Mr. de Blasio, who was sworn in early Wednesday, appointed Robert Linn, the chief labor negotiator under Mayor Edward I. Koch, as his own director of labor relations, and Stanley Brezenoff, a top aide to Mr. Koch with broad experience in city government, transportation and health care, as an unpaid adviser to assist in the talks. He described them as a “dream team” for confronting so many outstanding contracts.
“This may be the hardest assignment that anyone in the history of labor relations in this city has taken on,” Mr. de Blasio said.
New York’s 300,000 municipal workers are impatient after waiting out the Bloomberg administration, but their demands of Mr. de Blasio — long a labor favorite — pose a quandary for the new administration. Fiscal experts warn that if he gives billions in retroactive pay to workers, he could have to cut spending on schools, the police or parks, or have difficulty financing his plans for universal prekindergarten.
Mr. Linn and Mr. Brezenoff were both tight-lipped about how they would approach the talks. But Mr. de Blasio said that his goal was to resolve as many of the outstanding labor contracts as possible in 2014 and then avoid letting contracts expire.
“We need to respect our work force, and we need to protect the interests of the taxpayers at the same time, that’s the mission,” he said. “And the only way we can do that properly is by restoring a certain continuity and order to the process.”
Mr. de Blasio announced three other appointments on Tuesday, accelerating what had been a leisurely pace in filling out his administration.
He named Polly Trottenberg, a top official at the United States Department of Transportation, as his transportation commissioner. Gilbert Taylor, currently the executive deputy commissioner at the Administration for Children’s Services, will be the new commissioner for homeless services. And Kyle Kimball, the president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, will keep that position.
Ms. Trottenberg will succeed Janette Sadik-Khan, the architect of the Bloomberg administration’s sweeping expansions of bike lanes and pedestrian plazas in recent years. Ms. Trottenberg said she was committed to expanding the use of bikes as well as reducing traffic fatalities as part of a Swedish transportation model known as Vision Zero. (She was more circumspect about pedestrian plazas, about which Mr. de Blasio expressed skepticism during the campaign.)
But Ms. Trottenberg also described transportation as vital for improving economic and social mobility — a major theme of Mr. de Blasio’s campaign — and said that she was committed to expanding bus service in the boroughs outside Manhattan so people could more easily reach jobs and training opportunities.
In naming Mr. Taylor homeless services commissioner, Mr. de Blasio noted that more New Yorkers were living in shelters than at any time since the Great Depression. He said he was committed to finding new strategies to prevent homelessness and referred to a recent series in The New York Times about a girl who lived with her family in a squalid shelter in Brooklyn.
Mr. de Blasio said he had spoken with Mr. Taylor about the articles, “and I saw a fire in his eyes to make a change and to not accept an unsupportable status quo.”
Mr. Taylor, for his part, promised to take on his new charge “with every part of my heart.”
Mr. de Blasio’s decision to retain Mr. Kimball was perhaps the most surprising, given how often he criticized the Economic Development Corporation’s subsidies to large companies like FreshDirect under the Bloomberg administration.
On Tuesday, the mayor-elect reiterated that he would take a new approach, looking at “at every single development deal as an opportunity to right some wrongs.”
Asked why, then, he was keeping Mr. Kimball, Mr. de Blasio made it clear that Mr. Kimball had convinced him that he was eager to pursue the new approach.
“When I’ve talked to people who I thought were very, very talented and experienced, my question is: Did they share my values? Were they ready to implement this program?” Mr. de Blasio said. “I know from long years in government, the ideas aren’t enough. You need people who can implement them.”
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