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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC and the New York City mayoral primary is on the races on toward the June 22nd, primary. We've said on the show many times this is going to come up fast, and the mayoral primary is probably the election this year, because there's probably going to be no viable Republican, so June 22nd. Here on the show, we're interviewing the candidates who are considered to have a chance so you can start to get to know them and make an informed choice. Of course, we'll have the candidates back, the ones who prove themselves to matter along the way.

Today we're going to meet candidate Zach Iscol. He's a military veteran and the founder of the non-profit Headstrong, a provider of cost-free mental healthcare treatment for military veterans and their families. City & State, the news organization says, "Iscol is positioning himself as a more moderate Democrat, one who has a better relationship with big business in the city than Mayor Bill de Blasio", but it says, "He's trying to position himself as a cross between De Blasio and Bloomberg." We'll see how he describes himself. Hello, Zach Iscol. Welcome to WNYC.

Zach Iscol: Thanks so much for having me on. I'm going to apologize right now, Brian, first off, let me just say I'm a huge fan of the show. I think you're a guitar riff is probably more New York than bodegas and pizza, and I'm going to apologize right off the bat for any barking dogs or crying kids you have in the background. We have a lot in our house, but it's great to be here and thanks to let me on.

Brian: We actually love the barking dogs and the crying kids, many have made their radio debuts on The Brian Lehrer Show. How much do you accept that-?

Zach: We have three- I'm sorry.

Brian: Go ahead.

Zach: We have three rescues and I'm sure they will make it their first Brian Lehrer appearance today.

Brian: How much do you accept that city and state characterization of your positioning is trying to be more business-friendly than De Blasio, but part De Blasio part Bloomberg?

Zach: I don't think we can have a mayor who is antagonistic to any community. I don't accept that I am just friendly to business, I think we need a mayor who is friendly to everybody in the city, and who also understands that solving some of these seemingly intractable problems in the city is going to involve getting the private sector, the non-profit sector, and city agencies to work together.

I've led through a lot of crisis in my life. The one thing that I've learned leading through various crises is that the only way you get through it is together, that's certainly true at this moment, and I think we need to move past divisiveness in the city. There's nothing like a crisis that pulls New Yorkers together, and in this moment, we are going to have to depend on upon everybody to help us recover from this pandemic.

Brian: When you give that answer in response to the question and the way I asked it, does that mean you think that the De Blasio administration has been too tough on the business community, and that's something you would try to adjust?

Zach: I don't think he's involved the business community. I think that part of the problem that we have now, Brian, is we have a political class that looks for people to blame as opposed to looking to solve problems. They care more about the political outcome than the real outcome, and I'll give you an example of how this could have played out. When you're looking for somebody to blame, you often don't involve them.

Imagine if nine, 10 months ago, Mayor De Blasio had reached out to the business community, to the technology community, and said, "We need to figure out a way of providing a world-class online education to a million school kids by September." By involving the private sector, we could have reinvented online education, instead, we have the fiasco that we've had over the past few months of trying to open closed schools, and not getting kids the education we need.

We now have developed a vaccine through public-private partnerships. A vaccine in less time than it's taken the city to get 70,000 tablets into the hands of school kids. Another example, the Mayor loves to punch the real estate industry. Imagine if earlier this fall, when we have so many public schools that don't have the right ventilation systems, are not safe places to learn. We have kids who are now schooling at home, trying to do Zoom school without access to the internet.

What if the mayor had reached out to the real estate community and say, "We have all this empty commercial office space, can we convert it into classrooms? Or at least a safe place for high school kids to go where they have access to the internet, ventilation systems, and they can do online learning"? I think we need to start being creative and inclusive, and how we solve problems they're going to make a big difference in people's lives and address some of the inequities that we see in New York City.

Brian: Would you say the real estate industry has too much power, too little power, or roughly the right amount of power in New York today?

Zach: I think that part of the problem that we have in addressing housing in New York City is we take a backward approach. If you are a real estate developer- first off, I think when we look at the problem, affordability in this city, and it is a huge problem, nobody should be spending more than 20, 25% of their income a month on their rent or their housing. I think that should be the goal.

I think we as a city, what I have found in my career, and I think maybe if I back up and explain a little bit about my background and introduce myself to folks, people will have a better understanding of how I approach problems, but in my career, I've lived through a lot of crisis. I led troops through some of the heaviest combat of the Iraq war. When I came home from that war, I suffered from post-traumatic stress. I was able to get the help I needed.

Many of my fellow veterans were not. In fact, I was in one of the heaviest [unintelligible 00:05:57] battalions in Iraq where I lost more Marines to suicide since coming home than I did in combat, and so we built the Headstrong Project, which you mentioned in your intro, which is now one of the leading and largest providers of mental health care in the US. We take care of almost 800 to a thousand veterans every week. Then, most recently earlier this year at the height of the pandemic, I went to Javits Medical Center as a volunteer.

We had 28 federal state and city agencies working there. They weren't working together. Some of the most remarkable people I have worked with in my career were in that building but these agencies from the federal state and city government were not working together. I know you did a lot of the reporting on this, some of the problems at Javits in the early days. One of the stories that has not been told is the turnaround of Javits into one of the only successful COVID field hospitals. I was part of that as the deputy director there.

What I have found in those situations going back to my time in Iraq, where I had to get local tribes, religious groups to work alongside US Marines, to getting those 28 federal state and city agencies together, to get hospital systems, clinicians, public, private partnerships, corporations, and local governments to work together to address a suicide crisis, is you need to have a starting point where you have a shared mutually agreed-upon objective.

If you think about real estate, one of the problems in this city is that we talk about tactics and how we are going to solve these problems. We relinquish a lot of these projects to the developers to come up with their plans, and then we defer to the community, instead, what we need to do is we need to flip the script. I think community boards, local communities, we need to do an assessment, even citywide, where we decide the outcome is going to be, nobody should spend more than 25% of their income a year, a month on rent.

From there you say, "Okay, how much vacancy? What's the vacancy rates we need? How much inventory do we need?" You can look at specific communities and they can say, "We need this amount of inventory at these different AMIs, at these different income levels." Then from there, a developer can come in and they can say, "We can eat this part of the pie with this development".

You can start building constituents early on. Usually with developments, you have a lottery system that happens on the tail end of the project, almost when it's completed or when it's completed. That should happen upfront so people know that they have equity in the process, and they know that there is a house or an apartment, a home that is being built for them and that they will then have a stake in that. I think it's about flipping the script and it's not about who has more power or less power, it's about creating a more inclusive process by starting on shared outcomes that we can agree upon.

Brian: This is WNYC-FM, HD, AM in New York. WNJT-FM 88.1, Trenton. WNJP 88.5, Sussex. WNJY 89.3, Netcong. WNJO 90.3, Toms River. We are in New York and New Jersey public radio, and we have a few minutes left with New York City mayoral hopeful, Zach Iscol. Following up on some of your background that you just described there and your non-profit Headstrong dealing with mental health of veterans, for example. The first lady of the city of New York, Chirlane McCray, has made mental health her issue and with the mayor created the program ThriveNYC.

How well do you think that's done and addressing the mental health needs of New York City? How would you, since that's part of your background, go about improving it more? Especially at this time of so much stress and challenges to our mental health in the city as everywhere.

Zach: First off, let me just say I applaud the first lady Chirlane McCray for her work in mental health and the work she has done to make a point of how big of an issue this is. Talking to New Yorkers around the city, one of the things I hear from New Yorkers is that they can't sleep at night. When I came home from war, I couldn't sleep at night. We know that right now in New York, it is more dangerous to be a New Yorker in the time of COVID than it is to have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have lost a greater percentage of New Yorkers to this disease than we have lost a percentage of troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last 18, 19 years.

We know that there were kids, even before COVID, and particularly kids of color, who suffer from higher levels of post-traumatic stress than troops returning home from war, just because they grew up in New York City. This is a major issue. It is the second pandemic. It is something that we need to start addressing now. In terms of ThriveNew York City, I think part of the problem is we have no idea if it is effective. A lot of the money that was spent, was spent on providing care for people that did not have a long-term or critical mental illness, but we really don't know where a lot of that money was spent, where it went, or what the outcomes were.

In addressing mental health, I think there were a couple of things that as a part of my policy platform that I would do is, number one, we need to increase the capacity for clinical care in this city, particularly in communities of color and in particular clinicians who are culturally competent in certain communities. There is a huge deficit of Black and Brown psychologists, psychiatrists, licensed clinical social workers. We need to create pathways in this city to have more of those clinicians.

We also need to increase capacity by changing state licensing so that we can do telemedicine from other states to increase the number of clinicians to provide care to people. We also need to be focusing on ways that we can reduce the need for clinical care. Those are things like access to the outdoors, things like better bike paths, making sure we have better parks, access to open spaces, making sure nobody's food insecure and that people have healthy diets, that people exercise.

Those are all things that contribute to better mental health. Reducing violence in communities, better mental health. All of these things. We need to take a truly holistic approach to addressing it because this is the next pandemic and it has already started and we need to get serious about it. I applaud what Chirlane McCray tried to do, but if you don't start with outcomes, if you don't start with rigor, you're not going to be successful, and I think ThriveNYC is an example of that.

Brian: Last question before we run out of time. I want to get your reaction to a news story this morning, if you've seen or looked into it yet, and that is the confrontation down around the City Hall last night between NYPD officers and Black Lives Matter protesters. From some of the accounts, it seems to fit the pattern that has caused the State Attorney General, Letitia James, to sue the city for court monitors over policing of protests, where reportedly, police were charging peaceful protestors violently last night. Do you have an opinion about that or Letitia James's lawsuit or the behavior of the NYPD generally over the last year?

Zach: Yes, I do have opinions on this. First off, watching the videos from last night, it is indefensible that changes have not been implemented over the course of the past few months, past few years. It is far beyond time. The buck in the Letitia James suit, you see that the mayor is named in that suit. The buck stops with the mayor. I come from a community in the military community, I was in the Infantry and Special Operations, where accountability is paramount, where the leadership is paramount.

I've built military units overseas and at home. There is a real need for much better training for the types of people we are selecting into the NYPD, but ultimately this falls at the mayor's feet and he has done nothing to create change. He continues to create the situations with his lack of leadership and with his unwillingness to create a culture of accountability.

In military units, accountability is paramount. If you lose a rifle, any piece of serialized equipment, that's the end of your career. This summer, there was a tragic accident off the coast of California. A Marine Corps Amtrac, an amphibious assault vehicle sank off the coast of California, nine Marines drowned. About four months later, the Marine Corps somberly fired the battalion commander.

Now this battalion commander is five levels up the chain of command, probably very little he could have done to have prevented that accident, but the Marine Corps institutes a strict culture of accountability because it knows right now every Colonel in the Marine Corps is inspecting their amphibious assault vehicles to make sure that they don't sink. That ultimately sends a message across the Marine Corps that the lives of Marines matter. Every Colonel in Marine Corps right now is inspecting their vehicles and making sure that they're well-maintained, making sure the screws are tight, making sure that doesn't happen.

That culture of accountability is needed within the NYPD. I would argue it is needed across city government. I think that extent to your earlier question about ThriveNYC. If you don't have a specific outcome that you're driving towards, you will just spend a billion dollars without having accountability for how it's being spent or what you're trying to achieve. That is really needed and missing from city government right now.

Brian: New York City mayor hopeful, Zach Iscol, as I say to all the candidates, good luck out there on the trail. Thank you so much for coming on today and introducing yourself to a lot more New Yorkers.

Zach: Brian, thanks so much for having me on. It's great to be here. Hope to talk to you again.

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