Opinion: How to manage for some real change in this city

Eric Adams, New York’s second Black mayor, often compares himself to David Dinkins, the city’s first Black mayor. But in terms of how they function as mayor, there’s little to compare. Where Adams is about swagger, Dinkins was about empathy and viewing the role of his administration through the eyes of New Yorkers who depend on government to be responsive to their needs.

This difference is evident in the early stages of the 2025 mayoral campaign. 

Amid candidates’ promises to provide more affordable housing, expand child care and meet other big picture needs, a more prosaic issue is emerging among the candidates’ talking points: the Adams administration’s failure to deliver basic services to New Yorkers. It’s a concern that took center stage even before Mayor Adams’s indictment and multiple investigations engulfed the top echelons of City Hall. 

Service delivery is the fundamental role of city government, and there’s growing evidence it’s not getting done. Staffing shortages and out-of-service ambulances mean EMS response times are increasing, which has deadly consequences. These delays are occurring especially in low-income neighborhoods. The problem is apparent when it takes an average of 15 minutes for cops to respond to a crime in progress or more than a month to process many applications for food stamps, despite 1,000 additional staff being hired. Or when a recent study finds that two-thirds of the park bathrooms are either shuttered or lacking soap or toilet paper. Or when 1,100 homeless youth were sent back on the streets over a recent six-month period. And when it takes the public housing authority more than a year a year to house a new family in a renovated apartment despite the ongoing housing crunch, there is ample reason for concern about how well the city is functioning.

I’ve experienced what it takes to deliver city services from the inside and the outside. As director of the Mayor’s Office of Operations for Dinkins, deputy schools chancellor for finance and administration and first deputy administrator of the city’s Human Resources Administration under former Mayor Ed Koch, I spent years as an insider at the intersection of decision-making, problem-solving and determining budget choices. In subsequent years, I had a vantage point from outside municipal government, working with nonprofit and philanthropic organizations to affect service delivery.

It’s not an over-statement to say that the city teeters at the intersection of vast private wealth and public squalor. While streets in neighborhoods like the Upper East Side are nearly litter-free, vacant lots in neighborhoods such as Far Rockaway remain dumping grounds, sacrificed to budget cuts.

I want to hear from the candidates about their commitments to break from the city’s hidebound austerity budgeting and their willingness to challenge the affluent elites and structures and rules that sustain inequality, holding us back from building a just city. But it takes more than bold promises to get results. Getting a bureaucracy as big and ambling and siloed as the city’s to change course – whether on fundamental administrative tasks or larger policy directions – takes more than campaign rhetoric. There are some things I learned along the way that can help achieve this.

Dinkins was mayor during a tumultuous time in the city – a time when the city was hobbled by a recession, riven by racial discord and battered by crack and crime. In an “if it bleeds it ledes” news culture, the fallout from these challenges dominated the public perception of the Dinkins administration. Yet beyond the shadow cast by the headlines, Dinkins committed his administration to some fundamental changes, a vision that shifted the center of gravity from Manhattan below 96th Street to neglected neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs. He believed that through better management, even in tough fiscal times, the municipal government could not just deliver but also enhance services that residents rely on and deserve.

While our management efforts were often the kind of inside baseball that did not grab headlines, they frequently got results that mattered. Much like today, the city had a ballooning overtime budget, mostly inflated by the police, fire and corrections departments. To get it under control, the mayor shifted oversight responsibility from the Office of Management and Budget to the operations office – not the kind of change likely to provoke headlines. For the budget office, the primary focus was keeping the city budget in balance. But Dinkins gave operations and a new, specially-focused unit within it, a wider berth. The goal was not just fiscal savings but plowing those savings back into services for some of the most under-resourced neighborhoods in the city. 

In this new unit, staffed by a mix of government veterans and young staff hungry to promote change, we put a spotlight on overtime and other spending excesses. We increased the need for supervisory approval for overtime and held regular meetings with the freest-spending agencies. To foster accountability, we began to issue quarterly overtime spending reports – and shared them with the press. Commissioners of overspending agencies faced not just City Hall disapproval but public opprobrium as well.

These efforts resulted in savings, which were then plowed into tangible services for some of the city’s neediest communities. In probably one of our most significant achievements, we reimagined school buildings, which sat idle for many hours of the day – turning many of them into community centers known as Beacon schools. Once the school day was finished, the Beacons offered after-school programs to kids as well as social services and other programs for entire families. This was back in the days before the mayor had control of the schools, so it meant getting the schools chancellor and school principals, who didn’t report to the mayor, and the youth services commissioner, who did, to work together and implement the program. More than 30 years later, this after-school initiative continues to offer varied programs to meet the diverse needs of students, parents and other adults.

Equally important was the creation of Communi-care, which brought health clinics to underserved neighborhoods. These clinics provided 24-hour preventive and primary care and were run jointly by the city’s public hospitals and Department of Health. Financing came from a partnership between the city and the Primary Care Development Corporation, a nonprofit entity founded by Dinkins that now supports community clinics nationally.  

Despite the tough fiscal times, recreation centers and indoor pools increased their operating hours. Libraries, which in some neighborhoods were open only three days a week, began six-day service throughout the city – a service threshold that subsequent mayors have frequently undercut.

Dinkins also made improving public spaces a major goal. He pressed us to be innovative and to manage services well, with the aim of softening the harsh edges in too many impoverished neighborhoods. This meant focusing efforts on vacant lots, derelict or abandoned buildings and environmental contamination. 

To meet the mayor’s clean-up goal, we broke agency silos among the sanitation, fire, transportation and parks departments, sharing skilled workforces and equipment to clean long-ignored areas of the city: ridding streets, roads, parks and arterial highways of abandoned vehicles, as well as debris illegally dumped by construction contractors. We also removed debris from abandoned private property while also increasing street cleaning and litter basket collection on commercial streets in neighborhoods long denied adequate services.  

Under this management approach of shared responsibility, we cleaned the city’s gateway highways for the Democratic National Convention and the U.S. Open tennis competition. And when the city was hit with a major hurricane, we cleared debris and cleaned the entire coast of the city from Staten Island to The Bronx.

But getting agencies throughout the city to work together wasn’t easy. The operations office became the focal point for service improvements and cost-saving strategies. In the early stages, 8 a.m. breakfast meetings were scheduled. Operations staff from each agency were invited, and specific agendas were offered for each initiative. Initial meetings were fraught with negative responses and much resistance from agency staff. Habituated to ruling their own fiefs, they weren’t interested in collaborating with other agencies. To address this, we simply stopped inviting staff who were resistant to change to future meetings. Fear of missing out eventually won some of them over, and recalcitrant agencies began expressing interest in pursuing changes and sharing ideas about how their respective skills and equipment could be used to forge cost-effective and improved services. 

As each initiative was implemented, we didn’t rest on our laurels. Ideas were offered that improved upon each initiative. We also learned something important: seasoned municipal workers had enormous skills and insight. They just needed an opportunity to put their experience to work. The operations office gave them that opportunity. And rather than focusing credit for service improvements on the mayor, City Hall gave the responsible agencies the kudos. Promoting their success encouraged more risk taking, which allowed for greater innovation in sharing workforce knowledge, expertise and equipment.

Unlike today, when the municipal instinct seems to be to create a new agency or mayoral office for every emerging need, we undertook consolidations aimed at both garnering savings and improving service delivery. We merged six agencies involved in economic development into two – despite opposition from the affected commissioners. Similarly, we folded responsibility for providing senior services into a single agency that would contract with nonprofit organizations with deep connections in their communities. 

The operations office also pushed for some changes as part of negotiations with the city’s unions over upcoming contracts. We promoted gainsharing deals with union staff in the sanitation and parks department, enabling higher wages for workers and improving services for residents. At the parks department, this meant a change in work rules for mid-level supervisors that allowed us to reduce staff through attrition. The resulting savings were shared: it helped fund raises for parks workers while enabling the department to increase the number of hours that pools and recreation centers were open. Likewise, work rule changes negotiated with the union representing sanitation workers enabled mutual benefits for labor and communities: raises for workers and increased clean ups on underserved commercial strips as well as at vacant lots and buildings. 

The Dinkins administration also used the City Charter-mandated Mayor’s Management Report as a public means for calling agencies – and the entire administration – to account. The MMR, as it is known, is typically used by mayors as little more than a public relations vehicle, cherry-picking positive stats that will benefit them politically. We committed to making the MMR an honest report card, offering “the good, bad and ugly” assessment of agency performance. And we didn’t just leave the bad and the ugly buried in hundreds of pages of stats: many were highlighted along with the good in our own press releases. 

For too long, management in this city has meant little more than budget cutting. But real management of the kind the city desperately needs takes leadership and a desire to shake up the status quo. We need to reach beyond austerity budgeting – a legacy that has grown individuals’ wealth and enriched the bottom lines of organizations led by the rich while  inequality has widened and core services have declined for many New Yorkers.

The roster of candidates seeking to run for mayor next year is already taking shape. They are offering their vision for the city and their campaign platforms. They may promise us more affordable housing, better parks and cleaner streets. Some may even take a bigger swing and talk about a break from the domineering influence of Wall Street, real estate and other wealthy interests.  

But how will their campaign platforms translate into governing agendas? Will their campaign promises turn into little more than litter to be swept away like the confetti dropped after an electoral victory? The candidates’ personal stories and experiences will inform us about who they are and why they seek this job. Listen carefully as they articulate their leadership and managerial experience and budget expertise. Consider whether they can attract the kind of staff that have the ability – and desire – to manage for fundamental change. 

At this moment in the city’s history, will the candidates stake out the changes that we deserve? The problems we face are evident. The path to correct them is no more elusive.