DEMS IN MIGRANT SCHISM
Hizzoner hits back at Lander for critique on visit to Texas
So, Brad, what are you doing to solve the migrant crisis?
Mayor Adams clapped back Tuesday after city Comptroller Brad Lander criticized his weekend trip to the southern US border and said it wouldn’t help the city secure emergency aid.
Adams twice called the city’s chief financial officer, a fellow Democrat, “disingenuine” and said he couldn’t “understand the logic” of Lander’s attack.
“Is it political or is it something for the — for the city?” Adams asked. “And so, I just think when people are disingenuine, it’s just, it’s just — it bothers me when people are just disingenuine.”
During an unrelated news conference at City Hall, Adams also blasted his fellow Democrat for not speaking up earlier in favor of emergency funding for the city’s escalating $1 billion-a-year migrant crisis.
Adams said Lander’s “first tweet to call for help” came during Gov. Hochul’s Jan. 10 State of the State speech.
“The people of this city have been going through this for months — for months — and his first communication was, you know, a week or so ago,” Adams fumed. “He’s the comptroller. He should be concerned about our fiscal stability.”
Adams’ ire was sparked by a Sunday tweet in which Lander said there were “many ways to demand the help we need from Washington & Albany” but that Adams’ visit to El Paso, Texas, “does little to deliver” it.
“Instead, it risks reinforcing a harmful narrative that new immigrants themselves are a problem,” Lander added.
During his rant against Lander, Adams said the comptroller’s answer to the migrant crisis was to “raise taxes on rich people to pay for migrant asylum seekers.”
That attack apparently stemmed from another Sunday tweet in which Lander said that “in addition to rightly demanding more from DC & Albany, we’ve urged the mayor to raise revenues from the wealthiest NYers, to help struggling families afford the rising cost of housing & child care.”
“I mean, you’re the comptroller. You should be concerned about the financial hit our city is seeing,” Adams said Tuesday. “And he should be writing letters with me and going to DC. I don’t know — I don’t know if he actually went to DC at all to advocate for money.”
No new taxes on rich
Last week, Adams said he adamantly opposed raising taxes on wealthy New Yorkers and had told Lander that “the first order of business is we must get our fiscal house in order.”
“And also shared with him that our city is hemorrhaging high-income earners. We’re losing a substantial amount of high-income earners to, of all places, Florida,” Adams said. “New Yorkers deserve better than how we’ve been using their tax dollars.”
In a Tuesday statement, Lander press secretary Chloe Chik said the comptroller “has been consistently calling for the federal and state government to step up to aid the city so that we can welcome immigrants with open arms.”
Chik said Lander began making public statements in September — more than two months after Adams first sounded the alarm — and provided links to three press releases that included calls for federal and state aid. Those statements also expressed Landers’ “serious concerns” about Adams’ handling of the crisis and said the mayor’s budget plan “meanders with little direction.”
Adams and Lander have openly been at odds since November, when the comptroller called the mayor’s ill-fated tent city for migrants a “debacle” — then laughed during a TV interview when Adams was shown vowing not to “hide the cost.”
‘City Hall accountable’
“The job of the comptroller is to hold City Hall accountable and also to work together, and we try really hard to do both those things,” Lander said at the time.
Last month, Lander released a report that found the city’s budget should include $1 billion in annual spending through fiscal 2026 to pay for the costs of housing, feeding and educating the city’s migrant population.
That came after he told Bloomberg News in late September that Adams’ since-abandoned tent city would cost taxpayers $150 million.
As of Sunday, the city has tallied the arrival of 40,200 migrants
since the spring, with 26,900 housed in taxpayer-funded emergency shelters.
Adams didn’t include any migrant funding in the $102.7 billion budget plan for fiscal 2024 he released on Thursday.
Later on, Adams also lashed out at Landers’ capital counterpart, state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, after DiNapoli criticized Adams for the budget omission.
“Can you ask the comptroller to show you the letter he wrote to the federal government asking for help for us?” Adams told a reporter during a City Hall news conference.
“Can you get him on his cellphone, speakerphone and say, ‘Can you send us the letter that you sent to the federal government saying: “Help New York City?” ’ Or send us a tweet or do an Instagram post with a sign?”