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Joe Borelli, councilman to the 51st District in New York City, called for state and local government officials to start addressing “reasonable guidelines” to reopen the Big Apple and get people back to work.
“The mayor and governor put a lot of effort into the lockdown and securing supplies. But now, every day more families are being bankrupted and forced on unemployment,” Borelli, a Republican, told Fox News on Saturday.
In a Friday tweet showing pictures of crowded street corners in Manhattan, Borelli wrote: “This is #NYC tonight. Manhattan, not a right wing backwater. People are ready to start reopening and our businesses and workers need it. We need to see some urgency - not blue ribbon commissions, business czars, & bureaucracy - just reasonable guidelines that we can safely follow.”
More than 1.9 million New Yorkers have filed for unemployment since the week of March 14, and New York City accounts for nearly half of the state’s claims with 930,000 jobless residents, according to the Department of Labor.
“And there’s no urgency whatsoever in addressing our financial issues. Not to mention, the city and state are going broke and they will simply be unable to support progressive social programs they support,” said Borelli, who is also a Fox News commentator.
New York has been the epicenter of the coronavirus in the United States, with more than 348,000 confirmed cases and nearly 22,500 deaths, according to the state’s Department of Health.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, laid out a four-phase plan on May 4 for how the state will likely reopen if regions met certain health-based guidelines.
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On May 14, he signed an executive order extending "New York State on PAUSE" for five of the 10 regions in New York, including New York City, until on May 28. The other five regions in the state were allowed to start phase one of reopening on May 15, as they had met the criteria.
Speaking during his press briefing on Saturday, Cuomo warned that there will be an increase in coronavirus cases now that some regions are allowed to begin partially reopening, “but you don't want to see a spike.”
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The New York City region has only met four out of the seven criteria required to initiate phase one.
“We are social creatures. We need to be with each other. We need to collaborate. We need to think together. We need to experience things together, [but] that may not be… possible for the next few months,” said New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, also a Democrat, in a Saturday press briefing. “We… have to meet the state indicators.”
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The five regions still under executive order could be set to initiate phase one of reopening on May 28, but it is unclear how likely it is that they meet the seven requirements set by the governor in that timeframe.
Plans for initiating phase two for other parts of the state have not yet been laid out.
“I'm not for a moment trying to ignore the tough challenges, the tough questions ahead. But I'll tell you something, you get nowhere being pessimistic,” de Blasio said Saturday.
De Blasio came under fire last month after he criticized those involved in a large gathering at a Jewish funeral in Brooklyn. He later apologized for his warning to the Jewish community as a whole that threatened future arrests.
"I regret if the way I said it in any way gave people a feeling of being treated the wrong way, that was not my intention," de Blasio said at the time. "It was said with love, but it was tough love.”
De Blasio had tweeted after police in Williamsburg broke up the funeral of Rabbi Chaim Mertz, specifically calling out Jews instead of only giving a general warning to the city.
Fox News' Ronn Blitzer contributed to this report.
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