Monday Morning Mayoral Report Card

On Friday afternoon, City Hall released the Mayor’s Management Report, which for the last 45 years has been a kind of report card for the administration, charting how the city's 45 agencies are doing in broad strokes.  

Mayor Michael Bloomberg used to give presentations about the report, which must be released every September by law. Mayor Bill de Blasio stopped the presentations, but still took questions about the report. 

Mayor Eric Adams didn't hold a press conference on the report, and continued the recent tradition of putting it out on a Friday afternoon…though it does appear that this year's MMR allows readers to map the results out. (Adams is technically only responsible for half of the results, since it covers the most recent fiscal year, from July 2021 through June 2022.)

And because the pandemic is over (so say our mayor and president), it’s best to compare 2022 to 2019 and 2018, the last years before… things got complicated. 

Some notable numbers from the MMR:

•  The NYPD has basically given up on traffic enforcement, with moving summonses down 50 percent since 2019.
•  Total starts of affordable housing units are down 38 percent since 2018, from already deeply inadequate levels. 

•  On Rikers, with the daily population down a third from 2018, the rate of serious injuries to detainees is up NINE TIMES, while the rate of detainees brought to court on time plummeted to 79.1 percent, from at least 94 percent.

•  The installation of new bike lanes are down by at least ten miles, compared with three previous years, with even less forecasted next year. 

•  Fire inspection numbers are down, with City Hall projecting that number will continue to drop. 

All of these numbers are indicative of a city workforce still struggling to come back from a slew of retirements during the peak of the pandemic, and mass resignations during the first few months of the Adams administration. Because capacity to #GetStuffDone relies specifically on the number of people you have to get said stuff done, it makes sense that the Adams administration has announced that worsening trends will continue. Especially as they impose cuts across the board to city agencies and issue a temporary hiring freeze. 

Some other links to get your week started most productively:

•  The mayor who can’t build enough affordable housing is now seriously considering placing asylum-seekers on cruise ships. In fact, Mayor Adams's chief of staff Frank Carone even stayed on a cruise ship in France last month, for “research.” 

•  Bishop Lamor Whitehead, who enjoys a close relationship with Mayor Eric Adams and who Hell Gate most recently reported had seemingly taken illegal campaign contributions and allegedly stiffed campaign workers, was handcuffed by police yesterday after shoving a woman who was interrupting his church service in Canarsie. Whitehead was released two hours later, telling the Daily News that “higher-ups” in the NYPD had intervened, and that “you don’t get to arrest me and throw me in prison.” 

• Lt. Eric Dym, the most-complained about NYPD officer, is retiring—making the 52 substantiated allegations of misconduct by the Civilian Complaints Review Board totally meaningless, as the board will no longer be able to discipline him. According to The City, Dym faced upcoming discipline for “four instances of pointing a gun at someone, three incidents of improper physical force and one case of making a false official statement.” Dym has so far cost the city over $1.5 million in settlements. He now gets to retire with a full pension. 

•  Despite committing $200 million to turn hotel rooms into affordable apartments during the pandemic, New York state has converted a grand total of zero. Why? Well, even though Mayor Eric Adams supports the idea, a major union backer of his, the Hotel Trades Council, definitely does not, preferring the hotels to remain hotels. With tourism in the city rebounding, the window for this ambitious idea, which has worked in other states like California, has most likely closed. 

• The Mayor is announcing this morning the expansion of free broadband to some public housing residents. Maybe that’ll make the monstrous 5G towers popping up in the outer boroughs irrelevant?