair recovery, I am convinced we can pull these pieces together and build something new and better.
Now the part of the day we always wait for, reviewing the indicators and this has everything to say again with the restart. We've seen some good progress in the last few days and today is another good day and I'm very happy about this. Now the first indicator is unchanged and I want to see it go down, but still it's not going in the wrong direction. I am a guy who believes the glass is half full, so I'm happy to see it's not going in the wrong direction and many days this one has gone in the right direction. Indicator one, daily number of people admitted at hospitals for suspected COVID – unchanged. Indicator two, number of people in ICUs across our Health + Hospitals system for suspected COVID has gone down, 785 to 768. Percent of people tested who are positive for COVID-19 has gone down 30 percent to 29 percent. Now, unfortunately, this is the one piece of this that is not so sunny, public health lab tests have gone up 31 percent to 46 percent but still when you look at this day and the days before, overall continuing to move in the right direction, seeing good signs, but I want to see all of these go down consistently for 10 to 14 days. That's what will signal those first steps in opening up.
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