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Mayoral hopeful Brad Lander pushes new plan to hold City Hall accountable
By
Elizabeth Kim
Published Jan 24, 2025
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By
Elizabeth Kim
Published Jan 24, 2025
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New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander is promising to bring more transparency and accountability to City Hall as part of a “public integrity plan” that his campaign shared with Gothamist and will release on Friday. Lander argues his ideas would restore confidence in city government, taking aim at Mayor Eric Adams over his administration’s corruption scandals.
Lander's plan includes a pitch to make the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board independent from the mayor’s office, with its own fixed budget – something good government experts say would allow the board to hold the mayor and top officials accountable without fear of retribution. A majority of the board's current members are mayoral appointees, and Lander said he’d allow other elected officials to appoint members and require them to approve any chair he nominates.
Lander would also require top administration officials to disclose meetings with lobbyists, a practice that Adams stopped early in his first year of office.
“Trust is at an all-time low,” Lander told Gothamist. He said Adams’ recent overtures to President Donald Trump, who has said he would consider pardoning the mayor, had only worsened the public’s confidence in City Hall.
“It's a grifting presidential administration and a mayor who's kowtowing to the grifting president for his own self-interest, not the problems of New Yorkers,” Lander added.
Ethics have been a recurrent theme in the mayoral race – as well as a sore spot for the incumbent mayor, who is fighting federal corruption charges and has seen multiple top aides depart amid various scandals. Adams has pleaded not guilty, but has become the target of a crowded field of Democratic challengers, many of whom have vowed to institute anticorruption reforms.
Ridding the city of corruption and ethics loopholes would be challenging for any mayor, said John Kaehny, executive director of the good-government group Reinvent Albany.
Kaehny applauded many of Lander’s proposals, especially an independent Conflicts of Interest Board. But he warned against seeing any disclosure or transparency plan as a foolproof measure against corruption.
Disclosing all meetings with lobbyists doesn’t account for reality, Kaehny said, because "essentially there are tons of people running around New York City doing lobbying but are not registered lobbyists.”
Lander also supports tightening restrictions on one type of person running around doing lobbying: former mayoral administration members. He said he’s on board with a City Council effort to ban mayoral staff from lobbying for two years after they leave their government jobs. The bill, which passed Thursday, has been described as closing the “Carone loophole,” a reference to Adams’ former chief of staff Frank Carone, who became a consultant after leaving City Hall and amassed a roster of big-name real estate and business clients.
Lander’s plan targets mayoral appointments, a sensitive area for Adams, who has been criticized for establishing his longtime friends in high-level posts. Lander said he wants to change the balance of power by ceding unprecedented approval authority to the City Council over key roles in the administration, including schools chancellor and NYPD commissioner.
The Council and mayor have battled over this issue since last spring, when Council Speaker Adrienne Adams introduced legislation to expand the number of commissioner-level appointments the Council is required to approve.
Such laws must be approved by a citywide ballot proposal – a possibility that Adams foreclosed by putting his own proposals on the city ballot, edging out any space for City Council propositions. Lander said that even if the proposal didn’t become a law under his administration, he would nevertheless agree to allow the Council to hold hearings and vote on – and potentially block – such appointments.
Lander told Gothamist that he would also agree not to appoint any family members to paid positions, which became an issue for Adams in his first month in office. The mayor tried to hire his brother Bernard Adams as a deputy NYPD commissioner, a role with an expected annual salary of $240,000. The Conflicts of Interest Board denied his request, and the mayor’s brother instead accepted a position as a senior adviser for $1 a year.
In an effort to improve transparency, Lander promised a speedier response to Freedom of Information Law requests, some of which have languished for months under Adams.
As comptroller, he estimated that his office fulfills most FOIL responses within five days. But the mayor likely receives far more inquiries than the comptroller and other elected officials.
Lander is not the only mayoral candidate to campaign on ethics issues. Scott Stringer, the former city comptroller, released his own platform last week, also seeking to crack down on lobbying. Stringer has said he would bar city agencies from hiring people who have lobbied them in the past year, part of an attempt to break “the cycle of insider influence.”
Jim Walden, a former prosecutor who is seeking to run as an independent, has said he would combat corruption by forming a Citywide Department of Public Integrity that would be empowered to prosecute and ban people from holding city government jobs.
Lander is also proposing to direct his emboldened Conflicts of Interest Board to rule on claims of sexual harassment, a plan that takes aim at both the mayor, who is facing a civil sexual assault lawsuit, and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who resigned amid sexual misconduct allegations. Both Adams and Cuomo have denied any wrongdoing.
Cuomo has not officially entered the race, but rumors of his candidacy and high polling numbers have led many to treat him as a front-runner – including the declared candidates, who pair him with the current mayor in their attacks.
“Neither the Eric Adams nor the Andrew Cuomo City Hall is the right place to adjudicate sexual harassment claims about its own people, that's for sure,” Lander said.
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Politics
Elizabeth Kim
Elizabeth Kim is a reporter on the People and Power desk who covers mayoral power. She previously covered the pandemic, housing, redevelopment and public spaces. A native of Queens, she speaks fluent Mandarin. Got a tip? Email [email protected]
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