In the wee hours of Albany’s legislative session two weeks ago, Mayor de Blasio worked behind the scenes to kill a bill that would have cracked down on unsafe day care providers.
The bill would have made it easier to shut down operators where children were injured or killed, including providers who take in children without bothering to get a license.
It would appear counterintuitive that de Blasio would want to stomp on such an effort, except for one crucial fact — it had been proposed by Gov. Cuomo, his political nemesis.
How this came to be is a study in the Machiavellian ways of Albany politics, where protecting turf is sometimes more important than protecting children.
The bill — sponsored by Cuomo in response to a Daily News investigation about hidden dangers in child care — would have increased penalties for operators cited repeatedly for dangerous conditions.
It would have made it easier to shut down repeat offenders and unlicensed operators, and greatly increased transparency in site inspections. The current system is next to impossible for parents to navigate.
It nearly made it to the finish line.
By June 13, just days before the session’s end, the leadership of both the Assembly and the Senate had signed off on the bill. It sailed through the Senate, and started its journey through the Assembly by winning the approval of the Children and Families Committee.
“We have to send a message to people who are running bad operations that we are paying attention,” said the committee’s chairwoman, Assemblywoman Donna Lupardo (D-Binghamton), who voted in favor of the bill.
But behind the scenes, clouds were forming. Lupardo said opposition first surfaced after “the City of New York advocates started calling members of the committee and they started communicating to the chair.”
According to people familiar with the chain of events, de Blasio’s lobbyist in Albany, Simcha Eichenstein, went to work to kill the measure.
Eichenstein reached out to four Assembly members on the Children and Families Committee, the sources said.
The argument presented was this: day care providers in minority neighborhoods would more likely have problems meeting safety requirements, so shutting them down would leave minority families in the lurch.
Underlying this was de Blasio’s belief that the bill was yet another example of Cuomo trying to intervene on the city’s turf.
The argument effectively gave unsafe operators a pass in a system exposed as inadequate by The News, and the four members on the Children and Families Committee were persuaded to vote against the bill.
Assemblywoman Michele Titus (D-Queens) had sponsored prior legislation to increase penalties on bad-actor day care operators, but now she was against this version. She declined to discuss her reasoning, but Lupardo revealed that all four who voted “no” had raised the same concerns pushed by de Blasio’s lobbyist: that aggressively shutting down bad operators would disproportionately punish the minority families who rely on them.
“The concern was about notification,” Lupardo said. “Some of the members who represent minority communities and communities with a lot of poverty, they were concerned that if a child-care center was shut down, the (families) would arrive at the site and it would be shut down.”
De Blasio spokesman Eric Phillips insisted to The News that the ploy was not political, stating vaguely, “The bill would not have helped New York City kids, so Assembly members wisely opposed it. That’s not a political ploy. It’s lawmakers seeing past the politics to do right for kids.”
He did not address questions about the argument that cracking down on unsafe sites would somehow unfairly burden minority parents.
Although the bill received a favorable vote from the committee, the four “no” votes were enough to kill it when it reached the Codes Committee — the last stop before an Assembly vote.
Last week, one of the bill’s co-sponsors, Sen. Jeffrey Klein (D-Bronx), expressed disappointment that the bill never made it to the finish line.
“This legislation would have been the logical next step in protecting children from all corners of the city and state from unlicensed and dangerous day cares,” he said.
