Mamdani is all over LinkNYC. Is that allowed?

With his pre-K enrollment ads running incessantly on the LinkNYC kiosks, Mayor Zohran Mamdani is crossing a line that Eric Adams’ City Hall didn’t dare to: putting the mayor’s larger-than-life face in city-funded public service announcements.

New York Democrats banned elected officials from appearing in government PSAs in 2007 after GOP Gov. George Pataki used agency budgets for de facto campaign TV ads. But that law doesn’t apply in Mamdani‘s case, City Hall spokesperson Dora Pekec said, because the city isn’t paying to run them. Instead, the city gets a quarter of the screen time set aside each month for free as part of the franchise agreement. A LinkNYC spokesperson confirmed the arrangement. 

Ethics watchdog Rachael Fauss of Reinvent Albany agreed that Mamdani seems to be abiding by the letter of the law since the city isn’t paying. “But certainly the spirit of the law is, it might be better not to appear in any PSAs,” she told City & State.

That’s why you never saw a digital Adams smiling streetside, said Fabien Levy, his former deputy mayor for communications. Levy wanted to put the mayor up there, but city lawyers shut him down. Two other Adams insiders told the same story. “We tried asking a bunch of times,” Levy said. “And they said no.”

Pekec brushed off the precedent. 

“We’re not going to be taking lessons on ethics in City Hall from the Adams administration,” she said. 

The city can use its free airtime how it likes, Pekec added, “and I’d argue that child care enrollment is the top of the list of priorities here.”

The city charter strictly bars elected officials and their spouses from appearing in city ads in an election year, but that likely wouldn’t apply to Mamdani until 2029.

Adams’ face did make LinkNYC screens at least once. Just as Mamdani is trying to bring his signature style of vertical videos into government, Adams was featured in a static NYPD ad, making his signature hand heart with then-Police Commissioner Edward Caban.