The White House is finally dispatching one of President Biden’s top aides to the Big Apple for a sit-down with Mayor Eric Adams that is set for Thursday morning, The Post has learned.
The meeting between Hizzoner and Tom Perez, the director of intergovernmental affairs at the White House, is scheduled to take place at City Hall, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
The expected tête-à-tête will unfold just hours after Adams warned the projected price tag to house and provide social services for the asylum seekers could hit $12 billion — and that another 60,000 could join the roughly 100,000 who have journeyed to the five boroughs so far.
“We are past our breaking point,” Adams told New Yorkers in a dire address from City Hall’s historic rotunda on Wednesday, unveiling the shocking new tallies. “New Yorkers’ compassion may be limitless, but our resources are not.
He added: “And our partners at the state and federal levels know this.”
City Hall did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the meeting with Perez.
The dramatic speech and expected confab followed days of newspaper photographs and accounts of the dire circumstances outside the processing center and shelter opened inside of the Roosevelt Hotel, where dozens of migrants were forced to sleep on the streets because the shelter system ran out of space.
When pressed about the conditions, Adams told CNN late Wednesday night that he could not guarantee that it would not happen again.
“We received over 90,000 people in our city, and I’ve been stating for some time that we need relief,” he said. “We need help. This is a national crisis and it should be handled by national resources and national policies.”
Adams has pressed Gov. Kathy Hochul and state lawmakers for assistance and they have responded, in part, by agreeing to pick up $1 billion of what was then an estimated to be the $4 billion cost.
The feds, so far, have contributed or promised just $142 million.
Adams has met with Perez before, most recently when the mayor went down to Washington, DC to press the White House for additional federal funds to help refill the city’s coffers and expedited work papers for recent arrivals so they can exit the shelter system.
But, the mayor came away with only a promise from Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that the administration would dedicate a staffer to improving coordination between the feds and City Hall.
The offer of a “liaison” was widely ridiculed by local elected officials across the political spectrum as insufficient.
The crisis has swelled the city’s shelter system to double its usual size in the space of just a year, pushing the safety net to what officials have described as its “breaking” point.
The Adams administration has gone to court seeking a judge’s permission to dramatically downsize a series of legal settlements that form the Big Apple’s ‘Right to Shelter’, which guarantees anyone in the city and in need a bed and access to services.
Many of the asylum seekers have fled to the US, seeking refuge from dire violence, dictatorships and economic turmoil in South America, Central America and the Caribbean. Some have even come from as far as Africa.
More than half, an estimated 57,000, of the recent arrivals remain in the city’s care, staying in a web of roughly 200 emergency shelters, mega-relief centers and smaller, short-term respite facilities.
City Hall says the daily tab for the operation already runs to $9.8 million — $3.6 billion annually, provided the numbers don’t keep increasing.
But increase they have — and Adams warned the trends could mean as many as 100,000 could be living in city facilities by June 2025, potentially growing the annual tab to $6.1 billion.