In June, New Jersey launched Pay It Forward, a bond initiative to fund workforce training programs for good-paying jobs in growing industries as part of an effort to address the lack of short-term education options for low-income residents. Economists and skills-training providers are urging Mayor-elect Eric Adams and the incoming City Council set to take office in January to explore a similar model in New York to raise badly-needed revenue, fill growing skills gaps, and create a more cohesive workforce development landscape.
A new report from Center for an Urban Future (CUF), explores how a bond program in New York City, if done carefully, can help bring successful training programs to scale and shift incentives to encourage workforce development in higher-wage jobs with better long-term opportunities.
The report, "Financing Economic Mobility: Adopting New Jersey’s Pay It Forward Model," is being released Monday, December 20, as the debut publication of CUF's new Economic Opportunity Lab series, which will examine innovative and inclusive economic policies from outside New York that can be replicated in the city. New York City's unemployment rate is still more than double what it was in March 2020, before the economic shutdown, and there is growing attention on economic recovery and workforce development as the next city government takes office.
"The city's incoming leaders will need to ensure that thousands more New Yorkers have access to high-quality job training programs that lead to well-paying careers," said Eli Dvorkin, CUF's editorial and policy director, in an email. "But today few of these programs are able to scale up to meet this demand, in large part due to limited public funding and narrow restrictions on how those dollars are spent."
The pandemic has churned New York City's economy, eliminating once steady jobs and accelerating preexisting labor market trends, like the growth of tech and automation. With the economic shutdown and subsequent rise of remote work, jobs in tech, healthcare, and advertising have boomed alongside a disproportionate decline in lower-wage jobs. The city's tourism industry, which before the pandemic employed more than a quarter-million New Yorkers, lost 89,000 jobs, a third of its workforce, in 2020 and continues to lag.
According to CUF's research, close to a fifth of all new job listings in the city since the pandemic began have been in technology, a sector whose most common job titles had already grown 71% in the decade before the pandemic. Advertising and healthcare jobs, which were already growing steadily when the pandemic hit, have met and exceeded, respectively, their pre-pandemic levels.
At the same time employment in retail is 11% below pre-pandemic levels and 27% below in the restaurant industry, sectors that employed large numbers of low-wage workers where jobs had once been accessible to people with little or no training.
New York City has only a patchwork of short-term workforce training options that would meet the needs of many of the job-seekers left under- or un-employed by the pandemic – including older, mid-career residents for whom a full-time college or technical degree program is not an option. Many of the ones that do exist are prohibitively expensive for the thousands of lower-income job-seekers striving to enter higher-paying and more technical fields. Nonprofit providers and ones geared toward poorer communities are few and far between, according to the CUF report, most serving only a few hundred prospective employees a year, owing, in part, to a lack of public funding.
A "career impact bond" system like New Jersey's leverages public seed funding to encourage private investment in scalable training models.
When it launched, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy said the bonds would create "new opportunities for New Jerseyans who have been shut out of good, family-sustaining jobs in the past.”
Pay It Forward used $5.5 million in tax dollars to match private donations from a consortium of large companies known as the New Jersey CEO Council. Under the program, the career impact bonds they funded initially pay the cost of job training. Eligible residents – people left unemployed by the pandemic or prior, people on public assistance, and formerly incarcerated New Jerseyans – only have to pay the cost of their job training if and when they get a job with good wages in their chosen sector. If they don't get one within five years, they don't have to pay. The bonds also fund related costs, like childcare and transportation.
"New Jersey has been able to attract grants from major companies who are committing to reinvesting the return back in the program," Dvorkin told Gotham Gazette. "Some companies may view this solely as philanthropy, while others see this as a scalable way of helping to train their future workforce."
In December, Mayor-elect Eric Adams met with the heads of 60 companies to establish his own "Corporate Council," giving business leaders a direct voice in his economic recovery planning.
“Getting our city back on track is going to require strong public-private partnerships. I’m humbled by the response from our Corporate Council to lean in, roll up their sleeves, and help accelerate our recovery,” Adams said in a statement. “From partnering on priorities such as workforce development, childcare, and revitalization of our commercial districts, the business community has made it clear they are with me and all New Yorkers every step of the way.”
Adams, currently the Brooklyn Borough President, made workforce development a focus of his campaign platform and now mayoral transition. When he takes office in January, he has promised to undertake a robust analysis of job listings and skill needs at the district level, a sentiment lauded by employment advocates, which he says will help calibrate the workforce with the changing job market. As part of his platform, Adams committed to establishing a city-run jobs database that he said would centralize disparate hiring practices and facilitate job-seeking. He has said he will partner with the city's biggest employers on job placement.
Both New York and New Jersey have publicly-funded college tuition programs for low-income residents and workforce development programs have historically emphasized job placement over career growth, particularly for younger job-seekers. By tying workforce development funding to high-paying jobs, the career impact bond may help reorient services towards long-term advancement.
It links "the interests of public and private backers, who want to see measurable results; employers, who need a steady supply of well-trained talent; and workforce trainers and learners, who both stand to benefit from better-aligned programs," reads the CUF report.
Some workforce development providers are wary of funding systems like Pay It Forward that rely on income-sharing agreements out of concern that students may find themselves indebted to the state without the good salaries they were seeking.
“If not built incredibly well, [the bond] will have a net negative impact on the population that’s being served, and not a net positive,” Jose Ortiz, Jr., head of the New York City Employment and Training Coalition, told CUF, as explained in the report.
Provisions like the five-year statute of limitations and the fact that loans are zero-interest may help New Jersey avoid this pitfall, according to the CUF report. The group also argues that being administered by state means the bond programs will make it easier to erect protections and recourse for students.
Because Pay It Forward provides "an investing environment for human infrastructure," it has the potential to create a more cohesive and expandable workforce development landscape, Dvorkin said.
"I think one lesson for New York is that innovative programs like this happen when there's a strong executive push from government to bring business leaders to the table around workforce development," Dvorkin said.
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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
@GeringerSameth @GothamGazette
Council Member and likely next Speaker Adrienne Adams (photo: John McCarten/City Council)
City Council Member Adrienne Adams, a Queens Democrat, declared victory on Friday in the race to become the next Speaker of the legislative body, issuing a list of supporters who will make up a majority in the next City Council.
Announcing support from 33 members, including herself, well past the 26 required votes in the 51-seat Council, Adams is poised to be the first Black Speaker when the vote among the new City Council class is seated in January.
She will also be taking over a first-ever women-majority New York City Council and one of the most diverse, with dozens of new members elected in this year’s city elections when the entire Council was on the ballot and about three-quarters of current members were term-limited from running for reelection.
“I am honored to have earned the support and the trust of my colleagues to be their Speaker," Adams said in a Friday statement. "Our coalition reflects the best of our city. We are ready to come together to solve the enormous challenges we face in order to not just recover from Covid but to build a better, fairer City that works for everyone. I want to thank the Council members, labor and party leaders, women’s groups, and everyone in our broad coalition for their support. The City Council will be a collaborative and effective legislative body that incorporates what makes New York City great and focuses on the needs of our communities.”
Adams, who was elected to her seat in 2017, represents District 28 in Queens, which covers the neighborhoods of Jamaica, Rochdale Village, Richmond Hill, and South Ozone Park.
She was among the candidates who threw their hat into the Speaker race several months ago, along with Council Members Justin Brannan of Brooklyn and Keith Powers and Carlina Rivera of Manhattan. Council Members Francisco Moya of Queens, Diana Ayala of Manhattan and the Bronx, and Gale Brewer of Manhattan eventually also jumped into the fray.
Adrienne Adams picked up significant momentum in the last few weeks when Mayor-elect Eric Adams (no relation) and some of his top advisors began to throw their support behind the scenes in favor of Moya, also a Queens Democrat.
Mayor-elect Adams had pledged to remain out of the speaker race but he, his surrogates and allies began to mobilize behind Moya and attempted to convince Council members to cast their votes for the Queens member.
The move rankled several stakeholders including powerful union leaders, women’s groups, and returning and newly-elected Council members, including some who wanted to see a woman lead the Council when the three citywide elected officials will all again be men. It offended other Speaker candidates who had been working hard to earn their colleagues’ support, powerful elected officials at other levels of government, Council members who do not want the Mayor trying to pick the next Speaker of the Council that is supposed to hold the chief executive accountable, and still others. Broadly, there was a sense among the next Council class that Moya was simply not popular among his current and future colleagues and that the mayor-elect’s team had made a major miscalculation.
The tide quickly turned toward Council Member Adams, in large part as a response to the moves for Moya and because of her standing with key labor unions and Rep. Gregory Meeks, the head of the Queens County Democratic Party.
On Tuesday, Brannan, Powers, Ayala, and Brewer publicly withdrew from consideration and agreed to support Adams’ candidacy.
Things took a bizarre turn when Adams then Moya both declared that they had garnered enough votes to be the next Speaker and sent out celebratory public statements to that effect, adding significant confusion to the race.
“After much discussion and collaboration with my colleagues, I am honored to have received the necessary votes to become the next speaker of the New York City Council,” Adams said in a statement. “The incoming City Council will be beautifully diverse and wonderfully collaborative in so many ways.”
That was followed shortly by a statement from Moya. “I am humbled to announce that our diverse coalition of council members and leaders from across New York City has collected a majority of votes to elect the next speaker of the Council,” Moya said in a statement. “I look forward to leading this body into a brighter future for our great city.”
But Adams appeared to have the upper hand and her position grew in strength. She had the backing of the Queens and Bronx County Democratic Parties. And, on Wednesday evening, most of the Labor Strong 2021 coalition -- unions 32BJ SEIU, DC37, CWA District 1, and NYSNA -- announced support for Adams and the group said it had successfully “made the case” for Adams to be the next Speaker.
“She is hard-working, well-liked, and has the proven ability to unite the council behind a worker-led recovery from COVID-19,” the unions said in a statement. “We’re thrilled that her candidacy has galvanized a majority of the council and we look forward to seeing her make history as the next leader of New York City’s legislative body.”
The one union that had been part of Labor Strong throughout the election year, the Hotel Trades Council, has had a long-standing allegiance with both Mayor-elect Adams and Moya, and has been privately supporting the latter’s Speaker bid.
On Wednesday and Thursday, several women’s groups issued endorsements of Adrienne Adamsm for Speaker, and current or incoming women Council members took to Twitter to voice support for her. Meanwhile, forces behind Adams — especially 32BJ, DC37, and Brannan — were collecting firm commitments to end the race. At the same time, Mayor-elect Adams and others supporting Moya were unsuccessfully attempting to secure a majority for Moya's Speaker bid.
The National Organization for Women’s NYC chapter urged Council members to back Adams. “An all-male top leadership in NYC just isn't acceptable," said Sonia Ossorio, NOW-NYC executive director, in a statement. “Adrienne is ready to lead and ready to hold her own. She won't be a rubber stamp for the Mayor. That balance of power is critical. We urge council members to pledge their support to her today,” she added.
On Friday morning, Council Member Rivera announced she was dropping her bid to become Speaker and backing Adams, tweeting, “I’m backing Adrienne Adams to be Speaker of our historic women majority City Council. She will lead our work in 2022 + beyond w/ honor.”
That afternoon, Council Member Adams issued her list of 33 supporters, including herself. Soon after that, Mayor-elect Adams tweeted congratulations to her, in effect conceding that his team had been defeated. Soon after, Moya conceded the race. The congratulations for Adrienne Adams came flooding in on social media, from those who had supported her and those who had not. By the end of the day, she was the presumptive next Speaker of the New York City Council ahead of the early January vote that will make it official.
The initial list of Council Members(-elect) supporting Adams, as issued publicly on Friday, December 17:
Manhattan
Council Member Carlina Rivera, District 2
Council Member Keith Powers, District 4
Council Member-elect Gale Brewer, District 6
Council Member Diana Ayala, District 8
Queens
Council Member Sandra Ung, District 20
Council Member Tiffany Cabán, District 22
Council Member-elect Linda Lee, District 23
Council Member Jim Gennaro, District 24
Council Member-elect Shekar Krishnan, District 25
Council Member-elect Julie Won, District 26
Council Member-elect Nantasha Williams, District 27
Council Member Adrienne Adams, District 28
Council Member-elect Lynn Schulman, District 29
Council Member Selvena Brooks-Powers, District 31
Bronx
Council Member Eric Dinowitz, District 11
Council Member Kevin Riley, District 12
Council Member-elect Marjorie Velazquez, District 13
Council Member-elect Pierina Sanchez, District 14
Council Member-elect Althea Stevens, District 16
Council Member Rafael Salamanca, District 17
Council Member-elect Amanda Farias, District 18
Brooklyn
Council Member-elect Lincoln Restler, District 33
Council Member-elect Jennifer Gutierrez, District 34
Council Member-elect Crystal Hudson
Council Member-elect Chi Ossé, District 36
Council Member-elect Sandy Nurse, District 37
Council Member-elect Alexa Avilés, District 38
Council Member-elect Shahana Hanif, District 39
Council Member-elect Rita Joseph, District 40
Council Member-elect Darlene Mealy, District 41
Council Member Justin Brannan, District 43
Council Member Farah N. Louis, District 45
Council Member-elect Mercedes Narcisse, District 46
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
Ben Max contributed to this story.
City Council Member Adrienne Adams, the likely next Speaker of the Council (photo: Emil Cohen/City Council)
City Council Member Adrienne Adams, a Democrat from Southeastern Queens, is poised to become the next Speaker of the City Council. Adams, who has represented District 28 since 2018, will be the first-ever Black Speaker of the 51-member legislative body and will lead the first-ever women-majority New York City Council.
The Speaker is one of only four elected officials with citywide authority besides the Mayor, Public Advocate, and Comptroller, and holds the powerful position of leading the city’s legislature, a co-equal branch to the executive. Though the Speaker will be elected in an internal vote by members in early January, the winner has already been decided in months of mostly backroom negotiations among elected officials, county party officials, labor unions, and other powerful figures, including Mayor-Elect Eric Adams (no relation).
In addition to her own vote, Adrienne Adams will need 25 members on her side, but, if previous Speaker votes are any indication, the vote will be unanimous or nearly so.
After a field of seven Speaker candidates, all Democrats, emerged, the race eventually became a two-way contest between Adams and Council Member Francisco Moya, also of Queens, and only after members of Mayor-elect Adams’ team attempted to mobilize votes behind Moya as the mayor-elect’s chosen candidate. The backlash was swift.
Adrienne Adams soon emerged as the favored candidate of 32BJ SEIU and DC37, two of the city’s most powerful labor unions representing property service workers and municipal employees, respectively. She was also backed by Democratic county party leaders in the Bronx and Queens, both of which remain influential in city politics even as they have had to become more attentive to the individual members of their delegations.
And, crucially, Adams gained support of most of the rest of the field of Speaker candidates, winning the backing of Council Members Justin Brannan, Diana Ayala, Keith Powers, and Gale Brewer. The seventh Speaker candidate, Council Member Carlina Rivera, remained independent. Other labor unions, including of nurses and communications workers, and women’s groups backed Adrienne Adams, as did a number of more independent Council members and members-elect from Manhattan and Brooklyn. In sum, Adams garnered support from over 30 colleagues to declare victory on Friday, December 17. She issued a list of 33 Council Members(-elect), including herself.
Adams, 61, was first elected to represent District 28, which includes the neighborhoods of Jamaica, Rochdale Village, Richmond Hill, and South Ozone Park, in 2017. She filled a seat that was left vacant by former Council Member Ruben Wills, who was expelled after being convicted on corruption charges, a conviction that has since been reversed on appeal.
Adams won a low turnout primary against two opponents and went on to handily win the general election that year. This year, Wills sought to reclaim his seat and, along with another candidate, challenged Adams in the Democratic primary. She again was the victor and sailed to reelection in the general election.
Adams grew up in Hollis, Queens, where she attended Bayside High School and was a classmate of Eric Adams. After graduation, she attended York College in New York, studying music theory for about a year and a half before switching her major to psychology. She then transferred to Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia where she received a bachelor's degree in psychology.
According to her LinkedIn, she had a long career in the corporate sector before she won elected office. Her involvement in politics, like many others in New York City, picked up steam as a member of her local community board, where she rose to chair.
In 2009, Adams had joined Community Board 12 in Queens and was the chair of its education committee for three years until the end of 2012, when she became chair of the board, a position she held until being elected to the Council in 2017. The board, under her leadership, was involved in ongoing protests against the building of new shelters in the district, pointing out that they were already overburdened with existing shelters (as DNAinfo reported, 10 out of 22 homeless shelters in Queens were located within Community Board 12 in 2014).
In the private sector, Adams was a field marketing specialist for MCI Telecommunications for nearly eight years between 1988 and 1996. She then worked as a regional business operations manager for Winstar Communications from 1997 to 2001. Between 2003 and 2006, she worked for InfoHighway Communications, as a corporate training manager and marketing communications manager. For one year after that, she was an independent training and marketing consultant before joining MedSave USA as manager of training and performance for six months. In 2010, she spent a short three-month stint as a program manager at Goldman Sachs.
Between 2011 and 2016, Adams was a child development associate instructor at TLL Consulting, Inc. while she continued her work on the community board. At the same time, she was also on the Board of Directors of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority’s IVY AKAdemy Day Care Center.
Between 2015 and 2016, she was appointed to the Board of Trustees of Queens Public Library. Later in 2016, then-Governor Andrew Cuomo appointed her to the Local Planning Committee for the Jamaica Downtown Revitalization Initiative. She was previously the co-chair of the Jamaica NOW Leadership Council, which provided oversight of the redevelopment of downtown Jamaica.
In 2016, Adams unsuccessfully challenged then-State Senator James Sanders in the Democratic primary for the 10th District.
In 2017, when she first ran for Council, she told DNAinfo, “Community and service are not empty words, but are the principles that have guided my life.” She said her goal was “to improve the economic opportunity, transportation options, and overall quality of life in Rochdale, Jamaica, Richmond Hill and South Ozone Park.”
Appearing in a documentary series earlier this year called “Blaq Brilliance,” produced by Raleigh Hall, who runs Hallmarx music and is president at RSConsultworx, Adams shared more about her personal life than she has generally in public. She is a daughter of union workers. Her father drove long haul trucks for UPS and her mother was an officer in the New York City Department of Correction who retired as a captain. She is a mother of four adult children and a grandmother.
She spoke of her love of singing and her role models – Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight and Mahalia Jackson – and how she still “retreats into her music” from time to time, singing with friends online. She cited Diahann Carroll, who played the titular role of a nurse on the sitcom Julia from 1968 to 1971. “She was the first Black actress in a series who played a professional woman, not a maid, not a servant. She was a professional,” Adams said admiringly. “She really emanated such poise and grace and excellence and she brought that part of herself to that role when she became Julia. She brought that excellence into my living room…And it was absolutely marvelous to see what I could someday become,” she said.
She also spoke of her reasons for moving on from her corporate career. “When I gave up life in corporate America, several years ago, I gave it up because I wanted to dig deeper into my community and the prospects of the things that I could bring to my community,” she said. “I couldn't do that in my other life, in my other world as a corporate trainer.”
What is clear from the interviews is her deep abiding faith. “I can do all things through Christ, not through me, but through Christ who strengthens me. So I know that I'm never alone. It's Christ that strengthens me. He is the one. She is the one. They are the one,” she said in the documentary.
Adams’ membership in Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first sorority for Black women in America, was also a source of inspiration for her dedication to public service, she said. “This political thing really found me much later in life. And it found me through community service again, through a love of community, through what the sorority taught me and what the sorority means,” she said in the documentary interview. “Our basics and our basis is community service. And from that, people saw this thing in me. I never saw it in myself. So the whole political thing, it found me. I didn't seek it.”
“I was born to do this work. I didn't realize that I was born to do this work until about maybe five, ten years ago…I was born to do this work and every day, I can't say it enough, I wake up on purpose with a purpose,” she added.
In her first term in the City Council, Adams has been the prime sponsor on 33 bills and seven resolutions. Of those, 15 bills have become law. They include legislation requiring the police department to report on traffic encounters; requiring annual financial disclosure from individuals with any interests in taxicab license; requiring reporting on demographic information for emergency removals by the Administration for Children’s Services; requiring reporting on arrests, summonses, removals, escorts and use of force incidents in Department of Social Services/Human Resources Administration job centers and SNAP centers; and requiring the Department of Citywide Administrative Services to conduct an ongoing assessment of risk factors associated with sexual harassment, among others.
For the last year, Adams has chaired the Council’s Committee on Public Safety, which includes within its purview the NYPD, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, courts, legal services, District Attorneys, and the Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor.
In that role, she has chaired several high-profile legislative and oversight hearings, including around the NYPD budget, the police department’s much-maligned special victims division, and more. She also sponsored a bil to give the Civilian Complaint Review Board, a police oversight agency, the ability to proactively launch investigations into police misconduct. The bill was approved by the Council on December 9 and is expected to soon become law, setting the stage for more active police oversight.
During the extraordinarily heated debate over the city budget in the summer of 2020, when some advocates and elected officials were calling on the Mayor and City Council to “Defund the NYPD” by cutting between $1 and $3 billion from its $6 billion-plus annual operating budget, Adams emerged as one of several Black Council members who opposed a major reduction in police resources and backed a compromise that was reached.
Even as they pointedly recognized the need for better, fairer policing and the history of police abuses that have harmed New Yorkers of color, Adams and her colleagues – Council Members Laurie Cumbo, Vanessa Gibson, Alicka Ampry-Samuel, Robert Cornegy, Mathieu Eugene, Andy King, Farah Louis, Daneek Miller, Bill Perkins, Debi Rose, and Ritchie Torres – helped negotiate and vote in favor of the budget deal with relatively modest NYPD funding cuts.
Adams and her colleagues argued that significant cuts to the NYPD would in fact harm the communities they represent and that are the most affected by violent crime. They said that many of their constituents want robust police presence and attention to crime, but done in a fair and racially-just way. They opposed calls for the elimination of unarmed school safety agents, who are mostly Black women, though the deal included shifting those agents to the Department of Education and out of the NYPD. That shift, yet to take place, is something Adams has said she opposes and one that may not happen under Mayor Eric Adams.
[Read: How Do Black Lawmakers and Activists View ‘Defunding the NYPD’? It’s Complicated]
“What a lot of us recognized was that in some areas of New York City, shooting and criminal activity were on the rise and the hashtag, Defund the NYPD, doesn’t speak to that tragedy or to the residents who are affected by it,” Adams would later explain in an interview with Gotham Gazette during the summer of 2020.
But Adams has said she believes strongly in the need for significant reforms at the NYPD. “There has to be a substantial change made in the culture of the NYPD and that is a culture that has so many strong roots, decades and decades of a lot of strength, a lot of impression, in the department," Adams said in an October appearance on the Max Politics podcast from Gotham Gazette.
“It is my hope that incoming officers coming into the ranks will have a new perspective, and again, it's going to have to start with the top-down,” she added. ““That's why I say the new [police] commissioner really has her work cut out for her.” At the time, Eric Adams was still only the Democratic nominee and had pledged to appoint the NYPD’s first female commissioner. He followed through on that promise this week, announcing Keechant Sewell, the Nassau County chief of detectives, as his pick.
In running for Speaker, Adams emphasized the historic nature of her potential victory as the first Black City Council Speaker. “I think that it's important that New York City makes history again,” she said in a July interview with Gotham Gazette. “I love firsts. You know I was the first woman elected to represent District 28 and I think this would be an amazing first for the city.”
She also touted the experience she has built in the private sector which she said would be essential in overseeing a class of mostly newly elected Council members. “I think it's going to be really important for my new colleagues coming in who are not experienced in governance to have mentorship that has a background in, again, management and education,” she said.
In an interview with Gotham Gazette in October, Adams stressed her corporate background, her grassroots organizing in her community in Queens and her record on the Council. “I happen to bring to the table a vast background, not just on the political side but also in corporate America…I've got a vast background, as I said, in moving things, making things happen…That takes leadership,” she said.
“I've been able to make those wins, both inside of the doors of the City Council and outside of the doors when it comes to making my district more abundant, giving my district things that we've never had before, the funding that we've never had before.”
Adams would be the first City Council Speaker from outside of Manhattan in many terms, since Peter Vallone Sr., a Queens Democrat who was Speaker from 1986 till 2001.
And the likely next Speaker of the Council has a long relationship with Mayor-elect Adams since the time they attended the same high school. She endorsed his bid for Mayor and spoke highly of her expectations for him.
“My confidence in our Democratic nominee for mayor is in his plan to bring New York out of the pandemic and into stability once again,” she said on Max Politics. “And not just stability, but bring us into abundance, to bring our tourism back, to bring our streets back, our safety back, to bring back the confidence in New York that the world has always had.”
It's unclear if any of that may change after Adams sought to install Moya at the head of the Council, however, but she has already insisted that she will not let her ties with him affect her leadership.
“I am hoping that however the chips may fall, that for my merit and for my leadership capabilities, the things that I've done in the past, what I've done for my district - more than any other of my predecessors — and what I've brought in leadership to the New York City Council over the past four years…that is what I'm standing on to become the next Speaker of the New York City Council,” Adams said on the podcast.
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette