Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio is elevating Department for the Aging Commissioner Lilliam Barrios-Paoli to his deputy mayor for health and human services.
Our Annie Karni and I report:
Barrios-Paoli, who served in the administrations of former Mayors Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani — and had a serious falling-out with the latter — before working for Mayor Bloomberg, is one of the few top leaders de Blasio has yet to name with less than three weeks to go before he takes office.
“We’re looking for people who share the values of the platform I put forward to the people of New York City,” de Blasio said at a news conference, flanked by First Deputy Mayor (elect) Anthony Shorris and Barrios-Paoli, as his First Lady, Chirlane McCray, looked on from the audience at Surrogates Court on Chambers Street.
“We insisted on having a government that looks like New York City,” de Blasio said.
Barrios-Paoli, whose heritage is Mexican, addressed the press in both English and Spanish.
“I have spent the bulk of my career trying to work on behalf of the poor,” she said.
Echoing de Blasio’s campaign theme, Barrios-Paoli continued, “I totally believe we live in a tale of two cities, and it is our job to make it a tale of one city.”
“There but the grace of Gd go all of us.”
(On that note, the mayor-elect mentioned Barrios-Paoli was a nun for five years and is “influenced by some very progressive ideas about how we could make our society more fair.”)
In a career that’s spanned both the public and non-profit sectors, as well as education, Barrios-Paoli has served as commissioner of the city Human Resources Administration, Welfare, Housing and Preservation Development and the Department of Personnel, as well as the Department of Employment.
The combined experience gave her direct supervision of billions of budget dollars and thousands of employees.
Barrios-Paoli got booted from HRA in the Giuliani years after battling the mayor over an investigation of alleged misdeeds at a women’s shelter.
As our Joel Siegel
, Barrios-Paoli “was quoted as saying officials removed the shelter’s staff without a thorough investigation of sexual misconduct and child abuse charges because they feared that Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer, a Democratic mayoral candidate, would make the allegations a 1997 campaign issue.”
Barrios-Paoli was, reports said, forced to retract her statements; Giuliani removed her from HRA and sent her to oversee Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center in the Bronx. The job came with a pay hike, but was widely acknowledged as a demotion.
Before agreeing to head Bloomberg’s Aging Department in 2008, Barrios-Paoli ran
, a non-profit offering counseling to impoverished families and children on medical issues, abuse, and domestic violence. Her non-profit experience also includes a stint as senior vice president and chief executive for community investment of the United Way Of New York City.
, Barrios-Paoli earned her undergraduate degree from Universidad Iberoamericana and her masters and doctorate in anthropology from the New School. She has taught at the college level in both New York and New Jersey.
IMAGE: PEARL GABEL/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
