Rep. Malliotakis to Newsmax: NY Mayor-Elect Adams Must Be Kept Accountable

New York City will see improvements under incoming Mayor Eric Adams, but there will still be "challenges and fights," Rep. Nicole Malliotakis said Wednesday on Newsmax.

"I think you can't get worse than [outgoing Mayor] Bill de Blasio," the New York Republican told Newsmax's "John Bachman Now," adding that work must still be done to hold Adams accountable and "make sure that he does the things that he said he was going to do."

Adams has said he doesn't support large-scale shutdowns over the COVID-19 pandemic, and Malliotakis said there is hope the Democrat mayor will reconsider some of the mandates de Blasio has made, including with vaccine requirements for city employees, including those on the police and fire departments.

"Vaccinated individuals have been testing positive, and they fired those that were unvaccinated," said Malliotakis. "We're hoping he's going to reconsider this as well as the mandates on the private sector because we're afraid those staffing shortages are only going to get worse."

The loss of workers in the private sector will also cause supply chain issues and inflation to grow even more for New Yorkers, she warned.

"We're already lagging behind the nation in terms of recovery," she said, adding that there are also issues with crime, school safety, education, and more that must be addressed.

"There's going to be a lot on this new mayor's plate," the congresswoman said.

Meanwhile, de Blasio has said he does want to keep schools open through the use of expanded coronavirus testing, and Staten Island Councilman Joe Borelli, who was also on the program, said that the ruling was one of the "more reasonable things" that de Blasio has proposed in the past two years.

"We want to do everything to make sure schools, in general, do not close or entire buildings close," said Borelli. "When you do have a positive case, I don't have a problem with making sure the other kids who are wrestling and fooling around with the other kids are not bringing COVID home to their parents."

At the same time, the city must push back against the teachers' union and others who want to close schools "in perpetuity every time there is a new wave of virus," said Borelli. "We can't shut down our schools. We can't shut down our businesses. We can't shut down our stores. If we could have a reasonable commonsense approach at a micro-level when we have positive cases, that's the future and that's OK."

Malliotakis also on Wednesday spoke out about reports from the New York Post that city police officers surrounded a mother and her young son at an Applebee's restaurant in Queens and ordered them to leave because they did not have vaccination cards, which is a requirement for the city's restaurants for people 5 years of age and older.

"I think it's really sad that New Yorkers are being pitted against each other like this and that the mayor has done this to our NYPD," said Malliotakis. "We have spikes in crime, murder, shootings, carjackings — so many different levels of crime that we're seeing that we haven't seen since the late ’80s, early ’90s before Rudy Giuliani came in, cleaned up the city, and this is what the mayor is doing with our NYPD. He's forcing them to be the vaccine passport enforcer, and I think that's wrong."

Borelli said he's "cautiously optimistic" about Adams, a former NYPD officer.

"He knows we need to return proactive policing to our streets, so I want to keep optimistic until he proves me wrong," said Borelli. "De Blasio was given, essentially, the key to the kingdom, the safest large city in America.

"Then just over the last eight years in combination with a whole bunch of laws at the state level, he just turned New York City back into the crime-plagued city that it once was."

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