NYC Council votes to create veterans agency

A unanimous City Council vote on the eve of Veterans Day paved the way for the creation of a department dedicated solely to meeting the needs of New Yorkers who served in the armed forces.

Council approval of a stand-alone Department of Veterans' Services came after initial resistance from Mayor Bill de Blasio. The city's 225,000 veterans are a group often "overlooked and underappreciated," Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito said Tuesday at a City Hall rally celebrating the vote.

The Democrat from East Harlem recently joined Councilman Eric Ulrich, a Queens Republican and chairman of the council Committee on Veterans, in his bid to replace the existing Mayor's Office of Veterans' Affairs with a full-fledged agency.

A department would have more funding and staff, Ulrich said. It would help veterans navigate the bureaucracy of local, state and federal services -- in part by providing a benefits counselor in each borough -- and advocate for servicemen and women on housing, health care and jobs, Ulrich said. It would also be subject to council oversight, he said.

"Veterans have had to demand from the city their rights and their dignities," he said.

De Blasio in January hesitated on a new department, calling it not "the way to get things done best," and his veterans' affairs commissioner, retired U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Loree Sutton, in a May op-ed warned against putting it at a greater distance from City Hall.

But Sutton spoke at the rally Tuesday alongside other veterans to offer full support. De Blasio did not attend, but said in a statement that the "brave men and women who put their lives on the line to protect us deserve access to every opportunity."

Ulrich said the Democratic mayor had the "political maturity" not to ignore the "snowball effect" behind a bill that was co-sponsored by 45 of the council's 49 current members.

Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, noted the need for government intervention in such crises as veteran suicides. "This is an emergency response," he said of the creation of an veterans support department.

Veterans' services, which had a $2.4 million budget this year, will receive an additional $335,000 for the transition. Council members said they hope for more from the mayor when the preliminary city budget for next year is discussed in January.

Sutton said that de Blasio's commitment to the armed forces is evident in the growth of her staff has grown from 4 people to July to 11 people now. It will include 20 members by the end of the year, she said. She reiterated the administration's pledge to end veteran homelessness in the city by the end of the year.