NEW YORK -- Mayor Bill de Blasio and Sen. Charles Schumer announced a deal Wednesday evening to boost relief for taxi drivers facing crushing medallion debt.

The agreement will supplement the city's medallion relief program with a city-funded deficiency guarantee. That means lower monthly payments for taxi workers around the city.

Under the city's agreement with the Taxi Workers Alliance and Marblegate, an asset management firm that is the largest holder of medallion loans, outstanding loans will be restructured to a principal balance of $200,000 -- a $170,000 guaranteed loan, plus a city grant of $30,000.

The mayor's office says the new loan will include a 5% interest rate and a 20-year term. The city pledges to also "provide funding for a guarantee on the principal and interest for these loans and will work with all other medallion lenders to achieve the same terms."

This restructuring will cap debt service payments at $1,122 per month for eligible medallion owners.

Bhairavi Desai, the president of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, told anchor Cheryl Wills on "NY1 Live At Ten" in the evening that she was thrilled by the agreement.

The deal comes after taxi drivers have been on a hunger strike for 15 days, pleading for better medallion debt relief and arguing the city's previous plan still left them with massive debt that they could never pay off. Desai told NY1 that drivers on Wednesday had an avocado to break their fast in victory.

Since 2018, at least eight taxi drivers in the city have killed themselves, with family, other drivers and advocates blaming the medallion debt crisis.

Asked by a reporter at his Thursday briefing whether the city bore “unique responsibility” for the issues taxi drivers found themselves dealing with, de Blasio maintained the “whole picture needs to be looked at.”

“Very cynical things were done by lenders, very cynical, for their own profit and at the expense of the drivers. The lenders were supposed to be regulated by the federal government and the state government. That did not happen,” he said. “That is a piece of the puzzle that needs to be addressed that has not been.”

De Blasio maintained that a cap on for-hire vehicles, which he unsuccessfully pushed for back in 2015, “would have staved off a lot of the worst of what happened.”

“When suddenly, the taxis were confronted with a new competition, Uber, Lyft, etc., technology, we needed some limits and we needed some way of regulating that, which the previous administration was not willing to do,” he added. “But remember, Uber and Lyft tried to do things without waiting for government regulation, without getting consent from government, and I think that caused a lot of the problem, not only here, all over the world.”

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