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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We've just spent the first half-hour of the show talking about national politics. Let's go local. The day after Labor Day is traditionally back to work and back to school day for so many people, obviously, and here in New York City, it is back to the classrooms today for public school teachers except those in about 10 buildings where the ventilation system has been declared not up to the challenge. There may be many more than 10, but officially, there are 10. On Labor Day, ironically, the pandemic induced budget crisis means the city is reeling from private sector unemployment. You know that, especially if you couldn't make your September rent or other kinds of payments, and now the prospect of thousands of city workers being laid off this fall just as we celebrated workers yesterday. I am joined to talk about those stories and more by Jeffrey Mays, New York Times reporter on the Metro desk, and our own, Brigid Bergin, WNYC City Hall and politics reporter. Hi, Brigid, and welcome back, Jeff Mays.

Brigid Bergin: Good morning.

Jeffery Mays: Thanks for having me.

Brian: Let's start with the schools and as of last week, the blueprint is students are not reporting to any classrooms before Monday, September 21st and the start of online classes is delayed until next Wednesday, the 16th, but teachers are supposed to report today except, as I mentioned, in those 10 buildings. Brigid, can we say teachers are back?

Brigid: We can say teachers are certainly heading back in many of those cases to do professional development. As you mentioned, there are some schools that will not be open. Those 10 buildings that were identified that needed some work done on their ventilation systems. It's just keeping half an ear on the mayor's press conference which is happening right now and he gave a brief update in terms of the surveys that they have done for the other schools and what the status is of those other buildings. So far, it sounds like schools are pretty much on track. He said that of the more than 1,400 school buildings that they examined with thousands of classrooms, 96% of them passed. That's a pretty high number but we do know that there are those 10 schools that do need to have new ventilation systems added and so teachers who are assigned there are going to other places. If the work is not completed in time for when students are supposed to be back, they will also go somewhere else.

Brian: I'm reading about the Martin Luther King Jr. Building on the West side of Manhattan that now houses several smaller high schools within it. It sounds like it's ventilation system hasn't worked properly in years, Jeff. Getting these systems fixed could be a silver lining to this whole mess, but also who knows how long it's going to take if it hasn't worked in years.

Jeffery: Yes, absolutely. I think it shows just how important the safety issue is here. The teachers' union has made that their priority that teachers want to feel safe. I certainly have a number of teacher friends who have expressed to me concerns about being safe, whether the facilities will be set up and one of the big questions, I think, floating around is people feel like maybe some of this stuff should have been done earlier in the summer, that there should have been a look at these systems and whether they were working properly. Because certain for people to return to school and teach their best and do their best with students, they're going to need to feel comfortable. I think that's the issue the mayor is facing right now.

Brian: I want to come back in a couple of minutes to teachers and the dueling lawsuits that I see out there. I don't know if we can exactly equate them, but we have restaurant owners suing the city to let them open for indoor dining because they say it's safe. We have teachers suing the city to not open the schools at all because they say it's unsafe. This is the state of COVID politics and COVID interests and COVID fears as we sit here on the day after Labor Day, but people who are listening at the very top of the show, right when we started at ten o'clock, heard me mention a tweet from somebody named Ray. Twitter goes by Ray, who tweeted that his wife was a teacher and went back today and already no ventilation and no PPE. Now I see that that same guy is calling in and I want to take his call. Ray in Harlem. You're on WNYC. Thank you so much for calling. Hi, there.

Ray: How you're doing?

Brian: Good. Help us report this story.

Ray: My wife went in and she sent me some-- She was very nervous about going in and there are over 100 staff in her building and for instance, the sink in her hallway had absolutely no soap in it. The windows in the staircases were shut and locked. The windows in her room only opened 6 inches. There's no way to even put a fan in to pull air out of it. That's just a small number of things. There weren't enough PPEs to go around so they told them if they had their own, to use those instead of taking a few they had.

Brian: Wow.

Ray: The screening is basically three questions you do on your phone. Have you had COVID? Have you come into contact with anyone that has COVID? That's their health screening.

Brian: Are they taking temperatures?

Ray: Randomly on the wrist. It's not everyone that [crosstalk]

Brian: Do you want to say what school it is?

Ray: Probably not. She'd probably get upset if I did. [chuckles]

Brian: You could tell us of the air if you want, but that's up to you.

Ray: It is a school in the West Village and it's a school in a neighborhood. It's wealthy and there's no doubt that most of the kids there, they'll be fine, whether they're in school or not. Of course, they have no idea how many people are coming to school because people chose blended learning so that they could hedge their bets and decide at the last minute.

Brian: If even there, they don't have ventilation and PPEs where privilege usually means they're going to be well taken care of, then what might be going on? Ray, thank you very much in the rest of the city. Brigid that's an interest-- It's one anecdote. We can't verify it, but it's maybe an interesting indication of what's happening around the city, perhaps as teachers walk into their school buildings today.

Brigid: It's troubling. I asked the mayor and schools chancellor last week a question about, to what extent they were going to centralize the distribution of PPE because we were hearing from city council member, Mark Treyger, that he was getting feedback from teachers with some mixed information about what extent it would be a centralized distribution versus whether or not schools will be purchasing it themselves. The chancellor was pretty strident in his answer, making clear that the city was going to manage this, that all schools would have sufficient PPE. That the only thing that was different was that schools were being told that if they wanted to buy additional PPE, which obviously raises a whole host of other issues because only schools that have additional funds to do that would be able to do that. This is definitely something that I think we're going to be following particularly in these early days, particularly before some of the testing is happening on a routine basis. We want to hear from teachers, from parents, from everyone about what that experience is like today.

Brian: You can do that on the phone, 646-435-7280, but we're not just talking about the first day of back to school for New York City public school teachers. We're taking stock of a number of the big things going on. COVID-related, racial justice-related more as we sit here on the day after Labor Day and head into a new seasoned, not officially first day of fall, but you know what I mean. We're going to go onto some non-education things and you can call on any of it, finances, employment, racial justice protests. 646-435-7280. 646-435-7280 for WNYC City Hall and politics reporter, Brigid Bergin, and New York Times Metro reporter, Jeffrey Mays. 646-435-7280. Jeff, I mentioned that the city is facing potential layoffs of city workers. The mayor has mentioned the number 22,000 potential city worker layoffs even as we just celebrated Labor Day. I guess this is revolving now around what's going to be a new issue to a lot of people who don't pay close attention. The mayor wants additional borrowing power. The mayor wants the city to borrow at least $1 billion dollars, maybe up to $6 billion to prevent that and to continue to cover many of the vital services that the city has to provide, especially in the pandemic. It's controversial. Can you layout the sides if there are sides of this?

Jeffery: Sure. I think one issue is the mayor has called for this additional funding and he's threatened those 22,000 layoffs as you said. He recently held off on sending out those layoff notices so that he could work with union leaders to try to come up with some more savings. On one side of this, there's been this criticism of the mayor that the cuts and the savings have not gone far enough yet before he looks to borrow this money, which people were very wary of because of what happened during the 1970s fiscal crisis. What's happened is it's become more and more clear now. You've had more officials agreeing with the mayor that there may be a need to borrow. You had the controller Scott Stringer, who was skeptical at first, who said that there may need to be borrowing and the city council speaker, Corey Johnson also is on board. What people have asked to see from the mayor is a very specific plan about how the borrowing will be used. I think there's a fear of whether borrowing that money will cause more damage down the road as the city looks to repay that. It's just a political issue because the mayor needs this permission from the state to borrow this money as well. It's a similar issue with the mayor caught between the state local officials. It's unclear now whether that borrowing is actually going to go through, but there seems to be a much more of a consensus now that the city's financial state may call for.

Brian: Brigid, do you want to add anything to this? Because the people that are concerned about the borrowing, as I understand it, are like, "Geez, the city is in debt already from past borrowing. This is going to put too much of a burden on the city's future to pay back all that debt service. It won't be able to fund as much city services going forward," versus, "Hey, here's the real emergency. This is when you do borrow money in the middle of the pandemic until the vaccine or whatever comes and the city's economy can recover. Oh, by the way, interest rates are so low. That also makes it a good time to borrow money."

Brigid: Right. I think part of what is happening here as Jeff said, the politics of it are really hard. You have a mayor who is a lame duck as I'm sure we will talk about 2021 races are here. He is not in his most politically powerful position. One of the things that has happened throughout his mayoralty is his budget has grown by some $20 billion. He's added to the workforce. One of the criticisms he's received from people like the Citizens Budget Commission, which is a nonpartisan think tank that looks at the city's fiscal issues is, there hasn't been enough of an effort by this administration to go agency by agency and look for savings. Certainly, agencies have cut back. For example, under the Bloomberg administration when we also had a fiscal crisis, agencies were required to hit targets of a certain percentage and really assess their own efficiency and find ways to save money. The other part of this is when we talk about the negotiations with labor unions, there's been a long time push from advocates like the CBC for the city to be pushing unions to pay more for their health care. Currently, city unions don't contribute anything for their health care. If they could contribute towards their health care premiums, that would be another way that the city could save some money without having to lay off workers. I think the question of borrowing is one way of addressing this problem. The city needs money to balance-- It is required to balance its budget every year. It needs at least this billion dollars for fiscal 2021, but then it's facing more gaps as you look at the out-years. There's some question about whether or not borrowing is the best way to deal with it. As Jeff said, that becomes this politically complicated question because the decision has to be made by Albany.

Brian: The spending side, people will cite everything from potential layoffs of EMS workers, right? Right after they were heroes in the pandemic and everybody was celebrating them and the mayor said, "Let's give them a ticker-tape parade." Now they might suffer layoffs to cutting the schools budget at the same time that the schools need more money in order to do this hybrid model of remote learning, which takes more training and tools and everything and in-person which takes more cleaning and everything. They want to avoid as much of that inability to spend as possible. Is there any reason, Brigid, to think that the mayor could even have enough leverage over the unions to get them to do something like start contributing to their health care costs more all of a sudden?

Brigid: I think part of what-- There's a question here about the extent to which holding out this number of layoffs, and then de Blasio has very clearly said, as he pushes for the borrowing authority, that these unions are also pushing for it. Because he doesn't necessarily have the political capital. Will the unions be able to help solve this problem even in the short term by persuading state lawmakers that in fact the city needs this or they will lose these jobs because it's beneficial to them?

Brian: Yes. The leverage is they might lose their jobs altogether. Then there's relief from the federal government, which is in the house bill for state and local governments like New York, but the Senate under Mitch McConnell is not going along. Here is Senator Schumer speaking yesterday. I think we can get Senator Schumer up here in just a second. This is just seven seconds of Chuck Schumer if we have it. Do we have it?

Chuck Schumer: The bill seeks to rock the core of the big apple. It would be a devastating loss for New York.

Brian: We know a minority leader, Chuck Schumer, who of course is from New York, thinks about the majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and how he is approaching, helping New York and other locales around the country. I want to take a call from somebody who says they work in one of the 10 New York City public schools that's been closed for a lack of adequate ventilation. It's Alex in Brooklyn. Alex, you're on WNYC. Thank you so much for calling in.

Alex: Thank you. Yes, I just wanted to share with you the timeline we received of the information. First, around August 15th, we were told everything was fine. Then maybe a week or eight days later, we were told 16 rooms in the building, including mine, were unsafe, but we weren't told what criteria was used to tell us they were unsafe. Then we were told 60% to 80% of the building was unsafe and then it was closed. We were given probably 15 to 16 hours' notice before we knew we weren't going in.

Brian: Huh. What happens next?

Alex: I have no idea. I'm sitting around waiting to find out when the school will open. If we'll be moved. I have no clue.

Brian: Thank you for helping us report this story, Alex. Thank you very much. Jeff Mays, what were you thinking as you heard Alex call?

Jeffery: I think this is going to be a really difficult process. This is the largest school system in the country. 1.1 million kids. 1,600/1,700 buildings, many of them old. It's no surprise that the ventilation is not working in some of these buildings. I know what they're doing at the MLK campuses. They're going to go fully remote. I believe. They have that option. Look, it's just a really difficult situation. There's been many people in the city that have sacrificed over the course of this pandemic. You've had grocery workers and MTA workers who've gone out and risked their lives to do their jobs. There's just no easy answers at this point. It's just a tough situation.

Brian: There's a change at the federal level to what FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, will cover in terms of PPEs and cleaning supplies to prevent COVID-19 spread. This is more bad economic news for the city, but it also seems like more hostility to New York. This is money that the feds were given to clean the subways and clean the schools just as Trump keeps arguing that everybody should re-open as much as possible and get back to working as usual, and yet they're cutting this money to disinfect the subways and other things like that. Brigid, what is this? Is this just the president looking to punish New York in any way that he can to help his electoral chances and other states that are hostile to us?

Brigid: It is a rule change made by an agency that he controls. [chuckles] I think that that's probably not an unfair way to characterize it, and it would hurt a city that he is now using as what I think is essentially a prop in his re-election campaign, pointing to anything and everything that could go wrong, and to the Democratic leadership that's in charge of it. That all feeds into his narrative of why he should be re-elected. I think it is a dangerous move. As you were talking about Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, came out over the weekend saying that FEMA, the agency who's changing its rules and would withhold this money that would prevent the city from doing the type of ongoing cleaning of subways in schools, things that are necessary so that the city can function, basically taking that money away and not reimbursing the city for some of those expenses. That is just going to add to the burdens already facing the city.

Brian: Jeff, I want to mention that the protests continued over the weekend after the police killing in Rochester. The counter-protests are also continuing. It's not just in Kenosha, Wisconsin in Portland, Oregon, it's also here in New York where we saw this horrific thing on Thursday night in Times Square when a car driven by counter-protesters who apparently police helped into their vehicle, maybe because they thought their safety was being threatened, these counter-protesters, I don't know, but then they drove into a group of protesters and caused injuries. Witnesses are starting to come forward and talk about this. Are you on this story enough to know what we really saw there?

Jeffery: Look, I can't give a final answer. It was a scary-looking video where you saw the car lurch forward. I think most people were able to get out of the way. I believe there may have been one or two people that were injured. I believe police say they are investigating at this point, but there's certainly been calls for more accountability for those who were in the car. Look, these protests are not going away. There is something happening in this country where people are recognizing and are concerned about policing and the racial ramifications of how policing is carried out. I think you're going to continue to see these protests and maybe even counter-protesters now as we move closer and closer to the November elections.

Brian: Somebody just tweeted us a picture of an open, empty stretch of sand. It says, "Sitting on a very quiet post-Labor Day beach listening to Brian Lehrer at WNYC." This is not what I usually consider beach listening the show, but I'm really glad you're out there listening to us on the day after Labor Day weekend on a deserted beach. Brigid, anything to add on the horrific incident in Times Square and the bigger picture of whether we might be headed to more of what we saw in Portland and Kenosha, and places like that in recent weeks?

Brigid: I think to Jeff's point, these protests are not going to go away. Certainly, I think we're going to see them continue through November. One of the things, just to bring it back locally, I think will be interesting is to what extent what we have seen throughout this summer shapes the conversation about what city leadership should look like in 2021 and what kind of leader city residents are looking for. While we are still just beginning to hear who some of those candidates maybe, some of the likely candidates are people who were out there participating in those protests. Maya Wiley, one of the former lawyers for the mayor. She was participating in some of these protests, tweeting about the experience. She would be the first Black woman to be mayor of New York City. How does her candidacy change the potential platforms for some of the other candidates who we're soon to hear from as soon as today? City controller, Scott Stringer. Potentially, sanitation commissioner, Kathryn Garcia. I'm really interested to see how this really animated summer transforms the conversation for 2021. Certainly, COVID and re-building will be a huge part of it, but also, what does an agency like the NYPD look like under a new administration and what do people want from that?

Brian: What about law and order "pressures on de Blasio" with respect to any side in the protests that doesn't want to just express themselves verbally, but might want to bring guns like we're seeing elsewhere or drive cars into protesters like apparently we saw Thursday night, or run up lower Manhattan as I've seen reported, tell me if you can confirm this, selectively smashing windows of Starbucks, Duane Reade, and banks. Brigid, do you know?

Brigid: I saw similar reports of some of those incidents over the weekend. I think this mayor is still in charge of the NYPD and he ultimately, this is his police commissioner, this is his department. He is ultimately accountable for their actions. I think to the extent that we see more of those types of incidents of potential violence during protesters, whether it's violence that is committed by some protesters or whether people bring violence to these protests, that becomes something that is a tremendous challenge for this administration and potentially one that will force people to think about what-- This is an administration that was supposed to have transformed the NYPD. To what extent have we hit the limit in terms of what can change without a deeper cultural shift or a deeper examination about what the role of this agency actually is?

Brian: Let's finish on one of the names, Jeff, that Brigid just mentioned as a potential new entrant into the mayor's race for next year, of course, that election is a year away, but it's interesting that all these people are getting in and it potentially changes the nature of the conversation in the city. I saw that you tweeted out an article by some of your Times colleagues that Kathryn Garcia, who is definitely not a household name, she's been in New York City Sanitation Commissioner, but she's certainly somebody who mayor de Blasio has trusted with big jobs. He's put her in charge of major emergencies, crisis management during the pandemic, and other things. Kathryn Garcia, you want to give us just 30 seconds on the idea of her entering the race and what it could mean?

Jeffery: Yes, she's been the mayor's "miss fix-it" really. She's held the title of czar numerous times. She was the food czar during this pandemic to make sure that New Yorkers struggling were able to get fed. When NYCHA was dealing with lead issues and mismanagement there, the mayor put her there to try to bring some order to that. She generally gets high reviews from her job of running the sanitation department. She helped layout electronic recycling and composting. Some major issues that people were happy with. I think, what happens now is there's no name recognition. That's going to be the hardest part of this for her. She has a great reputation inside government circles. In addition, some of the other candidates like Scott Stringer who was expected to announce today, they've been fundraising for a long time since he's behind in those critical errors of name recognition and fundraising to be able to make a dent in this race. She's certainly the type of person I think you will see, given what's happening in the city with the pandemic and the need for a strong manager. I think that's going to be her argument that the city needs a strong manager to get it back on track after what we've experienced in the last six months.

Brian: Also, your most recent article headline Do New York City Voters Want Another White Mayor? The racial justice season changes that calculus, doesn't it?

Jeffery: Absolutely. I think as Brigid mentioned earlier, this debate about policing in the city. There is going to be, I think in the next mayoral race, a big question of what should police look like? What should police be doing? Should police be responding to mental health calls? Should they be doing traffic stops? What is the role of police? That is the large debate that has to happen around some of these issues of racial justice and policing. I think a lot of the candidates are already starting to address that issue now. Someone like Scott Stringer had called for defunding the police somewhat in order to fund other social services. That's a major issue coming up in this election, but again, you're going to have candidates that are going to make the argument that, "Well, that is an issue but the city is in dire straits right now. We need money. We need to get back on track." I think it's going to be a really healthy season of debate for New York City coming up.

Brian: Jeffrey Mays, New York Times Metro correspondent, and WNYC City Hall and politics reporter

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