Mayor picks new health commissioner
ANDREW J. HAWKINS Crain’s January 16, 2014
Mary Travis Bassett, a former deputy health commissioner and the “architect” of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s most prominent public health policies, was named commissioner of the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene by Mayor Bill de Blasio Thursday.
Dr. Bassett will be tasked with building on the previous administration’s aggressive public health agenda that is credited with lengthening life expectancy and included significant pushback from the business community against policies like a ban on trans-fats, smoking and an attempted prohibition on the sale of large-sized sugary drinks. In choosing someone he described as the driving force behind many of those policies, Mr. de Blasio is aligning himself with his predecessor’s legacy on public health.
“I have said many times this is one of the areas where I agreed with Mayor Bloomberg,” Mr. de Blasio said, noting he was one of the first sponsors of a bill to ban smoking indoors in the City Council. “So it’s only fitting that we’ve reached out to someone who was one of the architects of these successful policies.”
But Mr. de Blasio said his administration will attempt to soften the government’s approach to public health in the hopes of blunting the “nanny state” criticisms that were often leveled at Mr. Bloomberg. Without going into specifics, Mr. de Blasio said his health department would be more “grassroots” in its dialogue with the community, though he did not discount continuing the Bloomberg administration’s aggressive public service announcements on health.
“We know we can do better communicating and listening,” he said.
Mr. de Blasio also said he would try to correct the previous administration’s “unequal, uneven enforcement” of health code violations at restaurants and small businesses. He said the widely criticized restaurant “grading” system wasn’t the problem, but the way the system was enforced.
“We think we can work more effectively with businesses to get it right,” he said. “We want to get away from a ‘gotcha’ culture.”
Mr. de Blasio said he would continue to watch the soda ban play out in the courts, in the hopes that it will ultimately be upheld. The state’s top court is currently reviewing the constitutionality of the ban.
Under Mr. Bloomberg, Dr. Bassett oversaw programs that focused on non-communicable disease and maternal and child health, as well as the district public health offices based in Harlem, Central Brooklyn and the Bronx. More recently, her work at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation focused on strengthening health systems in projects underway in Ghana, Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzania and Zambia. Last year, she contributed to a book calledComrades in Health: U.S. Health Internationalists, Abroad and at Home.
Mr. de Blasio also appointed Rose Pierre-Louis to head the mayor’s Office to Combat Domestic Violence. Ms. Pierre-Louis previously served as a deputy Manhattan borough president under Scott Stringer.