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Hey, everybody, Welcome to the Buck Sexton Show. The one and only Joe Borelli is with us. He is the Republican leader of the New York City Council. He is the Sage of Staten Island. A man who knows many things about many things. Mister Barelli, always an honor of privilege and a pleasure.
How you doing, I'm doing good. It is great to see you. Great. You look healthy, Buck, As they.
Say, yeah, you know, I'm trying. I'm a Florida man now, and I will say the weather is nice. It makes you soft, although you have to be really fit here, so it makes you soft, like to temperature wise. But then again, you know, I probably should like stop eating carbs entirely if I want to fit in with the Miami set here. But tell me this, I actually want to dive into how are things going in good old NYC these days? Like what what's the latest with the
mayor Adams? How would you grade him at this point? How's it all going?
Well? I'd give him a pretty low grade. But the irony is that if he were to lose in two years from today to twenty twenty five is the next mayoral election. If he were to lose, it would only be to someone attacking him from the left, and that would be even worse than the current situation we have now.
How is that even possible? Like, what does it take for people in New York City to figure out that having homeless people defecating on the streets and stabbing people with you know, whatever they have at hand, and rising crime and all this stuff, and the subways being unsafe and people getting pushed in front of trains, what does it take for the Libs to be less crazy? In my hometown and your hometown? How does this happen.
They don't get less crazy, if any thing, They just get more entrenched in their bizarre world. And you see that mostly in Manhattan. You see this less frequently in the outer boroughs, where regular assault of the earth New Yorkers live. That I'm talking about Black New Yorkers, Hispanic New Yorkers, Jewish people, Russian people. They're all starting to shift. But the epicenter of the problem is Manhattan. And I'll
give you a great example. I mean, Alvin Bragg is the epitome of moronic district attorney Soros Fund the district attorneys, and he is being cheered on right now or indicting a police officer yesterday. So this cop was basically involved in a situation in a Manhattan Apple store in twenty
twenty one. Alvin Bragg investigated this for two years, two years, and just brought an indictment against the cop for punching someone as he was trying to escort this person outside of the apple store who was harassing people in the store and threatening to kill everyone. That's the one we
live in. So even though we see you know, Deoderant locked up in in cages in Dwayne Reid, the elected leaders who are actually in charge of prosecuting these people are completely on this side of the criminals.
What is what justificates an excessive force from the police officer. That's why he's bringing the indictment.
A third degree misdemeanor, the lowest charge possible you can bring to basically get the cop fired, which is just again two years of an investigation, not of the person who has been a serial burglar and arrested numerous times for a host of crimes. And by the way, the Apple security guard just had a great story in the Post today basically saying, I saw the whole thing. The DA's office didn't even ask me, and I'm the damned
security guard and the cop did nothing wrong. And this is sort of, you know, the example du jour of the backwardsness of the majority of New York City.
Why is this? Why is Alvin Bragg? Why is DA Alvin Bragg pro criminal? Because that's really what it seems like. He thinks his job is to use the hower he has to the greatest possible benefit of the criminal class in New York City.
Why Yeah, I mean, I think the best thing we could say about him, and the most favorable thing I can come up with, is that he was honest in telling us this is exactly who he is. And that's why this is such a problem, because the voters picked this. The voters didn't get you know, they didn't get Option B. And then suddenly, behind door number two, some woke liberal came out. They got a guy who said, I am going to make sure the fewest number of people get
put in jail. I am going to make sure the absolute fewest number possible people who are convicted of a crime or plead to a crime get put in a New York City jail. And he's doing that. His Day one memo basically said, here are the crimes we are
no longer going to prosecute for now. Downstream two years, we're suddenly surprised again that you know, if you want to get lipstick, it's locked up in a cage somewhere in your local supermarket, or that stores are closing and bodega owners are getting charged criminally, cops are getting charge criminally, but not the regular people were regularly committing these crimes.
It's just remarkable to me. I would I would have thought years ago, given what New York City went through, Joe in the nineties, you were there, right, you were in Stane out right, Yeah, given the crime rate which was truly just heinous for people's day to day lives all over the Five boroughs, and then the turnaround during the Giuliani era, and just how much better it was for everybody once the city got cleaned up. And it's not that complicated, it's literally cleaned up like the streets,
but also enforced the laws. How do we get to this place where New York, which was the case study of how to fix it all, decided to unfix it. You know what is that?
So this is by no means blaming the pandemic, because a lot of big cities in the country did not go through a similar thing. But the pandemic as the catalyst of acceleration for some of these problems. Absolutely happened because you even had and you got to remember, Buck, you lived here during this time. You lived during the
first term of the de Blasio administration. That was a pretty good time for New York Mayor Bloomberg, who I disagreed with on twenty different things a year at least kept the basic services and functionality of the city under
good management, and he should be commended for that. Then you had the pandemic hit, and you had sort of the acceleration of seeing all the woke policies that were put into place, like bail reform and all sorts of criminal justice reform were actually playing out in quick time because people got arrested, people felt like they can get away with things, and sort of the narrative arc of crime went so quickly. Now other cities in even blue cities in red states, those came, you know, parabolic, the
crime went up, and the crime went down. In New York, we're just starting to see the crime going down, largely because of the NYPD. The NYPD is making more red I mean low and behold right, what we always said, if we have more aggressive policing in a lower crime that is actually happening. The crime level is down, But on the prosecution side and on the keeping people behind bars,
I mean, this is just not happening. Build a Blasio in his last year, did a press conference touting the fact that we had the lowest jail population on Rikers Island since World War Two. If the crime rate was the same as it was in nineteen forty five, the number of violent felonies were the same as it was in nineteen forty five, we would be patting Build A Blasio on the back saying, hey, heck of with a job, buddy. But it wasn't. The crime was actually going up by then.
Just the number of people who are criminals that were segregated from us through the criminal justice system was at its lowest point since nineteen forty five.
So this is important. I feel like everyone should know that in some of these places like New York where the Democrats or Democrat left is calling the shots and you got the Soros back. Prosecutors ess actially not the police, that are really the weak point. Necessarily, it's often not the police at all. It's the prosecutorial arm of the local government.
Right.
It's the decision what to charge and how long to hold them in prison for the crimes they've committed. I want to come back though, and talking about the economic side of things, the Mayor Adams said that New York is full when it comes to illegal migrants. That's so strange because I thought we're a nation of illegal migrants now and we're supposed to think that they make everything better. We'll talk about this in just a second. Take your
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That's cchoq dot com. Save thirty five percent off any Chalk subscription for life when you use my name Buck at checkout chalkcchoq dot com and use my name Buck for thirty five percent off. So what happened to New York City is going to just take in all the huddled masses of abroad and right to give me. You're tired, you're poor, You're the thing on the poem, the Lazarus poem on the Statue of Liberty. That's what they always tell us about all the need for open borders. But
now Adams is saying, all full too many illegals. What's going on?
Yeah, it turns out poems don't pay the bills. So what I believe happened? And from my conversations, both with people in the Adams administration and just sort of my own observation is that he was more than willing to sort of carry the Democrats water be the post of boy of sanctuary cities. And when the projections were going to be that it was going to be five thousand people, ten thousand people, you know, So that effect on our budget is like a fart in a breezy day. It
wasn't going to have any impact. But now that we've had almost one hundred thousand people come through our system and over fifty thousand people in our shelters nightly in addition to our regular homeless shelter population. Mind you, this is fifty thousand migrant homeless population. Now the dollar amount is simply unsustainable. Not only is the dollar amount unsustainable, but the Adams Administration can't actually find enough rooms to
put people. Know, they can't basically put tent cities wherever they want. There's no hotels that are any long and willing to lease space, and they're coming up on basically a hard stop of where they can put people. They're actually renting hotels outside of the city limits in counties on the island and in the Hudson Valley. But the number is insane. The number in our last budget that was unaccounted for, meaning it was migrant money that was not budgeted prior to the start of the fiscal year,
was about one point eight billion dollars. So, to give the listeners a comparable, one point eight billion dollars is more more than we spend on the fd and Y. FD and Y has ten thousand firefighters, five thousand EMPs, three hundreds firehouses, five thousand ambulances, twenty four hour rotations, people watching the city all day long, and yet the migrant crisis is actually costing more money than the largest fire department and EMS system in the country. It's simply bonkers.
And now add them to the stuff between a rock and a hard place, where they've they've resorted to actually putting flyers out. I don't know if you've seen this book. They're actually putting flyers out that they're sending to Texas and having people hand them out at the basically the centers that process people when they come across the border, telling them that New York's really expensive and there might
not be a place for them to live. So that's how far We've come from let me be the poster boy for sanctuary city policies to now he's attacking the Biden administration rightfully, by the way, for not paying for this problem that has caused one hundred percent by the
federal government's failure. We're just on the hook on being the world's refugee camp because of our own dopey politicians who decided to have not just the sanctuary city law, but a right to shelter law ingrained at our state constitution, which guarantees any person, which person is now defined as a migrant, unlimited resources should they need them.
It's unbelievable.
I mean, just give me the right choice by leaving Buck, I'm not gonna lie.
I Well, you know, I see now where do all my tax dollars go? Recently I saw not only do you got the one point eight billion going for illegals, but there's this judgment that Deblasio set up this fund right for teachers that failed the test who are black and Hispanic, who failed this teacher certification exam. They're getting a million dollars, some of them two million dollars, paying them for an entire career of work that they never did,
They went off and did other jobs. But now after twenty years they get the full back pay for all twenty years and benefits because they failed the test of basic reading and teaching skills. Like, that's where my tax dollars are going as a New Yorker, or where they would be going. Rather, that's where yours are going, Joe, Yeah.
Or the thirteen million they just settled with on BLM protesters after George Floyd. So if you were arrested during the protest and perhaps roughed up in the ensuing scuffle, or maybe you were held two hours too long, they settled about thirteen million dollars with a whole bunch of defendants who felt they were wrongly arrested and wrongly detained. I mean, this is this is the kind of city we live in where where it just it is unsustainable.
The New Yorker, which I'm sure you don't read it because I don't really read it that often, but they came out with a really good article yesterday about the crisis involving New York real estate, both commercial and residential. And we are at the precipice of a fiscal cliff. And you know, I've been hyperbolic about this in the past, and maybe too much though, but now we really are up against a very very very hard situation where banks may have to default on lenders. Uh and and UH business.
I'm rather building owners no longer have the ability to go to local banks to get refinancing, and some of the largest buildings in New York City. This is this is actually a catastrophic event for New York that could be happening.
How far off is that from becoming a reality at this point? Like, is this expected to happen in a matter of of you know, weeks, months, years?
I would say within a year or two. I mean, you'll start seeing some of the regional banks and lenders who finance some of these smaller properties. You'll see it affected in their stock market price and some of the issues in the market on them. Then you'll see some of these and and a Blackstone a company just handed back the keys of their building because they couldn't refinance. I mean, so you're you're starting to see the cracks
in the dam. The dam hasn't cracked completely yet, the water isn't flowing, but we're at the point now where you're starting to see major buildings get defaulted on, or just the older the owners handing back the keys to the lending institutions.
I want to come back and ask you, Joe, if I made you the King of New York, which arguably you are, But if I made you the king of New York and you had to fix the place, and you could just do whatever you needed to do to fix it, to make it the greatest city in America, which I think, at least for a period of my life I lived in, which I do believe it was for a while the greatest city in America. I want to ask you how you'd fix it, given that you
work in the city council. You know, the budgetary issues, the police and law enforcement issues, the sanitation you know. I just want you to give me your quick version of how you just make the city function at its absolute best. But we'll get to that a second. One of my pillows most popular products is now back in stock and at a great price. These are the Giza Dream Sheets, the bed sheets made with Giza cotton from a region in Egypt by the same name. These are
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sale on the Geeze Dream sheets. Remember, use our names Clay and Buck as your promo code my pillow dot com Clay and Buck as the promo code, or call eight hundred seven nine two three two six ' nine. Uh Joe, how do you fix? You're the King of New York for a year. How do you fix the city?
Well? It's interesting. It essentially would have been the zeldn plan. You know, I was very close to when still am with Lee Zelden, and we ran a pretty good campaign where he almost actually won and became governor. His plan started with public safety, and so would mine. I mean public safety is paramount to getting people back into their offices. By the way, people are not not going to offices in Manhattan because they don't want you. It's partially because
they don't feel safe. So the first thing we have to do is repeal cashless bail. We have to repeal most of the criminal justice provisions that were voted on over the last ten years that said we have to make real estate valuable in New York City. Again, we have to make sure the industry is solid, and you do that by giving, you know, old fashioned tax breaks.
The governor and the legislature couldn't come up with a great agreement this year to extend some of the tax abatements that a lot of these developers needed to continue building the skyscrapers and apartment buildings that New York Is need. So it's an interesting catch twenty two where on the finance side we have to spur some growth, we also need to lower our business taxes. I mean, right now
we're losing companies. Forget the people that'll leave it right I might leave because the weather's nice, but JP Morgan just went to the Dallas Metro because of the tax structure and the business climate of Texas, So we'd have to reform that as well, if we could do that, and I think we do. I really do think New New York is poised for the pendulum to start swinging back.
I just don't know if it's going to happen in my say, political lifetime, but I bet you by the time I have grandkids, New York will be in full swing again. It took you mentioned the nineteen nineties before. Remember, crime was really bad in the late seventies, early eighties, and it took about, you know, five or six years for things to really level off going into ninety nine, two thousand, two thousand and one.
What are the biggest areas of the city budget in New York that you're just like, what the heck are we doing?
Yeah? I mean I would have to say the Department of Education, I mean our Department of Education. And my wife's a teacher, and God blessed the work, and some of them do. But we spend more per child than any other system by far. And I don't mean like we spend ten percent more five percent. We spend about triple what say the private school systems here in New York spend on average the Catholic schools, for example, educated
kids for about seven or eight thousand a year. In elementary school we're up to twenty seven, twenty eight, twenty nine thousand dollars per year, So that is the biggest vacuum of city spending. A lot of it has to do with the age of some of our school buildings. We have, you know, twelve hundred school buildings in New York City. A lot of them are are one hundred years old. So there is going to be some capital needs for keeping the system itself going. But this cost
per spending is probably astronomical. And then you can look at any agency. I mean, the NYPD spends more money than North Korea, but would I wouldn't say we should cut that. So even though New York is so big, we have to approach cuts with a scalpel. And by the way, you know, the budget growth of one percent two percent a year is falling in a city like New York that for the last twenty years was able to meet that with regular old growth. We haven't really
raised taxes. Taxes are high, we haven't raised them. It's only recently with this migrant crisis and sort of the out of control pension and liability, pension and healthcare spending that that we've been put in this fiscal problem.
I want to ask you to tell me a little bit of Staten Island history to close us out here in a second, mister Joe Burdh, because Joe, oh, my god, has written a book on the history of the great island known as the Staten My understanding was that Stton Aims were the British like to hang out when they were trying to crush George Washington and the Patriots.
Oh sure, as heck I mean, so I'll give you two fun facts about State is Ale history. And by the way, I wrote one book, but my publisher made it two books, so you can go on Amazon and buy and I get a buck of books. So hopefully the audience buys a couple but so fun fact about the American Revolution. If people like the show Turn it was on AMC. It was a great show about the American Revolution and the spy network. That spy network really happened on Staten Island, and one of the main characters
was Lieutenant Simcoe. He was the sort of the evil antagonist of the show. If you're on the eleventh tee at Latarette Golf Course, it's a very high elevated tea on top of a hill. You're actually teeing off on top of a redoubt that was construction constructed by the British in seventeen seventy seven, So it's a one hundred year old burm that you're basically playing off your tea.
And if you're playing at Silver Lake Golf Course on the eighteenth fairway, you're actually trampling over the graves of ten thousand Irish and German people who were killed by typhoid, fever and scurvy and god knows what else they brought with them over as they came across the ocean to come to New York. So macabre history for New York City, goth.
What's the name of the book or the books?
So revolutionary Staten Island is the first one, and then Staten Island the nineteenth century is the second one. The first one's better. It's you got more gore, more killing, stuff like that.
Very good, mister Joe Borelli, Sage of Staten Island. Great to have you on, sir, Thanks so much.
Thank you. Book