Mayoral candidate Shaun Donovan vows fed connections will get money to NYC
Shaun Donovan on Friday touted himself as a mayoral candidate best equipped to both secure funding from the federal government and trim fat from a city budget that became bloated under Mayor de Blasio.
Donovan — who served as President Barack Obama’s budget director and HUD Secretary and oversaw housing under Mayor Mike Bloomberg — vowed to bring his Washington, D.C. and government know-how to City Hall at a time when the Big Apple is still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic and facing fiscal peril.
“The question is who’s the candidate in this race who you actually believe could get this budget challenge under control and invest in the kinds of things I’m talking about,” Donovan said in a speech to the Association for a Better New York on Friday morning. “People forget that President Obama faced the biggest budget deficit since World War II, and we actually brought that deficit down faster than anytime since World War II, while getting the Affordable Care Act done, while getting big investments in infrastructure and housing.”
Donovan said he aims to cut costs through finalizing the closure of Rikers Island, instituting the kind of agency-by-agency cost savings that were employed during the Bloomberg era and “aggressively” managing attrition of the city’s workforce.
“We have a huge opportunity to manage the city budget more effectively,” he said.
Donovan also touted areas he plans to invest in, such as the New York City Housing Authority, the city’s pandemic response and preparedness, as well as his Equity Bonds proposal, which would give $1,000 a year to every child in the five boroughs through a city-administered savings account.
His speech Friday also offered a glimpse into which of the two previous mayors he’s more in alignment with — de Blasio or Bloomberg.
Donovan bemoaned de Blasio’s move away from the fiscal discipline employed under the Bloomberg administration he served in, and said the current mayor dropped the ball when he shifted the city’s COVID test and trace responsibilities away from the Department of Health.
“Leadership means being willing to set your ego and ideology aside for the people you serve and to let the professionals do their jobs. Donald Trump failed to do that. Bill de Blasio failed to do that,” he said. “Removing contact tracing and testing from the Health Department was both a failure and a warning sign that mirrored what we saw countless times in Washington the last four years.”
