Transcript: Mayor Adams Holds In-Person Media Availability

January 16, 2024

Deputy Mayor Fabien Levy, Communications: Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Fabien Levy and I serve as deputy mayor for Communications for the City of New York. We appreciate everyone joining us today for our weekly in‑person media availability.

Just a little while ago, Mayor Adams unveiled our preliminary budget for the upcoming fiscal year. Despite the unprecedented financial challenges facing New York City, this team delivered a budget that's responsible, balanced, and forward‑looking. It builds on our track record of strong fiscal management, while maintaining vital investments in public safety, public spaces and people. We're incredibly proud of this plan and are eager to take your questions.

We unfortunately have a hard out today so Director Jiha and his team can provide you with a technical briefing and so TV stations can quickly turn around packages for the evening newscast. So, because of our limited time, we'll really have to limit reporters to just one question so we can get to as many outlets as possible.

So, joining us this [afternoon] we have Mayor Eric Adams, First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright, Chief of Staff Camille Joseph Varlack, Deputy Mayor for Operations Meera Joshi, Deputy Mayor for Housing, Economic Development and Workforce Maria Torres‑Springer, Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services, Anne Williams‑Isom, Deputy Mayor for Strategic Initiatives Ana Almanzar, Chief Counsel Lisa Zornberg, New York City Mayor's Office of Management and Budget Director Jacques Jiha, New York City Emergency Management Commissioner, Zach Iscol and New York City Department of Correction Commissioner Lynelle Maginley‑Liddie. So without further delay, Mayor Adams.

Mayor Eric Adams: Thank you. And we just want to really maximize our time with questions, but I just want to take a moment and thank Commissioner Iscol for his comments today at the funeral of not only a good friend but a great New Yorker and a great American, Chief Esposito.

For over four decades, he served the city well, and just the comments that you heard showed how much he was just an average Joe and he never stopped being a blue collar person that took care of working‑class people in the city. And I just think Zach's comments really personified what many of us were experiencing: you know, we're the Joe's, the everyday people, and he was just really one of them.

If you didn't have an opportunity to meet him, it was a great loss that, you know, we just lost a real New York hero. And I'm going to miss him, I'm sure many of us are as well. But you know hats off to you, Joe, and I wish his family peace during this time. Let’s open up some questions.

Question: Hey, Mr. Mayor, how are you doing?

Mayor Adams: Quite well, and you?

Question: Pretty good. So, my question is now that you've balanced the budget, you've had more revenue than you thought compared to the last projections over the summer, do you feel like you'll have a harder time convincing the federal and state governments to get migrant aid?

Mayor Adams: The real question that people have yet to fully absorb is why were we able to balance the budget. The management that we displayed, I know people are going to look back later and see this period of time. We projected that we were going to get 100,000 migrants and asylum seekers; instead, we got 168,000.

I saw around my sixth or seventh trip that we were not going to get the revenue that we wanted from Washington. There was a slow pace to this. So, we kicked in a two‑pronged plan. Number one, we had to project what it was going to cost. We couldn't wait until the time of the budget and all of a sudden said, oops, we didn't project. We did.

The second time, Deputy Mayor Williams‑Isom and Chief of Staff Joseph, they went in and kicked in a real plan of getting people out of the system. We were able to get 70 percent of people out of the system by using a host of methods: 30 days, reticketing, connecting people, intense care. And so that's the real story that people are missing.

And so once we identified that, hey, we're down to 68,000, we are able to… We're down to 68,000, that we are able to now have additional money. And then we had better revenue. So, this was smart fiscal management and not being reckless during this particular time. And thanks, 60 percent, not 70 percent, thank you for correcting me.

So we still need help, we're not out of the woods, we're still getting thousands of people a week. It's just that we're successfully getting people out of the system. If we would have sat on our hands, we would have had 168,000 people in our system that would have really ballooned this budget. It's the combination of what the team did and what Jacques did that this is just a successful management of the city's resources and a crisis at the same time.

Deputy Mayor Levy: And Joe, I would just point out, if you look at the last couple of months, we've been at this 67, 66, 68 percent right, DM Anne? Of the number of people in our care.

Deputy Mayor Anne Williams‑Isom, Health and Human Services: Yes.

Deputy Mayor Levy: And that's because we've done a lot to move people out as quickly as they've been coming in.

Question: Hi, Mayor.

Mayor Adams: How are you?

Question: I'm good. What would you say to New Yorkers who are feeling whiplash from the budget cuts? There are cuts, now they're reversed, now there's more cuts maybe coming, depending on the feds and the state. Some of your critics on the left are saying this isn't financial responsibility, this is mismanagement because you didn't predict it correctly.

Mayor Adams: I'm going to say this again. If anyone can say that we mismanaged getting 60 percent of people out of our care, who would have predicted that we would have been sitting here today talking about this crisis? We predicted 100,000, we got 168,000. Could we have properly predicted that? Could we have properly forecasted the actions of Governor Abbott? And so we saw a real fiscal responsibility of a moving target, of one week he'll surge, one week he wouldn't.

Did we know that we were going to automatically be able to get 60 percent of the people out of our care? No, we did not. As we went on and Deputy Mayor Williams‑Isom came up with these various ideas, this amazing feat of stabilizing and having people become self‑sufficient was all part of it.

So, I understand that some people want to politicize this and I got it, you know, but we have to remain focused during these times of navigating the city out of this condition we're in. And there are going to be people who are going to critique and criticize the job that we've done. This is part of the business that we're in and we just have to accept that.

But I know when you look at what this team has done, we looked over where the money we were able to save, we were able to restore some of the cuts, particularly around public safety, because I know how important that is. And so there are going to people who are critiquing us.

But you know what? We are the men and the women in the arena, and we know what it took. We know what we have to do. And we have to stay focused on that. That's what I tell the team all the time. We just have to stay focused, because this task is a Herculean task and history is going to be kind to this administration when they see what we accomplished.

So, New Yorkers are not saying, Eric, we're getting whiplash. New Yorkers are saying thanks for restoring the police class, thanks for restoring keeping the libraries for now harmless, thanks for these things that you're doing.

That's what New Yorkers are saying to me when I'm on the subway and I walk the streets. But I understand that people are going to critique us. That's part of the business of being a mayor, we're going to be critiqued, this administration.

Deputy Mayor Levy: And maybe if Director Jiha wants to jump in and also add a little bit about how our strong fiscal management is what got us to the point where we can bring back some of the… Restore some of the cuts earlier and stuff like that.

Mayor Adams: Yes, hold on, Jacques, because you're right. Before Jacques, you say that. Remember when we started in January of 2022, and we implemented PEGs right away? We did things right away. I think we did three or four PEGs. We took smart fiscal decisions, and everyone keeps dismissing, as I keep saying, the bond raters raised our bond rating.

Why are the bond raters saying we are good managers and we keep hearing that we're not from those who don't have the expertise in that area? The bond raters said we're looking at what Eric Adams and this administration is doing and we feel a level of comfortability to raise their bond ratings. Go ahead, Jacques.

Jacques Jiha, Director, Office of Management and Budget: [Inaudible]. Yes. It's [inaudible], because we are not [inaudible]. The mayor [inaudible].
So if the mayor decides to restore $200 million out of the $7 billion, it's [inaudible]. Okay? It's not a reversal. Okay? It's only $200 million out of $7 billion. Okay? And the notion that we don't need a PEG, okay, to… 

Deputy Mayor Levy: Sorry, Jacques, could you put a mic down? That mic doesn't seem to be working. Can we give Jacques…

Jiha: The notion that we [inaudible] the PEG to balance the books, okay, okay? Again, spurious argument, because we put up $3.7 billion in additional revenues, and we couldn't balance it. So, we still needed a PEG to balance our books.

So, again, we're not reversing course. It's just the mayor decided this is the priority of his administration to make sure the streets are safe and clean. And so therefore, he did some restorations. So, it has nothing to do with reversing course.

Question: So, on the revenue piece of it, I think we were seeing, what was it, $2.9 billion in additional for '24 and '25 that wasn't expected. So, you know, there's been a lot of conversation about this from you know the Council, other groups that kind of prognosticate and do projections.

I mean that's about $3 billion. So, how is it that kind of the city's initial projections were so far off, and is there anything specific you could kind of point to in projection modeling that made those projections so far from kind of what you had it at before?

Jiha: Sure, sure. Let's begin with, our forecasts are in line with all the fiscal monitors, okay? So, we are a bit more optimistic than the Council, but doesn't make that our because their forecast is more conservative, doesn't make ours out of line because our forecast is more or less in line if you look at financial control, I mean the city comptroller and the state comptrollers. Okay, and IBO. So, we are more or less aligned with their forecast.

Now, what transpired is that last year, every economist, almost most economists were predicting a hard landing of the economy. Okay? This is because interest rates were rising. We had 11 consecutive increases in interest rates. So, economies were projecting a recession more or less. Okay?

Fortunately, we managed to avoid that recession, so we have a soft landing, okay? So, because we anticipated something bad and it's better than what we anticipated, so therefore that leads to a higher than expected revenues. So, the key here is we had anticipated a recession last year, like most economists, and instead we had a soft landing, okay, we're still landing, okay, but it's not a crash, okay?

As a result, we end up with more people working than anticipated, more profit on Wall Street than anticipated. So, as a result, you end up with more tax revenues than you anticipated.
Any economist would give you the same explanation. There's nothing mysterious about what happened. This is exactly what most forecasters were predicting last year. And basically, we changed our forecast because of the fact that we are in a position of soft landing instead of a recession.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to get some information. You said that out of the money that the federal government has committed, you haven't received any of it. Can you go into detail why that hasn't happened? And you also mentioned moving to a more non‑for‑profit model. I wonder if one of the contracts you're looking at renegotiating or maybe going down on is DocGo?

And then my final question, you brought in more than $650,000 to your legal defense fund. That's a lot of money in a little bit of time in the last two months. I’m wondering what type of donors gave that money to your legal defense fund?

Mayor Adams: Jacques will go into your first part of the question. I would just say the trust, all this is going to be public dealing with the trust. As I stated in the beginning of this issue, New Yorkers called and they said that, you know, we want to help. People have known my character and they said we want to help. And I think that's a reflection of it, and the contributions were made to, you know, to assist in the legal fees.

So, I just, I thank those New Yorkers. You know, people have known me for years, you know, for my days of being a police officer, state senate, borough president and now the mayor. And you know, you sometimes don't realize, you know, how people appreciate your life of service, from wearing that bulletproof vest to being the mayor of the city. So, I just thank those New Yorkers who responded.

Question: And then the question on out of the millions committed, what are… 

Jiha: The fed so far awarded the city about $156 million, of which we collected $49 [millions]. And it's been very difficult for us to collect the rest of the money. And I don't know if you see the city comptroller and the Office of Management and Budget of Chicago issued a joint letter to the DHS secretary asking to release some of the constraints that are imposed.

And as a result, the city and other cities, becomes very difficult for us to collect these resources. And one of which is only $15 of that money can be allocated for hotel. And as you know, you know how much hotel costs in New York City. We have to have A numbers, something like some registration numbers, A numbers that we have to have. The city was not collecting this information before.
Okay, so we're trying to see if they could relax some of the requirements so we could see if we could accelerate the collection of these resources. The second question you had was about… 

Question: About the DocGo contract? Was that one of the ones being renegotiated or are you rethinking that contract?'

Jiha: You're going to have to talk to H + H that manages this particular...

Deputy Mayor Williams‑Isom: Can I jump in? I was just going to jump in and say the mayor has asked us to look at all contracts and all leases to see if there's anything that we can do more efficiently, Kelly.

Question: I have a question for Commissioner Maginley‑Liddie, and speaking of contracts, will you revisit the Keefe commissary contract? And why does the DOC continue to use Keefe  if, you know, my colleagues have reported that they do extreme price gouging for detainees on Rikers Island?

Commissioner Lynelle Maginley‑Liddie, Department of Correction: That contract is currently under review by our team right now [inaudible].

[Crosstalk]

Question: Mr. Mayor, you know, regarding… 

Mayor Adams: I'm sorry, why don't we talk about DOC? Oh, you're going to ask that question?

Question: No, I only get one, so…

Mayor Adams: Okay. While we're talking about DOC, and I just want to really thank the commissioner for being here. But we saw the letter from the monitor that indicates the concern about this bill. It's not only the bill that's coming out of the City Council that's going to come in front of me. Not only is it going to jeopardize the safety of staffs, of inmates, which is often ignored. 80 percent of the people who are assaulted are other inmates who are just trying to do their time.

And you know, I just wanted, commissioner, can you go into the response from the monitor and the concerns about this bill?

Commissioner Maginley‑Liddie: So, yes, mayor, I reached out to the Council last week. I sent a letter to all Councilmembers because I had deep‑seated concerns about implementation of 549-A and the serious threat to the safety of staff and people in custody if it were to be implemented.

Following sending that letter to Council, I also reached out to the monitor for their input on the bill and basically what it would be, how would it impact our staff and people in custody if it were implemented? They provided me with their input, and I'll just share a line from the letter that they provided to me last week that I thought was extremely important.

And it says, the monitoring team strongly believes based on its many years of experience and expertise that the various operational requirements and constraints that accompany the elimination of solitary confinement in Council Bill 549‑A will likely exacerbate the already dangerous conditions in the jails, intensify the risk of harm to both persons in custody and department staff, and would seriously impede the city's and department's ability to achieve compliance with the requirements of the Nuñez consent orders.

Mayor Adams: And that says a lot. And those who have been saying to us for the last two years "listen to the monitor," "listen to the monitor," "listen to the monitor," they need to listen to the monitor.

Question: Will you veto the bill?

Mayor Adams: That's all that's on the floor, but we're hoping that they will reconsider this bill. This is… We cannot jeopardize the lives of those who are serving time and civilians and other uniformed personnel.

And you know, we're seeing two bills that are impacting public safety, and when the monitor is saying the same thing, we don't want to go backwards. We've been decreasing violence. We want to continue to decrease violence. This bill is extremely alarming.

And you know, one aspect of the bill? It states you cannot handcuff prisoners when they're being transported on a bus. We would never allow a person who committed a crime to sit in the back of a police car unhandcuffed, why would we do this to correction officers?

Question: Mr. Mayor, regarding the state migrant funding that the governor announced today, you said… I believe it was sufficient, if there are sufficient funds, you know, you will hold off on the April PEG. What does that look like? The governor said $2.4 billion is what she wants. Is there another amount that you're looking for? Were you saying like if state lawmakers agree to that?

Mayor Adams: Well, we both had to do our budget announcements today, and so it didn't give us time to go through. So, we need to really go through the details of it and see exactly what that funding is going to look like. And then we will come back. We're hoping that we will have another so we won't have to do the April PEGs, but right now we need to look through the budget.

We've been running around all day from the funeral to the briefings we had to do with the speaker, to the public advocate, the comptroller, to the Council people, so we've got to get in and now dig into the governor's announcement. The governor has been a partner on many fronts, on many different issues. But this is an important issue that we need the federal government and the state to really help with this issue.

Question: Hi, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor Adams: How are you?

Question: I wanted to ask you about two of the cuts. One is with respect to DOB, the Bronx borough president you may have heard. She's called on you to not do the cut that would affect staffing. And she's pointing to the building collapses as a reason why the city needs to maintain the level of staffing and inspectors at DOB.

And the second is with respect to the libraries. You spared them a cut this round, but you didn't restore the $24 million they lost in November, which caused them to cut Sunday services. Since it's such a small amount, had you considered putting that back in?

Mayor Adams: I think Borough President Gibson is doing an amazing job in the Bronx taking over from my good friend, Díaz. We have a lot of conversations with our colleagues, and whenever they tell us not to cut somewhere, my next response is, okay, tell me where? And it's total silence.

None of these cuts are easy. And when we say, well, okay, it's just $100 million, just $200 million, just $300 million, but where do we get it from? We are required by law to balance our budget, by law. We don't have the luxury of not doing so.

And then when you look at the fact we have almost $1 billion in outstanding property taxes, which is one of the number one issues, and we're telling the City Council we need help to go after those property taxes. And so you can't run a city just on financial altruism. It costs money to have police, firefighters, teachers.

All the things that she said about staffing at the DOB, all of those things cost money, every one of them. And so if the BP, who I really appreciate her commitment, if she has some place that she recommends for us to cut instead of other areas, we're looking for those recommendations. We take a lot of recommendations, but no one is raising their hands saying, cut me, cut me, cut me. You know, that's just not the reality of what we're facing.

We're making some tough choices, and they're hard choices. And so with the libraries, the libraries had the decision to determine how they were going to do their PEGs. They made the determination of taking away those weekend services. They made the decision of doing that. We thought that was too draconian, and we held them harmless. But they have to make the decisions. And this is an all hands on decks moment of, you know, some of them have almost $1.5 billion in endowment. Come on. We've got to all step up, you know?

Deputy Mayor Meera Joshi, Operations: I'd like to comment, if you don't mind, on the DOB cuts. We, obviously, it's a large city. There's many buildings. There's new building applications for development pulled every day, and that's a sign of economic prosperity.

There's no world in which we could have building inspectors for every single building. It is not totally a boots on the ground endeavor when we do safety as a regulator. But, however, we made a special exemption for our building inspectors and so the cuts that DOB felt did not impact to the degree their building inspectors.

But we do have several things that are underway to increase the safety of our building stock that do not take individuals, they're really about changing the laws and changing how we approach. Number one is on scaffolding. We've been a lot of talk in this administration and every administration before about the shadow that scaffolding puts on our streets and how do we attack it.

It's beyond the shadow, it's the fact that it's delaying critical facade work because it's often cheaper to leave the scaffolding up than to do the actual safety work, and many of the instances we've seen lately have been due to scaffolded facade work. So, by working with City Council, which we intend to do in 2024, we can increase the penalties and make it meaningful so that the work gets done, the scaffolding comes down and we really shore up our building stock.

We've also relied tremendously on the professionally licensed engineers and architects for our plan review. We've increased the number of audits that we do of those submissions, both pre and post submission, by 36 percent post-submission and 22 percent pre-submission. So, we're absolutely using every tool we have to improve safety regulation within the city and certainly we'll work with Council to make sure one of the pivotal things, which is scaffolding reform, happens.

Deputy Mayor Levy: And DM Joshi, just to be clear, even though you're doing all of that, you guys… Excuse me, Commissioner Oddo at the DOB proactively sends folks out to inspect every building of the owner of that Bronx building collapse, right?

Deputy Mayor Joshi: Absolutely. And as you know, we, the equivalent of “disbarred” the engineer that submitted the plans.

Question: Hello, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor Adams: What's happening?

Question: Happy budget day. So, it seems like the state funds was not really accounted for in this in this budget. So going forward with April now that we know it's about 2.4 billion that's coming could we see more rollbacks of maybe the November PEG or anything like that such as police classes or anything else that has already been cut.

Mayor Adams: Jacques, can you touch that of what is the exact dollar amount that we projected, because I think that there's a sort of a difference.

Jiha: Currently, our expectation is $1.5 billion for fiscal year '24 and '25. We're still reviewing the governor's proposal to see exactly how much net, okay, because we don't know if the $2.4  billion reflects commitment previously made. Okay, I'm not sure, but… Okay….

Question: [Inaudible.]

Jiha: …So that were previously made to pay for Creedmoor, for Floyd Bennett Field. So, we have to make sure we have a good understanding of what the number is, what's the net, but right now our expectation is we expected a net of $1.5 billion. Okay?

Question: So, that's lower than… 

Jiha: I don't know. We don't know. We are reviewing the governor's proposal to see exactly how much net commitment is included in it, but we don't know for sure.

Mayor Adams: And we thank her for the acknowledgement that handling 168,000 people that we don't have children and family sleeping on our streets.

[Crosstalk]

Mayor Adams: Hold on. I'm sorry, hold on. Go ahead.

Question: Could you see a rollback of the other cuts if it is higher than that 1.5, I guess, that was, either that was penciled in, you said you didn't have the number yet.

Mayor Adams: The mere fact we have to use the term rollbacks show that we never wanted to do any of these cuts in the first place. Whatever we can do to make agencies as whole as possible, we're going to try to do. We don't enjoy this. We need to be clear on this. We don't enjoy it, all of these programs that we fought hard and put in place we would like to see remain in place.

And we have to look at the financial, the dollars that is coming from the governor. And we don't know what this guy is doing down in Texas. You know, he has done these surges. We've been successful in transitioning people out, which is hugely successful, but this stuff is so volatile. We don't know what this guy is going to continue to do. And now we're seeing others are sending people to our city.

Question: Mayor, in which sector you are going to cut or slash the budget specifically and you reversed some of your decision regarding NYPD and FDNY. So, why don't you review your decision on the cut of ethnic media's budget?

Mayor Adams: Of which one?

Question: On ethnic media's budget?

Mayor Adams: I think that, you know, this administration has done what others were not willing to do. Really hats off to José on making sure that we include the ethnic media and do our advertisement dollars of… We believe ethnic media plays a vital role and we're going to continue to see how we can continue to support ethnic media as much as possible.

So, with the support that we can get from the federal government that would help us in many of those areas, like the ethnic media. That was the number one thing I did of starting the Office of Ethnic Media, and José has stepped in and really not only financial, making sure we're doing advertisement, accessibility, because we believe you get the message out and really cover the work that this administration is doing. So, we're with you 100 percent.

Question: Hi, mayor.

Mayor Adams: How are you?

Question: Good, how are you?

Mayor Adams: Good, good.

Question: We've been outside seeing St. Brigid’s the last two days where asylum seekers are waiting, some of them tell us they're waiting like eight to 10 days to be assigned new shelters. Some of them don't have proper shoes, coats. And then they say they're staying overnight in these rooms without sheets and no access to showers. They told us today they feel like they're being treated like animals. I wanted to know what your response was.

Mayor Adams: Our goal is to treat people with dignity and respect that people deserve. And this is unfair what's happening to migrants and asylum seekers, and it's unfair what's happening to long‑term New Yorkers. We're out of room. We are accommodating as best we can.

We've stated months ago we were going to reach this point. And as I shared with my friends around the Floyd Bennett Field that the visualization of this crisis is going to start to materialize in our neighborhoods. Our neighborhoods are going to shift and change.

And so to those who are there that feel as though they're being treated unfairly, that is not our desire. Our desire is to accommodate people with the best within our means. Our hearts may be endless, but our resources are not. And so we're going to ask them to be patient with us as we attempt to accommodate the large number of people who are in this city.

And we have to continue to run this city in an appropriate fashion. And I think we have… Everyone that has come here and analyzed what we've done, they stated the level of humanitarian response that we've shown to people who were needing assistance. And we're going to continue to do the best we can with the resources we have.

Question: Thank you. Hi, Mr. Mayor.

Mayor Adams: How are you?

Question: I'm good, thank you. Could you provide an update on the hiring freeze? Is that still on? Do you see any flexibility and exemptions to that with the sort of newfound resources and revenue or even into April, if there is another PEG averted, if that's something that we could see lifted all together?

Mayor Adams: We had some of the top line items. One, children and families can't sleep on the street; two, we didn't want to raise taxes on working class people in the city; three, we did not want to do layoffs. As we continue to navigate ourselves out of this, hopefully we can slow the front door keeps coming in, our national leaders can do something at the borders and start helping us fund this, then we can go back and look at some of the actions we took that stabilized our economy in the city, and that includes hiring freeze.

We were doing job fairs. We were trying to fill those 14,000 jobs. But we have to be honest with ourselves on the challenges that are in front of us, and we have to continue to be fiscally responsible to get through the state that we're in.

Question: [Inaudible] FDNY… 

Mayor Adams: Don't ask me anything about congestion pricing.

Question: I thought you had put back 20 engine company personnel, the 5th firefighter, and the budget here I'm looking at, it says temporarily shift staffing of 20 engine companies from five firefighters to four. And I thought you had restored them last week. Is this a… Is this printed ahead of time, or are they… Are you taking those guys away?

Jiha: That was printed ahead of time. Yes, that's correct. That was restored.

Question: That was printed ahead of time.

Jiha: There's a section on restoration in that book as well.

Question: Okay.

Jiha: There's a section that says restoration, and you will see that in that section.

Question: I think the total number of firefighters is 8,125 and it's budgeted for 8,465. Number of fire fatalities in the past year were over 100 for the first time in 20 years. Is there any possibility of adding firefighters to the budgeted amount because they are down about 300 or 400 from where they should be.

Mayor Adams: And a lot of those fatalities are connected with the lithium-ion batteries. We saw a number of cases involving those batteries. and that is why Commissioner Kavanaugh, she has been extremely proactive not only on a federal level but on a local level and we've taken a number of actions to deal with these batteries, particularly those that are just not safe.

And so at this time the numbers of the FDNY is not projected to be increased but we have to do more to create a safe environment, particularly around these lithium-ion batteries.

Question: Good afternoon, mayor. I just want to ask you about the migrant shelter curfew to start today at four sites. Are you planning to expand the curfew?

Mayor Adams: The more and more we move into this crisis and the normalization of it, we're learning a lot. You know, we're learning things that we can do where we're not so rigid. And we know that in the traditional shelters that we have a curfew.

And I don't know if we're putting them up yet, Anne, but we're putting up signs to explain what is the code of conduct of, you know, this system was built from ground up. And so the thought of a curfew is something that we think is important because we have to make sure that we give people what our expectations are and they can respect the rights of others who are there.

And you know, we're looking to, you know, to make sure that we have a curfew. I ideally believe it should be in all of our systems.

Deputy Mayor Williams‑Isom: I just want to… I'm sorry, Zach, really quickly. You said that we built it from the ground up, and Commissioner Park said to me last week, it took us 40 years to build the DHS system and we replicated it and doubled it in 18 months. So, we're learning a lot as we go along. But commissioner, you may want to say something.

Commissioner Zach Iscol, New York City Emergency Management: Yes. The only thing I'd add is this is not the first time we've had curfews in the system. We had curfews at a number of our sites over the summer. This is something that's, this is not new or novel. It is something that we have done in the past and we're implementing at some of our sites now as well.

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