Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Every Tuesday, Mayor Adams holds his only news conference where reporters can ask questions on topics of their choosing. He started this a few weeks ago. The rest of the week, reporters can only ask on topics that the mayor says they can ask about. He does this on Tuesdays and on Wednesdays. Our lead Eric Adams reporter Liz Kim, has been coming on with us with clips and analysis and to take your call. Let's do it again. Hi, Liz. Welcome back to the show.

Elizabeth Kim: Hi, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Let's start with a clip from a town hall on Monday, the day before the news conference. This clip is making news in and of itself. Should we just play it or do you want to set this up? It's something that he told some New Yorker at this town hall, right?

Elizabeth Kim: Right. I'll set it up. I was actually at the town hall. It was a town hall in Corona, Queens. The way this works is the mayor tries to go to different communities and he opens it up for different constituents to ask him questions. This particular woman asked the mayor-- There were a bevy of concerns that had been raised prior to her about sanitation, about crime, about migrant children enrolling in schools. Her question was a good one. She said, "Mr. Mayor, given all the concerns that you've heard here, how do you plan to address them given the budget cuts that you've proposed?" Here is that exchange.

Mayor Eric Adams: I'm going to ask you, have you-- did any protest to Washington D.C. about what they're doing to us?

Tanya: I have not.

Mayor Eric Adams: Okay. That's what I need. I need for you-- I've been to Washington 10 times and I need for people to hold me responsible, but we have to hold each other responsible. Everyone that steps up and say, “Eric, you should not be cutting the budget,” they should be showing me their bus ticket or plane ticket that they went to Washington D.C. and say, “You should not be doing this to New York City.”

Brian Lehrer: That raised eyebrows? It certainly probably raised eyebrows among some listeners right now who heard it for the first time. His response to this New Yorker from Queens was, "You should be getting yourself down to Washington D.C. and staging a protest."

Elizabeth Kim: Right. I will say that the mayor did begin by saying that what he needs to do as mayor is to find, he called it a sweet spot, which is saying that he needs to be judicious in what he chooses to cut, but then he quickly, then, as you heard, he turned to her and asked her that question. It's actually not the first time that the mayor has raised this as an issue. It's frequently come at other elected officials who have criticized him.

For example, for a long time, he was doing that with the city comptroller, Brad Lander. When a criticism was raised, something that Lander said, and reporters would ask the mayor, he would come back at reporters and say, "Well, has the comptroller been to Washington D.C.?" Actually, I should say that the comptroller recently did finally go to Washington D.C. This is not a new tactic or a new request that the mayor has made of people who are criticizing the cuts.

Brian Lehrer: After that exchange, you spoke to the Queens resident who asked the question, name is Tanya, here's eight seconds.

Tanya: I'm processing a lot. It was a lot of information. I felt like it was a little bit of a joke, a little shtick or whatever but--

Brian Lehrer: When she says it was a little bit of a joke, felt like a little bit of a shtick or whatever, did she mean that-- She wasn't insulted. She didn't think the mayor was really saying, "If you want your problem solved, don't ask me, go to Washington D.C. and hold a protest."

Elizabeth Kim: Well, yes, and it's interesting the words she said. She said she thought it was a little bit of a shtick, meaning that I think she interpreted it as a gimmick. I think the mayor would disagree with that because he was asked about it at the press conference and he doubled down on this idea that he wants New Yorkers who are angry about the budget cuts to go to D.C. The mayor has--

Brian Lehrer: Maybe we should play that clip right now. Here's the mayor. Okay, folks, you've heard what the mayor said at the town hall in Queens on Monday night. You heard what the person who he said it to thought the mayor was doing. Liz says he doubled down on this at the news conference yesterday. Here's 38 seconds of the mayor.

Mayor Eric Adams: I traveled to D.C. numerous times, the Million Man March, to fight against abusive practices, for school support. That's what we do. The heart and soul of who we are as Americans is to go to our center of government and raise our voices when we believe government is not responding accordingly. So, I'm not pushing this off on New Yorkers, I'm saying to New Yorkers, “You're angry and I'm angry, and the source of our discontent lies in Washington D.C.

Brian Lehrer: Liz, I don't want to confuse the listeners, but I may have been confused that that was not actually from yesterday's news conference, but actually more of what he said at the town hall. Is that right?

Elizabeth Kim: No, that was from the news conference.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, okay.

Elizabeth Kim: The question put to him was, "Is it really fair to put it on a constituent to go to Washington D.C. and ask the federal government for more funding?" As an example, should a constituent be asked to pay for the bus fair, the train fair, and can they? Does everyone have the means to do that?

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, what do you think about the underlying issue here? Listeners, you can call up and ask Liz Kim anything about what reporters asked the mayor at the news conference yesterday, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Do you think that people's ire about New York City budget cuts that are coming down the pike from the mayor should be directed less at City Hall and more at Washington D.C.? Because as the mayor keeps saying, immigration is a function of federal policy. The reason so many migrants are coming to New York seeking asylum at the same time is because things that the federal government is doing and so the federal government should be the ones to foot the lion's share of the bill here. 212-433-WNYC, but then again, there are people who say the mayor is proposing to cut more than he needs to cut. 212-433-9692.

Did it get beyond the, "Who do we blame" question yesterday, Liz? Because I know City Council has some very specific objections to the mayor's proposed cuts with respect to other ways that the mayor is spending money, including on the migrants that they think is unnecessarily expensive.

Elizabeth Kim: No. In general, the mayor has refuted all of those critiques. Even when in response to the council has brought up that their economist sees that there will be an additional over $1 billion in unanticipated tax revenue that's forecasted. The mayor's response to, "Well, that's $1 billion, what about the other $6 billion?" It's an estimated $7 billion whole that the mayor and the council need to address for the next fiscal year. His response to that is that he doesn't believe wholly in the council's argument that the crisis could have been better managed.

In fact, what he argued yesterday and what he's been doing more increasingly is saying, "Look at what New York City has done. Look at what the city has done in comparison to other cities, for example, like Chicago, where migrants were forced to sleep in police precincts. Look at what we've done in comparison to Massachusetts, which is now struggling and has said that they cannot shelter anymore migrants."

The city has taken on and has, for the most part, most people have not had to spend many days outside in the streets. Most importantly, to a lot of advocates, is we haven't seen that happen to families with children. That's something that the mayor points to and which he's right to point to that. It is a success.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Timothy in Queens, you're on WNYC. Hi, Timothy.

Timothy: Yes. Good morning. Thank you for taking my call. I just want to say I think we're looking at it the wrong way. We should not be going-- Eric Adams should not be telling us to go to Washington to beg for more money. He should be demanding that Joe Biden secure the border. That is the real issue. We have people who are abusing the asylum process. We had on Monday 12,600 people come over the border.

Now, you extrapolate that over 365 days a year and what do we have? Over 3 million people? This is insane. No country can sustain this. For some reason, and I'm perplexed as to why the Biden administration is allowing this to go on, he's allowing people to abuse the asylum process. We need to demand and Eric Adams needs to demand that the border be secured. Talking about more money is just putting a Band-Aid on the real issue. That's my comment.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Let's talk about that and how it pertains to Mayor Adams in New York City. In fact, Timothy, you should know and everybody should know we're going to be doing a segment tomorrow, probably with a member of our local congressional delegation on the issue as you described it, from the federal perspective, because that's holding up aid to Israel, aid to Ukraine. Republicans want some greater closure of the border than Biden has been willing to agree to so far.

We'll take that up tomorrow explicitly as a federal issue but as it pertains to New York, Liz, there is a difference between how the mayor talks about this issue and how the Republicans talk about this issue in Washington, even though they both are saying New York City is getting overwhelmed, right?

Elizabeth Kim: Right. The Republican talking point is that the federal government needs to shut down the border. In fact, the mayor was asked exactly this question on FOX 5 this morning and his response was, "No, we need to control the border." As we've talked about in previous weeks, the mayor often uses this term, he wants a decompression strategy. The idea with that is that the federal government should decide who gets to stay, but also where they get to ultimately go. This idea that everybody's coming to New York City, in his view, is unfair to New York City because New York City is then left with tens of thousands of migrants who are currently living in its shelter system. New York City also has a Right to Shelter rule.

There are actually many reasons why migrants want to come to New York City. In large part, it's because it's an international city and there are also jobs. What the mayor has tried to argue is the federal government needs to step in and at the border, try to help resettle migrants in other communities, other communities, which also may have job opportunities for migrants.

Brian Lehrer: Here's Frank from Stratford Connecticut who wants to react to the mayor telling that constituent and Queens to go to D.C. and protest the lack of federal funding for the migrants. Frank, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Frank: Good morning. Yes, I just wanted to make one comment. What bothers me about the mayor's comment is he just seems to fundamentally misunderstand what his role is in all this. The ability to petition your government is a constitutional right of the citizens of the United States of America. We don't have to do that. He's trying to put that obligation on us. The obligation is on him. He was elected to be the mayor of the city of New York and it's his obligation. It's his job description to advocate for them in Washington on their behalf. I'm sure he knows that so it is a shtick. It's nothing more than a shtick, even though he doubled down on it. He's really just passing the buck to citizens and that's cowardly in my opinion.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, well, he would say, though, I imagine that he's doing this. He's doing this constantly. What might help is if citizens got involved, because public action, private people's action helps bring results. Everybody should be involved on issues that they care about, the mayor said yesterday at his news conference. “If you are concerned about this, back me up, folks. Back me up voluntarily, because I am doing this every day,” he would say. Does that make it any better?

Frank: Okay, I agree. Well, a little better, a little better. I would come back and argue that that's not our obligation, it's his. If he's really concerned about that, and I know-- I suspect he would come back with another comment similar to what you said, then he organizes that group of people to go down to Washington D.C. Don't put that on the back of the-- It seems very condescending to me.

Brian Lehrer: To buy a bus ticket. Frank, thank you. That's an interesting idea from the caller right there, Liz. Does the mayor have any intention of organizing buses? We know this has happened for many protests over the years on many different topics. He mentioned the Million Man March for example. The city could organize buses and say, “All right, we're going to try to send thousands of New Yorkers down to D.C. to get in Congress's face and get in the president's face and say look what you're doing to our finances. Take some responsibility here." Can’t council do that?

Elizabeth Kim: Well, I was referring-- He did a FOX 5 interview this morning, and he was asked exactly that question, "So are you organizing a protest?" He said that he's speaking to clergy and they're talking about it. So he is kind of dangling it out there. I will say that this is also-- his intensifying demand that New Yorkers go to D.C. is also coming at a time when his popularity is hurting. His poll numbers are hurting in part because of the budget cuts. When he goes to town halls or when he's interviewed by reporters or at the off-topic, he's repeatedly asked about the cuts. The cuts have become extremely unpopular.

In a way, what this does is try to redirect the blame from him who is calling for the cuts to President Biden. To some extent, the mayor is right. He has no choice but to make some cuts. Now, critics can argue, are the cuts too steep or is he making the cuts in the right area? That's all fair game but I think what he's trying to say is, “Don't blame me. This is not my fault.” The question is, is does it work? Because like Frank, the caller says, does he-- perhaps I don't know that New Yorkers will make that leap in their logic that at the end of the day, the mayor is helpless in all of this.

Brian Lehrer: One more call on this topic then we're going to move on. Stuart in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hello, Stuart.

Stuart: Hello, thanks for taking my call. I'm just curious on a more macro level. I've never heard really throughout most of this any good explanation about why the feds have been so silent, why the Biden administration hasn't reached back, what political issues might be involved, or their hands tied. I'd be just interested to hear your and Reporter Kim's thoughts on that.

Brian Lehrer: Sure, Stuart. Thank you. We have on the show asked Washington reporters that exact question. Biden says he's for New York. Biden and Adams until this issue were allies. Adams was even a surrogate for the president at various speaking engagements. That's not happening anymore because of this issue. My understanding is that the level of funding that we're talking about to bail New York out on this would have to go through Congress. The Republicans in Congress, per the earlier caller, Timothy in Queens are saying, "No, we're not going to take money from all the taxpayers of the United States to use as a Band-Aid for New York City to allow the border to remain this open. Then we're going to have to designate billions more dollars next year and billions more dollars the year after that.”

We have to deal with what the Republicans see as the underlying issue, which is the ability of so many asylum seekers to come at once at all and put this financial burden on New York. I don't know, Liz, if you would add to that, if there's any other reason that the Biden administration isn't doing anything else that the mayor may be asking for them to do that may not be financial in that explicit respect.

Elizabeth Kim: No, that pretty much sums it up, Brian. I would only add that if you listen to the mayor and city officials, they repeatedly call it a humanitarian crisis. That is another option available to Biden in which he could call it, declare it a humanitarian crisis wherein that would unlock disaster funding without having to go through Congress. To do that would draw even more attention to the- -migrant crisis and perhaps politically, that's not something that Biden sees in his interest as he's coming into what appears to be a close reelection.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with our lead Mayor Adams reporter, Elizabeth Kim, and turn the page and play clips from the mayor on other topics, including the one we were talking about with Public Advocate Jumaane Williams early in the hour, this Bill in City Council today that would require a lot more reporting by the NYPD on pretty ordinary encounters that they have with New Yorkers. Stay with us.

[MUSIC - Marden Hill: Hijack]

Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue with our lead Eric Adams, reporter Elizabeth Kim, who's been attending the Mayor's Tuesday news conference and coming here on Wednesdays with clips and analysis and taking your calls as we've been doing. Before we get off the budget, which the mayor hangs on the influx of asylum seekers, and it's controversial as we said, how much that's really the cause of these budget cuts to other things that he says are necessary but I know you've reported on the libraries.

I want to give you a chance to talk about that deep dive that you took on Gothamist about how the libraries are affected. I know it was kind of a vigil, I think on Sunday by people involved with the Brooklyn Public Library system because they're losing their Sunday service.

Elizabeth Kim: Right. Basically, seven day-a week service has ended at the New York City Library Service and they're very worried. Last year, we were at the same place as we are now, in which they thought that they were going to have to reduce hours of service, but at the last minute, they had a little reprieve and they got the funding restored. This year, they're facing what are known as mid-year cuts, so they had no choice but to reduce hours. They're worried that the mayor has said that there are more cuts coming next year. Their fear is that they're going to then have to eliminate six-day-a-week service.

Brian Lehrer: We will see what happens there, but the libraries’ not just in the cross hairs on paper, but already suffering these once-a-week shutdowns when obviously people use the libraries every day. I even had the thought, why not shut them down on Mondays if you have to shut them down one day? I guess they know their workflow, they know their user demand and so they made the most appropriate decision to them, but I don't know. It occurred to me that when people aren't going to school, when people aren't going to work, maybe they need the libraries even more than they do on a random weekday.

Elizabeth Kim: That's an excellent question, Brian and I think I will ask them that. Like you said, I'm sure they study what are their peak times and they decide from there. I don't know if it also has to do with the amount of staffing, and how much maybe it costs to keep the libraries open on the weekends as well. They often frame it though, not so much in is it Monday to Friday? They frame it as how many days a week are they open? Because there's some libraries that may be closed on Sundays, but they may be open on Saturdays, for example.

Brian Lehrer: Right. Yes and who knows, maybe Sunday there's a budget issue because Sunday by right is an overtime day. I don't know the nature of the contract, so there could be many reasons. Yes, go ahead and ask that question and bring it back to us in a future day. All right. A major topic for the mayor yesterday was what we spoke to Public Advocate Jumaane Williams about earlier in the hour, the City Council bill to require more reporting by the NYPD of relatively ordinary encounters with civilians. The mayor says he would veto that bill and here's 40 seconds of the mayor from the news conference yesterday explaining why.

Mayor Eric Adams: You're at Times Square, you're in the 75 Precinct, you're in the 68 Precinct, you're an active cop. Missing person. You're stopping asking six, seven people, “Did you see this child? Did you see this child?” Each encounter is going to take, let's say five minutes. After you put the information on your phone, then you got to go back, you got to download the document. If you spoke with six people on that missing person, that's 30 minutes. If you responded to a cat in a tree and you asked the person, “Hey, is that your cat?” that's another time. This stuff adds up.

Brian Lehrer: Liz, there seems to be a factual dispute because I don't know if you heard the public advocate on the show earlier, but he seemed to be saying those kinds of stops, like something like the mayor was just talking about, get your cat down from the tree wouldn't need to be documented. I don't know if it's clear to you or if there seems to be a factual dispute between what City Council and the public advocate are saying on the one hand is actually in the bill and what the mayor said yesterday.

Elizabeth Kim: No, that's exactly right. We're hearing two different versions of what would happen under this bill. It's both what would constitute a level one-stop, which the mayor had his chief counsel, Lisa Zonberg read out, describe exactly that. Then you heard the public advocate say, "No, the legislation actually carves it out and specifically says what's not on,” what a police officer doesn't have to report, which is like the cat up in the tree.

They are disagreeing about this and they're also disagreeing about how much time it would actually take the police officer to do this. You hear the mayor there give an example and he's very much leaning on his own police officer days because he can conjure up two scenarios like that. This is what happens in practice. He can speak very authoritatively to that in part because he was a police officer.

He's going around and he has been doing a series of interviews pushing back on the Council's bill, and he's saying exactly these things, but the Council is saying that those are untrue, that the mayor is distorting what the bill actually asks the NYPD to do.

Brian Lehrer: Is there some other motivation that the Council thinks the mayor has for planning to veto this bill other than the time it takes to do the paperwork and how that would distract the police officers from actually being out there protecting people, which the mayor says is his motivation, but the Council says wouldn't really happen?

Elizabeth Kim: That's not clear to me. The sense that the mayor and his administration is communicating is that this is not something that police officers should be spending their time on. His chief counsel went as far as to say that this could be dangerous because this will disincentivize them from making any stops.

Brian Lehrer: You brought that clip. I'm going to play it now. This is the mayor's chief counsel, Lisa Thornburg, responding to a question about that police stop bill.

Lisa Zonberg: This law, this bill as currently written, would incentivize police officers to do the exact opposite of what we want from an effective police force engaging in community policing. It would discourage police officers from talking to community members simply to avoid becoming a paperwork bureaucracy.

Brian Lehrer: I don't know if this has come up, Liz, but just a theory that occurs to me that even if the City Council is right about the relatively small extra burden that this requirement would put on the NYPD, and the gain in transparency that would be had, and knowing whether there was racial profiling going on and things like that. Even if it's not that much of a burden to the police officers involved, maybe the mayor is looking at what gets widely reported as low morale among the NYPD and even trouble recruiting recruits for the NYPD, and he doesn't want to deteriorate that morale anymore. Has anybody suggested that?

Elizabeth Kim: No, but I think what the Council would argue, and you heard the public advocate say this, is that they're not asking the officers to really-- It's not the paperwork bureaucracy that the administration is characterizing it as. I spoke to the Council spokesperson yesterday immediately after the mayor's press conference, and he told me that they've estimated that it would add maybe between 13 to 17 more reports a month per officer. They're saying that- -as the public advocates say, it's just a couple of questions and it's going to be done on an app, so it shouldn't take that long.

It's alarming for the mayor's chief council to suggest that it is so burdensome that a police officer wouldn't even want to interact with the public, that they would want to limit their interactions just to avoid this paperwork. I think the Council would be very critical and skeptical of that.

Brian Lehrer: We talked about the libraries a couple of minutes ago. Shirley in Manhattan is calling in on that. Shirley, you’re on WNYC. Hello.

Shirley: Oh, hello. It's the first time I've been willing to speak. This is so important. Libraries cannot close on a weekday because for thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of children, it's their safe space after school. If you check with the libraries, you'll find that’s so.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. That's obviously a true statement about the way a lot of New Yorkers use the libraries. Maybe that's the answer Liz, to the question that I was raising before about if have to close one day, why is it necessarily a weekend day when people don't even have school or have work in most cases, might need the libraries more, but Shirley's absolutely right. Many kids use the libraries as their afterschool space because that's another thing that the city has wanted to do.

I remember talking to Mayor de Blasio about this a number of times. He wanted universal afterschool, and we don't have universal afterschool. A lot of kids use the libraries at that time before they go home, if their parents, let's say, are at work.

Elizabeth Kim: Right Brian, and that's a very astute point by Shirley. I should have thought of it myself, because when I was talking to library officials on my story, they tick off a range of uses and users for the library. One of them that is very integral is, as Shirley mentioned, are our students, our children. They often like to go there to study, to hang out, to use the internet, to use the computer labs so that's very much true. The library has been described as part of the city's social infrastructure. Part of that involves, like you said, it does serve as afterschool and it has in effect become part of the city's social safety net.

Brian Lehrer: One more clip from the news conference yesterday. The mayor was asked about the Middle East. Obviously, we have a very diverse population in New York City with a lot of Jews, a lot of Muslims, a lot of Arab-Americans, however, you want to describe the demographics. Here's what, the mayor of New York, who often has to have a foreign policy of his own had to say.

Mayor Eric Adams: I think every hostage should be returned. I think Hamas needs to be destroyed. I think they're a terrorist organization that carried out horrific acts. I don't want to see an innocent person lose his or her life in Israel or in Palestine. I've made that clear over and over again. I have a large Palestinian and Jewish community and Muslim and Arab community in the city. We have a very diverse city. I don't want to see innocent people killed.

Those who are responsible for the negotiation and the decisions on how they're going to move forward in this action is beyond my scope. As the mayor of the City of New York, I would like to see the loss of lives of innocent people to come to a conclusion.

Brian Lehrer: Liz, put that clip in context for us. What was he actually asked? Does there seem to be a lot of demand from either side for the mayor to take their side?

Elizabeth Kim: I thought that clip was noteworthy because it was the first time that I could remember that the mayor spoke to this question. The question he was asked was, he was asked that-- a reporter said there have been thousands of Palestinian casualties. When are electeds like yourself going to stand up and call for a ceasefire? Basically, what is it going to take? As you heard in that clip, it's not a straightforward answer. He doesn't say, “Yes, I do believe that we should call for a ceasefire,” which some electeds have gone on the record as saying, but he does say that he wants it to come to a conclusion. I think listeners can take that as they will. He acknowledges also that this is not within the scope of his control. He says it will be up to the negotiators.

Brian Lehrer: There we leave it for this week with our Liz Kim. You can read her reporting on Gothamist and of course, hear her on WNYC. She attends the Mayor's weekly Tuesday news conference. Do you know if he's going to have one next week during Christmas week, day after Christmas?

Elizabeth Kim: I asked Brian and they said they're going to play it by ear.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe we'll talk to you next Wednesday or maybe Liz, Happy New Year, and we'll talk to you after the first Tuesday in 2024.

Elizabeth Kim: Same to you, Brian. Thank you.