When Mayor Michael Bloomberg (Ind.) handed Carol Robles-Román her portfolio in 2002, she said he stressed just one word: “access.”

Robles-Román said the mayor’s directive was clear for his deputy mayor for legal affairs, a new position he created at the outset of his administration.

“It wasn’t the job of defending the city when it gets sued,” she said in a recent interview in a conference room on the first floor of City Hall. “It was one where you take these various agencies that had various legal mandates that in the past had been operating autonomously and kind of below the radar, and put them all on the radar.”
She was surprised when Bloomberg offered her the job. 

“I wasn’t looking for this,” she said. “I didn’t put my resumé in 1-800-Michael-Bloomberg.”

But in the end, Robles-Román said the task of clearing the way for New Yorkers to access different government agencies—each with its own array of legal or judicial services—was appealing enough to pull her away from her work in economic development.   

As one of seven deputy mayors, Robles-Román is the leader of what she calls the “legal affairs team,” a group of commissioners and agency heads who oversee the Administrative Justice Coordinator, the Mayor’s Office to Combat Domestic Violence, Commission on Human Rights, Office of Immigrant Affairs, and Office for People with Disabilities. She serves as the liaison to the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings, Mayor’s Advisory Committee on the Judiciary, Civilian Complaint Review Board, Commission to Combat Police Corruption, Conflicts of Interest Board, Equal Employment Practices Commission, and the Voter Assistance Commission.

She also vets the mayor’s judicial nominees to the criminal and family courts, and spearheaded the effort to reform the city’s administrative tribunals.

But in the year and a half left in Bloomberg’s term, Robles-Román is focusing on the list of remaining priorities, like the executive order Bloomberg signed in July which requires every city agency, in direct contact with New Yorkers, to provide language assistance in the six most-spoken languages in the city: Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Korean, Italian and French Creole. 

The plan was four years in the making, full of intense negotiations between immigrant advocates, the City Council and various members of the administration.

Robles-Román led the effort along with Bloomberg Director of Operations Jeff Kay and Guillermo Linares, commissioner of the Office of Immigrant Affairs. She said the executive order was in the spirit of 311 and other Bloomberg’s access-improving initiatives.

“We’re government and we’re going to use the tools that we have to make sure that everybody can access government,” she said, pounding the table for emphasis. “He’s very proud of what he’s done and I’m very proud of him.”

But Council Member Kendall Stewart (D-Brooklyn), chair of the Immigration Committee, said that the driving force behind the executive order was the Council, not Bloomberg or Robles-Román. Criticizing the administration’s handling of immigrant affairs overall, Stewart said he wished Robles-Román and Linares were more aggressive in pushing immigrant issues.

“I don’t think they’re doing as much as I think they need to be doing,” Stewart said. “They do not speak out or even put up policy information on immigration issues.”

Next on the agenda, Robles-Román said, is trying to increase government access for victims of domestic violence in the city. Already under Bloomberg’s watch, family-related crimes have decreased 21 percent and intimate partner homicides by 51 percent over six years.

Now, with over $1 million in federal grants, the city is working on opening family justice centers in each borough by the end of the term, Robles-Román said. To date, there are centers open in Brooklyn and Queens.
The justice centers were born out of a close analysis of the domestic violence statistics, something Robles-Román said is typical of all of the mayor’s initiatives.

“We looked at the numbers very strategically, very Bloombergian,” she said, “and said, ‘Where are the majority of the fatalities taking place?’”

Robles-Román’s past jobs include several executive posts with the New York State Unified Court System, and serving as a senior vice president and general counsel of the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Company, working on economic development operations and marketing initiatives.

Most administration officials avoid talking about life after Bloomberg. Robles-Román does not.

“Will I stay in public service?” she mused. “No. I’ll go into strategy, which is something I do in everything I take on, and economic development.”