As chairman of the City Council's General Welfare Committee, Bill de Blasio has received resolutions asking for an independent federal prosecutor to investigate the Administration for Children's Services' "alleged human rights violations, wrongful removals, and unconstitutional practices," and for a hearing on improving the grievance procedures for families facing removal of their kids. These resolutions had several City Council sponsors, but they have died at the end of each session, for several years, because de Blasio did not hold hearings on them.
Did he just forget about them? Or was he pointedly ignoring them? . . .
de Blasio's Response: None yet.
"The hearings of the General Welfare Committee are a display of a controlled circus," says foster care reform advocate Rolando Bini. "He allows plenty of time to testify to his cronies and even has time to joke back and forth with them, but to the real child welfare advocates who he knows are critical of the system, he makes sure that they are only allowed to testify at the very end, when the room is almost empty, and he is very careful to enforce the three-minute limit of testimony on them."
