Linda Lee is not like other finance chairs

It takes a lot to make New York City Council Member Linda Lee upset – and even more for her to show it. “When I do get upset, people are like, ‘Oh shoot,’” she says.

Being a longtime social worker, it’s not surprising that one of the few times she recalls outwardly displaying her anger was during a March 2024 budget hearing for the then-Committee on Mental Health, Disabilities and Addiction on the city’s plan to only contract with mental health clubhouses serving more than 100 people, which she said made it impossible for smaller, community clubhouses to compete. Lee went off script: She decided to ask then-Health Commissioner Ashwin Vasan a series of yes or no questions.

“After hearing some of the stories … that tell you how much these programs matter … do you believe small clubhouses have a role to play in our mental health system, yes or no?” Lee, then the committee’s chair, asked Vasan.

The commissioner replied, “I’m sorry, but I’m not going to answer your questions as yes or no –” 

“If you could answer just yes or no that’d be great.”

“These are not yes or no –”

“These are very simple questions, that are yes or no: (Do) you believe smaller clubhouses have a role to play in our mental health system?”

When Vasan’s answer was longer than one word, Lee quipped, “OK, I’m assuming that’s a yes,” and launched into her next point. The rest of the line of questioning continued in a similar fashion.

Even in recounting the incident almost two years later, Lee’s frustration is palpable. “That got me pissed a lot – like, for sure,” she said. “I was so angry. And I was like, ‘What the hell?’”

If all you heard of the incident was Lee’s description, you might imagine a testy hearing with a fiery lawmaker. But watching the footage back, that’s not what you see. At best, Lee comes off as mildly losing her composure out of passion. At worst, she comes off as frustrated and short. Yet this is the example Lee points to. In other words: This is Lee’s ceiling.

But that’s who Linda Lee is. The member representing eastern Queens since 2022 is widely described as warm and personable, and she’s generally nonconfrontational. She is mild-mannered, easy-breezy, go-with-the-flow. She is not one who looks to get into political fights, and has largely stayed out of the press. Much like her politics, the moderate Democrat takes a measured approach. It’s the kind she expects to take in her new role as chair of the powerful City Council Finance Committee. “I’m not really the type to go in there with guns blazing,” Lee said.

Even if that’s not Lee’s style, it was certainly for some of the finance chairs who came before her – former Council Members Justin Brannan and Danny Dromm to name a few. It’s not just that Lee’s predecessors are bombastic and outspoken – it’s that the role has become defined by politicking, horsetrading and backroom dealings. That has never been the new finance chair’s MO. “She’s not, like, a politico,” said Democratic political consultant Evan Stavisky. “She’s just a very diligent, hard-working, thoughtful advocate who had the opportunity to run for City Council.”

A lesser-known figure compared to many of her peers, Lee is coming into the role at a crucial moment in New York City: The city faces a $5.4 billion budget gap this year, according to Mayor Zohran Mamdani. That new mayor has fewer than three months of executive experience under his belt and is under as big a microscope as they come. The council is also not as far left as the democratic socialist mayor, particularly the council’s new leadership team under Speaker Julie Menin. As finance chair, Lee will be Menin’s lieutenant in budget negotiations and overseeing hearings. In a room of big personalities like Mamdani and Menin, how will Lee’s approach stack up?

“I want to be that calm, steady, collected, thoughtful sort of hand when it comes to looking at the budget from our side on the council,” Lee said.

Those qualities are not to be underestimated. As Rep. Grace Meng put it, “As big of a smile and a heart she has, don’t mistake that smile for weakness.” 

“One of the good ones”

Lee arrived for our interview at the Blue Bay Diner in Fresh Meadows at exactly 10:30 a.m. – right on time. 

Despite her best efforts to hide it with makeup, from the moment Lee walked in, it was impossible to ignore the giant bruise on her chin. She’s glad when I ask her about it. Lee explained she’d taken a rough fall when she slipped on ice about a week earlier, painfully slamming her chin on the ground.

“My husband was like, ‘Take it as a sign from God to, like, slow down,’” she said. (Within 24 hours, she was in Albany for Caucus Weekend. Not exactly slowing down.)

Linda Lee is a workhorse. And much like the bruise on her chin, it’s hard to miss.

Kwang Suk Kim, the longtime former president and CEO of Korean Community Services, saw Lee’s potential early. She joined the nonprofit organization focused on helping Korean and immigrant communities, particularly seniors, in 2009 and stayed until she took office in January 2022. Not long into her tenure, she took on a monumental task: launching the center’s mental health clinic. The process, which required getting various state approvals, proved complicated, Kim said, but it opened after about four years.

Kim started giving Lee the chance to work more closely with KCS’s board of directors, and that inspired more confidence. “She can handle this organization,” he recalled thinking. He began grooming her to succeed him as president and CEO. “He really took a chance with me,” Lee said, noting she was only 30 when she joined KCS and didn’t speak Korean fluently. “I give him a lot of credit as a first-generation Korean male, that he was willing to elevate a second-generation Korean American woman.” Kim more than stands by his decision to have her carry on his work: “She’s better than I am, actually.”

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic. Queens was hit hard – that included those who relied on KCS. Lee had to get creative. Volunteers were required to deliver meals instead of KCS staff, who were older and more vulnerable to COVID-19. The nonprofit partnered with commissaries to make sure there were no delivery disruptions. KCS also had to change how they packaged meals. And KCS ultimately became the first permanent vaccination site in northeast Queens.

Lee hopes to apply a similar innovative spirit when it comes to the city budget. “One thing I think that the nonprofit sector really taught me well is how to make a penny go as far as it can, and how do you make $1 last forever?” she said.

Her predecessor in her district, former Council Member Barry Grodenchik, announced he would not seek a second term in 2021 after admitting to sexually harassing an aide. Lee had considered running after Grodenchik was term-limited out. But the perfect storm of the pandemic and the government’s response to it – Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and overall social unrest – gave her another push. “There was someone close to me who was like, ‘You know what? If you’re going to do it, now’s the time.’”

Lee didn’t grow up imagining life as a politician, and the now-46-year-old wasn’t even too interested in politics until she reached her early 30s. “I try not to take up too much space in the room,” Lee said.

Yet others had been encouraging her to run for years. In 2012, shortly before Meng left the Assembly for the House, both Lee and Meng were at an event at the Flushing library. “After I spoke, (Meng) came up to me and whispered, ‘You know, you really should think about running for something,’” Lee recalled. “And I was like, ‘No way, you’re crazy.’”

It took years to convince her. “It was a combination of coaxing and cajoling,” state Sen. John Liu said – claiming he’d been doing so for “close to 20 years.” Other wheedlers were the late former Council Member Paul Vallone and, at one point, former City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, per Lee.

As extroverted as she can be, part of why it was so difficult to get Lee to run is she simply is not one who feels the need to broadcast her opinions at all times. It’s a quality she says she shares with her mother. “In church meetings … people would always say, ‘Wow, your mom doesn’t speak often, but when she does, it’s very impactful,’” Lee said. “I don’t know if what I’m always saying is impactful, but … I want to reserve my moments to speak up in times when it will matter and have an impact more. I don’t think I always need to be in the room talking – because there are plenty of other people that will probably say the same things that I’m thinking.”

Lee is all too familiar with the stereotype of the reserved and soft-spoken East Asian woman – and by her own account, she can fit it at times. But it’s an oversimplification of who she is and what she’s capable of. “I think the thing that East Asian women struggle with, for example, is, usually we’re keeping our heads down and quiet. But if you’ve seen the work that I’ve done on the advocacy side, on the nonprofit side, I can be very loud when I need to be, and very planted and rooted in my stances when I definitely need to be,” she said.

“And you know, most other times, yeah, I could be a team player, go with the flow. But there are very distinct moments where, when I feel very, very strongly and principled about an issue, I will dig my heels in and say, ‘You know what? This is something that we have to fight against,’ or ‘This is something that we need to stand up to,’ which I’m not afraid to do.”

Lee grew up as the daughter of Korean immigrants in Elmira, New York, in the largely rural Southern Tier. Her family moved to Nassau County when she was about 10, but for the past 18 years, she’s lived in the Queens neighborhood of Oakland Gardens, now with her husband and two sons. District 23 – which includes Oakland Gardens, Bellerose, Glen Oaks, Fresh Meadows, Jamaica Estates, Hollis and parts of Queens Village – is about 46% Asian (including about 15% Indian and 13% Chinese) and about 21% white. It’s a politically engaged area, home to two significant New York political dynasties: the Cuomos and the Weprins. Though with a growing South Asian population in the district, the district’s political leanings are changing – in the Democratic mayoral primary last year, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo edged out Mamdani by 267 votes out of 18,000 in District 23. Issues related to education and to homeowners reign supreme. While the district leans more toward the left than other parts of eastern Queens, it is pretty moderate, and there is often a sense that one false move could flip the district red.

In 2021, Lee found herself in the middle of a seven-candidate Democratic primary in that politically complex district. Her top opponents included Grodenchik’s right-hand, Steven Behar, and Democratic Socialist of America-backed Jaslin Kaur. The challenge was clear: How do you distinguish yourself from the rest of the field?

While the campaign was “a very shoestring kind of operation,” her then-campaign manager and former chief of staff Asher Zlotnik said the strategy was to rely on Lee’s personability and skills as a people person. “We would knock doors, and if someone came to the door, we’d be like, ‘Hey, do you want to meet Linda?’ And Linda would just like, talk to them for 20 minutes,” Zlotnik said. “The whole thing was just like, if you get people to meet Linda – from all these different backgrounds – people will fall in love with her.”

That’s the thing about Lee. Among her peers, she has allies, but she doesn’t really have enemies – it’s just varying degrees of how much they like her. In the political arena, it sounds naive to think an elected official is genuinely down to earth, has nothing but good intentions and is nearly universally liked. Across more than 15 interviews with sources, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. But it never did. As consultant and former Meng staffer Anthony Lemma III said of Lee: “She’s one of the good ones.”

A social worker in office

“I love knowing what makes people tick,” Lee said. “I love understanding what is important to you, and this is what’s important to me. How can we sort of meet in the middle somewhere and do the negotiation that way?”

That’s why she’s able to build relationships with a wide array of her peers – be it Council Member Vickie Paladino or Mamdani himself. Multiple members of the council interviewed for this story – Paladino included – noted Lee has made a point of meeting with every one of her fellow council members heading into budget season (as of March 10, she’d met with all but a handful, Lee said).

It’s also a strategic approach, which she attributes in part to her background in social work. “If you’re going to look at how to solve an issue, you should be talking to those people that have opposite views as you do to make the outcome that much stronger,” Lee said. “That’s my sort of philosophy in life.”

“She is not somebody who’s going to make knee-jerk reactions, and pound on the table – that kind of thing,” Lemma said. “She thinks through everything.” 

Listening and asking questions is also how the council member decides what issues to spend her energy on. And they aren’t always the sexiest issues. 

While Lee is best known for her work on mental health issues, spearheading the council’s Mental Health Roadmap, she has also been at the forefront of pushing for reforms to Local Law 97, the city’s climate law limiting emissions for large, nongovernment buildings. Co-op shareholders and condo owners are more vulnerable to the law’s penalties given they are responsible for the costs of upgrades. District 23 being home to the largest number of co-op and condo owners in the entire city, Lee introduced legislation to ease potential penalties by incorporating open and green space on their properties into building emissions calculations.

Her efforts were well-received in her district when she started taking on the issue in 2023. More widely, though, there was a sense she was walking a political tightrope: How could a New York City Democrat be pushing against pro-climate legislation?

But Lee was ahead of the curve: She presented it not as a climate issue, but an affordability one. Fast forward to the Oct. 22 mayoral debate – Mamdani made a similar argument in favor of removing barriers to the J-51 tax credit, an incentive for building renovations.

A self-described “New York moderate,” Lee agrees with the median voter in her district on most issues. One apparent exception: affordable housing. She believes more is needed. “Personally, I believe that. Although if you looked at my vote strictly on paper, you wouldn't know that,” she said, pointing to her no vote on the City of Yes Housing Opportunity plan as an example. But Lee knows at the end of the day, she represents the district. “The question I always ask is, ‘Who put me in office? Who am I here to serve? And when does that voice of representing my community outweigh my personal things?’” she said.

That thinking sets Lee apart. “In the world of politicians, ego, it makes up so much of how people maneuver,” said Council Member Nantasha Williams, an ally of Lee’s. “Everybody has egos. I’m not gonna say (Lee) has none. On the spectrum of ego, hers is on the lower scale. … Because she doesn’t lead with ego, and she leads more so with heart and with open ears, I think that is why she doesn’t really have any quote, unquote enemies.”

The big leagues

Several rows of folding chairs sitting in the gym at the Cross Island YMCA were filled with a few dozen of Lee’s local political allies, civic leaders and nonprofit partners on Feb. 18. It’s like looking at Lee’s memory lane, an illustration of all those who have helped her along the way. They’re there to celebrate Lee’s appointment as the council’s finance chair. Lee mingled around the room, genuinely excited to see everyone.

Menin seemed to be there to talk about the budget. In a gaggle with reporters right after the press conference, the speaker answered every question; Lee stood dutifully at her side throughout. NY1 cut half of her out of the shot.

Such moments underscore the question some have posed, quietly, about Lee as finance chair: With Menin as much of a micromanager as she is, will Lee – the one who stays out of direct political confrontations – be able to stand her ground?

Lee did not need to be talked into the position the way she needed to be convinced to run for office – she wanted to be finance chair. It’s evidence of her political growth. But her motivation is largely unchanged. “Where could I have a meaningful impact?” Lee asked herself. “For me, the finance chair’s role is one where you really have a seat at the table, front-line view of how to impact the city’s budget in a way where it could really help a lot of struggling New Yorkers and have a voice and a seat at the table,” she said.

But she’d have to become finance chair first.

Lee was an early supporter of Menin’s bid for speaker, and she advised her throughout the race. Longtime former area lawmaker turned consultant Mark Weprin called her “one of the quarterbacks of Julie’s campaign.”

“(Lee) had in her mind a plan – like, she had lists of names of people who – she wasn’t sharing – but who were with Julie,” Weprin said. “For someone who’s not a politician and didn’t grow up in politics, she was a good general for Julie.”

Lee expects that partnership during the speaker race to continue into their current leadership positions. “I would joke with her … ‘I’m going to be that person that’s going to tell you the things that you don’t want to hear,’” Lee said about Menin. “But I’m doing it because I care and because I want us to succeed, and so I don’t think that’s going to be different in this role.”

Right after she said that, Lee expressed concern that that might not land the right way – perhaps a sign of uneasiness in this new stage of their partnership.

But indeed, Menin said she and Lee “have so many candid conversations.”

While as speaker, the buck ultimately stops with Menin, multiple people cited Menin and Lee’s strong relationship as evidence of why the speaker will not dominate her finance chair. “I don’t think Linda’s as easy to roll over as the impression that she gives,” said Paladino, a known firebrand in her own right.

“She doesn’t have any misgivings or qualms about being in the spotlight,” Liu said. “And to the extent that Julie shares the spotlight with Linda – which I think she will – Linda will do just fine.”

It’s go time

Lee was not on time for the Finance Committee’s first budget hearing March 11 – she was five minutes early. She milled about the council chamber in her blue blazer and white velcro sneakers (for all the running around she’ll be doing over the next few months, she said – she hasn’t worn heels in years).

This is just the beginning of the council’s weekslong series of budget hearings. And Lee has more to learn about being finance chair and helping craft the city budget. “At least I know who to go to to get my questions answered. So I’m not naive enough to think that I know everything,” she said weeks before at the diner.

As many people interviewed for this story argued, managing a large nonprofit like KCS and overseeing its finances is a skill transferable to the city budget. She may not be a politico by nature, but overwhelmingly, there was a sense of confidence in Lee’s ability to step up to the plate.

In the coming months, Lee will not only need to work closely with Menin, the council’s budget negotiating team and the council’s finance division – she’ll also work with Mamdani.

Unsurprisingly, Lee did not endorse anyone for mayor, but she said she and Mamdani have developed a rapport over the years. Once fellow Queens legislators, Lee and Mamdani have been aligned on issues related to taxi drivers, per the council member. Lee said during the transition period, Mamdani’s team reached out to set up a one-on-one meeting so she could give her input on his community safety plan. Meticulous as ever, she showed up to the meeting with a copy of the plan with her notes in it, and by her account, the mayor was receptive.

In her opening remarks of the budget hearing, Lee applauded the Mamdani administration’s efforts to correct the Adams administration’s chronic underbudgeting – but also was concerned about overdrawing reserves, particularly with general economic uncertainty and revenue projections for next year looking grim. And for good measure, she made clear once again that raising property taxes was a nonstarter.

“We again find ourselves confronted with a budget dance, but this time, with a different kind of music,” Lee said.

Lee’s right: It is a different kind of music this time. But she’s also a different kind of dancer. And she’s taking the floor.