Council sways de Blasio on veterans department bill
A bill to create a city department of veterans affairs is expected to receive a vote in the City Council next week, after tense negotiations between members and Mayor Bill de Blasio, who had previously questioned the need for a new department.
An agreement between the bill's prime sponsor, Councilman Eric Ulrich, and de Blasio was hashed out at meetings today at City Hall, sources told POLITICO New York.
The bill, which has the backing of 45 Council members and Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, will essentially abolish the Mayor’s Office of Veterans’ Affairs — a relatively small office that veteran advocates have long argued is ill-equipped to serve the needs of the city’s 225,000 veterans.
Ulrich, a Republican from Queens who chairs the council’s veterans committee has argued that passing the bill would make New York City “the largest municipality in the country to establish a veterans-specific agency.”
Sources close to the negotiations said de Blasio voiced concern that creating an agency would create a dangerous precedent for Council members, by signaling that they can create issue-specific departments at will.Currently, all veteran-related matters in the city are handled through the Mayor’s Office of Veterans’ Affairs, which is led by commissioner Loree Sutton, and relies heavily on coordinating with other city agencies to address issues of homelessness, mental health, and unemployment in the city’s veteran population.
“I’ve never been convinced that turning an office into a department, in any subject matter, is necessarily the way to get things done best," de Blasio told reporters in January when asked about the proposal.
The mayor has had a complicated relationship with the city’s veteran community, which has accused him of moving too slowly on issues including veteran homelessness, rising rates of suicide and unemployment and offering policies that are not tailored to that community. De Blasio was also harshly criticized early in his administration for taking nine months to appoint Sutton as head of the current veterans office, and for a subsequent delay in making appointments to the Veteran Advisory Board.
A flag-raising ceremony on Wednesday was a late addition to the mayor's schedule last night — and with negotiations over the bill still ongoing this morning — Ulrich was conspicuously absent.
As the mayor hailed members of the armed services for their work, and touted the city’s efforts to end veteran homelessness by the end of this year, some veteran critics took to Twitter to disregard the ceremony as a “photo op.”
“And there’s the photo op the mayor was hoping for. While he continues to try to kill bill 314 for a dept. of vets,” said Paul Rieckhoff, founder and C.E.O. of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, who has frequently criticized the mayor on the topic.
As the day drew to a close, Ulrich and de Blasio met a second time at City Hall, according to sources.
As part of the negotiation, Ulrich proposed to delay the implementation of the law until the start of the upcoming fiscal year, in order to give Sutton enough time to coordinate the launch of the new department.
Sources close to the speaker confirmed the bill will be brought for a vote at the Council’s next stated meeting on November 10, one day before the Veterans Day holiday.
A spokesperson for the administration did not respond to a request for comment.
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