Lew's View: De Blasio report card for 2019

It’s time for Bill de Blasio’s annual report card. He continues to disappoint New Yorkers with his lack of leadership.

While I heard quite a few jokes about New York City being better off when he’s not on the job, the Mayor spent a record amount of time absent and out of touch. Four months on his delusional Presidential Campaign.

Attendance: F

Hand in hand with his excessive absences was his legendarily lazy approach to the job. With only seven hours spent at City Hall the entire month of May he gets an
F for Effort

De Blasio continues to underwhelm with his ill-fated plans to improve New York City Public Schools. As the NY Post pointed out this week, New York City has over 140 schools with at least one grade where 90% of the kids fail their state exams. The only good thing he did was to kill his own School Renewal Plan.
 
Education: D

De Blasio’s wife led an effort called “She Built NYC” which conducted a poll to determine which women to honor. Mother Cabrini was the top vote getter yet she was not chosen. This allowed his nemesis Governor Cuomo to ride in and save the day with a state sponsored Mother Cabrini statue.

Common Sense: F

Homelessness is a problem which continues to worsen in New York City. In his first term the Mayor denied that we had a problem. Now he has presented a 5 year plan to end homelessness. All that means is that for the last two years of his political career he will try to silence his critics by proclaiming we need to wait for his plan to work. Oh and he’s also getting sued by the Feds, Newark and Jersey City for his program which relocates the homeless to other cities.

Homeless problem: F

On the mental health front, De Blasio put his wife in charge of a program called ThriveNYC which proceeded to spend nearly a billion dollars of taxpayer money with little to no results.

Yet another F for failing to help those in need.

Recently De Blasio has been trashing Presidential hopeful Mike Bloomberg. Besides being really bad form, he gets a C in Political Science because it’s certain to boost Bloomberg’s chances.

The Mayor’s management style has shown no improvement as he rarely meets with his department heads, hardly ever talks to the City Council Speaker and he continues to suffer high profile defections like the recent resignation of his Police Chief. D for poor management.

The Mayor does get one good grade and that is for corruption. He’s currently being investigated for improper use of city funds during his failed presidential run and it was uncovered this week that his team delayed damaging education reports to help his bid to retain Mayoral control of New York City Schools. An I for corruption.

Unfortunately for us we’ve got two more years with this guy who is lazy, spends most of his time looking for his next job and has shown in so many ways that he is done being the Mayor of New York City. He spent six years being influenced by donors to his campaign. My guess is that he spends the next two being influenced by anyone offering him a ‘job” when his political career is over.