Council Member Eric Ulrich said he was "very close" to making a decision on running. | New York City Council Ulrich, still undecided on campaign, promises to fire homelessness chief if elected mayor

If City Councilman Eric Ulrich is elected mayor — and he hasn't yet decided whether to run for the office — the first thing he plans to do is fire the city's commissioner of social services.

"The first thing I'd do is first Steve Banks," Ulrich said during a forum with announced and potential GOP mayoral candidates hosted by the Columbia University College Republicans Thursday night.


"I'm gonna fire the HRA commissioner — he's also the commissioner of DHS, as if he couldn't do enough damage in one agency, they actually gave him two," he added, referring to Banks' roles leading the Human Resources Administration and the Department of Homeless Services.

"Steve Banks had 20 years suing the city of New York as a member of the Legal Aid Society. And Mayor de Blasio let the fox in the hen house by allowing him to run the homeless shelter system and the department of human services," Ulrich said. "Steve Banks was supposed to enact certain reforms that were supposed to transition people out of the shelter, and instead he's actually made it easier for people to get in and harder for people to leave."

Whether Banks and de Blasio have made it harder to leave shelter is debatable. After de Blasio took office, he brought back city rental assistance programs to help people afford housing and move out of shelter. A similar program had ended in 2011 under then-mayor Michael Bloomberg after the state cut its share of the funding.

De Blasio also started offering Section 8 vouchers and public housing again to help people move out of shelter, which Bloomberg had stopped doing early in his administration.

Ulrich, a Queens Republican who has had a camera crew filming him this year for a possible reality show on his possible mayoral campaign, said he was "very close" to making a decision on running. (He wasn't joined by a film crew Thursday night.)

At a press conference after the forum, Ulrich said that if U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara indicts Mayor Bill de Blasio in the culmination of a long-running investigation into his fundraising, that could prod him into the race.

"You'll see a bunch of people jumping in the race, Democrats and Republicans," he said, if that happens.

Ulrich told NYTrue.com's John Kenny that he'd decide on whether to run in about two weeks.

If Ulrich joined the race, he could shake up a Republican primary in which Paul Massey, a real estate developer, now looks like the front-runner, having far surpassed his competitors in fundraising to this point.

The other, declared candidates present Thursday night — Massey, Michal Faulkner, the former Jets player and New Horizons church pastor, and Darren Aquino, a disability advocate — also went after de Blasio's handling of homelessness.

"The more money we seem to spend on it, the worse it's getting. So, whatever Mayor de Blasio's doing, it's obviously not working," Ulrich said, closing to applause from the one- or two-hundred attendees listening in the rotunda of Columbia's Low Memorial Library.

Dan Levitan, a spokesman for de Blasio's campaign, responded to the critiques of the mayor's housing policy in a statement directed at Massey.

"Mayor de Blasio has created enough affordable housing to house the entire population of Paul Massey’s hometown (Larchmont, population: 5,951) more than twenty times over," he said. "That’s a record we are happy to compare with anyone."

Brendan Cheney contributed to this report.