Drew Warshaw wants to ‘cut out the Wall Street middlemen’ managing state pensions

Tom DiNapoli has never faced a primary challenge in the nearly two decades he has served as state comptroller. He didn’t even need to win an election to become comptroller; the state Legislature appointed him when his predecessor resigned. But that changed in May, when Drew Warshaw, an affordable housing nonprofit executive, announced that he would take on DiNapoli in next year’s Democratic primary.

Since then, one other candidate has announced their campaign for the position, and another has filed to run. But Warshaw has set out an ambitious agenda on how he would take a different approach to the role. His campaign is two-fold: He is working to introduce himself and his policy ideas to the electorate, and he is also trying to educate voters about the powers of the comptroller – that other statewide position that gets little coverage compared to the governor and attorney general. It promises to be an uphill battle, but Warshaw said he’s up to the task.

Warshaw spoke with City & State about his background, his ideas to use the comptroller’s office to address the affordability crisis and his thoughts about the growing number of insurgent candidates like himself taking on longtime incumbents. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What inspired you to run for state comptroller?

After 18 years of the same person in the same seat, we’ve got to have a change that will use all that power and all that money that he is sitting on to address the raging affordability crisis around us with an urgency and relentlessness that New Yorkers demand and that they need right now. And we simply do not have that in this seat. People look to the mayor to address the affordability crisis. They look to the governor to address the affordability crisis. Not one single person looks to the state comptroller. Yet he is sitting on the most powerful political office that virtually no one has ever heard of, with all this power and all this money to actually address the affordability crisis, and he is not lifting a finger to do that. And that is a problem.

What about your background do you think has prepared you to take on this position and really revitalize it?

I helped rebuild the World Trade Center after 9/11, and when we got there, the site was still a 16-acre hole in the ground, and this was seven years after the attacks. No one thought that government could be at the center of a turnaround that could get something built. And over the next four years, we proved that we could. That’s when I saw when government used the power and the money it had to address the crisis in front of us. Then I ran a renewable energy company and solar business, built solar farms all across the United States. Building that business, running it, raising capital, deploying capital, building solar farms. That type of experience, building a team, setting a tone and temperature for that team to solve complex problems, that is what I do. And then running the largest affordable housing nonprofit in the United States. I don’t think there’s any greater crisis we face than the crisis of the fact that New Yorkers can’t afford a home and they can’t afford their rent and they can’t afford (a) down payment (and) they can’t afford their mortgage.

Tell me about your vision for the office and what you would do if elected.

First, I would cut out the Wall Street middlemen who are sucking value and lighting our taxpayer dollars on fire. Tom DiNapoli’s bankers, who invest the third-largest public pension fund in the United States, have underperformed his own benchmarks over the last 17 years by nearly 40%. He has cost taxpayers $55 billion for that underperformance. And he has paid these bankers $11 billion over that time in fees, taxpayer-funded fees, for them to not do their job. Two, I would take $10 billion, and of that money, I would stake the largest affordable housing and workforce housing fund in the United States and invest those funds in homes that New Yorkers can actually afford. Three, I would give back (the) $20 billion that DiNapoli owes New Yorkers in unclaimed money that, again, he has shown no urgency or imagination to give New Yorkers their own money back. The last thing I would just say is he has the ability to audit anything that touches a state tax dollar, which is just about everything, and we need to use that audit authority to address the biggest issues facing New Yorkers.

Why do you think no Democrat has challenged DiNapoli before?

I think you need two things to challenge an 18-year incumbent like this. You have to know why you’re doing it. You have to have a very tangible and concrete set of ideas, and you have to know the full power of this office. I just think people have been sleeping on this office because the guy who is there treats the job like it’s a lifetime appointment. I don’t think most people even understand the full power of the office. I think if they do understand the full power of the office, I think a lot more people would be running for an office like this. The other piece here is it’s really hard to run for statewide office. New York is a big place, and it costs a lot of money to run for these offices. I think that can be daunting for people, but we need leadership right now. We need urgency right now, and we have to do more, and we have to step up.

You’re part of a growing wave of challengers to longtime incumbents, often with a narrative of the need for generational change. How much or how little is that something you plan to lean into with your campaign?

I want to be very clear on this: I am not running against Tom DiNapoli because I am 44 and he is in his 70s. I am running because I have a fundamentally different vision for how to use all the power and all the money that he’s been sitting on for the last 18 years to address the affordability crisis that is crushing New Yorkers. If people want to vote for me because I’m in a different generation, they can vote for me because of that. But that is not why I’m running. We’ve got to do things differently. We cannot keep electing the same people over and over again and expect different results. And he’s asking New Yorkers for a sixth term. What is he going to do over the next four years that he has not been able to do over the last 18 years? It is time for a change.