Transcript: Mayor Adams Appears Live On CBS 2 News At 5pm

January 10, 2024

Kristine Johnson: Well, stormy weather led to the evacuation of thousands of migrants from Floyd Bennett Field to a Brooklyn high school. That backlash to that decision so intense that the school actually received a bomb threat. Mayor Adams joins us now, along with CBS 2 political reporter Marcia Kramer to discuss this.

Maurice DuBois: And Mr. Mayor, let's start with this. After you put those 1,900 migrants at James Madison High School, there were hate calls and that bomb threat we just talked about. Should the folks behind that be prosecuted for that?

Mayor Eric Adams: If they fall within any prosecutorial misbehavior, they should be, because it is inappropriate. And I really want to say to New Yorkers, do not allow those with fringe outlook and fringe responses to define us as a city. It's not who we are.

And Maurice, let's be clear. Yesterday was the anniversary of the fire in the Bronx. When we saw that happen in 2021, we moved the — 2022, I'm sorry — we moved the residents to a school building. When we had floods, we moved people to school buildings. When you have a building collapse, we use school buildings. That's the focal point of our community.

And so we are not going to treat migrants differently. And if you closely, those are children, and we're going to treat them with the respect that we would treat any other New Yorker.

Marcia Kramer: Well, Mr. Mayor, I'd like to ask you about your recent decision to restore some of the police and fire cuts that you had announced just two months ago. The question is this. You're going to hire one new police class, one of five that were on the chopping block, 600 police officers.

But the head of the PBA says that's a drop in the bucket because we're still down 2,700 because of a huge number of people who retired. What are you going to do about it, and do you think you're going to have the money to restore those other four classes that are so needed?

Mayor Adams: Well, it's not a drop in the bucket, and that's literally an inaccuracy. It's far from a drop in the bucket. We have two classes that were already in the academy, we're going to add another two. That's a total of four classes.

And we will love to do more. I don't know how I can articulate to folks more that… You know, when you're dealing with a $7 billion out‑year budgetary gap, you know, $12 billion over three years, we're going to do a 20 percent decrease in the spending on migrants and asylum seekers and renegotiate contracts and other action.

But this fiscal management by our budget director and the programs that Deputy Mayor Williams‑Isom put in place of telling people they have a 30‑day and a 60‑day notice, 80 percent of the people who were told they had a 30‑day notice, 80 percent are self‑sustaining. Over 50 percent of those who came into the system, almost 57 percent, are self‑sustaining. They left the system.

And so we are doing smart fiscal management. That's why we had a AA bond rating, and that is why the city is really seeing a steady flow to try to navigate us out of this crisis.

Johnson: Mayor, back to the migrant crisis. You know, due to a new deadline implemented by your administration, the city this week began evicting migrant families with children from shelters. We'd like to know what the point here is, because you basically have to find new hotel space for them anyway.

Mayor Adams: It's not eviction. It is giving people a clear definition of how long you can be in our shelter system. And with intense case management during the process of those 60 days, then they check out, would come back into the system if need be. Some did not come back in. Some went to stay with family members, loved ones, leave the city. Then we do an evaluation and place them in a new location if need be, because I have one order to the city: no child or family will sleep on the streets of the City of New York.

But we need to be really clear. A child that grows up in a homeless shelter or housing insecure is less likely to graduate from high school. We're not trying to create permanent residents in our shelter system, we need to encourage people to become self‑sustaining.

Kramer: Mr. Mayor, I'd like to go back to the flooding for a second. Yesterday in her State of the State speech, the governor called for creating something called Blue Buffer. She wants the state to buy houses of people who live in the flood plains, like Staten Island and other places. Is that a good idea, and are you going to be asking people in New York, in Staten Island and other places in Queens, to sell their homes to get rid of the floodplain?

Mayor Adams: I think what the governor is stating and others have stated it, there are low lying areas in our city that we know each time we had a major storm in the past, it would impact those areas. And what we're saying, those major storms that all of us have heard, the 100‑year storm now would seem like it's coming every 100 days. Look how many storms we've had in the last few months.

And what she stated, we have to rethink where we live. We have to rethink how we secure our shorelines and we have to have a new approach to the change in climate. Listen, we've been abusive to Mother Nature and we're paying the price for that, and she's thinking outside the box on how we can think differently about solving this problem.

DuBois: Okay. Mayor Adams, thank you for coming on tonight. We appreciate it.

Mayor Adams: Thank you. Take care.