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HOW MANY OTHERS WILL JOIN HIM?: This police officer was not among the 6,100 who sought an exemption on either medical or religious grounds from the city's vaccine mandate. Mayor de Blasio, brushing off a Thanksgiving deadline by which one of his own agencies had pledged to have decisions on both requests for reasonable accommodations and appeals in cases where they were denied, said the 14,000-plus requests was so great that it would 'take weeks and weeks to sort out, obviously.'
A Thanksgiving deadline set by the Department of Citywide Administrative Services for ruling on employee applications for exemptions from Mayor de Blasio's vaccine mandate was missed, with the Mayor saying the day before that the volume of requests had been too great to meet that target.
During his daily media briefing the day before the holiday, asked for an update as to whether city agencies would be able to render timely decisions, Mr. de Blasio denied there was a hard-and-fast deadline, notwithstanding DCAS having stated in writing that all determinations and appeals were supposed to be decided by Thanksgiving.
'Going to Take Weeks'
Describing it as "an ongoing process," the Mayor said that "what matters is, as decisions are made...if someone gets told, well, after all the appeals, everything else, that you do not get an accommodation, then they have a choice to make."
He added, "I don't know if previously there was some kind of timeline, but with these kind of numbers, we know it's going to take weeks and weeks to sort out, obviously."
Originally it was stated that city agencies had received a total of 12,000 appeals, half of which came from the Police Department. Updated numbers reported by Gothamist indicated that the total requests had swelled to roughly 14,400, including 6,100 from police officers, 1,500 from firefighters and 1,300 from Sanitation Workers.
A day earlier, Police Commissioner Dermot Shea said on NY1 that of the first 1,100 requests the NYPD had considered, most of them were denied.
Can Keep Working
Those who filed for "reasonable accommodations" citing either health or religious reasons have been permitted to continue working while their applications, and appeals of initial denials, are considered. Once appeals are exhausted, employees who do not comply with the vaccine mandate face 30-day unpaid suspensions.
Questions have been raised as to whether uniformed agencies—particularly the Correction Department, which because of a staff shortage was given until Dec. 1 to have employees comply with the mandate—would have difficulty providing essential services if hundreds of workers wound up suspended. Mr. de Blasio has pointed to the rapid acceleration in inoculations in uniformed agencies when it came time for suspensions to begin to express confidence that the overwhelming majority of holdouts would comply rather than risk loss of pay for an extended period.
Responding to a follow-up question on the issue, he said that "while you're waiting for accommodation, you're working. If you get accommodation, you're working. If you don't get an accommodation, you've got a decision to make. [The] vast majority are going to choose vaccination and keep working. It will just take some weeks to sort out."
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