She’s got the chops
Ever applied for a job running a 25-person department, only to be told that your management experience didn’t quite cut it? The race to become the next mayor, to oversee a 300,000-employee city government that delivers services to 8.3 million New Yorkers, has narrowed to a contest between four people with wildly different track records running large organizations.
We endorsed Kathryn Garcia because she has solid priorities and pragmatic plans. But a tale of the tape on management experience is also immensely instructive. Eric Adams was a police officer for 22 years. Then he served in the state Senate and as Brooklyn borough president. In the first two capacities, he barely oversaw anyone. In the third, he’s supervised roughly 67 full-time employees, but was never held accountable for results because, well, borough presidents don’t have to do very much.
Maya Wiley has been a lawyer for decades, working for a U.S. attorney, as well as for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Open Society Institute. She started a small nonprofit, the Center for Social Inclusion, that talked about a lot but delivered few concrete results. As for public-sector leadership, as counsel to Mayor de Blasio, she had few direct reports. At the CCRB for a year, some former colleagues said her fealty to City Hall hurt the agency’s performance.
Andrew Yang quit his first post-law school job and started a website that, in his own words, “failed spectacularly.” Then he started a company that hosted parties for professionals, which also soon shut down. Then he wound up running a small test-prep company. In 2011 came his biggest management test, as founder of a non-profit. He promised Venture for America would create 100,000 jobs, but it wound up producing 150. (He also ran for president.)
Garcia rose through the ranks of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection during the Bloomberg administration, becoming chief operating officer of the 6,000-employee agency. Then she ran the Department of Sanitation — which has more than 10,000 employees — for six-plus years. As interim chair of the city’s Housing Authority at a moment of crisis, she started to drag a broken bureaucracy out of the pit. And as the city’s food czar during COVID, she coordinated a massive effort to get free meals to thousands of New Yorkers.
Only one of those profiles sounds like it belongs to a future mayor.