Transcript: Mayor de Blasio Appoints Herminia Palacio as Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services

January 5, 2016

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, good afternoon, everyone. This is a very happy occasion. And Chirlane and I are very pleased to announce that we have some good news for the city.

I’m announcing today the appointment of Dr. Herminia Palacio as our new Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services. I want to welcome Dr. Palacio to the administration. 

As we have named key figures in this administration over the last two years, we take the occasion each time to reiterate the goals, the values we bring to this process. And it’s important to say it again – we believe in creating an administration that is fundamentally progressive in its values. And therefore, we look for talent that shares those values and has been effective in implementing progressive values. 

We want an administration that reflects all the people of New York City, all the people that make this city great. 

And we always fundamentally believe in experience and effectiveness in previous work. 

Once again, we’re confident that we have put all of these factors together and found a great leader to add to our administration. This position, Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services, New York City, is clearly one of the toughest, most rigorous roles in local government anywhere in the country. And it takes someone with extraordinary capacity to handle it. Deputy Mayor for Health and Human services will oversee eight agencies, including the country’s largest municipal health system, and agencies that employ thousands of our city workers, have combined a budget in the billions, and make a huge impact on life in this city – just, as an example, the public health system, the Health and Hospitals corporation alone has a $7-billion dollar budget. So that gives you a sense of the magnitude of the role that Dr. Palacio is stepping into.

Given that we were very focused on getting the very best person for the role, we conducted a national search. I spoke to leaders all over the country and experts in health and social services, looking for the right person. And I am extremely proud to say that Dr. Palacio came through that search with flying colors.

She is a nationally-important figure in the area of public health. She’s a seasoned leader in the area of emergency preparedness and response. And she’s a person throughout her entire life who has been firmly committed to fighting inequality in all the work she has done. 

Now, Dr. Palacio, from the beginning, saw as her core mission lifting up underserved communities. And the origins of that mission and that sensibility come just from one borough away from here, in the Bronx, where Dr. Palacio was born and raised. This is an auspicious moment for this administration, because, with the addition of Dr. Palacio, I can now say we have four deputy mayors who were all born and raised in this city and have shared the experience of this city throughout their lives. And I want to thank First Deputy Mayor Tony Shorris, Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen, and Deputy Mayor Richard Buery for all being here with us. The scorecard goes two for Manhattan, one from Brooklyn, one from the Bronx. It reflects all the greatness of this city.

I also want to take a moment to say, this was an extensive search, as I said, a national search. And I want to thank our Director of Appointments, Rachel Lauter, who played a crucial role in pulling this search together and seeing it through to successful completion. So thank you, Rachel, for your great work.

I’m just going to give you a quick overview about Dr. Palacio before you hear from her directly. I’m them going to give you a quick update on a related matter before we go into q-and-a. 

Dr. Palacio, as I said, born and raised in the Bronx on Clay Avenue to an immigrant family – and this, you’re going to hear a pretty classic New York City story here – an immigrant family of humble means, but at the same time dreamed great dreams for their children. Her father was a shoemaker with an eighth-grade education. Her father, when he got to this country, became a cab driver and then later a bus driver. Her mother was a seamstress, who later became a postal worker, and then, for 20 years, got a job with the MTA selling tokens in the New York City subway system. Well, that’ll immediately separate those of us who remember tokens and those of us who don’t.

Again, a classic New York City story, but also the American Dream here – a family that believed that they could find something better in this city, in this country, and dreamed of what it could mean for their children.

Well, here’s what it meant for Herminia. She first went to P.S. 53 on 168th Street and she was a young child of great promise; worked her way to Bronx Science; from there to Barnard College; from there to NYU School of Medicine and Mt. Sinai. So her formal education is outstanding, but her informal education – the things she learned growing up in the Bronx are at least as important – the things she learned with her first job bussing tables at the concession stand at the Bronx Zoo; and what she learned later – and just, we’re going to date you again here, Herminia – this one’s wonderful – she learned at her job cold-calling people for family portraits at Gimbels. Take a poll of how many remember Gimbels. She did all the hard work, she learned the life lessons, and it made her who she is. 

And I mentioned her father, a cab driver, her mother, a token-seller – by the next generation, Herminia, a doctor, her brother, a lawyer, so, such a great example of a family committed to their children and seeing the dream through to completion.

Now, Herminia, obviously a true New Yorker – and when she went to her – beginning of her career, it was in San Francisco, and she thought it would be temporary, but it became a number of years. And she had a very illustrious career in San Francisco – first, at a public hospital, then as one of the leaders of the Department of Health. And that was a very painful and difficult moment in San Francisco as the AIDS crisis and the AIDS epidemic was fully coming to bear.  Herminia was at the frontline in that fight and played a crucial role in developing the strategies that San Francisco used to address AIDS.

I will now call you Dr. Palacio for variety.

After that, Dr. Palacio went to Texas – to Houston where she was an attending physician at the Veteran’s Administration – excuse me – Medical Center, before become the Chief Public Health Officer for Harris County Texas. Harris County is a county that includes the city of Houston, so the total size of the county is about 4.4 million people. So, it’s one of the biggest counties in the country – the third largest after L. A. County and Cook County, Chicago – and the public health role there proved to be extraordinarily intense and challenging – issues like West Nile outbreaks, natural gas disasters, and most pointedly, the responses to Hurricanes Rita and Katrina.

Dr. Palacio will tell you, she got a call at 5:00 am as Hurricane Katrina was ravaging New Orleans – saying that refugees from New Orleans would be coming to Houston, mostly likely not by the thousands but by the tens of thousands. She was charged with creating the health apparatus to shelter these refugees. She had until 11:00 pm that day to achieve it. She put the system in place – and her and her colleagues set up a shelter capacity at the Houston Astrodome in 12 hours that ended up triaging 65,000 evacuees – and ultimately housing 27,000 refugees from Katrina.

She then led the public health operations for that shelter capacity from mass-immunization efforts to maintaining safe sanitation. She worked with county agencies, with the City of Houston, with federal agencies, and commanded a crucial public health element of the equation that had to treat any and all problems as they emerged.

That was through 2013 in the last few years Katrina – Katrina, I’m sorry – Herminia has come back to this city and has been living in New York City while working at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, focused on the needs of the future in the public health and public service, developing a network of new leaders to build a national culture of health in cities all across the United States.

Dr. Palacio has done great work all over the country but her heart has always remained in New York City – and she now has the opportunity to serve all eight-and-a-half million people of this city with the exceptional capacity she brings.

It’s obvious that she has a tremendous background in public health. As we know, this role also focuses on the human services side of the equation and here is an area where she has a lot of perspective as well because in all those public health settings, and all those clinics, and hospitals she worked in, she saw the extraordinary challenges that people face. She saw the effects of poverty. She saw the effects of homelessness. She saw the whole range of social service challenges – and from the beginning of her life she has seen her mission – beginning of her profession, I should say – she’d seen her mission as one of not only providing health care but trying to treat the whole patient and all their needs. It came down to something as simple as trying to figure out if she had a homeless patient, when and how to discharge them if they didn’t have a home to go to. She knew people who came in with something as simple as a common cold but she knew that if they were sent back out they would not have a place to go. So, she tried to find a way to work to not only cure the sickness but help homeless folks to get the support and the benefits they needed.

And, as Dr. Palacio will tell you, she has confronted challenges in her own family that have fundamentally shaped her thinking. Her own mother, very sadly, suffered a psychiatric break when Dr. Palacio was 17-years-old – one that her mom never really fully recovered from. One of the effects of that episode was eviction – and thank God that her mom had her – Dr. Palacio – and had her sister to keep her off the streets and make sure she didn’t end up homeless. But it’s an example of the fact that Dr. Palacio doesn’t see anyone as separate or different or those people, she understand firsthand the challenges so many New Yorkers face.

Now, we know that many, many New Yorkers don’t have that safety net of a family ready to pick them up when they fall and that’s why we’re going to use every tool we have – our public health capacity, our social security – excuse me, social services capacity – everything we have to help New Yorkers in need, to help folks who are homeless, to help folks who are poor, to help folks who don’t have some place to turn.

When it comes to homelessness, Dr. Palacio will bring a very personal perspective to this. She also understands the kind of innovative strategies that work across all of health care and social services – and she’ll help us build upon the initiatives that we’ve used, so far, to get 22,000 people out of shelter – to serve 91,000 people, to help them from becoming homeless to begin with.

She’ll help us build on the HOME-STAT initiative, which will allow us to reach homeless people every day and do the hard work of convincing them to come off the streets permanently. Dr. Palacio’s background will be invaluable in helping us develop the best approach.

We look forward to working with her every step along the way and look forward to all the contributions she will make to her native city – and she will be starting in just a few weeks on January 25th.

Before I turn it over to Dr. Palacio, just a few words in Spanish.

[Mayor de Blasio speaks in Spanish]

With that, it is my great pleasure to welcome our new deputy mayor and to introduce to you Dr. Herminia Palacio.

[Incoming Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Dr. Herminia Palacio delivers remarks]

Mayor: Thank you very much, Dr. Palacio. 

Before we take your questions, I just want to give you a quick update. We talked about this the other day, but with the cold weather coming on, our Code Blue apparatus was put into place. Now, you remember, in the days after I took office, we activated Code Blue and we greatly intensified it compared to previous approaches. Our simple message to all people who were homeless, dealing with cold weather or, by the way, dealing with a heat emergency as well, was that they would be welcome in any and all of our shelters, no questions asked. And that didn’t matter if it was a single individual or an entire family. We instituted that policy two years ago with a very robust outreach effort to go with it, in which our Department of Homeless Services outreach workers and nonprofits we worked with would constantly go through the streets, looking for people who needed shelter, working closely with the NYPD and EMS.

That same apparatus swung into action in the last 24-hours and will continue in place so long as we’re dealing with this frigid weather.

So, I want to give you an update that these agencies, working together with our nonprofit partners, cycled through the city constantly on regular rotations, including the subway system, and reached a number of homeless people who did chose to come in to either shelters or to our Safe Haven beds or to our city hospitals. So last night, 97 homeless New Yorkers came in for shelter or for medical care. 96 of those were voluntary. One was involuntarily removed to a hospital for a mental health evaluation. So I just wanted to give you that update from last night’s excellent outreach effort by our city workers. 

With that, we welcome your questions on the appointment of Dr. Palacio, and on the areas that she will be covering. 

Mara. 

Question: Dr. Palacio, welcome. 

Incoming Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Dr. Herminia Palacio: Thank you. 

Question: Congratulations. Could you just tell us – I understand that you haven’t really done any of the work yet, but what do you think that the city is doing wrong on homelessness that we need to fix? Like, what are you looking at saying we need to do this differently?

Incoming Deputy Mayor Palacio: What I’m going to be doing is building on the incredible work that this administration has already put forward on homelessness. I’m working in partnership with them to move the agenda forward.

Homelessness is an issue that plagues not just this city, but many cities across the nation. It’s an issue that was a long-standing problem before this mayor came into office, and unfortunately, it will be an issue that is likely not to be completely resolved, because issues that take 30 years to develop don’t go away in an instant, no matter how important and how much resources and how much work we are putting at it. These are issues that are complex. These are issues that are recalcitrant, because there are system and structural issues throughout the country, and economic issues throughout the country that make this work very hard.

So what I’ll be doing is working with the administration – and I – you heard a little bit about my experience in disaster response, so I think, if I can reflect a little bit, that there are some lessons learned there that I think will be very important and a perspective that I will bring to this work. So disasters come in very many different shapes and sizes. Some happen overnight, like the earthquake – the [inaudible] earthquake in 1989 that I experienced and had to go in to see clinics. Some happen with a little bit of advance notice, such as hurricanes. Some breed disasters of their own, such as the break of the levees. But with all of these, there are some common themes to being better-prepared and to responding – and these themes are actually quite relevant to thinking about the plight of homelessness, because in our city and cities across the nation, homelessness is a very pressing, urgent – and urgent challenge.

So we need situational awareness. We need to protect life and safety in the acute phases – that includes things like shelter and temporary housing. That includes things like the efforts for the outreach workers that the mayor just described last night. We need to know what our assets are, and so I’ll be working with First Deputy Mayor Shorris and with Human Resources Commissioner – Mr. Banks, to really think and look, as part of this 90-day plan, to understand what our assets, not just within the city, but the assets with our partners.

We need to have an all-hands-on-deck mentality. We need to be able to understand that to solve this problem, we need to work outside of our traditional silos. We need to leverage those resources together so that the sum is greater than the whole of its parts. So those are the types of approaches that I’m bringing from the lessons that I’ve learned along the way.

Mayor: Okay. Other questions, yes.

Question: First of all, how many candidates were interviewed for this position and what role did [inaudible] play, if any in that [inaudible]?

Mayor: There were – again, it was a nationwide search. We talked to many people about potential candidates. We only ended up interviewing a handful of candidates. Peter didn’t play a direct role. He knew some people who had known Dr. Palacio’s work, so he helped us to connect with them. 

Questions. Yes.

Question: Doctor, what are – just to follow up on Mara’s question – is the city doing anything wrong on homelessness that you could specifically name for us?

Mayor: We appreciate your positive question. Welcome to New York City. 

Incoming Deputy Mayor Palacio: My answer to the question is, every administration – this was true when I was running a department, this is true of all of the work that I’ve done – we always need to be looking for how we can do things better, not with an eye of casting, we got this wrong, but with an eye of here is where we are, taking stock, taking honest stock, and looking at ways that we can improve.

So as I said, I’m going to be working with first deputy mayor and really looking at the 90-day plan, taking a deep dive, understanding what this landscape is, understanding what the situation is, and looking at where we continue to build our strengths – and if, in fact, the evidence reveals that we need to make some mid-course directions, of course, that’s part of what we are promising to do – what we’re engaging to do is to make those mid-course corrections, because we’re all dedicated to the same goal. Nobody’s happy about seeing the homeless problem. We’re all dedicated to the same goal – we want to make this better.

Question: Just – just to quickly follow up, are you going to be one of the people who’s responsible for hiring the new DHS commissioner [inaudible]?

Mayor: Well, let me jump in on that, because, as you know, the purpose of the review is to determine how we want to proceed. As I’ve said very publicly, my assumption is we are going to come up with a number of reforms in the approach of both HRA and the Department of Homeless Services and how they interconnect. We work from the assumption that there will, at the end of that process, be the decision to continue having two separate agencies, and therefore, there’ll be a full search for a new commissioner. But that’s going to be a subject of discussion – what the structural reality of those agencies should look like going forward. So, I think it’s fair to say that, although we will be looking for names and looking for ideas about who could succeed, it’s important that we make – first of all, do that entire review and come up with our long-term plans before nailing down the next person. 

Question: Doctor, you talked about your work – your emergency work after Hurricane Katrina – anything specifically after that storm that applies to the job you’re walking into now regarding homelessness [inaudible]?

Incoming Deputy Mayor Palacio: Well, certainly that storm highlighted several things. One, is that we need to understand what infrastructure is, right? That part of the long-term solution is making sure that you have resilient infrastructures and that you have resilient communities. So, I think about things in terms of what’s the immediate – what can we do to improve the situation for people who are homeless right now, immediately? What can we do to prevent people who are on the brink of homelessness from becoming homeless? What can we do to transition people who are homeless, but we’ve protected with sort of the immediate health and safety concerns – how do we begin the transition to more permanent housing? Permanent housing being ideal, supportive, and transitional housing pathways along the way. And then how do we think more globally, across systems and across structures, to really harden infrastructures – to borrow a term from emergency management – how do we make them resistant to [inaudible]? That means resistant to economic [inaudible]. That means that people have to have good job opportunities, as well as a home. So it’s really thinking about this as a complex problem with multiple pathways to entering homelessness, multiple pathways out of homelessness, and how do we take a system approach, working collaboratively, to make sure that we’ve got systems in place that serve us not just right now, but for the time in the future. 

Question: Would you say a Katrina response is similar to what we’re seeing now [inaudible]?

Incoming Deputy Mayor Palacio: It’s a condensed response, I would say. What we had to do was in a very acute emergency situation, we had to develop a shelter – that was the acute health and safety. We needed to protect people right then. We also needed to find people some longer-term solutions – that shelter was not going to be a long-term solution. We had to address the many concerns that the people in our care had that was – that – without which, they couldn’t find long-term solutions, right? We needed to have their health – we needed to address their mental health. We needed to make sure they had safe food. We needed to make sure they breathed good air. So it’s – they’re not exactly corollaries, but they’re translatable skills, they’re translatable experiences that I think will add a different perspective to the perspectives that are already here in this administration, working on these issues. So it’s a complimentary contribution that I hope to make. 

Mayor: Let’s see if there’s any others on this side, and then we’ll go over to the other side of the table. Yeah. 

Question: I write for the Staten Island Advance, just to clarify why I’m asking such a specific question – but one of the things that Staten Islanders sometimes feel is that they often don’t get treated with the same – not the same level of attention, but they – there’s a blanket approach to a lot of the city services that are provided. And you’ve mentioned a couple of issues that are really important to Staten Islanders – for instance, disaster recovery, and, obviously, Hurricane Sandy was a big issue on the island, and also the heroin epidemic there. I was just wondering if you could describe a little bit how you’re going to approach dealing with a city that is so diverse, and especially for places like Staten Island that are a little less dense and there – I mean, there aren’t the same level of services there.

Incoming Deputy Mayor Palacio: Well, I guess I can begin by giving you a little bit of more background about Harris County, which is where I spent ten years in public service to understand that I have some experience with jurisdictionally complex issues. So, Harris County is a county that had one-and-a-half million people living in the unincorporated county. It had about two million people living within the city limits of the city of Houston, and another 500,000 people distributed among about 30 other municipalities that were either in whole or in part within the city – so even more jurisdictionally complex than a single city with five boroughs – this was many independent mayors, many independent police forces, many independent school districts, many political jurisdictions that required an integrated and an attentive approach to local needs, even within the greater sum of Harris County. So, without knowing the specifics to be able to address yet, I would say that my general approach and experience, I think, suit – prepares me well to think about not just the city as a whole, but needs that there may be – pockets of needs that may need to be targeted. 

Mayor: Yeah.

Question: I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about – this administration’s really made a priority out of addressing mental health issues. So, I’m wondering if you could talk about how you think mental health issues affect our current homeless situation. And to what extent will you be involved in some of the first lady’s work on addressing the – changing the city’s mental health system?

Incoming Deputy Mayor Palacio: So, I would say that mental health issues are crucial, not just in the issue of homelessness. There’s – mental health is important in criminal justice, in – and I can tell you from experience – in Harris County, one of the best places to get mental healthcare, unfortunately, was jail. So talking about mental health services globally is critically important. I applaud the first lady for making this initiative and I offer myself to her to help her in any way that she feels that I can make a contribution. 

Mayor: And just a reminder that what my wife started and has grown into ThriveNYC, with all of the day-to-day efforts among the agencies led by Deputy Mayor Buery, really does cut across every piece of this administration, because, as we’ve learned – and what you said speaks volumes – we learned very early on, you know, it’s easy to think of mental health through the perspective of the Health and Hospitals Corporation or the Department of Health, but so much of the actual connection that this city government has to people in need of mental health services, happens in the Department of Corrections; it happens through the NYPD – and by the way – 

Unknown: DOE.

Mayor: DOE – join in – there’s so many. But – and because of Chirlane’s efforts and because of Commissioner Bratton’s commitment, you know, now we, I think, have over 5,000 NYPD officers who have received mental health training – and that’s going to grow, going forward. So, what Deputy Mayor Buery has had to do is really cut across, yes, DOE and a whole number of other agencies as well. But there’ll be a very close working relationship with these two deputy mayors, because obviously Dr. Palacio brings a lot of great experience and several of her agencies are going to be crucial to this strategy. 

Okay, go ahead. 

Question: Mr. Mayor, I’m wondering if you could explain the decision to reappoint Justice Laura Johnson to a ten-year term, given some of the concern about some of her bail decisions. 

Mayor: She made that decision within – that we’re talking about over a year ago – within the laws that existed. And I think she’s a very respected and effective jurist, but we have to change that law – and this is a central point – and we’re going to make it a priority. It’s going to take a lot of work in Albany, but we must give judges the right to consider the dangerousness of the suspect in bail decisions and we must give judges the requirement of considering dangerousness when they make decisions about any diversion programs.

Coming over this way – anyone on this side. Marcia.

Question: Mr. Mayor and Dr. Palacio, I’m wondering if [inaudible] thoughts about how to deal with the street homeless, who both the mayor and the police commissioner have described as service resistant. [inaudible] city should deal with it [inaudible] get them into or convince them that the shelters are safe, that they can provide services for them that will help them?

Mayor: Let me start with just my perspective and then turn to Dr. Palacio. Look, I think this is a very real issue, and it’s part of why we want NYPD to have this mental health training, why Chief O’Neill has formulated a specific unit within the NYPD that will focus on street homelessness. We know that of that 3,000 to 4,000 people on the street, a lot of them are shelter resistant, and it may be accentuated of course by mental health problems and substance abuse problems. One of the best solutions is to constantly engage them and figure out what will work for them. We have done that too sporadically in the past. That’s why HOME-STAT is so crucial. It’ll be constant engagement in whatever language they speak, figuring out what that path is for them. And by the way, we have good-news stories. We have stories of people who came off the streets permanently, who accepted mental health support, accepted substance abuse services, got reconnected to their family – whatever it was that would solve the problem. We have experience of what works, but it takes a relentless approach. Second, the Safe Havens, which are something we didn’t have enough of. We have 500 more beds that are coming online right now, will all be in place by June, but as I said, we will keep building on that effort as much as the need demands, because that’s where you have a place that is more supportive and more reassuring to someone who’s on the street – not a big shelter, but a smaller, more intimate facility, typically in a house of worship, that a lot of folks feel more comfortable going to – and that starts a positive process. 

Incoming Deputy Mayor Palacio: Yeah, I would echo precisely what the mayor said, that really having a multiple-pronged approach is really important. This is – this problem has one label, homelessness, but it’s many different problems, all in play at the same time, as complex as the individuals that find themselves. And we have to allow ourselves to bring to that problem a complex set of tools that we can mix and match to meet the needs – the very different needs of the different sub-populations within that broad, overarching label of homelessness. 

Question: [inaudible] follow up. Do you think the Code Blue situation gives you a rare opportunity to convince people who might not otherwise come into shelters, to come in because it’s cold – to convince them that the shelters can service them?

Mayor: I think Code Blue plus HOME-STAT is what’s going to allow us to do that – meaning, we’ve used Code Blue to get people to safety previously, but convincing them to make a bigger life change takes real work. I think Dr. Palacio’s example of her patient who came in with tuberculosis and she had to convince to get off of drugs in the process, is a very telling example. So, to really sustain that effort, Marcia, to convince people to make a fundamental life change and give them the support that allows them to believe they can make that change, that takes the HOME-STAT approach – the constant engagement – that takes the Safe Haven beds. Certainly for some people that’s going to require the supportive housing – and the 15,000 new apartments are going to be crucial. So I would argue that in the past we had some of the tools. Now we believe we actually have a full tool chest to really go at this problem. 

Grace. 

Question: Bernie Sanders is giving a speech on Wall Street –

Mayor: Okay, this is going to be interesting, how you bring it back to this topic. If you can do that, Grace, you’ll get the award for the day. We’re doing this topic. We’re doing anything related to Dr. Palacio’s announcement. 

Question: [inaudible] –

Mayor: We’ll see what we can do that. 

Go ahead, Erin.

Question: On the – on the [inaudible] homeless people brought in, do you know how that compares to past similar events? Is that more than usual, less than usual, about the same?

Mayor: We will get you more background on that. We are making sure now, consistent with HOME-STAT, to constantly count. You know, we, of course, are working with a lot of structures as we receive them, and we’re making a number of changes. So HOME-STAT is going to be the biggest outreach effort this city’s ever undertaken or any city’s ever undertaken to the homeless – and one of the things we’re adamant about – and you all have raised it very fairly – is, what is the count on any given day or night?

First Deputy Mayor Shorris, working with the city’s Operations office, is going to lead that piece of the effort to constantly count, to constantly check all the streets of Manhattan between Canal and 145th and other key hotspots in the other four boroughs.

So, consistent with that notion is the point that when we have Code Blue in effect, we’re now going to consistently count the impact each night and publish the results so you know them. But, I think, in the past, even though there was a lot of outreach, I don’t think there was the same focus on collecting the data and publishing it regularly.

Question: First of all, are you going to move back to the Bronx?

Incoming Deputy Mayor Palacio: No, but I – well, I don’t know. I’m in Manhattan now – and this is how committed a New Yorker I am, so, just to put this in context – I work in – for a wonderful organization right now, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which is out in Princeton – and I moved from Texas to New York City and took on a two hour commute every day because New York is home.

Mayor: That’s love – that’s love of New York City.

Question: You live in Manhattan, so you are familiar, sort of, some of the homeless – street homelessness issues that have come up but have you, or do you plan to [inaudible]?

Incoming Deputy Mayor Palacio: Oh, absolutely. I haven’t – I’ve done that – no.

Mayor: It’s going to be part of the plan. Yes?

Question: [Inaudible] homeless person who says that the city’s shelter are unsafe or unsanitary or dangerous – and they say, ‘I don’t want to go a place like that –‘

Mayor: I think they have been for many years and we have a lot more work to do. There’s no question about it. There are some shelters – let’s be clear – there’s a wide-range of shelters run by a wide-range of organizations and some are very well run, and some are more modern etcetera, etcetera – and some still have problems. There’s no question. But I think the other part is – as you guys often fairly point out – perception versus reality. The perception certainly hangs in the air that some of them are not safe enough or clean enough.

We, earlier – last year, 2015, you remember, I directed our commissioner for the Department of Investigation to go through a number of shelters with the point of view of DOI, which is a very rigorous one – and give us a report on the conditions in our shelters so we could figure out what to do. We came back with a series of recommended changes, which we have been implementing. We came up with a repair squad, which, at this point, I think, is – between 70 and 80 percent of the violations we found have been resolved, and the rest we are working on right now.

So, the fact is, there is a long-standing problem that must be addressed and we’re committed to addressing it.

I think given the – both, the reality and the perception, there’s still going to be folks on the streets who are resistant – and that’s where the Safe Havens are a crucial, crucial tool. HOME-STAT plus Safe Havens are going to be necessary – and by the way, I think for some people, particularly the mental health challenge, even if the shelter were pristine and totally safe, the size still might be alienating and they would want and need a smaller setting that they felt more comfortable in, again, house of worship often provides that.

So, we’re very committed to doing that work consistently and figuring out what gets people in off the street. 58,000 folks in shelter – a number we’re going to work relentlessly to get down – 22,000 we have gotten out of shelter over the last two years. That 3,000 to 4,000 on the street, again, very different reality – that they face a different set of realities for them. For them, I think, even as we improve shelters, I still believe Safe havens are going to be more often the solution for them.

Okay, last call – please?

Question: In terms of getting [inaudible] learning curve, can you outline a little bit of what you envision for that, in terms of meeting with commissioners and other such aspects of that?

Incoming Deputy Mayor Palacio: Sure, I would say that the one word is deep-dive and swim very fast. So, I’m – you know, situational awareness includes meeting people, it includes briefings, it includes looking at the data that we have available, it includes the opportunity to actually reach back to mentors that I’ve had, to contacts that I’ve had, to think about bringing other ideas to the table, because New York is wonderful and I’m – but I’m shameless about stealing good ideas that emerge elsewhere as well.

Question: [Inaudible] specific people that are on that short-list?

[Laughter]

Mayor: You’ll get back to him.

[Laughter]

Yes.

Question: There were some reports that said that the administration was looking for more Latinos in office. I was wondering if you could tell us did that play a role when choosing Dr. Palacio.

Mayor: We did a national search to find the person that we thought could best do this exceedingly complicated role – and I think you’re hearing, over this last hour, you’ve heard a lot about why Dr. Palacio is the right choice and you can tell, as she speaks about these extraordinary experiences she’s had, why she was head-and-shoulders above the different choices we had out there. Look, someone who has experienced the effects of Hurricane Katrine, the frontline of the AIDS crisis in San Francisco – that alone would make a candidate exceptional. But, the fact that she’s born and bred in the Bronx, understands the life of this city, has our values, and, obviously, is passionate about making change – she was absolutely the right choice.

That said, we’re going to constantly be looking for talent from all the communities of this city and we believe fundamentally in having an administration that looks like New York City – and that’s an ongoing effort. We are constantly recruiting people from all different communities of this city.

Last call. Yes, Rich.

Question: Doctor, when did you get the news and did you [inaudible] heartbreak? Did you celebrate? What was going through your mind?

Mayor: He’s always going to ask the, get-to-the-core-of-the-matter human question. ‘Did you start sweating when you –‘

[Laughter]

Incoming Deputy Mayor Palacio: I got the news last week and yes, my heart raced and has been racing ever since – and I’m hoping that after this conference, the butterflies that have been occupying my stomach will finally leave.

Mayor: Amen – the final word. Thank you, everyone.