With no warning to the political press corps, Mayor de Blasio skipped town yesterday for a week-long New England family vacation. At 6 p.m., his press office issued a three-sentence statement, noting that the de Blasios will be attending “family engagements in Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut.”
The mayor’s sojourn comes a little more than a month after he took a week-long family vacation to Italy – the fifth trip de Blasio has made to Europe since taking office in 2014.
While it would be hard to begrudge most people for taking time off in the middle of the summer, most people aren’t the mayor of New York City. The city is facing innumerable challenges and hit with unforeseen crises on a regular basis. For the mayor to be out of town for days at a time makes the city seem like it’s running on auto-pilot. Additionally, leaving the city for a week puts the mayor at political risk should a crisis erupt while he’s out of town. It’s a risky move to take – especially when the mayor’s work ethic has been put into question by his critics.
De Blasio is obviously not the first mayor to go out of town. With his regular – and undisclosed -- weekend jaunts to Bermuda, Mayor Bloomberg was slow to respond to the shooting of Sean Bell in 2006 and barely was able to make it back to town as a blizzard bore down on the city in 2010. And even though he was in Japan for the city on a trade mission, it didn’t look great for David Dinkins that was far away from the city when the World Trade Center was bombed by terrorists in Februrary of 1993.
I suggested during the Bloomberg administration – and I’m re-suggesting now – that a vacation-craving mayor should establish a summer Gracie Mansion somewhere else in the city. When they served as mayor, both William O’Dwyer and Abe Beame had homes in the Rockaways and even had separate inaugurations there.
Why not have a working vacation in Brighton Beach or City Island? A real way to get Staten Island’s attention would be to set up camp there for a week. Sure, it’s nice to get out of town but why not explore places in town that could use the attention? I hear Tottenville is lovely this time of year.
Bob Hardt