Mayor Bill de Blasio and His Wife Chirlane McCray Need To Be Investigated For Fiscal Mismanagement

At the same time that homeless encampments, violence and looting, defunding police and no bail laws, graffiti and destruction of public property multiply throughout New York City, Mayor de Blasio's wife, Chirlane McCray and her $1.25 billion program to help people who need mental health services, ThriveNY, continues as usual and is hiring.

Lovely. (Luiz C. Ribeiro/for New York Daily News)

My question is, Ms. McCray, are you hiring homeless people hurt by the pandemic? Not all homeless are mentally ill, and people who have been left homeless by COVID-19 certainly could use a pay check.

Or, are you simply hiring people based upon what they can give to your future political campaign for Brooklyn borough president.

It is time to investigate the Mayor and his wife for financial fraud and other actions that do not benefit the City and only themselves.

 Betsy Combier

betsy.combier@gmail.com

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The makeshift homeless encampment in the East Village.Stephen Yang

Budget be damned, Thrive is still hiring

July 20, 2020, Julia Marsh

The hiring freeze clearly doesn’t apply to the unelected, anointed bureaucrat named Chirlane McCray . . . This gross abuse of power needs to end.
— Councilman Robert Holden

While other city agencies are tightening their belts under budget cuts and a hiring freeze, the city first lady’s embattled mental health program is thriving.

McCray’s $1.25 billion ThriveNYC program is recruiting new staff — despite Mayor de Blasio’s hiring freeze on municipal employees and warnings of layoffs for 22,000 city workers because of the $9 billion budget hole left by the coronavirus pandemic.

“The Mental Health Service Corps is hiring! Spread the word!” McCray tweeted Thursday.

The Corps’ workforce development program — which was rebooted last year after initial mismanagement — is holding a virtual job fair for social workers on Thursday. It is one of several programs under the ThriveNYC plan, which was expected to cost the city $1.25 billion since its inception.

De Blasio has said that only COVID-19 jobs are exempt from the hiring freeze, but the ThriveNYC flyer makes no mention of the pandemic.

“Corps members are offered a three-year fellowship to deliver mental health services in highneed locations within the H+H system,” said Christopher Miller, a spokesman for the city’s public hospital system, NYC Health + Hospitals.

“ThriveNYC provides programmatic oversight,” he said.

“H+H is not subject to the City’s hiring freeze because it is not a city agency, it’s a public benefit corporation. H+H considers Mental Health Service Corps members to be essential health care workers and is working to fill vacancies in this program.”

There are currently 54 Corps members. H+H is offering $60,000 salaries plus a “competitive benefits package” to six new staffers.

Councilman Robert Holden (D-Queens) slammed the carveout for the mental-health plan.

“The hiring freeze clearly doesn’t apply to the unelected, anointed bureaucrat named Chirlane McCray,” he said. “The amount of conflicts of interest and nepotism by this mayor and his wife is disturbing, and allowing this gross abuse of power needs to end.”

McCray is mulling a run for Brooklyn borough president. Critics have accused the mayor and his wife of using city resources to boost her political future.

De Blasio has said he’ll have to put 22,000 public employees out of work, including frontline workers like cops and doctors, if the federal or state governments don’t provide a bailout by this fall.

In May, Holden and his colleagues ripped de Blasio’s willingness to sacrifice the jobs of city cops, doctors and teachers before slashing funding from ThriveNYC.

“I understand it’s a pet project, but there needs to be equity across the system,” Councilwoman Adrienne Adams (D-Queens) said at the time.

ThriveNYC ultimately survived the budget process with just $12 million in cuts.

ThriveNYC is recruiting new staff despite city’s hiring freeze

First Lady Chirlane McCray’s embattled ThriveNYC mental-health program is recruiting new staff– despite Mayor Bill de Blasio’s hiring freeze on municipal employees — and warnings of layoffs for 22,000 city workers because of the $9 billion budget hole left by the coronavirus pandemic.

“The Mental Health Service Corps is hiring! Spread the word!” McCray tweeted Thursday.

The workforce development program — which was rebooted last year after initial mismanagement — is holding a virtual job fair for social workers on July 23. It is one of several programs under the ThriveNYC plan, which was expected to cost the city $1.25 billion since its inception.

De Blasio claims only COVID-19 jobs are exempt from the hiring freeze, but the ThriveNYC flyer makes no mention of the pandemic.

“Corps members are offered a three-year fellowship to deliver mental health services in high-need locations within the H+H system,” said Christopher Miller, a spokesman for the city’s public hospital system, NYC Health + Hospitals.

“ThriveNYC provides programmatic oversight,” he said. “H+H is not subject to the City’s hiring freeze because it is not a city agency, it’s a public benefit corporation. H+H considers Mental Health Service Corps members to be essential health care workers and is working to fill vacancies in this program.”

There are currently 54 Corps members. H+H is offering $60,000 salaries plus a “competitive benefits package” to six new staffers.

Jason Curtis, a resident of the encampment.
Stephan Yang

Homeless encampment in NYC getting ‘bigger’ despite de Blasio’s ‘crackdown’

Lorena Mongelli and Bruce Golding, NY POST, July 24, 2020

An entrenched group of homeless people is making life miserable for residents and merchants in Manhattan’s East Village — despite Mayor Bill de Blasio’s vow to “do whatever it takes” to break up such encampments.

The vagrants are living under a stretch of scaffolding along Second Avenue between East Seventh and East Eighth streets, where they’ve arranged cast-off furniture and set up a tarp under which two men were sleeping Friday afternoon.

“It makes me feel uncomfortable. It makes our city dirty and noisy,” said neighborhood resident Olga, 78, who’s lived in the East Village for 33 years.

“There was one woman who was making pee-pee and caca by the bus stop. It was very dirty and disgusting. Nobody wanted to use the bus stop.”

The owner of an eatery across the street also said the situation appeared to be spiraling out of control.

“They started camping out there when the weather got warmer and recently it got bigger,” the restaurateur said.

“Some of them have mental issues. They drink a lot and fight with each other. They throw bottles.”

On Thursday, de Blasio was questioned during his daily news conference about a series of other encampments across Manhattan, following a NYPD raid that broke up the “Occupy City Hall” site early Wednesday morning, about month after it was established.

“Anyone who tells us about an encampment, we’re going to have it addressed right away by Homeless Services, Sanitation, [NY]PD,” de Blasio said.

“Whatever it takes.”

One homeless resident of the East Village encampment, who identified herself as Solaura, 43, said she wound up there after losing a taxpayer-funded bed at the DoubleTree hotel in Chelsea.

Solaura, whose face and limbs are covered with tattoos, said she was a transsexual sex worker and was unable to abide by rules that required her to be inside by 10 p.m.

“I am a highly marginalized individual and I just don’t have the same opportunity as a lot of cisgender people as far as employment goes, so the work I do is at night or I would have no income,” she said.

Another resident, who gave his name as Macswel Hasanoeddin, said he was registered to stay at a nearby shelter but had been living at the encampment on and off for the past two or three weeks.

“In homeless shelters, people feel like it’s like a jail,” said Hasanoeddin, 52.

“There are a lot of concerns about things getting stolen so a lot of people don’t want to go. Curfew isn’t bad but there are other factors that people don’t wanna deal with, so they’d rather stay on the street.”

City Hall didn’t return a request for comment.

Additional reporting by Julia Marsh

RANK Nepotism in New York City: The Mayor Appoints His Wife to the New NYC Task Force On Racial Diversity

John Lamparski/Getty Images

Bill de Blasio’s latest crazy, no-good nepotistic job for Chirlane McCray

By Post Editorial Board, April 26, 2020

Sigh: Mayor Bill de Blasio just named first lady Chirlane McCray to head his task force on ensuring New York is more racially just when it reopens. Are you laughing, or crying?

The mayor says his wife’s record running the ThriveNYC initiative makes her perfect for this new job. We guess that means the Taskforce on Racial Inclusion and Equity will spend a ton of money to no obvious effect, with half its component programs closed down after a year or two because they never made sense in the first place.

That was the story of Thrive, which was supposed to boost New Yorkers’ mental health but mainly seemed to hire people without ever figuring out what they should do. And which mainly steered clear of the city’s most urgent mental health problem, the huge portion of the homeless population that faces major psychiatric issues.

With roughly a billion dollars out the door, Thrive is on its third or fourth “reimagining.” The next mayor is sure to close it down, if the city council doesn’t do so first.

Of course, the idea of a racial justice unit as a core part of city government’s work on restarting the local economy is as misbegotten as Thrive ever was. Just as Thrive was the wrong approach to mental health, this will focus on peripheral (or patronage) issues rather than the clear but hard-to-address reasons why lower-income black and Hispanic New Yorkers have suffered disproportionately from the coronavirus.

De Blasio claims that the crisis is an opportunity to fundamentally remake New York City economically and socially. In fact, the main challenge is to revive it at all. The chance that the virus will remain an ongoing threat for years poses a huge challenge to New York’s whole way of being: Density is now an enormous vulnerability, rather than a competitive advantage. If we can’t figure out how to make the subways safe, merely getting to work becomes a nightmare.

Even if you buy the mayor’s radical talk, his wife is the last person to put in charge: It’s impossible to manage your spouse as you would anyone else — you can’t fire her for incompetence for starters. (As Thrive proved.)

Indeed, the rank nepotism here suggests that de Blasio doesn’t even believe his own line: He’s just working the same old platitudes to justify putting his wife forward as a leader in hopes it will make her electable come 2021, as he seeks to install her as the next Brooklyn borough president.

Don’t laugh or cry, actually: This idiocy is cause for a primal scream.

BUSHWICK POL SLAMS MAYOR FOR APPOINTING HIS WIFE TO COVID-19 TASK FORCE

Chirlane McCray, de Blasio’s Wife, Is Questioned Over His ‘Revolutionary’ $1 Billion Mental Health Plan

NY TIMES, March 22, 2019


With opaque budget and elusive metrics, $850M ThriveNYC program attempts a reset

By AMANDA EISENBERG

Politico, Feb. 27, 2019

Lack of Accountability Leads to Massive Waste of Public Money Going To ThriveNYC

The corruption of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and his wife Chirlane McCray just keeps everyone busy, reading all about it.

The waste of money detailed in the latest article posted below cannot be an accident. However, the Mayor does not seems to have any accountability in his office, and/or no one is saying anything.

We just cant wait until someone, somewhere, does something about it,  but there is good news on the horizon, hopefully: a whistleblower of the Special Commissioner of Investigations made a complaint.

See also:
The Non-Thriving ThriveNYC Run By Chirlane McCray is a Scam

Maybe now there will be accountability.

Can a city Mayor be impeached?

 Betsy Combier, betsy.combier@gmail.com
Editor, ADVOCATZ.com
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ThriveNYC’s school ‘consultants’ are a $10M waste of time, say teachers
 by Susan Edelman, NY POST, December 15, 2019

A ThriveNYC program costing up to $10.5 million a year uses school “consultants” who deliberately avoid helping students in crisis and serve as glorified “311 operators,” educators and critics say.

The consultants put on workshops and compile lists of outside services, but don’t work directly with kids in distress.

“It’s a Band-Aid on a huge wound,” the principal of a Brooklyn alternative high school told The Post. “It’s an absolute waste of money.”

The principal said her school struggles daily with students suffering from family turmoil, drug abuse and violence, but gets little or no support from the “School Mental Health Consulting Program,” which was launched in 2016 as part of the $850 million ThriveNYC initiative led by Mayor de Blasio’s wife Chirlane McCray.

When a student’s mother was shot to death, the principal turned to her school’s “consultant,” a Department of Education employee, to comfort the traumatized teen.

“Is it possible you can step in and help?” the principal asked the employee.

“We’re not allowed to give any direct services,” the consultant replied, according to the principal.

Each consultant makes $58,381 to $79,694 a year, and their supervisors $69,000 to $95,611.

Councilman Mark Treyger, education committee chairman, told The Post: “They were getting exorbitant salaries for doing the work that 311 operators already do — referrals.”

Instead of offering sorely needed direct services such as counseling, the consultants plan and give workshops on topics such as recognizing signs of mental illness and suicide-prevention tips.

“All they really do now is sit with the principals and create a plan to come and do a workshop for staff, students or parents,” the principal said.

The workshops are okay, but superficial, she added. “We’re so beyond naming the issues. The problem is getting the resources and support for dealing with the issues.”

The consultants also compile lists of local hospitals and agencies that provide counseling and treatment, but leave it up to the school or students to get them, the principal said.

“They were supposed to be building partnerships with agencies to serve our schools, but that never happened. We didn’t partner with anybody.”

 

The program was “set up as a light touch,” Scott Bloom, the DOE’s director of mental health, explained in a memo to staff.

“It was never designed to be a student-centered service nor a first responder for crisis situations,” Bloom wrote, adding the program is “best utilized as a secondary responder — after the school’s support team or DOE Crisis Teams respond to the situation and have the situation under control.”

Bloom called it “post-vention.”

The ThriveNYC program, a collaboration between the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and the DOE’s Office of School Health, started in FY 2016 with 100 consultants and 11 supervisors for 950 schools.

That’s down this year to 73 consultants and eight supervisors. They now cover 820 schools. Some consultants were “moved out of schools where DOE has introduced other services,” officials said.

Officials did not list which of the city’s 1,800 schools get the consultants, saying they go to those without staff dedicated to mental health — about half of them elementary schools.

“It’s clearly not helping students in crisis, or helping school staff respond to and prevent further crises,” said Dawn Yuster, school justice director with the non-profit Advocates for Children. “That’s what we’re hearing from school staff.”

The DOE’s crisis teams are ill-staffed and often fail to promptly respond to students in meltdowns, Yuster said.

That leaves many school administrators no choice but to call 911 for an ambulance to haul the student to a hospital ER, or for cops to forcibly remove the child.

In 2016-17, schools called the NYPD for 2,702 incidents of “students in emotional distress” — half aged 4 to 12, an Advocates for Children analysis found. In 330 cases, cops clamped handcuffs on kids, some as young as 5.

And the problem has worsened. In 2018-19, the NYPD intervened in 3,547 incidents of kids in distress, the latest data show.

“We get calls all the time from schools at a loss for what to do,” Yuster said. “Students end up getting removed from class, missing work, punished or sent home.”

Several DOE insiders said the ThriveNYC funds could be better spent giving intense support to kids in districts or schools who need it most.

“It’s a question of targeting the resources instead of just increasing the budget for a jobs program and throwing money at the problem,” said Stephen Eide, a social-policy expert at the Manhattan Institute think tank.

D.J. Jaffe, an expert on mental-illness policy, agreed the program has little impact.

“Educating people about mental health is not the same as delivering services to the ill,” he said. “We need more services. We don’t need referrals to services that are already maxed out.”

McCray should know. In 2015, before launching ThriveNYC, she penned an op-ed describing the difficulty she faced in finding help for daughter, Chiara, then 18, who revealed she was suffering from anxiety, depression and addiction.

The family eventually found the right doctors and therapists for Chiara, leading to her recovery, McCray wrote, but she realized the mental health system is broken — “especially for those who don’t have the same advantages as us.”

In response to pressure by Councilman Treyger and  Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, the city’s FY20 budget now includes $10.9 million in new funding for a School Crisis Responder program with 85 social workers. 

ThriveNYC spokesman Joshua Goodman said the DOE is beefing up services for troubled youth.

“Today, there are new mental health clinics and clinicians in hundreds of schools, new teams of social workers who respond to crises, and expanded training for teachers on how to address the mental health needs of their students,” he said.

The Non-Thriving ThriveNYC Run By Chirlane McCray is a Scam

 Please tell us when the end of the McCray/de Blasio performance can be seen. We need to get rid of the corruption and fraud they are performing, with immunity, against a backdrop of poisoned children in NYCHA housing, bribes and other crimes against NYC taxpayers.

Betsy Combier, betsy.combier@gmail.com
Editor, ADVOCATZ.com
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Chirlane McCray

ThriveNYC is failing New Yorkers amid spike in NYPD shootings

By Bob McManus

, NY POST, October 22, 2019

Bill de Blasio and his conjugal co-mayor, Chirlane McCray, have conspired to blow almost a billion bucks on services for deranged New Yorkers, of which there are many, yet it seems things are getting crazier. Why is this?

The latest iteration of an all-too-familiar tale finds a street peddler with a long history of mental illness shot by police Friday after skulling a cop with a metal chair in a Brooklyn nail salon.

Saturday morning, the peddler was dead, the cop was in a medically induced coma and mutterings of police over-reaction were hanging in the air.

For once, such concerns are not unreasonable. Eleven civilians have been shot dead by officers in 2019, compared to four last year — and the obvious question is: Why such a sharp increase?

This question deserves a deliberate inquiry and an honest answer — which de Blasio is unlikely to provide, if only because the finger of blame points more squarely at City Hall than it does at One Police Plaza.

There are no easy answers, as always. Mental illness has been an intractable urban problem for going on to a half century; culture and case law have evolved to favor the mentally ill when they come into conflict with the community in all but the most extreme circumstances.

This leaves victims on their own.

The irony is that all too often the mentally ill are their own victims — even as that’s regularly lost in horrendous collateral damage.

Nobody really disputes this, and virtually everybody says something should be done about it — even the mayor and his missus. That’s why Bill handed Chirlane the mental health portfolio on Day One — along with a virtually open-ended draw on the municipal fisc.

Thus was born ThriveNYC — a classic example of an ill-directed, over-funded, ego-infused fiasco made possible by the fact that nobody, ever, wants to say no to the boss.

Friday’s nail salon tragedy was among ThriveNYC’s more obvious failures — the dead peddler’s family said it had been trying to get him help for some time, only to be dismissed — but it is far from the only one.

The problem, writes urban mental illness expert DJ Jaffe, is the mayoral make-work project’s misallocated priorities.

“Only 12% [of Thrive’s near-billion-dollar budget has been] focused on adults with untreated serious mental illness,” says Jaffe. “As a result almost 40% of the most seriously mentally ill in New York City go untreated.”

In other words, there’s plenty of dough to address angst and ennui — but bi-polar Brooklyn peddlers, deranged subway pushers, babbling park-bench homesteaders and the man who crushed the skulls of four fellow vagrants are on their own.

As is the city.

There’s no doubt that public disorder is increasing in the city, never mind the official stats. And while not all of the city’s ever-more-numerous and increasingly belligerent street-dwellers and cop-fighters are mentally ill and untreated, enough of them are to mark ThriveNYC as just another de Blasio administration failure.

No surprise there.

Twitter: @rlmac2