Editorial: A new beginning

On January 1, Bill de Blasio took the oath of office as the 109th mayor of New York City.

A Brooklynite, like Public Advocate Letitia James, who also was inaugurated on New Year’s Day outside City Hall, de Blasio will lead this city for the next four years.

The new administration is off to a good start, having coped efficiently with a near-blizzard just two days after taking office – an event that many people said would be a test of Mayor de Blasio’s ability to run New York.

In most corners of the borough, streets were rendered passable with admirable speed, and during the early hours of the storm, before the salting and plowing could begin in earnest, members of the city’s Department of Sanitation managed to collect at least some of the recycling that had piled up for those who had Wednesday collections, postponed by consecutive holidays.

New York’s Strongest then tackled icy streets as the temperature dipped, going from merely cold to frigid, leaving us optimistic that future storms would be handled equally efficiently.

It’s clear that our new mayor – who stopped to shovel his own sidewalk in the early morning hours of the storm before heading to City Hall — is taking his responsibility as mayor of all the people in all the boroughs as seriously as he takes the responsibility of being a good neighbor.

Mayor de Blasio’s appointments also give us reason to be optimistic. We salute Carmen Farina – who started her career in the classroom — as the new schools chancellor, and the returning Bill Bratton as the new police commissioner, among others named by the mayor in recent days to help run our city.

We wish our new mayor, his colleagues and his team well in their endeavors, as they tackle the issues of importance in what we believe to be the greatest city in the world.