If the subtext wasn't clear then, it was brought into sharp focus when the mayor's charter revision commission announced that its agenda for this year would include the possible elimination of the public advocate position. A little-understood office that was itself created in a 1993 charter revision (out of the wreckage of the title of City Council president, which had been stripped of most of its power by a Supreme Court ruling), the public advocate is supposed to act as an independently elected "ombudsman" to keep watch over the mayor and City Council.
That means the future of the office could rest in the hands of de Blasio, the former councilmember, federal housing official, and Hillary Clinton campaign manager who won the job after a tight four-way primary race and subsequent runoff against former public advocate Mark Green last fall. As chair of the Council's General Welfare Committee, de Blasio had been a vocal critic of many of Mayor Bloomberg's policies, particularly his refusal to allow able-bodied single adults to receive food stamps unless they're working, and what de Blasio considered an insufficiently robust approach to reducing poverty.
After eight years of Betsy Gotbaum, a lifelong city bureaucrat who was seen as largely inactive, hopes were high that the next public advocate would, as the Times put it, create "a more powerful counterbalance to the city's powerful mayor than the outgoing public advocate."
So far, though, de Blasio has been relatively quiet, even amid one of the most contentious budget seasons in recent memory. His most visible efforts have come in the area of homelessness, where he assailed the mayor's policies on the eve of Bloomberg's state of the city address in January; Coalition for the Homeless policy analyst Patrick Markee praises de Blasio's "very helpful role" in the successful campaign to roll back the state's plan to charge rent to homeless shelter residents. "We're really pleased that he's continued his role on the General Welfare Committee to hold the mayor's feet to the fire," says Markee.
Most of de Blasio's homelessness campaigning has come via press conferences and public statements, a pattern that's carried over his first six months in office: The news section of de Blasio's website is crowded with public statements on events of the day and rallies he's attended. It's a trend that drew a recent jibe from his predecessor Green: After noting to the New York Observer that de Blasio has been hobbled by a 40 percent budget cut to the public advocate's office that was instituted last year, Green added that de Blasio eventually needs to "produce measurable procedural or policy or legislative results beyond standing at press conferences with local residents or workers like an ACORN activist might do."
