Governor Hochul: "I want to help you any way we can and continue our longstanding relationship, the bond that has been there since the beginning. This is important to me."
Hochul: "I'm new at this, but I've been the lieutenant governor for seven years and it brought me here many times, not just for SOMOS ... You can count on my continued commitment to helping the people of this beautiful place."
Hochul: "I want you have more mental health professionals right here, right on this island, to help people recover from this. The pandemic was hard enough, but here people are still reeling from not one, but two hurricanes, an earthquake, devastation from the pandemic and it's almost asking too much"
Earlier today, Governor Kathy Hochul delivered remarks in Puerto Rico, announcing a partnership to increase extreme weather recovery assistance and create new solar jobs.
VIDEO of the event is available on YouTube here and in TV quality (h.264, mp4) format here.
AUDIO of the Governor's remarks is available here.
PHOTOS of the event are available on the Governor's Flickr page.
A rush transcript of the Governor's interview is available below:
Governor Hochul: I had to pull the press crew, the media, away from the local bars and restaurants to start spending money out here. I'm here with Julia Nazario. We share a very interesting dynamic here, not just these two reaching out from Buffalo and the media, but the Hispanic community and I have good friends I've known for my entire life, so there's a connection here between these two communities, my hometown of Buffalo and Loiza.
And also, the mayor just shared with me, her first nine months as mayor she had to deal with not one, but two hurricanes. Her first nine months, Irma and Maria. And I said, well, in my first ten days as governor, I had two hurricanes as well. So, strong women can deal with hurricanes. So, thank you, Mayor Julia Nazario.
Frank Miranda, long time friend of the Hispanic people, I've a rather admiration for him, our present CEO. I thank you for his passion to the Hispanic community, in New York and also Puerto Rico, we just have really good people like Frankie devoting his time and his talents to making sure everybody has a chance of success.
I also welcome members of the Hispanic Federation of Puerto Rico. Jonathan Castillo Blanco, Green Energy, among others on the Hispanic Federation, these are the great people I want to have a conversation on. [inaudible] This is a federal qualified health center, you're standing on that roof right now. Dr. Rio Rodriguez, Medical Director for where we are today too. I'm also joined by the soon-to-be Secretary of State for the State of New York, Assemblymember Robert Rodriguez. I want to thank him for answering the call to service me for many years in the future we're looking forward to it.
I'm here for a number of reasons, one is that I wanted to go to the areas I come out to local areas. I've spent a long time in local government, so I have such admiration for what happens on the ground in communities like this. Local officials really understand the pulse of what is going on and you have a sense of the means of the people you represent. This is an area of high poverty, high unemployment, and high vulnerability to natural disasters. The road we just traveled on to get here was literally underwater for a long time. The power was shut down.
You go to a place like this and talk to the heroes who got people through this crisis, Hurricane Maria, and I came before the pandemic because there were earthquakes on the other side of the island. So, this island has been battered and I've seen it firsthand.
But what we also learned was the vulnerability. After this hurricane, when the power went down, in some places for a solid year, because they did not have the resiliency in their grid, when people lost their lives, not because they were flooded out of their homes, but because they could not get lifesaving medical services. They couldn't get their insulin, they couldn't get what they needed for their diabetes. They couldn't get the help they needed that was offered right here.
This place did the best they could and they did an extraordinary job, but when you talk about the loss of life of 3,000 people, it did not happen on the first day, it happened overtime when people were disconnected from literally because of the flooding and that the power could not be kept on in so many places.
So, the brilliant people of this community said never again and the Hispanic federation bringing experts here teamed up and said why don't we do something that is visionary, transformative, and that's why we are standing not downstairs but on the roof of this facility to show, not just the rest of the island, but indeed the State of New York, how we can make sure that people are never again vulnerable to the whims of Mother Nature when it comes crashing here whether from the skies or from the shores and creating the habit that we saw.
When you have solar panels that will allow you to no longer rely on a diesel-power generator, which not just last time but the trucks couldn't bring the diesel here. It doesn't work if you can't bring the diesel on the trucks. And the cost of diesel is going up.
This is how you build an energy-independence that is so necessary so you can continue with your lifesaving work to support the 24,000 residents that you work on. Over 12,000 people are served here every year. You may have worked on half the population. And what are they doing right now? They're getting vaccinated. 12,000 vaccines administered right here. I am so proud of that and that is why Puerto Rico has a higher than New York State rate of vaccination. I'm very competitive. I'm catching up with you, okay? Slow down a little bit.
But I also saw that you're out there vaccinating children. And this is what we're able to do now. They're going to trust you, come to you. Parents are vaccinated, they're getting their children vaccinated. We're starting to see the vitality that was missing for too long.
I was here weeks before the pandemic started and the hotels were still not back from the earthquake and from Maria. They weren't there yet, and now we've got all this pent up demand. People want to come back, they want to come to this beautiful island. So many have been here before, some are discovering it for the first time. We're also going to help promote tourism here as well. I'll spend money here, too. That's why I brought my husband, he's used to me spending money wherever I go, I'm the only one person going up to the panelists.
So, we are here to deal with the issue of blackouts. Never again are we going to have it happen. So, we're working closely with Puerto Rico and the facilities to help assess disruptions. They have their plans in place, we want to cooperate with them. If they need our help, we're here. Also, we talked about jobs with the mayor. What kind of jobs are the most sustainable in the future? Clean energy jobs. That's what we're doing in New York. We're training people to be able to handle the offshore wind that we have in New York State. We're excited about the tens of thousands of jobs created there.
And solar, solar power. We saw the batteries that are made by tesla. And I said are they made in Buffalo because Tesla has a facility there, but turns out they're made in Nevada.
We are also trying to bring manufacturing here too, as we've seen in New York and the rest of the United States the vulnerability we have because of the issues at our ports. A lot of materials are not making it it out there, New York is fine, but there are ports around our nation that are bringing battery parts, which is a vulnerability we have and we have to rely on this, so let's manufacture batteries here.
So, I want to help you any way we can and continue our longstanding relationship, the bond that has been there since the beginning. This is important to me. As I mentioned, I came in Buffalo where many good constituents moved to.
Lisa mentioned a place where her friends went to, where they're my friends from up in Western New York. So, we'll help them and the people who are still here. Help them get jobs, help them with training in these solar panel installation jobs. Help the small businesses that are making the supply chain. We're creating a whole ecosystem here to replicate this magnificent ray of solar panels at this place. We can do that. That'll give people hope right here and we're going to offer our assistance as well.
One more thing I want to mention. When I was here after the earthquake, I was able to tour many healthcare facilities, in places where workers and mayors were giving out food, trying to bring some hope to people whose lives were devastated. One issues I became familiar with was the mental health crisis and the mental health challenges. This becomes too much for people, right mayor? This is too much. We have to do something and I want you have more mental health professionals right here, right on this island, to help people recover from this. The pandemic was hard enough, but here people are still reeling from not one, but two hurricanes, an earthquake, devastation from the pandemic and it's almost asking too much. We have to let them know that there's no stigma attached to getting help for mental health challenges, everybody has them at some point and we want to make sure we do that.
We are establishing a network of disaster mental health professionals across New York as well. New York was battered as well. We have a lot of people who need our help because of what we've been through, especially during the pandemic. So we're going to have forty graduate students with joint disaster mental health training. It's a specialty. We're going to have forty students come right here and start working with you communications to help train people here to deal with this unique niche in healthcare now, to help people overcoming effects that affect them personally where they have to live through a disaster.
So, this is where we want to offer our assistance. This is just the beginning. I'm new at this, but I've been the lieutenant governor for seven years and it brought me here many times, not just for SOMOS, but really dealing with Medicaid prices, we brought our Medicaid design team here my first year in office, we came back to help out after the earthquake and you can count on my continued commitment to helping the people of this beautiful place. It's beautiful, and we need to help you out, but more importantly, family. Thank you.