Opinion: The ungovernable city?

When Ed Koch was mayor in the early 1980s, he once famously said: “When a bird dies in Queens, they blame me.” The man whose middle initial (I) was also his favorite pronoun was humorously exposing a truism about New York mayors – and elected leaders in general.

We invest a lot of our faith and hopes in the people we elect to lead our government. Some are better than others. And on rare occasions, we are rewarded with a stupendous leader who is the right person at the right time.

But as Koch glibly pointed out, lots of things that happen – both good and bad – are out of the mayor’s control. When there was rampant drug use and crime nationally in the 1980s, New York became the epicenter of drug-fueled crime and chaos. When the national economy gets the sniffles, New York is likely to catch a cold. When Wall Street gets pneumonia, like it did in 2008, New York City is put in critical condition. And when a worldwide pandemic hit our shores in 2020, the city was put on life support for a number of months, as trucks piled up with dead bodies lined up outside many of our hospitals.

The way that our leaders react in a crisis can literally be the difference between life and death. David Dinkins’ decision to hire thousands of additional police officers in the late 1980s set the table for Rudy Giuliani’s amazing crime reduction in the 1990s. Mike Bloomberg’s steady guidance of New York’s budget (and wise savings in a rainy day fund) helped New York weather the worst of the Great Recession.

Management is an important skill, but one that we rarely consider when evaluating our potential leaders. Being mayor of New York City is arguably like being a CEO in charge of more than eight million people and 300,000-plus employees, and it requires a skill set and level of experience unlike any other job in the public sector.

During mayoral and gubernatorial campaigns, the local media and the voting public spend a lot of time analyzing polls and the horse race as well as candidates’ commercials and campaign war chests, but they often overlook candidates’ substantive policy ideas and the management experience that would allow them to actually achieve their ideas.

I have watched six mayors closely in my adult life in New York, stretching back to Koch in 1977, and each has had various degrees of success.

But three things stand out for me: Koch’s ability to revive New York from the crime-ridden, fiscal crisis crippled city of the 1970s; Giuliani’s crusade to make the city more livable and safe; and Bloomberg’s golden era – spearheaded by his quiet competence and talented administration that made New York a highly desirable destination for tourists, young people starting their careers and businesses and investors looking to capitalize on New York’s human capital.

As we enter a crucial four-month sprint to the Democratic primary for mayor in June, the city is at a crossroads. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been flight from New York, particularly by families. Public school enrollment has fallen from just over 1,000,000 in 2019 to 911,000 last year.

There is a general feeling that New York City is rudderless and that the current mayor has run his administration too chaotically. For many insiders and voters, the last straw came when Mayor Eric Adams lost four of his eight deputy mayors in a mass resignation. Even before that, the various indictments, investigations and subpoenas of the mayor and his closest advisors and commissioners didn’t inspire much confidence in Adams.

There have been miraculous political comebacks in history – just look at President Donald Trump – but most people both inside and outside government are now treating Adams as a lame duck. The mayor’s negotiations with the City Council in the upcoming budget negotiations should be telling in terms of whether he has any power left.

The recent announcement of the worst kept secret in town – Andrew Cuomo’s candidacy for mayor – has sharpened the debate about the importance of management skills and experience. It is indisputable that in the current field of candidates, the former (almost) three-term governor has the most extensive list of accomplishments: legalizing gay marriage, raising the minimum wage and executing large-scale capital projects like the renovation of LaGuardia Airport and the building of the Second Avenue subway. 

Many will point to his misjudgment on nursing home patients early in the COVID-19 crisis, and his ouster as governor just three years ago for alleged misconduct with women, as potentially disqualifying factors in his attempt at a political comeback.

But as we’ve seen on the national level repeatedly, alleged personal misconduct isn’t always a fatal ending to political careers. Even setting aside the extreme example of Trump, there was the reelection of President Bill Clinton after he faced impeachment in the Monica Lewinsky affair. Voters forgave him, and it’s very possible enough New York voters will forgive Cuomo or at least overlook his alleged transgressions and misjudgments to land him in City Hall.

Cuomo is the clear front-runner in the race, but there are a number of thoughtful, accomplished candidates running in June’s primary – boomers, Gen Xers and a few millennials.

Comptroller Brad Lander is a thoughtful technocrat known for coming up with innovative policy solutions, though his Achilles’ heel may be that centrists perceive him as too far left. Former Comptroller Scott Stringer – who had successful tenures as a West Side Assembly member, Manhattan borough president and city Comptroller – is known for his management experience and ability to hire quality people. 

Socialist Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani, a rising star on the far left, and state Sens. Zellnor Myrie and Jessica Ramos are all smart and passionate legislators who lack executive experience. It is often said that elections are about the future – not the past – and it will be up to these young and ambitious candidates to distinguish themselves in a field that’s currently dominated by an ex-governor who has been in the public eye since he was in his early 20s and running his father’s gubernatorial campaigns.

The most recent entrance into the race is City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, who just announced her candidacy. A relatively moderate Black politician with close ties to the Queens machine and organized labor, Speaker Adams has little city-wide name recognition but is known for her pragmatic and shrewd leadership of the City Council’s fractious Democratic conference.

Other candidates in the increasingly crowded field include: Whitney Tilson, who co-founded Teach for America and has been a major supporter of charter schools; former Assembly Member Michael Blake, who worked for former President Barack Obama and the Democratic National Committee; Jim Walden, a well-respected public interest lawyer now running as an independent candidate; and Curtis Sliwa, the colorful gadfly who has locked up the Republican nomination. 

It’s going to be an extremely uphill battle for any of them to get enough traction to be in the top tier of candidates – especially in a field that includes at least three long-time politicians. The only private sector candidate who has successfully run for mayor was Bloomberg, who had to spend close to $100 million of his personal fortune to eke out a victory in 2001 against Democrat Mark Green. And even in that race, it was only the extraordinary event of 9/11 and Giuliani’s pivotal endorsement that tipped the scales to Bloomberg.

As all the candidates deal with dozens of debates and forums, a gauntlet of barbed media coverage and an electorate that largely fails to focus on mayoral primaries until the last few weeks, it will be important to listen to their ideas on how they would improve the city – how they would make it more affordable for all, how they would not just cut crime but eliminate the chaos on the streets and subways that is driving people away from the city and how they would improve the public education system so that families will stop fleeing to the suburbs and other cities.

Voters should carefully assess which candidate will be able to execute their ideas. Who will be able to stand up for New York while not alienating the new Trump administration so much that the city loses billions in federal subsidies? Who will be able to effectively work with the governor, the City Council and the state Legislature to get the most money and help to tackle New York’s chronic affordability and livability problems?

As Fortune 500 companies know well, management skill and experience matters when choosing chief executives. New York voters should think like shareholders in corporations – and consider which potential occupant of Gracie Mansion can use their leadership skills to move the levers of government to make our lives and our city a better place for all.

It’s never been easy to lead New York City. “The Ungovernable City” is the title that Vincent Cannato chose for his book on John Lindsay, a mayor who struggled to guide the city through the tumultuous period of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Your vote for the next mayor will determine whether the once “ungovernable city” elects someone who can manage New York amid its current chaos and steer it back to the good old days – the way the city felt in the 2000s and early 2010s when crime was low, new neighborhoods were flourishing and anything seemed possible in the future.