It’s the new year and everyone’s just coming back to normalcy, so I’ll try to keep this one short, sweet, and a bit esoteric, if you’ll allow me. The year that just ended was, to make something of a comical understatement, not a good one for Mayor Eric Adams. Adams’ entire inner circle essentially experienced a nuclear-reactor-core implosion amid the pressure of federal investigations and indictments, including the mayor’s own.
With all this heat and light, I thought I’d ask a relatively simple, overarching question: can the Adams administration be saved? I’m not particularly referring to the reelection campaign. As I noted a couple of weeks ago, most well-versed observers seem to agree that Adams is swimming upstream as he tries to secure a second term at City Hall. I mean the administration itself, and I ask the question because I’ve heard something interesting from journalists and political observers about how things have shaken out in the aftermath of the upheaval.
Essentially, there’s an argument to be made that it’s now a better administration, from a standpoint of competence, professionalism, and accountability. Gov. Kathy Hochul reportedly told Adams to “clean house” during a call where the governor’s power to remove him was no doubt an elephant in the room. Adams has taken some active steps to do so, and the “house” has also just gotten cleaned further through a drumbeat of resignations.
I think a lot of people saw the Adams team as kind of bifurcated along two tracks. There were experienced technocrat types, with long-time agency credentials, and there were the longtime Adams pals, people brought over from his cop days or the comparatively much lower-stakes world of the Brooklyn borough presidency. These groups often clashed, or rather the former would strive to run the government and clean up the messes of the latter, which included people like disgraced jack-of-all-trades Tim Pearson, who resigned in September, or “Lioness of City Hall” Ingrid Lewis-Martin, who resigned a couple weeks ago as she was poised to be indicted on federal charges.
These officials were often understood to be calling the shots in some informal ways. Lewis-Martin, for example, reportedly intervened to kill a planned redesign of McGuinness Boulevard in Greenpoint. The redesign had already been signed off on by the administration following a pressure campaign by the politically connected Argento siblings, owners of the film production company Broadway Stages (an entanglement that Streetsblog has speculated might be tied to Lewis-Martin’s indictment).
Now those people are essentially all out, and the more standard career operatives are at the helm, with ultimately better results for the city. Let’s look at the New York Police Department, where Adams initially installed an outsider commissioner in the form of former Nassau Chief of Detectives Keechant Sewell. She lasted about a year and a half before she was pushed out after the Adams pal contingent sapped her operational power, and the mayor himself undermined her in her effort to hold department chief Jeff Maddrey accountable for abuse of power (in a twist that will shock no one, Maddrey also recently resigned after facing allegations of sexual harassment).
After Sewell came Eddie Caban, whose family was long in the Adams orbit, and who dedicated himself with gusto to the project of shielding the department and its problem actors from accountability. Caban then also resigned in September after he was raided by federal agents. He was briefly replaced by an interim commissioner, Tom Donlon (also raided by the FBI), before Adams finally settled on former sanitation commissioner Jessica Tisch, a respected longtime government administrator. Tisch proceeded to almost immediately crack down on unsanctioned reassignments and then conducted a sweeping purge of top brass, targeting just the type of chummy leadership that had found cachet in the relationship-driven Adams administration.
In another example, the very well-respected Maria Torres-Springer took over as first deputy mayor after the resignation of Sheena Wright, taking the helm of all sorts of matters within the administration. As the former deputy mayor for housing, economic development, and workforce, Torres-Springer was the City Hall official most directly responsible for shepherding the City of Yes housing plan.
We’ll have to see how this all shakes out, but it’s looking like this existential crisis will ultimately shape a far more professional Adams administration (notwithstanding the mayor’s own unpredictability and the specter of his potential closeness to the incoming Trump administration). From that lens, the current administration leadership, as much as it’s been living under a cloud of scrutiny, might not just be surviving but thriving. Perhaps the feds should have acted faster.
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