Mayor Eric Adams on Tuesday defended his decision to take an unannounced vacation last week to the U.S. Virgin Islands, just as a winter storm bore down on the city. The mayor’s two-day trip on Thursday and Friday was kept under wraps by his staff and came as the storm caused major flooding in coastal areas, including Howard Beach and the Rockaways. “I was in the U.S. Virgin Islands,” Adams revealed to reporters on Tuesday at his first news conference since returning from the trip Saturday. The mayor said the trip was for his own mental health and to help him reflect on his late mother, Dorothy Mae Adams-Streeter, who died in March 2021. “This is my second Christmas without my mother—and last year I was really in a state of depression, and what I put my staff through—and I said, ‘I can’t do that again,” he said. Adams defended his decision to break with past precedent and not announce his whereabouts. “Every mayor traveled away,” he said. “Nowhere in the city charter does it state that I have to report to the New York City press where my whereabouts are, and I’m not going to do that.” The mayor said it’s about having a good work-life balance as he watches over the nation’s largest city, where “every day something is happening.” “So if I take time off to get my mental capacity together—so I can take this city through the crises—I deserve those two days,” the mayor said. “I deserve private time,” he added. “I’m a believer in that. I deserve to walk out of a building without a reporter hiding behind a flowerpot.” Adams had faced some criticism that he was MIA during the storm and as a house fire killed two children on Staten Island on Friday morning. However, his first deputy mayor, Lorraine Grillo, held a storm briefing Friday while he was away and told reporters, “he might as well be here, because we’ve been speaking constantly throughout the day.” Separately, President Joe Biden and his family landed in the U.S. Virgin Islands late Tuesday for a vacation and to ring in the new year. The president and his wife, first lady Jill Biden, flew from Washington to St. Croix. The Bidens were joined by their daughter Ashley and her husband, Howard Krein, as well as grandchildren Natalie and Hunter, whose father was the president’s late son, Beau. Biden and his wife enjoy spending the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day in a warmer climate, and Jill Biden likes a beach, aides told the Associated Press. (AP)

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