Adams’ Pro-Biz Vows
As he awaits the November general election that’ll likely make him the city’s 110th mayor, Eric Adams continues to sound the right notes on New York’s future and economic recovery.
Last week, the Brooklyn Democrat promised a new, pro-business era at City Hall, telling a group of Wall Street execs that he offered his “hand in partnership” — while also asking for help in connecting hundreds of thousands of city residents to jobs and careers in growing industries.
“New York will no longer be anti-business,” he said at SALT New York, a yearly gathering of banking, finance and tech leaders at the Javits Center.
Adams emphasized that as mayor he’ll prioritize public safety by curbing crime and homelessness. While vowing to “create an environment for growth,” he noted, “The prerequisite to prosperity is safety.”
He emphasized his pro-order stance all week long, telling the City Council, “Far more needs to be done to address the conditions at Rikers” than Mayor de Blasio pretends, pushing for more funding for the Rikers Island prosecutor’s office to speed up criminal cases for inmates and more offsite secure facilities to handle detainees’ mentalhealth and substance-abuse issues, as well as a full ban on triple shifts for correction workers.
And after a hit-and-run driver with a long list of priors for recklessness killed an infant in Brooklyn, he called for “lifetime suspension” of the licenses of such motorists. He also dined at a Manhattan restaurant the day after a shooting there, noting again that “the prerequisite of our prosperity is public safety.”
On Friday, he returned to his pro-biz points on Bloomberg Radio: “Right now no one wants to do business in the city,” he said. “We have been defined as a business-enemy city instead of a business-friendly city.” Adams slammed “how too expensive and too difficult it is to do business” here, vowing reform because “agencies are in the way of building empires.”
A City Hall that embraces business with open arms will be a welcome change from the last eight years and vital as the local economy struggles to recover from the pandemic, lockdowns and soaring disorder of the last two years.
It’s all words now, of course, as Adams looks to win by as huge a margin as he can come Election Day. But the rhetoric sets the right tone for how he means to lead. We look forward to seeing him match his talk with action come January.