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Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. A recurring story during the coronavirus pandemic in New York this summer is coalitions of top business leaders in New York trying to get Mayor de Blasio's attention to be included more in planning for the city's recovery from the pandemic's economic shock. Now, in an open letter last week from 160 CEOs, warning the mayor about "widespread anxiety about public safety, cleanliness, and other quality of life issues". One small chapter in this uncomfortable relationship came on this show in July. When I asked the mayor about business leader's frustration over he's not taking them up on their offer with help with an economic recovery plan, and the mayor began his response like this.

Mayor de Blasio: There's an underlying truth in the fact that my focus has not been on the business community and the elite. Bluntly, my predecessor certainly focused that way and many mayors have. I think that's unfortunately. I think this is a profound problem. I am tempted to borrow a quote from Karl Marx here when he says--

Brian: They'd love that on Wall Street.

Mayor de Blasio: Yes, they will, but there's a famous quote that the state is the executive committee of the bourgeoisie. I use it openly to say, no, I actually read that when I was a young person and I said, well, that's not the way it's supposed to be. The business community matters. We need to work with the business community. We will work with the business community, but the city government represents the people, represents working people. Mayors should not be too cozy with the business community.

Brian: With that is prelude. We welcome Kathy Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, which represents many of the city's biggest businesses in their dealings with the city and state governments. Their slogan is, "We build partnerships between business and government to strengthen New York City." Kathy, thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Kathryn: Thanks for having me, Brian. I appreciate it.

Brian: Would you put the mayor's comments here from July in the context of what you thought you were asking for or offering at that time and your reaction to hearing that clip that day?

Kathryn: Well, I think my reaction was deep disappointment because we really believe that this is a moment in the pandemic response where all New York's resources have to be applied to the crisis that's facing the city and so many of its people that have been deeply harmed, not only health, but economically. It should be a moment when we're all trying to unite and work together to deal with issues that are bigger than politics. The mayor is hopefully mayor of all the city and recognizes that, but that certainly wasn't what came across.

Brian: Well, your report in July was called A Call for Action and Collaboration. Would you like to say what a few of the biggest things were then that you were calling for and if you think they still apply in the same way now?

Kathryn: Well, clearly the fact that more than a million New Yorkers are unemployed and all the economic statistics suggest that we are going to be suffering for months, years, from the impact of the COVID and the shutdown of our economy, and we have to figure out a strategy for going forward. That's what we're trying to push, is that we look at what the damage is, which the report really cited, small business, particularly communities of color, minority-owned business. Half a million people are unemployed from small business alone. A third of those businesses may not survive the reopening. That's one set of issues that we think we have to be looking at is jobs and employment.

Another major area is education. Obviously, the online blended learning reopening of schools is a huge challenge that impacts everybody in New York, whether you have kids or not. The future of our city depends on getting this right. It's very unclear that the resources we need are happening there. There are a whole series of important critical issues, making sure transit is safe, making sure our buildings are healthy, and the environment is safe. Trying to ensure that city and state government have the resources they need to move forward.

Those are all challenges that nobody has a blueprint or a roadmap for. We began to just try and document what's happened, what has been the impact, and what are some of the areas that we have to look at going forward.

Brian: Let me play you another 30 seconds of the mayor's response that day and drill down on some of the specifics in this. Here's the mayor.

Mayor de Blasio: I've met with business leaders from day one. Some folks have really found some good common ground with, and they really want to help New York City, but a lot of folks have just hit a wall. When I say, guys, "You're going to have to pay more in taxes, and we're going to have policies that favor working people more like rent freezes, which we've done now multiple times and things that really have to shake the foundations of our inequality," there is a tension there, but in terms of the comeback, I'm talking to a lot of business leaders, I'm looking for where we can find common ground. I know a lot of them do want to help New York City, and I do appreciate that.

Brian: Kathy is the mayor wrong on the specifics of where he says your group's interests and the interests of most working people in the city do not coincide when it comes to the issues that the mayor thinks are the most economically vital right now, like a rent freeze, and raising taxes on your wealthiest members to support the city services, that you don't want to decline?

Kathryn: Well, I think there's a difference between substance and politics. From the business community standpoint right now, reopening the economy and their responsibility in that regard is the issue that we're focused on. It feels like we should be helping in that process to try and figure out what solutions are. I know in the closing down of the economy for the COVID, when we were dealing with the shutdown, both the governor and the mayor reached out to the business community for their experience in Asia for how they handled the COVID. In the shutdown, there was input from business. In the reopening, we think there has to be the same kind of relationship. I wouldn't say--

Brian: Can I follow up and ask what you have in mind there? Because I know that-- I don't know if he was one of the CEOs on your list. I know there were a lot from real estate, as well as finance and other sectors, but was it Stephen L. Green, the real estate developer yesterday who asked for the mayor to bring city employees back to the office to model private businesses bringing people back to their offices?

If so, my follow-up question would be why does he want to push it? If you're talking about reopening, why do you want to push it beyond what the mayor is taking as I guess, a relatively conservative approach to this? Why is it up to him? Businesses can now, under phase four, bring people back to their offices, but most aren't doing it.

Kathryn: Yesterday, I was up at One Vanderbilt ceremony. They were celebrating the opening of a great new office building that SL Green has developed. They're obviously, as real estate owners, as office building owners, very anxious to get people back into those offices. That's a business reaction. From the standpoint of most employers, particularly, our big industries, our big office industries in the city, which is financial services, professional services, media, most of them are operating remotely until their people are comfortable coming back to the city.

That's the purpose of why we brought CEOs together to send a message, is that they're not going to order their employees back to the city, most businesses, they're going to try and make the city as comfortable and as safe as possible. They've done that together with the real estate owners, and the businesses, have cleaned up their offices, have established protocols, have set up systems where half shifts can come back so people can socially distance. They're doing what they can on that front.

At the same time, they're getting pushback from employees who are saying, "Is the city safe?" "Will I be safe on mass transit?" "What's going on?" Stories about the more aggressive panhandling, and people feeling threatened by folks on the subway without masks. Those are all questions that employers are not in a position by themselves to solve, but where they want to be helpful to the city and figuring out how to solve these issues, because until people feel comfortable coming back, you're absolutely right, you can't force them to come back.

Brian: You want the city to say, "Come back." You want the government to say, "Go back to your offices people in the private sector."?

Kathyrn: I think this has to be authentic. I don't think telling people to come back is the answer. The COVID has created a profound impact on people's lives, on our culture. It's not just the COVID, but in addition to those health concerns, we've had a whole set of issues surrounding race and the police, we've had a whole set of issues surrounding crime. There are a number of complex issues that have hit our city in the last six, seven months, and our country for that matter, and we're figuring out how to handle them. That's not an easy process.

People have a high level of fear and anxiety about what is the new normal, and how do we behave, and how much do we trust our fellow New Yorkers, whether it's on the subway or whatever, and are our kids going to be safe and be able to go back to school? How do we manage our lives in this situation? There are real anxieties. The response to that can't be arbitrary. It can't be just come back to the office and forget all those concerns. It can't be political. The response has to be authentic and real.

We've got to try and address those things that people are most concerned about now. It will help if the symbols of being a clean city, of being a secure city, of seeing people are abiding by the protocols of wearing masks, that will all help creating that atmosphere, and then it will help to start getting more businesses open and to focus on how do we do real initiatives to support the restaurant. Not just give them rules and guidance, but to get them open, to support the small businesses.

Brian: Kathy Wylde with us, president of the Partnership for New York City, which represents many of the city's largest businesses to city and state government officials. They have an open letter to Mayor de Blasio that came out last Thursday. To the issue that he keeps pushing, as a well-covered conflict with a lot of the members in your group, raising taxes, your open letter said, "We urge you to restore essential services as a precursor for solving the city's longer-term complex economic challenges."

If you're urging him to restore essential services, he's saying, "Okay, support my call for a billionaire's tax to the state legislature, so we have more of the money to do it from people who aren't going to feel the pinch financially." Are you offering that support as a group?

Kathyrn: No one in that group thinks that money is the key issue facing us right now. It is figuring out a plan and being able to manage an intelligent response to that plan. When we've got a plan, when we know what the needs are, when we know how we're going to address them, then we can talk about, okay, what's it going to cost?

Brian: Wait, how can money not be a key issue to a financial crisis?

Kathyrn: I don't know if you saw what Citizen's Budget put out a tweet they did yesterday, where they just had a fact where, in a $90+ billion budget, we're $1 billion off where we were. We are not in a money crisis right now. We're going into a money shortfall crisis over the next two years. That's not today's problem. Today's problem is how are we going to respond to these issues? Get people back, get the economy going again. We've got to have a strategy for where we're going to put our resources before we start talking about increasing taxes or borrowing.

Brian: Where do you think they're putting too few?

Kathyrn: I think that we don't know where they're putting too few because it's not a very transparent process. What we need is to come together around, how do we keep the streets clean? What are the issues there? Is it a money problem? Is it a people problem? What is the issue there? What is the issue with homelessness? When the city was flooded with resources, prosperous, prior through 2019, prior to the COVID, we still had the homeless problem. Somehow that problem was not solved by money. What's the solution to the homeless problem? I don't think we have a consensus on that in the city.

Same thing with the relationships between the police and the community, the whole crime situation. I don't think we have consensus on a solution. That problem was not caused by COVID. That's been building for a long time. Somehow our process for working together as a city, for leaders from all sectors, including local government, but not depending on local government, not depending on government to solve all these problems, we've got to work together.

This is what we did in the 1980s after the 1970s crisis when government was in a similar position, had no resources. We all came together and worked on figuring out how to build community support for community development activities, how to bring together the banks, the builders to rebuild the neighborhoods with community nonprofit organizations. How did we solve the crime problem? We did it through a combination of community, civic, police, and business efforts. Same thing after 9/11, we all came together. Business, labor, nonprofit institutions, all came together to figure out what is the plan? How do we respond? We worked together to do that.

We've got to do the same thing now. It's not by dividing the city into who's the working class and who's the bourgeoise, it's by asking people of the city to say, "Okay, let's figure out where we want to go. What do we have in common? What's the vision for this new normal post-COVID?", and start working on it piece by piece. How do we bring back the restaurant industry? How do we reopen the schools? There are so many resources in New York City, there's so many assets, there's so many smart people who want to contribute to the future of the city. We need an organized framework for bringing them together, and working on that together with government, state and local government.

Brian: What's an example of that, in our last couple of minutes here, because I could imagine the mayor saying something like, and I don't want put words in his mouth at all, but I can imagine him saying something like his job is to take care of the public functions as city government. The private sector, especially the big corporations who are most of the members of your group, have the wherewithal to take care of themselves and figure out the best ways to come back.

Why does he need you at the table to figure out how to help with the public service side of things like that? Why wouldn't the business community be doing whatever those things are anyway? I'm formulating a theoretical question here, but what would you say the specific reason is that they even need you at the table to provide public services, or you need them for banks and real estate companies and such to get back on their feet? We have one minute.

Kathyrn: I would say education's a good example. We've got a sophisticated education community in our universities, businesses in the ed-tech field, et cetera. Getting education, getting a strong, solid online education system, blended learning as they call it, part online, part in the classroom, developing teachers' skills in that area, providing the resources, making sure that broadband is hooked up, that there's access to all the kids to equipment and to Wi-Fi to be able to participate in online education. That's a public-private partnership. That's not going to happen on one side or the other. That takes both to get that right.

A lot of that effort was put in to getting the schools up and running after the March shutdown, but we certainly do not have consensus now. I think that's an example of where we should have been working together with the unions, with the Department of Education, and where we should be working together going forward. I would say education is just one example.

Brian: Kathy, I have to leave it. Kathy Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, thank you so much.

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