New York City Council Blasts de Blasio for Falling Down on New-Jobs Promise

(Bloomberg) -- New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio promised two years ago to spend $1.35 billion to create 100,000 good-paying jobs in 10 years. A dozen City Council members are now challenging the city’s chief economic development officer to prove the jobs exist.

Ritchie Torres, a Bronx Democrat who heads the council’s investigations committee, grilled James Patchett, president of the city Economic Development Corp., over his inability to calculate how many jobs the program has created. De Blasio has said his program -- including making garment factories and film studios out of an old warehouse -- would foster tens of thousands of jobs paying about $50,000 a year.

Patchett said the program has cost the city $300 million so far and produced 3,000 jobs and the warehouse facility may create another 2,500. More than $1 billion has been also committed for other aspects of the plan, Patchett said.

The program ran into controversy shortly after de Blasio proposed it when plans to spend $136 million to create a "Made in New York" hub in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park for the clothing and motion-picture industries drew protests. Existing production studios and Manhattan garment manufacturers said the subsidized businesses would hurt their own.

Patchett said the administration “has laid the groundwork” to create nearly 19,000 good-paying jobs in biotech, information technology and engineering. But when pressed to say how many of those were already created, he said 3,000. That’s when Torres pounced.

“You’re counting as jobs,” he said, “projections that are not real jobs.”

In the past decade, the city’s economy has added at least 800,000 jobs, reaching a record of 4.5 million as of February. The mayor has said too many of those are in low-paying retail or tourism.

The job-creation plan isn’t related to the city and state efforts to attract Amazon.com Inc. to a site in Long Island City, Queens. That deal, which would have brought 25,000 jobs paying an average of $150,000, fell through after it drew political opposition from local residents and officials who objected to the company receiving public help to locate a second headquarters there.

To contact the reporter on this story: Henry Goldman in New York at hgoldman@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Flynn McRoberts at fmcroberts1@bloomberg.net, William Selway

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