Hello from the other side: CM Lincoln Restler’s wife Anna Poe-Kest works at OMB

New York City Council Member Lincoln Restler’s wife, Anna Poe-Kest, recently started working on the other side of City Hall as the chief of staff to Sherif Soliman, director of the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget.

That’s news to some of his fellow council members, who told City & State they didn’t know. And their jobs put them at opposite ends of a contentious multibillion dollar city budget process, with each on one end of the negotiations between Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Speaker Julie Menin.

There’s nothing inherently unethical or illegal about the set-up – people in politics often date and marry other people in politics. But it can raise complex dynamics, often bringing with it the need for greater scrutiny than a situation in which a teacher married a fellow teacher or a scientist married a scientist. 

Restler contended that he and Poe-Kest have taken steps to create appropriate distance. When he has questions relevant to OMB, he reaches out to other people at the agency. At home, they maintain “a firewall” around the sensitive work they do. “I am incredibly proud of my wife, she is exceptionally talented,” he said. “As a city, we’re lucky to have somebody who is as capable and ethical and effective as she is.” 

Poe-Kest has long been in politics, and was previously a senior advisor at WorkMoney and a principal at New Deal Strategies. She also worked in a variety of roles across the de Blasio administration, including chief of staff at the Mayor’s Office of Intergovernmental Affairs and chief of staff at the Mayor’s Office of Appointments.

Under the direction of Mamdani and Soliman, the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget plays a central role in shaping how the city spends its money. Beyond developing and implementing the city’s revenue, expense and capital budgets, it’s the agency’s job to negotiate with the City Council, which plays an oversight role and proposes its own spending plan. The process is typically long, complex and contentious. As chief of staff to Soliman, Poe-Kest plays an influential role on the mayor’s side. Restler, a progressive Brooklyn Democrat, isn’t part of the team handpicked by Menin that is most directly involved in conversations with OMB about the city’s $127 billion budget. He is however a member of the council’s Finance Committee. He’s also the chair of the Committee on Contracts, which largely deals with the Mayor’s Office of Contract Services, not OMB. 

One Democratic council member who requested anonymity to speak freely said they think Restler should be more open with his fellow council members about Poe-Kest’s position at OMB. “At least during budget-related conversations he should have at least made a good faith effort to make sure that some of us knew about this,” they said.

Another Democratic council member who requested anonymity to speak freely argued that Restler’s connection to Poe-Kest is a potential conflict of interest that should be disclosed to the public – especially after he and two other council members spoke at a rally last month calling on Mamdani to veto a controversial bill directing the NYPD to create a plan to implement a protest “buffer zone” outside of schools. They also pointed to a March City Council hearing in which Restler told Soliman that while he doesn’t think the city should raid the city’s rainy day fund – a possibility the Mamdani administration raised that the City Council opposed – he understands the need to present a balanced budget.

Restler is a member of the progressive caucus, and is generally more politically aligned with the mayor than with Menin, but Restler’s comment still rubbed a colleague the wrong way.

“It's sort of like, why are you going so hard for the mayor against the City Council's institutional interest?” they said. “It’s one thing to vote against the bill, which he certainly has a right to do, but to rub it in your face I think speaks to a level of partiality and alliance he has on the admin side, which can make it feel as if he's a little compromised.”

Restler said he reached out to the Conflict of Interest Board to see if there were any potential issues before Poe-Kest began working at OMB. He’d been told that there was nothing that would prevent her from taking it and that opportunities for conflict of interest between the two of them would likely be “few and far between.” To avoid problems, the agency advised Restler to recuse himself from any of her communications with the City Council that involved himself and to disclose their relationship while voting on the budget, which sets Poe-Kest’s salary. City & State reviewed this exchange. Restler said he will adhere to the guidance. 

“I speak my mind,” Restler said, rejecting the idea that his participation at the anti-buffer zone bill had anything to do with his wife’s position. “I will often agree with this mayor and I will disagree with this mayor, and I'm not going to be shy about saying it publicly or privately when I do.”

Jack Lobel, a spokesperson for the speaker’s office, said that Menin doesn’t see an issue and that she’s confident Restler will do “robust, independent oversight in his role.” 

Rachael Fauss, a senior policy adviser at good government group Reinvent Albany, said that it’s always important for an elected official to disclose the connections they have to other people working in government – doing so allows the public to ask the right questions. Ultimately though, she doesn’t see an issue as long as the right steps are in place. 

“If some appropriate firewalls are put in place to make sure the council’s interests and OMB’s interests are protected, I think the risk is much lower,” Fauss said, adding that she’d see a far more opportunity for conflict if Poe-Kest worked at a private company trying to do business with the city. “These agencies should be working together anyway.”

In New York City, political couples abound. U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer’s wife Iris Weinshall is a top executive at the New York Public Library. Former Deputy Mayor Maria Torres-Springer is married to the head of construction and development at the MTA, Jamie Torres-Springer. Former Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright was in a relationship with former Schools Chancellor David Banks.

Manhattan Council Member Gale Brewer, a member of the contracts committee who said she hadn’t previously known about Poe-Kest’s appointment, vouched for her and Restler. “They will follow the rules to the nth degree. I don’t have any problem with it at all because of the integrity of the two of them,” she said. 

City Hall also defended the political power couple.

“We’re glad to have Anna Poe-Kest as a member of our administration because she has dedicated her career to fighting for working New Yorkers and brings years of experience in City government,” Dora Pekec, a spokesperson for the mayor, said in a statement. “We hired her exactly because of these merits and any suggestion otherwise is both sexist and false.”