Before Mayor Bill de Blasio indulges his presidential hopes with another trip to Iowa or Nevada, he has some pressing business closer to home.
There are more than a dozen key positions unfilled in New York City government. Agencies throughout the city’s $92 billion bureaucracy are without permanent leadership, or are being led by officials with substantial responsibilities elsewhere. Plus, like President Donald Trump, de Blasio appears comfortable filling high-profile roles with acting officials.
The city’s Housing Authority, which provides homes for 400,000 New Yorkers, has no permanent head. Neither does the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, nor the Department of Buildings. The Preservation Department is critical to the mayor’s affordable housing initiative; the Buildings Department enforces tenant protection laws.
Some officials are running two or more agencies. That would be a suboptimal situation in any city. In New York, where some agencies have budgets larger than the total spending of many states, it’s a management approach worth questioning.
Lorraine Grillo, for instance, is running both the School Construction Authority, with a $205 million budget, and the Department of Design and Construction, after that agency’s former commissioner resigned in 2017 amid a half-billion dollars in cost overruns on the city’s Sandy recovery program.
Then there’s Kathryn Garcia, the city’s sanitation commissioner, who was tapped in February to serve as interim chief executive of the Housing Authority after it was discovered that the agency mishandled lead inspections, allowing hundreds of children to be exposed to lead paint. The first deputy sanitation commissioner, Steven Costas, is leading that department as acting commissioner until Garcia returns full time. The Sanitation Department has a budget of $1.7 billion. The Housing Authority’s annual operating budget is $3.5 billion.
In one especially odd episode, Joseph Esposito, commissioner of the city’s Office of Emergency Management, continues to lead the agency months after he was abruptly fired in the wake of criticism over the city’s handling of a snowstorm. A de Blasio spokesman told Politico, which first reported the extent of the vacancies, that there was a continuing search for Esposito’s replacement.
Maybe that’ll happen soon, if de Blasio can carve out the time.
The mayor, who has 2 1/2 years left in his second term, has recently focused his attentions elsewhere. Yet, especially if he’ll be on the campaign trail, filling these positions is the least de Blasio can do to make sure the city that elected him gets the services it deserves.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.