Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio named Lilliam Barrios-Paoli as his deputy mayor of Health and Human Services Thursday.
Barrios-Paoli is currently the city commissioner of the Department of Aging, a post she’s held since 2008.
She has been the commissioner of five city agencies, including the city’s Human Resources Administration, and has worked under Mayors Michael Bloomberg, Rudolph Giuliani and Ed Koch.
De Blasio said that he chose her for her passion and experience in areas like poverty, health care and homelessness.
“I know it’s a huge assignment to have to fight on all these fronts simultaneously, but I know that Lilliam Barrios-Paoli is up to the task,” de Blasio said. “She has proven to be a reformer. She’s proven to be a change agent, someone who takes on big challenges effortlessly, no matter what budget or what economic moment we’re in.”
Both de Blasio and Barrios-Paoli emphasized the “tale of two cities,” with de Blasio saying that an ever-growing homeless population is unacceptable.
“Most fundamentally, in the campaign, I talked about the ‘tale of two cities,’ and I talked about the fact that the rising inequality, growing inequality in our city was unacceptable and was putting us on a dangerous path for the future, and we had to address inequality in New York City forcefully and directly,” de Blasio said. “That’s what I came here to do, and that’s what the people of this city voted for.”
“I’ve spent the bulk of my career trying to work on behalf of the poor,” Barrios-Paoli said. “It is incredibly exciting for me to be in an administration that really makes that a central tenant, not just an afterthought, not just something that it would be good to do, but makes it a central, central thing.”
Barrios-Paoli is the fifth appointment that de Blasio has made to his administration.
He previously announced William Bratton as police commissioner and Anthony Shorris as his first deputy mayor.
The mayor-elect is scheduled to meet with President Barack Obama in Washington, D.C. Friday.
The president is also sitting down with other newly elected mayors across the country.
http://newyork.greatlocalnews.info/?p=18858
via Great Local News: New York http://newyork.greatlocalnews.info
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