Bill De Blasio just created a “coronavirus racial inequality task force.”
No, wait – it gets better. Guess who he appointed as its head?
His wife.
Yep, the New York City mayor who was too busy going to the gym and encouraging people to use the subway to prepare his city for a pandemic is now worried that VOCID-19 and its fallout is disproportionately affecting minority communities. He’s so concerned, in fact, that he’s made a brand new position for his wife to mitigate it.
The New York Post reports that “de Blasio revealed Sunday that first lady Chirlane McCray, a rumored contender for Brooklyn borough president, would co-chair a Task Force on Racial Inclusion and Equity as the city plans its eventual reopening.”
“The economic and racial disparities that have been made so clear by this crisis, we knew about them before,” said de Blasio. “A powerful, painful exclamation point has been put on them by this crisis.”
McCray has come under fire for her alleged mismanagement of ThriveNYC, a plan to deal with mental health and substance abuse throughout the city. The program spent money like it was going out of style, but never could quite explain how it was helping solve the city’s issues, as it didn’t have any clear metrics by which to judge its success. Line-item budget requests by POLITICO were repeatedly ignored and the program couldn’t explain how it had spent its $850 million in taxpayer funding. Then, McCray tried to head up a new program called “She Built NYC,” a project aimed at building as many statues of women as there are of men around the city. Instead, she wound up garnering the ire of resident Catholics after she outright ignored the public’s top pick, Mother Cabrini, America’s first canonized saint.
But now, McCray is on deck to head up a brand new group to oversee racial inequality during the coronavirus outbreak, the goal of which is reportedly to ensure hard-hit minority communities get help as the city seeks to rebuild its local economy after the shutdown eases.
And even some local Democrats aren’t impressed. Councilman Robert Holden suggested the appointment was a ploy by De Blasio to help his wife become the Brooklyn borough president, saying, “This is political. I wish de Blasio would stop doing this. Let her win the Brooklyn borough presidency on her own merits.”
“Her track record on Thrive and the statue commission hasn’t been so good,” he added.
To add insult to injury, when the New York Post asked city officials about the group’s budget, they reportedly received no response.