(Bloomberg)—New York Metropolis Mayor Eric Adams has employed town’s first-ever public areas czar in an effort to assist re-open streets and sidewalks which have turn out to be overcrowded with outside eating, scaffolding, bike lanes and different makes use of.
Formally generally known as the chief public realm officer, Ya-Ting Liu’s job shall be to determine find out how to make town’s outside eating program everlasting, make streets extra pedestrian-friendly and maintain enterprise districts clear.
“Our metropolis’s public areas are too vital to fall by way of the cracks of forms, and now they received’t,” Adams stated.
Amongst her first tasks would be the implementation of a brand new Fifth Avenue plan after a vacation season avenue closing experiment opened the avenue to pedestrians, and the Broadway Imaginative and prescient plan to higher join the enterprise districts from Union Sq. to Columbus Circle.
However the mayor stated the job would additionally contain related tasks in all 5 boroughs, together with the areas underneath the Brooklyn Bridge.
The place was one of many key suggestions of the “New New York” report that Adams commissioned with New York Governor Kathy Hochul with the assistance of town’s enterprise neighborhood.
Earlier than coming to the mayor’s workplace final 12 months as chief technique officer to Deputy Mayor for Operations Meera Joshi, Liu labored at ride-share firm Through.
The brand new place is one among a number of that Adams has invented going into the second 12 months of his mayoralty as he makes an attempt to handle a few of the metropolis’s extra intractable challenges. He employed a police captain to run a brand new Workplace of Municipal Companies Evaluation final month, and created a Mayor’s Workplace for Baby Care and Early Childhood Training final week.
And he’s nonetheless searching for a Director of Rodent Mitigation — the “rat czar” — to assist rid town of vermin.
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