Adams is learning; NYC must too
Eric Adams has been going to mayor’s school. This is no remedial education. It’s an encouraging sign that the Democratic nominee — and likely next mayor — is open to learning what he needs to know to lead the city through a difficult present and future.
Adams has met with more than 100 public policy experts over the past two years, many for early-morning, immersive, breakfast briefings in a Brooklyn diner. Courses have ranged from policing and homelessness to growing small business and managing big business — the $100 billion annual city budget. Former NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton and Kathy Wylde, president and CEO since 2001 of the Partnership for New York City, were guest lecturers at Adams University.
Tom Allon was principal of Adams’ mayor’s school from early 2019 through February 2021. (“We started very early,” Allon told me.) A mayoral candidate in 2013 and publisher of City & State New York, Allon once taught at Stuyvesant, the city’s premier public high school.
“Eric is a good listener and quick study,” said Allon, whose son, Jonah, is press secretary to Adams in his capacity as Brooklyn borough president. “He became a much better candidate.”
It’s worked before. By the time he was elected mayor in 1993, Rudy Giuliani had run and lost the 1989 mayoral race to David Dinkins, worked in private practice, overseen the Southern District of New York for the U.S. Department of Justice and served as the No. 3 in Ronald Reagan’s DOJ. But if he was going to beat Dinkins the second time, Giuliani needed to beef up his mayoral knowledge.
Rudy’s administration-in-exile sent him to mayor’s school.
Richard Schwartz, Giuliani’s 1993 deputy campaign manager and his first-term senior policy adviser, developed the curriculum and invited public policy professionals to educate Giuliani on managing the nation’s largest and most complex city. As campaign press secretary, I was fortunate to have a seat in Schwartz’s classroom. He went on to become the editorial page editor of this paper and, later, my business partner.
Among the speakers at Giuliani University was Andrew Cuomo, who briefed Rudy on housing and homelessness. Cuomo was then chair of the New York City Homeless Commission which developed policies to address homelessness in the city and provide more housing options. In 1986, Cuomo had founded Housing Enterprises for the Less Privileged (HELP), a non-profit that built housing for the homeless.
In 1993, like today, restoring public safety was the city’s number one quality-of-life issue. After defeating New York’s first African-American mayor, Giuliani inherited a racially divided city with more than 2,000 murders a year.
The crime problem isn’t nearly as bad now, but Adams’ lift may be heavier than Giuliani’s: resolving income inequality; repairing the fractured relationship between police and neighborhoods of color; treating the mentally ill and housing the homeless; turning around a lingering economic downturn, and preventing the city from washing away after another, inevitable superstorm. All while battling the ongoing COVID-19, 20 and 21 pandemic — the worst public health crisis in 100-plus years.
Running a diverse city the size and breadth of New York also requires the basics from a mayor: assembling a competent administration; picking up the garbage and snow; educating a million schoolchildren; enforcing the law; negotiating legislation with a leftwing City Council, and getting along with the governor. Neither Adams, the onetime NYPD captain, state senator and current Brooklyn borough president, nor his Republican opponent, Guardian Angels’ founder Curtis Sliwa, possess that relevant background. But they do both have deep experience in keeping the streets safe.
Being borough president doesn’t prepare a politician to be mayor; borough presidents have no executive power. Dinkins was Manhattan borough president before he was an ineffectual, one-term mayor. The five borough presidents cut ribbons, issue proclamations, make recommendations to the Council on land use and cheerlead. That isn’t the stuff of which mayors are generally made.
In a city of 8.8 million, where registered Democratic voters outnumber registered Republican voters by 6.5-to-1, Adams’ victory is all but certain. So he’s put together a transition team to fill key positions in his administration.
Adams’ kitchen cabinet includes Sheena Wright, president and CEO at United Way of New York City. Wright, whose career has focused on the intersection of government, politics and the private sector, will helm a team of Adams’ advisers through the transition at City Hall. Meanwhile, his campaign inner circle, led by deputy Brooklyn borough president, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, continues to brief Adams on the city’s critical issues.
If he crams between now and inauguration day on New Year’s, Eric Adams can graduate from mayor’s school with a Ph.D. in NYC. We should all hope he does.