New York City’s Next Mayor Needs You
The already strained relationship between Mayor Adams and the city’s press corps is getting even worse, with the mayor lashing out at a media that has no choice but to report on the significant legal and political headwinds facing his administration.
This is a mayor who, unlike his predecessors, limits ask-any-question sessions to once a week, then ducks, defers, or complains about the queries he gets. Visibly afraid to sit down with political journalists, Adams schedules time with comedians and radio-show entertainers who don’t know enough about most issues to ask challenging questions. Predictably, the duck-and-hide strategy has failed to get Adams the good press he craves.
“You sit here every day, and everything we roll out, you want to find a creative way to crap on it and just act like it doesn’t exist, you have to ask yourself, what is your agenda? Is your agenda to report the news? Or is your agenda to say, ‘We’re going to try to be personally attacking this administration’?”
Nothing personal, Your Honor, but there’s been some bad news lately.
In one recent 24-hour span, Adams’s chief adviser and close friend, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, abruptly resigned from the administration and told reporters she expects to face criminal charges. That same day, the city’s Campaign Finance Board rejected the mayor’s application for $4.3 million in badly needed matching funds. And President-elect Donald Trump publicly expressed interest in pardoning Adams on federal corruption charges, a possible lifeline that might help Adams legally but won’t do much for him politically in a city that Trump lost by 38 percentage points, which comes out to nearly 1 million votes.
The mayor strongly suggested that his team’s relationship with the media is likely to get worse. “There’s a saying in politics: ‘Don’t criticize people who buy ink by the barrel,’ because they will get you,” he said. “I refuse to do that. I’ve disputed and fought against people who carry guns for a living. And I’ll be darned if I’m not going to do it to those who carry ink by the barrel.”
That’s unwise and counterproductive: The city’s daily newspapers have been publishing for centuries and will be here long after this mayor has moved on. Adams’s tantrum also misses the point. Far from trying to make the mayor look good or bad, journalists are simply reporting the inconvenient fact that, in a city where the mayor’s approval rating was at 22 percent before he got indicted, many of the city’s labor unions, major corporations, civil-rights organizations, political associations, philanthropic organizations, and other engaged civic groups have been holding serious conversations about what New York’s future might look like with somebody other than Eric Adams in charge.
More than half a dozen candidates have stepped up to challenge Adams in the Democratic primary. Expect a lively 24-week campaign in the New Year. But with all the promises and putdowns, and the debates and rallies getting most of the press, there’s an important process already underway — quietly — that will have a very big effect on the next mayor of New York (or even Adams, should he win a second term).
The reality is that most candidates start out with only a few concrete plans on how they intend to govern. Many of the most important issues the next mayor must handle get little discussion beyond some vague and hazy slogans, with some policies getting fleshed out based on what different crowds, donors, labor unions, and interest groups tell the politicians. So with the campaigns ramping up, some of the most consequential political action is taking place in the form of civic leaders meeting with candidates and educating them about the issues they will need understand in great detail if they are to govern the city effectively. Just as much as elections, it’s a core feature of New York City politics. If anything, more of us need to get involved.
I recently asked Comptroller Brad Lander something he’s learned on the campaign trail so far. “You’ve got to be able, in 60 seconds, to get your points across at the forums,” he told me. That level of simplification creates a danger that, by the time we get to June, the field of politicians could be promoting a hodgepodge of field-tested promises, positions, and talking points designed to please crowds and rack up votes rather than actually fix city problems.
Nobody knows this better than Adams, whose govern-by-slogan style has long included bromides like #GetStuffDone and “Crime is down and jobs are up,” a neat but inaccurate formulation that ignores New York’s increases over the last two years in rape, felony assaults, auto theft, subway violence, and other high-profile criminal activity, with many categories of crime still significantly higher than before the pandemic.
Every civic leader out there — from tenant-association presidents to corporate vice-presidents and community organizers — should be trying to get a moment with the leading candidates for office and educate them about different concerns. Be sure to tell rather than ask: On any given issue, there’s an excellent chance that many politicians will have no idea what might be the best and most effective path forward. It’s up to New York’s army of grassroots experts to bring our elected leaders up to speed.
A case in point is New York’s ongoing scandal of delaying and denying payments to the nonprofit organizations that provide critical services, including early education, addiction treatment, emergency housing, and more. The Human Services Council, an association of about 170 nonprofits, told The City news organization that the situation is “definitely the worst it’s ever been” and that nearly half of the nonprofits in a recent survey had borrowed more than $87 million to make ends meet and had to pay $6 million in interest. In some cases, organizations have been forced to lay off staff or close altogether.
I’ve asked a few candidates what they intend to do about it.
“This is inexcusable. The state government pays much more quickly than the city. It can be done. We have to reengineer the entire process, Manhattan Borough president Mark Levine told me on the day he announced a run for city comptroller. “Put more staffing in there to get these through more quickly and probably bring some technology and automation in so that these are done routinely and quickly so that there is accountability and nonprofits get paid. I’m going to be all in on the fight to get nonprofits paid on time.”
“It is disgraceful that we treat our nonprofits the way that we do, particularly because they are in many instances doing the work that people assume the city is doing,” is how candidate for mayor Zellnor Myrie responded. “Who you appoint, who you have running the contracts, running your administration, is also really important. And it shouldn’t just be the people that have been politically loyal to you. It should be people that have some know-how and have some level of expertise to execute and deliver on those contracts.”
That’s an okay start. I hope every civic activist out there will get moving as soon as possible. We need to build an informed, clued-in field of candidates — including Adams — before the next election sneaks up on us.