Mayor de Blasio vowed a less “punitive” approach to the city’s businesses in tapping his new small business chief, one of two top appointments he made Tuesday.
De Blasio tapped Maria Torres-Springer, formerly a top official at the Economic Development Corporation, to be the commissioner of the Department of Small Business Services.
He made a point of condemning predecessor Mike Bloomberg’s small business policies, which many shops complained included high fines for tiny infractions.
“Under the previous administration, I think there were policies in place that actually made it tougher on small businesses,” he said. “Our small businesses were struggling to begin with. They did not need overly aggressive enforcement and overly punitive fines added to the equation. We want to right that wrong.”
Torres-Springer’s new agency is not the one that doles out those fines – that duty falls to the Department of Consumer Affairs, where de Blasio has not yet appointed a commissioner – but the mayor said her organization would be key in shaping a new approach, especially targeting outer borough and immigrant-run businesses.
“For too long, the central relationship between small business and city government has been when an inspector walks through the door of that small business ready to issue a fine. And that’s not what we’re here to do in government,” he said.
De blasio also tapped Dr. Ramanathan Raju to be president of the Health and Hospitals Corporation, which runs the city’s 11 public hospitals.
Raju comes from the top job running Chicago’s Cook County Health and Hospital System, and was chief operating officer at HHC before that.
The $6 billion system is ailing financially, posting large operating losses that officials have warned could leave it needing hundreds of millions in new subsidies or drastic service cuts in the coming years.
“HHC has its own set of huge fiscal challenges,” de Blasio said, adding Raju “has begun a turnaround in Chicago that has defied the national trend. Care in his system has improved. Hospitals are more stable…And there, too, he’s grappled with tough fiscal realities and made substantial improvements.”
Raju, a native of India, began his career at Lutheran Medical Center in Brooklyn.
“I’ve always looked at myself first and foremost as a doctor, a physician taking care of people,” he said.
