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Menin conspicuously absent from Mamdani’s 9/11 health announcement

Jeff Coltin and Sahalie Donaldson — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 17:53:07 -0400

While several speakers lauded New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin for her work to support New Yorkers adversely impacted by the Sept. 11 attacks, she was notably absent from Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Tuesday morning announcement that his administration would release a trove of long-sought documents related to the air quality around the World Trade Center after 9/11.

A spokesperson for the City Council speaker’s office, Henry Robins, told City & State that, while the Mamdani administration briefed Menin on the release of the documents last week, they did not invite her to the City Hall press conference. A City Hall spokesperson disputed this, saying that Menin had in fact been invited, along with Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal and Rep. Jerry Nadler.

But Robins said Menin’s team never got an email. Hoylman-Sigal also told City & State he didn’t get an email about the Tuesday press conference, which was unexpected.

"I did not receive an invite," he said. "But the mayor has been diligent in including me about Manhattan events. They invite me to the opening of a jam jar. So I firmly believe this was an administrative oversight."

Diverging accounts aside, Menin’s absence was unusual given her professional and personal history. After experiencing the terror attack up close as a lower Manhattan resident and restaurant owner, she founded a nonprofit called Wall Street Rising that played a major role in revitalizing the downtown business community. Menin’s own mother died of cancer, which she says was 9/11-related. And as an elected official, she’s called for the release of all files on what the city knew about the toxins in the air following 9/11, helping to secure additional funding for the Department of Investigation to complete its long-delayed report.

City Council Member Gale Brewer, who’d sponsored legislation to fund the DOI investigation, was the lone City Council member in attendance Tuesday. Mamdani’s announcement about the documents, which were released through a public online portal, comes after years of first responders, elected officials and the families of people adversely impacted by 9/11-related illnesses demanding greater transparency from the city on what was known about the environmental threats. Multiple prior mayoral administrations had declined to release that information prior to this point.

“People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in the toxic air,” Mamdani told reporters, though he declined to specifically call anyone out by name.

The relationship between City Hall and Menin’s council has grown increasingly tense in recent weeks, as the council has sought to hold the Mamdani administration accountable on issues like the rocky roll out of the pied-à-terre tax and communications with influencers – but in ways the new and popular mayor’s team feels are unfair and performative.

And while disagreement is inherent to the dynamic between the executive and legislative branches, the relationship is being further tested by the commemoration of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, a high pressure period when the world’s eyes are on New York even more than usual – and emotions are still raw.

Mamdani has lately faced calls – many of them based on blatant Islamophobia – to avoid the ceremony at the World Trade Center. Asked what she thought about those calls, in a Tuesday interview on CNN, Menin scarcely defended her colleague in government, instead giving a broad response that “elected officials should be there” and the focus should be on families that lost loved ones.

“This is a day where hopefully we can put politics aside and try to focus on the remembrance … and the kindness of strangers,” Menin said.

Robins noted that Menin has previously defended the mayor, calling the attacks on Mamdani “absolutely inappropriate.”

Robert Gottheim, the chief of staff to Rep. Jerry Nadler – one of the speakers who shouted out Menin at the press conference – told City & State that he doesn’t know whether the speaker was or wasn’t invited. He did say however that Mamdani’s Corporation Counsel Steve Banks briefed a handful of elected officials, including Menin and Nadler, last Thursday about their plans to release the documents.

“The Mamdani administration deserves a lot of praise for what they’re releasing,” Gottheim said. “I don’t know why (Menin) wasn’t involved … Maybe it was an oversight. I can just say that Julie Menin has been instrumental in having these records released.”

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Opinion: The green economy is a jobs plan

Tracey Capers — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 14:30:45 -0400

New York City has employment and climate change problems, and we have spent years treating them as separate emergencies with siloed budgets.

But they are not.

The work of making our buildings more efficient and our neighborhoods more resilient is also a promising source of good jobs. The Mamdani administration has begun to treat it that way, and that is worth building on.

The affordability crisis is not only about the cost of living. It is also about wages that have not kept pace, in a labor market where most new jobs are being concentrated in low-wage sectors.

At the same time, New Yorkers feel the climate crisis constantly – when the heat index pushes past 105, when a cloudburst floods basements in the South Bronx and Queens, or when a storm surge creeps up a block in Red Hook or the Rockaways.

Both crises fall hardest on the same communities of New Yorkers.

Green jobs can address both. They cannot be outsourced, are rooted in the neighborhoods that need them, and many are reachable without years of school or expensive credentialing. The city's own Green Economy Action Plan projects that decarbonization and resilience efforts can create at least 260,000 jobs over the next 15 years.

At The HOPE Program, we have spent more than four decades preparing New Yorkers – many of whom have experienced homelessness, incarceration, domestic violence or long-term unemployment – for careers. Increasingly, those careers are in the green sector.

We are members of the New York City Employment and Training Coalition and JobsFirst NYC's Green Economy Network, each of which has given this administration a serious blueprint. Those roadmaps get the policy right. Over 40 years of placing people into these jobs have shown us where the challenges exist – and why those recommendations matter.

The constraint is not training capacity.

We can train more people than the job market currently absorbs. A graduate who is ready in March may be waiting until August for a job. Every additional training slot the city funds without a corresponding increase in employment produces a credentialed New Yorker with nowhere to use their skills.

But the city has influence.

Public dollars drive most of the decarbonization work in New York for upgrades to municipal buildings, resilience infrastructure and streetscape work. Therefore, the city can decide who gets hired for this work and what the jobs pay. Hiring standards attached to public contracts are one of the strongest workforce levers the city has to pull.

Existing and new housing developments also present major opportunities. The Mamdani administration has proposed its housing plan, Block by Block, which vows to create and preserve 400,000 affordable housing units. Each new development offers construction, mechanical, and electrical jobs. The even steadier work pipeline is for modernizing, weatherizing and retrofitting existing buildings.

Most of this work is familiar, done by the trades with new requirements: the HVAC technician who now installs heat pumps or the building manager who now manages Local Law 97 compliance.

One of our graduates, Rob, does exactly this type of HVAC work. He came to HOPE after returning home from prison, completing building operations and maintenance training to earn multiple certifications. Rob is now a union member earning a solid prevailing wage with a pension and health coverage.

His job exists because our city invested in the training and the jobs to make older buildings more efficient. Those are investments we can, and should, continue to prioritize.

And while job placement is the common metric, retention is where equity is truly won or lost. It provides more context into how many people are still working a year later. The answer usually hinges on factors that cost relatively little: a toolset, transit fare, a licensing fee or childcare during a shift change.

The administration is right that affordability is our defining challenge. Lowering costs and raising wages are the way forward. The green economy is where this city can do the latter – in the neighborhoods that have historically absorbed the most environmental harm and received the least investment.

The infrastructure is already here, in community-based organizations, training providers, and labor partnerships that have spent decades proving it works. The coalitions are organized. The people ready to join the workforce are ready. The city has laid the groundwork. Now is the time to invest deeper to create the jobs, and build the future New York deserves: one green job at a time.

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Lawmakers, health advocates prepare to spar over bill to enforce flavored vape ban

Kate Lisa — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 14:07:19 -0400

After enforcement measures for a ban on flavored vapes fell out of state budget talks this spring, lawmakers opted to pass another solution in their abbreviated time post-budget they hope will ensure the 2020 ban is properly enforced and put an end to the regulatory grey area. And its sponsors hope Gov. Kathy Hochul will approve the legislative remedy.

If Hochul signs the proposal, state tax officials will have new, sweeping authority to inspect distributor supply chains and revoke licenses. State health inspectors faced persistent legal hurdles and staffing shortages when auditing storefronts – making it exceedingly difficult to seize illegal and flavored vapor products before they hit store shelves and collect millions of dollars in state revenue.

Assembly Member Michaelle Solages sponsors the bill that, if signed, would require every vapor product distributor to obtain a license from the state Department of Tax and Finance. It would also create a public directory to track product movement and hold high-level suppliers accountable to comply, and is backed by law enforcement.

“It’s just become the wild, wild west, and unfortunately, our kids are falling victim to this illegal product, and also adults,” said Solages, who chairs the state’s Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic & Asian Legislative Caucus.

She also said her bill shifts the crackdown away from local corner stores and bodegas onto wholesale bulk distributors to combat the rise of illicit, foreign-made vapes. “Going after the distributors, the bad actors on a mass level will help us curtail this issue,” the Assembly member said. “I don’t forgive these distributors. They’re making tons of money, and if they can’t comply with the law, then that's their fault.”

And time is of the essence, Solages said: The FDA has authorized over 40 e-cigarette products, and started to include flavors outside tobacco and menthol earlier this spring.

But several nonprofit health groups aren’t convinced the proposal will fix the greater issue: curbing youth access. Vapor products in New York are currently subject to a 20% retail sales tax, that's imposed at the store counter, or paid by the consumer.

And the legislation would shift that 20% tax to the wholesale price sold by a distributor to a dealer in the state.

The legislation would restructure the flat 20% retail tax and make the state collect the tax earlier, when the distributor sells the product to the store. Pre-filled vapes or pods would be taxed at $0.32 per milliliter of liquid while refillable vapes would be taxed at $8 of the wholesale price.

That makes it easier for tax inspectors to enforce at the source, but the change is one some health advocates worry will lower the tax burden on each product.

Several health organizations signed a joint memo opposing the bill, including the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, American Heart Association, American Lung Association and others, arguing that the change would reduce the tax rate on vapor products and make them more affordable and accessible to youth. “It would also significantly reduce tax revenues collected by New York state by approximately $20 million annually, and New York state would subsequently have one of the lowest taxable rates in the country compared to other states that levy wholesale taxes on e-cigarettes,” they wrote June 3.

Solages dismissed the memo’s pushback and questioned whether nonprofit leaders with high salaries genuinely want to stop the spread of illicit tobacco or vapor products. A handful of Democratic lawmakers, including state Sens. Liz Krueger, Pat Fahy and Rachel May, also voted against the measure.

But advocates are hopeful that Hochul will sign the measure into law, even if there’s some tweaks. The New York Association of Convenience Stores is pushing Hochul to sign the bill, and has called on state leaders to enforce its flavored vapor product ban for years to squelch the growing illicit market.

“NYACS has long expressed concern that prohibition can push sales away from responsible, regulated retailers,” President Alison Ritchie said in a statement to City & State. “More recent policies, including the 75% tax on nicotine pouches, risk contributing to that same problem. New York should avoid policies that create opportunities for illegal sellers, while ensuring that existing laws are enforced fairly and effectively against those who violate them.”

The governor included a similar proposal in her executive budget at the beginning of the year that had different tax rates, product definitions and enforcement mechanisms. Asked for comment on the legislation, a spokesperson for Hochul said the governor would review it.

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Book excerpt: How steel from the twin towers came to symbolize the tragedy

City & State — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 05:00:00 -0400

The recovery from the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11 began almost immediately. That night, trucks began moving debris out of lower Manhattan to Staten Island. A portion of the steel was distributed by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owned the site, for the creation of 9/11 memorials, largely in the lead-up to the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks. From the introduction of “Scattered Steel: The Afterlife of the World Trade Center” by Samuel Holleran and Max Holleran, which published on Aug. 15, the authors write about how the steel from the twin towers became the main symbol of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and how these memorials connected the rest of the country to this tragedy.

From Scattered Steel: The Afterlife of the World Trade Center, by Samuel Holleran and Max Holleran, a Three Hills book published by Cornell University Press. Copyright (c) 2026 by Samuel Holleran & Max Holleran. Used by permission of the publisher.

In the years since 9/11, steel has become the de facto language of memorialization, and the placement of hundreds of salvaged steel beams in local memorials has spread the grief of the attacks to every US state. These scattered memorials are relics of a new kind, diffusing the national grieving process. Their appearance in quotidian suburban settings has helped to sacralize 9/11 and spread its remembrance.

Through a partially improvised process, authorities cleared the WTC site over a period of nine months, separating scrap-destined steel from beams and cladding that would become forensic evidence. The “relic” steel was held by the Port Authority, which also appointed a small committee to archive objects that were meant to show the “three chapters” of the buildings’ life: the pre-9/11 era, the day of the attacks, and the aftermath and recovery efforts. This collection of over two thousand objects included the miscellany of office life (glasses, a phone message book, a Three Stooges magnet), crushed fire trucks and police cars from the towers’ collapse, and memorials left on-site by the thousands of workers who helped clear debris. Above all, the collection contained structural steel: roughly seven thousand tons in total.

As early as 2002, the Port Authority began to informally gift steel to cultural, civic, and defense institutions. In the lead-up to the ten-year anniversary of the attacks, the agency formalized distribution through a special program that released 1,890 pieces of steel of varying sizes. Many were incorporated into firehouses and police stations located across the United States, but they were clustered densely in the tri-state area. Steel was often taken out of storage and brought to memorial sites with honor guards, convoys, and patriotic parades. The reverence and pageantry demonstrated for the steel can be seen as an attempt to provide a final burial for WTC victims, most of whose bodies were largely irrecoverable.

Many steel memorials were placed in front of civic buildings. These often consisted of a small section of I-beam placed on end, bolted directly to the ground, or resting on a plinth. Some were positioned immediately beside building entrances like the carved statues historically placed outside cigar stores or the bible-scroll-holding mezuzahs affixed to doorposts by religious Jews. These memorials, such as the beam bolted in front of the Fire and Rescue Company in Staunton, Virginia, force visitors to look upon them when entering the building. Other pieces were far too big for this and were positioned like roadside sculptures. In Wellington, Florida, a three-column exterior section of the WTC is mounted diagonally next to a wide thoroughfare; it is almost as tall as the nearby palms, and it casts its shadow across part of the street. A W-shaped piece, cut from the WTC’s pointed arches, sits in the oak grove at the center of Indiana University of Pennsylvania; it occupies a plinth at the intersection of two footpaths, like a piece of modern art commissioned for the campus. In Green Township, Ohio, a horizontal beam sits on a triangular island in the parking lot of the City Administration Building; a line of parked cars sits just ten feet away. At Prospect Hill, a historic cemetery in York, Pennsylvania, a large piece of steel, with concrete and twisted rebar still attached to it, is positioned on top of two massive columns, forming a “Court of Valor” honoring local service members. In Croton-on-Hudson, a town that’s an hour from New York by train, a riverside memorial uses a piece of steel, fused to a boulder, to form a giant sundial.

The framing of the WTC steel as a “sacred” set of relics that, in their distribution, help to keep the memory of the events alive has some precedent in the dispersal of Berlin Wall segments, the monuments built from pieces of the USS Maine, and the (limited) reburial of soil from concentration camps at memorial sites. As in the architectural tradition of spolia, where ancient column capitals and ornamental stonework are repurposed into new structures, pieces of the demolished buildings were incorporated into larger memorial structures with the explicit purpose of creating a commemorative link to Ground Zero.

This book focuses on the sacralization of WTC steel and how it became the primary visual language for memorializing the attacks of September 11, 2001. The steel has been conceptualized as a straightforward example of strength and rebirth, but its history is more complex. The difference between scrap-destined steel and sacralized steel was largely arbitrary. An ad hoc process saved and sanctified a small fraction of the WTC steel pieces, whereas the majority was shipped abroad for recycling. We examine the process by which architectural components were sorted and delivered to memorial sites as a form of controlled embodiment of memory, in effect franchising 9/11 memory. Solemn delivery processions not only provided rituals of national unity but also coded the losses as archetypically masculine heroism (primarily by working-class first responders). This shift in commemoration practices helped to frame 9/11 as an attack on American manhood and not just on the symbolic power of American capital embodied in the WTC’s towers.

Writing from the vantage point of a quarter century later allows us to periodize the steel’s initial distribution in the years leading up to the tenth anniversary of the attacks (when most of the memorials we examine were completed), placing this process in the context of the Great Recession and growing public criticism of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. “Support Our Troops” decals, “survivor trees,” and WTC murals have been analyzed as unique building blocks of political community and martial obligation; this work helps to better define the intersection of national mourning, memorial-making, and overt displays of patriotism.

Scholars, such as Andreas Huyssen and Erika Doss, have rightly noted that the 1990s saw a bumper crop of memorials, described as a “boom” or a “mania.” The scale, cost, and number of memorials shot up as architects and city officials sought to “get in on” memorialization without truly considering what their communities should commemorate. This was in keeping with a feeling that was in the air. The fall of the Soviet Union, expansion of telecommunications technology, and the millennium on the horizon led some to suggest that the “End of History” was at hand. With the stability of a world united by liberal democracy and free-market capitalism seemingly guaranteed – grand historical narratives seemed over, or at least paused – an urge to preserve, display, and heritagize took hold.

September 11 fundamentally undermined the “End of History” thesis, but it supported another, smaller uptick in memorial construction, particularly in the lead-up to the ten-year anniversary. The themes of these memorials range widely and include freedom, first responders, sacrifice, coexistence and religious tolerance, and the obligation to remember itself (a sort of teleological plea for the importance of history). Our book is also part of a larger discussion about how we remember shared tragedies and public events and how those events “gel” in our minds and in shared public spaces. It situates the attacks of 9/11 in a past that is still being formed.

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Never forget: Betrayals of 9/11 first responders have lingered for 25 years

Bob Hennelly — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 05:00:00 -0400

Around this time of year the phrase “never forget 9/11” gets invoked at the commemorations of the anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, when 2,996 people died in a multipronged terrorist attack in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, that would upend the world as we knew it.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, the world and the nation rallied around a wounded New York City and city residents also embraced each other. Impromptu wanted posters of people looking for their lost loved ones were everywhere.

What people did not know at the time after the attack was that the toxic air in lower Manhattan that the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said was “safe to breathe” would eventually kill thousands more people than died in the terrorist attack.

As was well documented by a 2003 EPA inspector general report, those false assurances upon which so many relied were generated by a Bush White House that wanted the world to see nearby Wall Street not missing a beat after the catastrophic attack.

Recently, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani committed to the full release of all of the city’s files related to what it knew and when it knew it after 9/11. And a preliminary report on those documents by The New York Times appeared to confirm what many suspected about environmental toxins lingering in the air around ground zero. Through a statement, former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, who was the EPA administrator at the time, told City & State she “fully supports making everything public from that time.”

“It says a lot about our politics that it’s going to take a mayor that was in grade school on 9/11 to finally release these documents that the older generation of politicians held onto all this time,” said Lila Nordstrom, who was in Stuyvesant High School on 9/11.

In the years since the attacks, the fight for 9/11 first responders to get healthcare coverage has been an uphill battle nearly every step of the way.

So when we pledge to “never forget,” there’s a lot to remember that all came after that exquisite September primary day 25 years ago when there was not a cloud in the sky.

It was like when the twin towers fell, the earth was knocked off its axis in a sea of unending grief and death.

A devastating toll

Since 2001, the New York City Fire Department has lost more than 600 members to 9/11-related diseases, far surpassing the 343 firefighters who died on the day of the attacks. There are more than 150,000 first responders and survivors who have enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program.

And Dr. Kristi Anderson, the program’s chief medical officer, said researchers estimate some 400,000 first responders, students, workers and survivors were exposed to the toxins in and around lower Manhattan and in portions of western Brooklyn.

After the attacks, New York City, in its bid to get back to normal, sent close to 20,000 K-12 students back into schools inside the Federal Emergency Management Agency-defined hot zone.

“We are doing outreach now because someone who now may be living in California, Iowa or Texas are both geographically and time-wise distanced from this event but still might be eligible,” Anderson told City & State. “The idea is that people still may have developed diseases from their exposure during that time so this kind of outreach is important to us.”

Anderson said cancer patients in the World Trade Center Health Program have an impressive track record. According to a new report on the program, 86% of World Trade Center first responders diagnosed with cancer are alive five years after diagnosis, compared with 63% of New York state residents who were not exposed to the World Trade Center and were diagnosed with the same cancers.

“Cancer-specific mortality rates for the World Trade Center Health Program enrollees is approximately 35% lower than demographically similar New York residents with cancer – that’s a big deal,” Anderson said.

At the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, cuts made to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services resulted in the World Trade Center Health Program losing one-fifth of its staff, according to 9/11 Health Watch, a nonprofit advocacy group. Anderson said the agency now was authorized to fully staff up and that hiring was underway.

The program has critics like Anne Marie Principe, who had a talent agency located in lower Manhattan and now leads Affinity Healthcare Advocates, a nonprofit committed to improving the quality of healthcare for the 9/11 community.

“Nearly 25 years after the toxic dust settled over lower Manhattan, a devastating illusion persists in the minds of the American public,” Principe wrote to City & State. “People see the multibillion-dollar federal funding packages passed by Congress – such as the mandatory funding extensions secured through 2090 – and they assume the battle is won. They assume all in the 9/11 community are finally being taken care of. The grim reality on the ground is that the systems built to protect the 9/11 community – the World Trade Center Health Program and the Victim Compensation Fund – are fracturing under the weight of administrative failures, staffing freezes, a large influx of new patients and corporate red tape. For thousands of survivors and responders who are literally fighting for their breath and their lives, the nightmare didn’t end in 2001. It is happening right now, fought in the sterile, unresponsive corridors of a broken federal bureaucracy.”

Passing the torch without dropping it

Firefighter Bobby Eustace, who recently assumed the presidency of the New York City’s Uniformed Firefighters Association, was just 20 years old when he became an emergency medical technician in April 2001, just months before he responded to ground zero. Prior to the World Trade Center, the most catastrophic FDNY loss of life was the Oct. 17, 1966, 23rd Street fire when a dozen members died after a floor collapsed at American Art Galleries.

“Now, the largest loss of life is 9/11, but we’ve never been able to look back and reflect on that truly because that wound keeps opening up because there is still another funeral almost weekly,” Eustace told City & State. “You can’t sustain that level of grief – you can’t. Even our turnout for funerals is not as good as it once was.”

The firefighters of the FDNY are represented by the UFA and the Uniformed Fire Officers Association, with a combined rank and file of about 11,000 people, according to Eustace. “So, if you add the UFA and UFOA that are still active on the job, figure there’s about 1,500 of us who were working on 9/11 and are still working today,” he said.

City & State asked FDNY Deputy Chief Jim Brosi, who has been president of the UFOA since 2023, if it gets harder to maintain the same level of advocacy for ailing firefighters as more FDNY members retire and die prematurely of their 9/11-related diseases.

“The further we get from the incident, the more difficult it becomes because there are more tragedies since 9/11 that fill the void making demands on the government, and it is a very hard concept to fathom the loss of thousands of people on a single day and the loss of thousands of people following the event along with the multiple of ailments that people are experiencing,” Brosi said.

As far as society “never forgetting” the sacrifice of 9/11 first responders, both Eustace and Brosi pointed to what they called the sorry state of the FDNY’s Bureau of Emergency Medical Services, the city’s refusal to restore a fifth firefighter to its engine companies and its aging rolling stock.

And then there are the subpar firehouses, like Engine 79 in Bedford Park, Bronx, where earlier this year a major fire left 14 firefighters injured and several others trapped in the firehouse’s second story living quarters that lacked a sprinkler system.

For Emergency Medical Services, the sense of political abandonment is even greater thanks to low wages, chronic understaffing as well as turnover and worsening response times. Vincent Variale, who served on 9/11 and is president of Uniformed EMS Officers Local 3621, told City & State it’s not uncommon, even as response times to the most serious medical calls continue to deteriorate, for there to be 100 FDNY ambulances sitting idle – almost a quarter of the city’s fleet – because of a lack of crews to staff them.

Variale told City & State that EMS’ second-class status predates 9/11 and goes back to the Giuliani-era merger of EMS with the FDNY.

“This year is the 30th anniversary of the forgotten service,” he said. “The fire and EMS merger happened 30 years ago, and still, EMS has the same inferior staffing, pay, benefits and resources compared to other fire and first responders. The promises that were not kept by the city have not only contributed to the plummeting morale in EMS, it has sacrificed the lives of many New Yorkers with unacceptable response times.”

FDNY paramedic Michael Greco, who was elected earlier this year to lead Local 2507 Uniformed EMTs, Paramedics, and Fire Inspectors, wrote in a text message: “You can’t forget what you’ve never acknowledged.”

Required to report

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, while the world was focused on the cops and firefighters, New York City’s municipal civil service sprang into action.

Joseph Colangelo is the president of SEIU Local 246, which represents the city’s mechanics, some of whom found themselves working on FDNY fire trucks that were still contaminated with World Trade Center dust even after the Giuliani administration had sent them to be cleaned by outside contractors.

“They did whatever needed to be done so the city could recover. At the same time, it became clear that those workers were exposed to dangerous conditions and would need protections and lifelong medical care, and our union fought to have our members protected,” Colangelo told City & State.

He added that 20 of his members have died from illnesses related to their 9/11 work.

Carol Wachter, along with her husband Charles Wachter, served generations of New Yorkers by creating and administering civil service exams for agencies like the Fire Department as employees of the Department of Citywide Administrative Services. Their office was in the David N. Dinkins Manhattan Municipal Building on Centre Street. They were not “first responders” but went back to work a week after the attack just blocks from ground zero.

Carol Wachter died after contracting World Trade Center-linked brain and lung cancers that were aggressive as well as inoperable. The couple had no children.

Charles Wachter told me for an interview with The Chief-Leader in 2019 that it was one of his wife’s last wishes that her story prompt fellow civil servants to pay closer attention to their own health for potential symptoms.

“Have yourself checked out,” he said. “Don’t ignore any symptoms whatsoever. And keep checking with the authorities for what kind of symptoms would be meaningful for them to be registered (with the World Trade Center Health Program.)”

He said as a couple they looked forward to retiring together but it was still “weighing on him” that she had “wanted to retire a year earlier,” and he had said “he was not exactly ready” to leave work. “We would have missed the whole thing (9/11) here if we had retired when Carol wanted to,” he said.

Stu Eber was a deputy commissioner in the city Human Resources Administration and led the New York City Managerial Employee Association, a voluntary union-like association for 3,500 managers.

“By the end of September, we had the all-clear and were back to work but the major computer hubs for Medicaid and food stamps under 90 Church St. were destroyed," Eber told City & State.

He said he takes pride that he and his colleagues were able to coordinate city, state and federal agencies to get a series of waivers for the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who continued to get the support they had come to rely on. “Millions benefited and you have to credit all three levels of government, the city, state and federal government,” Eber said.

Promises made, not kept

Eber is one of the tens of thousands of city retirees who is active with the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees, which is led by retired FDNY EMS member Marianne Pizzitola, who is also a World Trade Center Health Program participant. Her organization was formed to fight the de Blasio administration’s plan to force 250,000 retired municipal workers from Medicare to a Medicare Advantage plan that would’ve saved the city $600 million a year.

Quite a few of those city retirees were workers ordered back to their desks in the hot zone around ground zero. For this cohort, maintaining their continuity of care was particularly critical. After several rounds in court, the city under Mamdani appears to have backed off the plan that had been supported by the city’s largest public unions.

“The cruel reality is the city tried to force us into Medicare Advantage, diminishing our healthcare in the middle of a pandemic,” Pizzitola told City & State. “After failing to tell the truth about the safety of the air we were exposed to after 9/11, they sought to decrease our care. Not only are we fighting to protect the health benefits we earned, many of us are 9/11 survivors and others are battling illnesses or cancer as a result of 9/11. The city told us Medicare Advantage was ‘just as good,’ and we all knew that wasn’t true. When you’re fighting cancer, access to the best doctors isn’t a luxury, it’s lifesaving. The city repeatedly lied and put our lives at risk.”

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and for a few years after the attack the Bloomberg administration resisted the notion of any liability for occupational health issues, with Mike Bloomberg at one point asserting that NYPD Detective James Zadroga, for whom the 9/11 Health and Compensation Act was named, was not a hero but a drug addict, an allegation he later apologized for. (Bloomberg declined to comment for this story.)

Joseph Zadroga, who died in 2024, was a retired chief of police of North Arlington, New Jersey, and the father of James Zadroga, who died in 2006 from his 9/11-related health issues.

“We didn’t get the acknowledgement people were getting sick until after he died,” Joseph Zadroga said in 2022. “Luckily, he died in New Jersey so when the medical examiner did the autopsy, he put on the death certificate he died of all of the contaminants from 9/11 and that blew it all wide open. Prior to that, all the editors and producers, senators, members of Congress, anybody you would talk to, were told to leave the story alone.”

At the time, when the cleanup was underway, there were a handful of people who pushed back on the air being safe to breathe, like Rep. Jerry Nadler and former Daily News columnist Juan González, who told Democracy Now his writing “about the dangers, the health dangers, in the future for people who were living in or working at ground zero have proven to be true.”

Joel Kupferman, the executive director of the New York Environmental Law and Justice Project, worked closely with first responder unions right after 9/11 who were concerned about their members’ exposure to toxins in the air.

“It was mainly their withholding of information about the contamination of City Hall due to the large amount of World Trade Center dust that penetrated, and they disingenuously told us that there was no detection from the air monitors," Kupferman told City & State. “That was an indication to me it was just hocus pocus and complete misrepresentation of the data. The city told pregnant mothers and children that it was safe to go back.”

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Commentary: The political arrival of Muslim New York

Asad Dandia — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 05:00:00 -0400

In the lead-up to the 2021 New York City Democratic mayoral primary, candidate Eric Adams showed up to a late-night religious service at a Muslim community center under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. It was the 27th night of Ramadan, a night that most Muslims often hold to be “Laylatul Qadr” – the Night of Destiny – marking the night when the Quran was first revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. For most Muslims the world over, it is the most sacred night of the year, spent entirely in prayer and reflection. Up until that point, no candidate for mayor had campaigned on the Night of Destiny, let alone knew of its significance to Muslims. Adams became the first in the city’s history to do so, and that night, he spoke pointedly but warmly about having the community’s back when they were targeted by police surveillance, religious discrimination, and Islamophobia. He would win the election later that year, carrying the votes of the outer borough ethnic enclaves, labor unions and the business community, while losing with college-educated progressives. For many Muslim New Yorkers, it felt as though they had finally made it as a political force.

This was an unusual experience for a community that isn’t considered part of the city’s traditional or legacy “ethnic blocs.” Islam, of course, is not an ethnic group, and unlike Jews, Muslims are not an ethnoreligious community. Thus, to categorize the community as a singular bloc poses challenges: The diaspora comprises people from dozens of Muslim-majority countries, converts of countless nationalities (the fastest growing are Latino), and of course Black American Muslims, who were the first Muslims on this continent. But if there was a precipitating moment that galvanized them all to cohere as one, it was the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Scholars who write about Islamophobia in the United States will often say that Islam and Muslims are racialized. This means that even if they come from various ethnic or racial backgrounds, state policy and mainstream pop culture understood them as one. Of course, Muslims have their own internal unifying discourses (Muslims think of themselves as part of an “ummah” in the same way that Jews think of themselves as part of an “am”) but nothing united them politically like the shared experience of being targeted by the state for their religion. After 9/11, one could say that a Bangladeshi from Ozone Park, a Yemeni from Bay Ridge, a Gambian from Fordham Heights, an African American from Bedford-Stuyvesant and an Albanian from Tompkinsville might be part of the same organized community – Muslim New Yorkers.

As a late millennial, I came of age in a city where these social and political realities were the norm, and it completely altered the course of my life. In late 2011, when I was a college student, my friends and I started a faith-based charity organization, Muslims Giving Back, aimed at delivering food and groceries to poor families. In March 2012, a young South Asian man my age – 19 at the time – based in Queens messaged me on Facebook asking if he could participate in our work. I received these requests often from young Muslims wanting to get involved in service work that was grounded in faith, so I introduced him to my organization and friends’ group.

About a month later, an older brother figure in my neighborhood wanted to share something with me in confidence. This person was a police officer, and one evening while he was off duty, we met at our mosque and he took me into his car (but not without shutting both our phones off and throwing them into the trunk) to tell me that the NYPD was watching me, and that his precinct had a file with my name and photos in it. He asked me to be careful in my work, knowing full well how police can target our communities. Later that month, I had heard from another source that we were being surveilled. We decided we’d shut down the organization after a major summer event we had planned. But the organization continued to grow, and we were on cloud nine, so we decided to continue working.

In October 2012, as I returned home from delivering food, I received a text inviting me to check Facebook. When I did, I saw a Facebook status confession from the young man from Queens admitting to being an informant sent by the NYPD to investigate terrorism. My entire community was shattered. Shortly thereafter, I received an email from some civil rights attorneys at the CUNY School of Law who wanted to speak with me, and when we met, they had told me that they were working on a lawsuit to challenge the NYPD for targeting Muslims, and that they wanted me as a plaintiff. One of those lawyers was Ramzi Kassem.

Few New Yorkers were cognizant at the time – and perhaps not many know today – that the New York City government under the leadership of Mayor Mike Bloomberg implemented a widespread surveillance program targeting Muslim New Yorkers. Our mosques, restaurants, student groups and nonprofit organizations were all infiltrated by plainclothes informants. Not a single terror lead was found, but relationships and communities were completely torn apart.

It was personal for me. Imagine coming home one night to find out that a person whom you invited into your home, introduced to your family, broke bread with, shared intimate conversations with, and had sleepovers with was a government agent reporting on your activity to a police handler as if you were part of a sleeper cell.

I decided to join the class-action lawsuit, which was also being led by the American Civil Liberties Union along with CUNY, and the next few years – the entirety of my early 20s – were spent fighting back against these civil rights violations, which were a threat not just to Muslims but to all New Yorkers. After years of a protracted battle, we secured a settlement containing several policy changes in 2017, bringing an end to the discriminatory surveillance of Muslims and completely changing the course of the city’s history. It marked a turning point in the history of Muslim New York and paved the way for what was to come nearly a decade later.

In the summer of 2024, another South Asian millennial had reached out to me to seek my advice for an idea he had. This one wasn’t a spy. His idea was to run for mayor of New York City, and he wanted my help. Adams – who was the first to recognize that Muslims were essential to the city’s fabric – had been embroiled in federal indictments and corruption charges, and much of the community felt betrayed by him by what they felt was his one-sided approach to the war in Gaza. For Zohran Mamdani, a bona fide pro-Palestinian activist, this was an opportunity to offer a more humane approach.

The Assembly member wanted to chat about the possibilities of his mayoral campaign, his path to victory and an important question that few in New York politics have ever had to consider: how to galvanize the Muslim vote. We were initially going to meet at Qahwah House in Greenwich Village, but changed to Caffé Reggio, because a Yemeni coffee shop would’ve been the worst place for two Muslims to hold a secret meeting. We spoke at length, and a week or two later, he called to recruit me to his “kitchen cabinet,” a political campaign term referring to one’s informal advisers.

The press makes a mistake when it assumes that the Muslim vote was guaranteed for Mamdani. It was not. He happens to be a Shia, a democratic socialist and a theological progressive. Most Muslims are not all those things. But most Muslims also do not have views that are fixed. The great thing about politics is people can be moved and change.

Over the course of his campaign, Mamdani spoke at over 50 mosques (citing me by name as his friend through one of my tweets in every stump speech he gave), and on the last Friday before the Democratic primary, had 300 volunteers at roughly 136 mosques in the city, marking the largest Friday prayer canvas in American history. He went on to win about 90% of the Muslim vote, according to The Associated Press, leading to jokes that he won democratically in the overwhelming way Arab dictators win undemocratically by putting up “Assad numbers” in these communities.

For Muslim New Yorkers, 9/11 was a precipitating event. Now, 25 years later, and nearly 10 years after the success of our lawsuit, we have a Muslim mayor of New York City. Kassem, who is his chief counsel, was also my attorney when we sued the NYPD. In a classic New York story, Muslims have progressed from suing the government to leading the government. On the Night of Destiny, Adams understood that Muslims are essential to New York City. But destiny would have it that Mamdani would be the one to raise the profile of Muslim New Yorkers more than any other mayor before him. We finally made it.

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The 2026 Manhattan Power 100

City & State — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 05:00:00 -0400

Manhattan’s status quo is under threat, and not just because of a far-left mayor from Queens who’s making himself at home in Gracie Mansion. New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin, an Upper East Sider, hasn’t pulled any punches since assuming the leadership post at the start of the year. Three members of Congress representing parts of Manhattan – Reps. Jerry Nadler, Adriano Espaillat and Dan Goldman – are heading for the exits, with a trio of politicians lined up to succeed them. Meanwhile, there’s a new U.S attorney for the Southern District of New York, a new leader of the Partnership for New York City and a new president of Columbia University – and it’s an open question what each one will make of their new job.

But that’s a question for 2027. As for now, we have an updated ranking of the Manhattanites who are true power brokers in New York City and state politics and government. City & State’s latest Manhattan Power 100, written and researched in partnership with journalist Aaron Short, sheds light on the biggest players across the borough.

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Pataki says Mamdani should skip 9/11 memorial

Rebecca C. Lewis — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 17:44:35 -0400

Republican former Gov. George Pataki exclusively told City & State on Thursday that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani should skip the upcoming 9/11 memorial commemorating its 25th anniversary – an extraordinary demand from the man who was governor at the time of the 2001 attack.

“With respect to the mayor, I think anyone who doesn’t intentionally distance themselves from Hasan Piker, who has said that America deserved the attacks of September 11th, should not be there,” Pataki told City & State, referencing the left-wing influencer and frequent Mamdani booster. “Anyone who has refused to reject the phrase ‘globalize the intifada,’ which unequivocally calls for violence against Jews, not just in Israel but anywhere in the world, should not be at that site.”

During a mayoral debate last year, Mamdani condemned Piker’s comments about 9/11, which the streamer has also disavowed, but he continues to associate with Piker.

Pataki said he typically believes in “inclusion,” even of people who he doesn’t agree with. But he said the 9/11 memorial is different as it isn’t a government or political event. “I think (the mayor) has two choices: reject those extremist views against America and calling for violence against Jews, or voluntarily decide it's not in the families’ and the victims’ interest for him to be there,” he said.

A growing number of family members of 9/11 victims have said they don't want Mamdani, the city's first Muslim mayor, to attend the memorial service this year. A petition to that effect has attracted signatures from 98,000 people – though only a small percentage of the petition signers appear to be related to 9/11 victims. Many of them, like Pataki, have pointed to Mamdani’s association with Piker. The petition cites a number of other reasons as well, including Mamdani’s father’s academic work on suicide bombers and the mayor’s endorsement of candidates like state Senate Democratic nominee Aber Kawas and congressional Democratic nominee Darializa Avila Chevalier.

Conservatives have amplified these demands, and Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman said attendees should turn their backs on Mamdani at the memorial should the mayor attend, which Mamdani is expected to do.

Mamdani has said he still plans to attend the memorial on Sept. 11. “I will proudly honor the families, the survivors, the first responders forever impacted by that horrific terror attack by standing alongside them at this year's 9/11 commemoration, reaffirming that we will never forget the solemn day felt by all of us who call this city home and, frankly, by all of us who call this country home,” he said in a statement.

Pataki previously hinted at the idea he might add his voice to those demanding Mamdani’s absence. He told reporters at an August event in Albany that he had “grave concerns” about the mayor’s comments, before saying he “may have comments” at a later date about the mayor’s attendance at the 9/11 memorial at a later date.

No New York City mayor has skipped the 9/11 memorial event, so the demand that Mamdani do so is unprecedented. City Council Speaker Julie Menin, who has frequently criticized the Mamdani administration, called the campaign to keep the mayor from the memorial “absolutely inappropriate.” Menin, who previously chaired the Manhattan community board overseeing the World Trade Center site, noted that politicians explicitly aren’t permitted to give speeches at the event in order to keep the attention on the victims and their families, and said the push to keep Mamdani away from the memorial is itself politicizing the event.

Even if Mamdani attends the memorial, there will still be one extraordinary absence. President Donald Trump does not plan to attend the New York City memorial, reportedly because he was not allowed to give a speech. He will be the only living president who won’t be at the event in Manhattan.

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Meet the cop-loving North Country dairy farmer Democrat trying to flip Stefanik’s seat

Zach Jaworski — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 05:00:00 -0400

In New York’s largest congressional district, you see the campaign yard signs before you see just about anything else.

Staked at the end of driveways and on corners of naked intersections of roads that stretch for tens of miles through one-stoplight towns, sprawling farm fields and the Adirondacks.

Rep. Elise Stefanik’s name used to appear everywhere, since replaced with the name of President Donald Trump’s choice to succeed her, the eccentric – and often controversial – Anthony Constantino, who owns the T-shirt printing company Sticker Mule, and is a cage-fight promoter, musician and congressional candidate on the side.

But this cycle, it’s hard not to notice an uptick in signs for the Democratic nominee, Blake Gendebien, whose logo features the outline of a traditional red barn.

Gendebien is running as a moderate who wants to secure the border, “worship” law enforcement and keep dairy, beer and other traded goods cheap. And Gendebien thinks that profile, facing off against a wild-card candidate like Constantino in what’s shaping up to be an anti-Trump, blue wave year, could be the perfect recipe to flip the 21st Congressional District, one of New York’s reddest seats.

Gendebien is a dairy farmer by trade, and visiting his farm in Lisbon, just 20 minutes south of the Canadian border, it’s easy to see where the inspiration for the barn on his signs came from.

He arrived to meet me driving a green John Deere Gator, right at noon. Maeve Kelly, his spokesperson, said he doesn’t do any campaign work before then, using the mornings to keep his farm running.

“You see those wooden silos off in the distance over there, the red ones?” Gendebien asked, pointing northwest. “That’s where I grew up.”

Gendebien, who describes himself as “a pragmatic reflection of the district,” was born and raised in the district, on the farm his parents bought after stints as Peace Corps volunteers in Bolivia. The same can’t be said about Democratic candidates in recent cycles. Manhattan cannabis attorney Paula Collins was brand new to the district when she ran in 2024. Two years earlier, former CIA officer Matt Castelli couldn’t shake his connection to the Hudson Valley – Stefanik slammed him as a “Far Left Downstate Democrat from Poughkeepsie.”

Apart from farming, Gendebien previously served as vice chair of Agri-Mark – a $1 billion dairy cooperative – served on his local school board in Lisbon, coached basketball and founded a nonprofit alongside his wife, Carmen, for victims of pediatric cancer.

After graduating from Penn State, Gendebien returned home and grew the family farm from 50 dairy cows to 500 – which, with help from his 15 employees, netted him north of 38,000 pounds of milk daily. That goes toward the more than 16 billion pounds of milk produced annually in upstate New York, making it the region’s largest agricultural sector.

Grant Reeher, a Syracuse University political scientist, said that kind of connection is “essential” in a district like this one.

“The North Country’s different from the rest of the state – it’s really important that the person that represents it, at least for the voters, has a real connection,” Reeher said.

The 21st District is the largest congressional district by area in New York – and one of the largest on the East Coast – stretching from the towns west of Albany through the Adirondacks up to the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Canadian border.

“If there was going to be a recipe for a Democrat to win that district, it would be a guy like this in a year like this,” Reeher added.

The North Country has long been represented by Republicans – and Trump won the district by double-digit margins all three times he’s run, including a 21-point win in 2024. While Democrats remember that Barack Obama won the district twice, albeit with slightly different lines, the last Democrat – and the only one in the 21st century – to represent the North Country’s sprawling district was Bill Owens, who won a special election in 2009 when a Republican and Conservative Party candidate split the vote against him. He narrowly was reelected to two full terms before retiring in 2014.

Since then, Stefanik has held the safe red seat, consistently winning by double digits and bringing the district national recognition as chair of the House Republican Conference and staunch Trump ally.

When asked about Stefanik’s time in Washington, D.C., Gendebien said that “she worked incredibly hard.” Specifically, he noted her advocacy for first responder resources that he said saved his mother when she had a stroke. “I appreciate that,” he added.

Mid-interview, one of Gendebien’s three sons, Miles, came out of the house to ask his dad if he could borrow his truck to get a haircut. Gendebien told me that Miles, who graduated from college last spring, had just returned from helping a farmer in a nearby town.

“We’re crossing the aisle,” Gendebien joked, revealing that the farmer happens to be a Republican. “That’s important in this district.”

In mid-August, I trailed Gendebien at the Bannertown Fair parade in Mayfield, about 50 miles north of Albany, as he lagged behind the other Democrats he was marching with.

“You guys need some candy,” he told one man, who pulled a lit cigar from his pursed lips to let a smile crack through. “Can I have one of the cigars?” Gendebien jokingly asked. He and his wife tossed candy to almost every kid they saw, and talked to their voting-age parents too before jogging to catch up with his partisans.

At one point, Gendebien stopped to talk with a woman in her mid-20s. On her truck flew a “blue lives matter” flag. Below it, on the lawn itself, was one of Gendebien’s campaign signs.

“It didn’t surprise me at all – nobody supports law enforcement more than I do,” Gendebien told me later when I asked him about the interaction. “Our law enforcement needs to be worshipped and they need to be put on a pedestal and supported.”

Gendebien also finds common ground with conservatives on immigration enforcement, which he said the Trump administration “has done a good job of, and I support.”

“But we also need to streamline the legal process,” he said, adding that his wife, Carmen, “escaped communism” when she legally immigrated to the United States from Cuba.

Blake Gendebien with his wife, Carmen, in front of the campaign sign with the barn. / Zach Jaworski

However, he doesn’t want his immigration opinions confused with the other main “border issue” in the 21st Congressional District: tariffs.

The U.S. currently exports more than $1 billion of dairy products annually into Canada, which could be hindered after the Canadian government introduced 50% retaliatory tariffs on U.S. milk and cheese products last month.

“Our relationship with Ontario and Quebec is so very important to the economy here,” Gendebien said, noting that even the local favorite beer, Labatt Blue, is imported – though he prefers Coors Banquet himself. “Now we have this yo-yo effect and we can’t plan for our businesses.”

Being a Democrat in New York state means a lot of different things in 2026 – especially given the rise of democratic socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. And the Democratic Socialists of America had their own slate of victories this summer, including in cities upstate.

However, Gendebien said he isn’t worried about being tied to that brand of Democratic politics. “I don’t even know what the full acronym of DSA stands for,” he said, adding that he hadn’t heard of it until six months ago.

“New York City’s problems are 6 1/2 hours away, completely different issues to what we’re facing here in the North Country,” he said

But Gendebien isn’t just distancing himself from the socialists. He declined to comment on whether he’d support Hakeem Jeffries to be speaker of the House if Democrats win it back this fall.

Jeffries, the current House minority leader, may need his vote for his speakership bid to be successful – especially as a handful of progressive candidates prefer a new face. But even if Gendebien isn’t willing to stand with him while running, Jeffries is backing Gendebien. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee labeled the 21st District as a “district in play” last month, a sign that more PAC money could be headed up north.

But Gendebien has also had his own success fundraising at the local level, raising nearly $5.5 million from thousands of individual donors as of the most recent filings in July, while his opponent, Constantino, has self-funded with $12 million.

Constantino has been recently caught up in controversy – including an online video with comedian Ricky Berwick where he jokes about being given a “pass” to use a slur for people with disabilities – and his close ties to the unpopular president could fuel the opposition. In the primary, the state Republican Party supported Constantino’s more mainstream opponent, Assembly Member Robert Smullen.

The parade in Mayfield came just days after the first public poll of the cycle had Gendebien with a slight lead over Constantino, but a second poll by a different outfit found Constantino with a comfortable lead. Still, Gendebien is adamant his campaign is the right strategy.

“These are not Democrat issues, they’re not Republican issues,” he said, “they’re North Country issues and upstate New York issues, and that’s what I want to fight for.”

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This week’s biggest Winners & Losers

City & State — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 05:00:00 -0400

New York City won its war on rats. Albany is … working on its war on pigeons. But New York now has a new animal menace: the tick. For outdoorsy New Yorkers, this may not seem like news. But this isn't your average tick season. Lyme disease cases are up 16% around New York, and state Health Commissioner James McDonald went so far as to say “the ticks are winning.”

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Blakeman sends fake pied-à-terre letters in campaign stunt

Rebecca C. Lewis — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 17:20:50 -0400

More than a month after the worst of the rocky rollout of New York City’s pied-à-terre tax, Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman’s campaign is sending some awfully official-looking “memorandums of tax assessment” to New York City homeowners, claiming those people would be subject to the city’s new tax on second homes while soliciting them for campaign donations. He appears to be treating as a potential donor list the same homeowner data he criticized New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani for releasing.

City & State obtained pictures of the materials, which were sent to a couple in Queens. “According to our records, you own a secondary property that has been identified as subject to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax,” reads the letter leading the package. “Your information, including your full name and address, has been released publicly by the city’s Department of Finance.”

The letter, labeled a “memorandum of tax assessment” in the header, does contain the necessary campaign disclosures associating it with the Blakeman campaign. “Not official government business” is printed in the header as well, and the bottom of the document includes the disclaimer “Paid for by Blakeman for New York.”

But the recipients, described as “die-hard Republican immigrants” by the source who shared the photos, were immediately panicked when they first opened their mail and saw the letter. And it wouldn’t be the first time they panicked over such a thing.

A letter from the Blakeman campaign impersonated a letter from the New York City Department of Finance. / Obtained by City & State

The city publicly releases tax rolls yearly which contains information on homeowners related to their taxable properties. But the list released in July caused confusion and concern as it contained hundreds of thousands of primary residences despite purporting to detail residences that could be eligible for the second-home surcharge. In the end, the city directly contacted only 17,000 people to notify them they may need to pay the tax, meaning the vast majority of people on the public list never received official correspondence on the matter.

The source added the recipients would own only one home – their primary residence – and are not subject to the tax. “It’s bad enough Mamdani screwed up the rollout, even worse when the (gubernatorial) candidate they support sends it again and makes them panic,” the source said.

In addition to the “memorandum of tax assessment,” the package includes a separate explanation from Blakeman and a plea for campaign contributions. “I sent you this tax memorandum today because Kathy Hochul and Zohran Mamdani want you to pay a new pied-à-terre tax to fund their socialist agenda,” the letter signed by Blakeman reads. “I’m writing you as the Republican Nominee for governor of New York because on day one of my administration, I will move to ELIMINATE this ridiculous tax.”

The Blakeman campaign’s package also included donation requests and other materials. / Obtained by City & State

A post script implored recipients to “join (his) team with a $50 or more contribution.” The full package of materials also included a contribution form and a return envelope addressed to Blakeman’s campaign PO box.

Republicans across New York have sought to tie their opponents closely to the democratic socialist Mamdani – and that’s especially true of Blakeman’s approach to Gov. Kathy Hochul. It’s not a new tactic, as Republicans in the past have similarly sought to link Democratic governors to New York City mayors unpopular in the suburbs. But statewide polling shows that Mamdani is still popular, and the governor hasn’t been shy about standing with the mayor in areas of agreement, such as the tax on second homes she signed. Still, the rollout of the pied-à-terre tax is not the governor’s responsibility, but the city’s – making it a bit of a reach to campaign on.

A spokesperson for Blakeman didn’t provide an answer when asked how the campaign chose the addresses to send these campaign materials to. But it likely relied on a list of 950,000 New York City residences released by the city Department of Finance of homes that may have been eligible for the second-home surcharge. The release of the information was widely panned, especially by the conservatives.

“Kathy Hochul and Zohran Mamdani owe New Yorkers a tremendous apology – for making New York even more unaffordable with another tax and then botching its rollout so badly that they published the wrong addresses on the city’s official website,” Blakeman said in a statement when reached for comment about the mailers.

Blakeman’s frequent use of artificial intelligence has garnered scrutiny in the past several months, raising questions about whether failing to disclose that use may violate election law, as they can constitute deceptive political communication. The package sent to New York City homeowners on their face appear potentially deceptive as well, but election attorney Sarah Steiner said they are technically allowed. “Sadly, lying and misleading are not necessarily illegal,” she said in a text to City & State. “This is manipulative scaremongering.”

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Harry Nespoli reflects on the evolution of the labor movement

John Celock — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 05:00:00 -0400

Harry Nespoli retired last year after decades as one of the top union leaders in New York City. A five-decade veteran of the city Sanitation Department, Nespoli retired as president of the Uniformed Sanitationmen’s Association and as chair of the Municipal Labor Committee. In a Q&A, Nespoli talked about how New York City’s labor movement has changed over the past two decades and how the city needs to address affordability issues affecting municipal workers. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How has the labor movement in New York evolved over the past 20 years?

Well, there’s more pressure on unions, only because of the cost of living in the city. So that means that the concern of all the unions in the labor movement is to satisfy the members the best they possibly can. With the cost of what’s going on in the city right now compared to what it was years ago, I mean, congestion pricing, everything costs money now, and I think that the labor movement is doing a very good job of representing their members, and it seems like a lot of unions are getting frustrated with their members not getting a big enough raise to keep up with what the cost for New Yorkers is.

How would you rate the New York City mayors that you worked with?

Probably the one that really kind of knew what the unions were looking for in the beginning was (Mike) Bloomberg. He’s a businessman. I went to the City Council to speak in favor of getting an extra term for Bloomberg because 9/11 was there, and the city was really in shambles as far as money was concerned. Who do you want at the helm? You want somebody that doesn’t know how to do business? No, and he won. He got the term.

Since you stepped down there has not been a permanent chair of the Municipal Labor Committee. Do you think this is hindering the committee work?

The MLC is very, very powerful, and the people that are on the board are able to turn around and run the MLC because they’re together. And when they’re together, that’s when that’s dangerous for the city of New York, because if you slap one around, the other one’s looking at you. So, I know they had the runoff and they didn’t get the third or whatever, but I think there’s something they’re still working on now, and I think it’s going to be resolved, and it’ll be a single person on top. But again, that’s a board, and the board rules there.

You had a chance to work closely with Jessica Tisch when she was sanitation commissioner. How would you rate her work at both the city’s Sanitation Department and the Police Department?

Whenever she wanted to speak, I was there. Whenever I wanted to speak to her, she was there. She is very, very creative. She’s not a pushover, and she asks you a question, she knows the answer already. She’s a very, very intelligent person and she comes to work and she works. And anytime I wanted her, anytime I called her, she was involved. Anytime I had a gripe about something, she sat down and she waited and she voiced her opinion, and she gave me her answer to it. That’s all I could ask for, is somebody that is willing to listen and willing to weigh the problem and to come up with something together. I’ll tell you one thing, she’s doing a hell of a job as commissioner of the Police Department. And, you know, it’s a tough job. Tisch is a hell of a worker. She ain’t scared of work.

What do you think Jessica Tisch’s political future is?

I think that I think she has a great future ahead of her politically, no matter which way she goes, because she’s there, and she shows up. She was always there in sanitation, always. I think that she has a great future as long as she wants to continue doing it.

How has the Department of Sanitation evolved over time?

It’s doing great. It really is. From the time when I loaded the truck in 1970 when I was hired to the time that I retired last year, it’s progressed along excellently. You got some good union leaders in there now, and you got some great management leaders there. And we’ve always had an open door policy that we can work it out as long as we get to a meeting. The department never turned me down, no matter who the commissioner was, and I never turned the department down. I always, no matter who the labor relations (commissioner was), Jim Hanley and Renee Campion. But when you reached across the table, you shook a hand, you knew you had a deal. That was it. Renee, when Renee gave her word, she kept her word. And whatever was across the table, she always remembered, and I always remembered too.

How do you view the entire debate and fights over Medicare Advantage? What are your thoughts looking back on that?

I thought the program was put together well, I really did. But, the members didn’t want it, some retirees didn’t want it, and you got to let it go sometimes.

And speaking of the state, how do you think Gov. Kathy Hochul is doing?

She’s doing the best she possibly can do, but it’s politics, and now it has changed. And you don’t know until you count the ballots. Every time I talk to her, she sounds positive, she sounds good, and she’s been around. Everybody likes to change, change, change, but you know what? Sometimes change isn’t good.

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Hochul says Trump is ‘defunding the police’ amid growing tension with Washington

Sophie Krichevsky — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 17:42:34 -0400

“Let me translate that in real simple terms: Donald Trump is defunding the police,” Gov. Kathy Hochul said at a press conference Tuesday at her Midtown office. Flanked by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, state Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services Commissioner Terrence O’Leary and law enforcement leaders. Hochul called on the Trump administration to release $87 million in counterterrorism funding the federal government still owes the state from a year ago.

The governor’s plea comes as she has been subject to criticism from the right – including her Republican opponent Bruce Blakeman as she runs for reelection – that she has not been particularly tough on crime, which dogged her in her 2022 run, too. She’s instead put “defund” onto Trump, in a subversion of one of the most politicized political phrases since 2020. And she did so standing next to Mamdani, who previously had called to “defund the police,” but backed away while running for mayor last year. Just as pointing the finger at Trump has become part of the governor’s reelection playbook, increasingly, having Mamdani by her side is, too.

It’s not the first time the governor has spoken about the concept of Trump defunding the police, specifically in regard to the $187 million. In response to Trump administration proposals to loosen firearm restrictions, Hochul recalled at a July 30 press conference calling the president last year to demand he restore the funds.

“‘Mr. President, do I have to say you’re defunding the police? Is that what you guys are doing now? That’s not going to play well with your people,’” she said at the time. And a January Hochul campaign email called out Blakeman for failing to say anything when “Trump attempted to defund the police.”

Last October, Trump posted on Truth Social saying he’d reverse $187 million worth of federal cuts to aid New York’s counterterrorism efforts after Hochul penned a letter to then-U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. But only $100 million of that money ever made its way to New York, Hochul said – meaning less funding for intelligence operations, training, equipment and transit security.

“After a quarter century of successfully thwarting other attacks on our homeland, our brave police and firefighters learn that the Trump administration is abandoning them,” Hochul said, referring to the upcoming 25th anniversary of 9/11. “That’s right – Donald Trump is withholding funding intended to keep New Yorkers safe from another terrorism attack.”

Meanwhile, downtown at 26 Federal Plaza, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin claimed his agency arrested more than 2,100 immigrants in New York City over the last month, criticized the state’s new law limiting local law enforcement’s cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement through 287(g) agreements, and suggested the state and city are less safe under Hochul and Mamdani.

“I don’t think we should be sending one federal penny to sanctuary states and sanctuary cities,” Mullin said.

Hochul and Mamdani pushed back on the idea that New York City’s lack of a 287(g) agreement has made the city less safe. There’s never been one, the governor said, and major crime categories are at record lows. She also pushed back on Mullin’s estimate of more than 2,100 arrests. “There is no way that that number constitutes people who have committed crimes the way we consider a crime a crime in New York state,” Hochul said. “They consider anybody who crossed the border a criminal.”

Rounding out the Trump administration’s New York offensive, U.S. Small Business Administrator Kelly Loeffler was in Bayside, Queens, with City Council Member Vickie Paladino to oppose the mayor’s plan to build five city-owned grocery stores – none of which have been planned for the suburban Queens district at this point.

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City Council grills Mamdani’s pick for key housing position

Sahalie Donaldson — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 17:37:14 -0400

New York City Council members grilled John Mangin, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pick for a key housing position, during a lengthy confirmation hearing on Tuesday, pressing him on his views on development, homeownership and whether he’d defer to council member and local voices while weighing in on the city’s land use process.

Mangin, who currently leads the Department of City Planning’s housing division, was nominated by the mayor in June to chair the Board of Standards and Appeals, an independent five-member board that oversees zoning requests and disputes in the city. Looming large over Mangin’s potential confirmation, however, is the fact that this board recently gained additional powers over the greenlighting and fast-tracking of some affordable housing projects. This was one of several charter revisions approved by voters via ballot proposals last year that diluted the City Council’s authority to reject or approve new housing in their districts. Changes included allowing some projects to sidestep City Council review – including setting up a fast-track for affordable housing through this board – and the creation of an appeals board with the ability to overrule City Council rejections of certain projects.

The board’s new power, as well as the fact that Mangin worked on the commission that advanced those changes, has made his quest for confirmation a hot issue. The majority of the City Council staunchly opposed the overhauls to the land use process last year, seeing them as an attack on the council’s longstanding practice of deferring to the local council members on land use actions. Now the fate of one of the people who helped weaken the body’s authority over projects in their districts is in their hands.

Mangin was in the hot seat for nearly three hours Tuesday, facing council members’ questioning far longer than the mayor’s other two nominees for separate positions. Throughout the hearing, council members repeatedly sought assurances that Mangin and the board wouldn’t disregard local voices while making decisions to approve or reject housing projects.

Promising to carefully consider council members’ input on any projects that affect their district, Mangin vowed that he would have “a completely open door policy” as chair. He was less definitive on how consequential that input may ultimately be. “I believe that local voices are paramount when it comes to projects, but also I’ve learned in my career that local voices aren’t the only voices that matter for land use decisions that have an effect on (the) broader community within the city level,” he said.

Other concerns council members cited centered on some of the things Mangin wrote in a paper for the Stanford University Law and Policy Review more than a decade ago, including the idea that “wealthy homeowner cartels” are to blame for the housing supply issue and that policies like community benefit agreements can actually end up increasing housing prices. Noting that he hadn’t written the paper about New York City specifically, Mangin attested that he’s a strong supporter of home ownership. He also said that he believes community benefit agreements are an important piece of tackling the housing crisis, though they must be carried out in conjunction with building enough housing.

Mangin’s supporters in the pro-housing space are many, ranging from groups like the Real Estate Board of New York to Open New York. That puts the City Council in a tough spot. Rejecting his nomination could open the body up to accusations of NIMBY-ism at a time in which the city is grappling with a historic housing crisis.

Some, like Dan Garodnick, former director of the Department of City Planning, voiced strong defenses of Mangin at Tuesday’s hearing.

“A lot of what happened at the hearing today was taking small bits and pieces of words that John has written in law review journals,” Garodnick told council members. “Yes he is an academic and yes he is a booster of all types of housing at all levels and all corners of the city, but what should not get lost here is he is as qualified and excellent a candidate as one might find for this role.”

One person markedly absent from Tuesday’s hearing was Speaker Julie Menin, who has so far publicly refrained from taking a position on Mangin’s nomination.

“Today’s hearing provided Council Members with an important opportunity to hear directly from Mr. Mangin and ask questions about his background and potential approach to the BSA,” she said in a statement after the hearing. “I had a productive meeting with Mr. Mangin last week, and I look forward to consulting with my colleagues in the coming days as we review his nomination.”

The full City Council vote to approve or reject Mangin’s nomination will likely take place next week at the upcoming stated meeting, according to a spokesperson for Menin.

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Meet the brains behind the State Fair

Kate Lisa — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 13:57:56 -0400

The Great New York State Fair has been a summer tradition since before the Civil War, and the agricultural spectacle continues to delight over 1 million visitors in Syracuse for nearly two weeks each August. The 13-day fair – which runs from Aug. 26 through Sept. 7 – features hundreds of events, a wide variety of food, farm and cultural exhibits, including the 58th annual butter sculpture.

The fair has grown a whole lot bigger, and looks a bit different, than the first one in 1841, but state Fair Director Julie LaFave said many of its iconic traditions – like the 25-cent milk bar, famed butter sculpture and low ticket prices – aren’t going anywhere, at least as long as she’s in charge. She spoke with City & State on opening day about maintaining those traditions and some things she’d like to expand in the coming years to ensure the fair keeps up with the 21st century.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve been director how many years?

This is my fourth year being here, but it’s my third in charge.

I’m sure you’ve been coming many years before that.

Yeah, I didn’t grow up here, but I moved here about 20 years ago. So yeah, it was always a staple in my summer.

Where were you originally?

Michigan, but I moved around the country a bit – did that thing in my 20s and moved around – and then settled here.

What made you say, “I want to get involved in leading this event”?

I have 20 years in public service, and being a civil servant or in public service has always been something I really enjoy. My first 20 years of my career were in parks and recreation. I knew that I wanted to do that, and I also found a love of running large events and the logistics. I love the logistics of an event. I go to events on my own, and I look to see where they place trash cans, or I look to see the lines that people (are in), and it’s a very similar career to parks and recreation. You can run a large community festival. It’s all relatable, scalable.

What differentiates planning for the New York State Fair from another event?

We put so much emphasis on highlighting what is great about New York state, not just New York state, but New York state agriculture growers, producers, everybody who comes here and does business here, the small businesses, we highlight the animals, we highlight the farmers. It is the best of New York on display for 13 days.

Do you have a favorite part of the fair of all those days?

When I started, they told me it’s going to take me three fairs before I see everything, and I can confirm that that is true. If you look (at) how many buildings there are, there’s 375 acres. I want to get to know as many of the people who come year after year, in addition to the people who come for the first time, and to do that takes time. But I try my best over 13 days to walk through every building to say “hi” to at least one person in each booth, meet one of our animal owners, and it’s not something that can be accomplished in 13 days. Think about going to a city; you can’t walk every street, and you can’t walk every street in 13 days.

How many people do we have coming in? Is it still growing?

It is still growing. I think there’s a few things to keep in mind. I think a successful player is not always dictated by that attendance number, but people are always interested in that attendance number. I think 1 million mark is where everybody thinks that that’s a successful fair. There’s a lot of factors that people don’t take into consideration. The weather can impact things. Even if it’s raining, it doesn’t mean people don’t have a good time here. We have all of these buildings. We have a lot of places for people to take cover and to still explore.

You’ve seen everything now – so now what do you take into every year?

Now we’ve made some good assessments. We’ve made some good observations. We are careful to not touch those nostalgic things, but now we really put a lot of practice into keeping things fresh and new and adding what’s new that we can, and we compare with other fairs around the country too.

What are the nostalgic things that are never going anywhere?

Guarantee is a strong word, but I feel like it’s a guarantee that the milk will always be 25 cents, the potato will always be $1. I don’t know that the admission price will always be the same, but I think it’s a good guarantee. We remain the cheapest state fair in the country, and I think it’s always been important to this governor, and I think previous governors, as well. We want New Yorkers to come and experience that, and part of that is the price tag, as well. … We’re still cheaper than it was pre-pandemic to get in.

How is that possible?

I think of the State Fair almost (like) state parks or your local park. They don’t exist to make money. They exist to provide a service. They exist for their residents or their customers or their clients to get out and experience something. You don’t go to the state park to walk through the forest for them to make a profit. We want you to come to the state fair to experience New York, and we don’t want it to cost you a lot.

What do you want to change now that you’re finally solidly in this role?

We always want to attract new vendors. Arts and crafts changes. That’s a good example. So it was the Art and Home Center, now it’s the Creative Art Center. But you know, it’s not just needlework anymore. We still have needlework, but there’s new types of crafts out there. So everything we have is a competition. So this year, we have a fine art competition. We have a cookie decorating competition for America 250 this year. So we see what’s happening in the world, or in the fair world, and this year is America 250. So we’ve added new elements to match that. Next year, we’ll see what it is. In two years from now, it’ll be the 100th anniversary of the Haudenosaunee village here, and it’ll be the 100th anniversary of our ag museum here. So those two years, I imagine, will be trying something new to celebrate both of those occasions.

I have to ask you: What’s your favorite food here?

The best answer I always give to this, which I think frustrates people, is it’s like picking a favorite child. You can’t. I have two dogs, I can’t pick a favorite dog. I have five kids, I can’t pick a favorite one. But what I will guarantee everybody is that over 13 days I don’t repeat a meal. And this year, more than ever, I think our new options, our vendors have gone really wild with some of the concoctions that they’ve created.

Which ones are really exciting?

Actually, we have honey puffs with chocolate. We have deep fried ribs that came last year. Cool. There's a new crepe stand. There's new Greek food. I mean, the newest thing the last few years is sprinkling Hot Cheeto dust on things, or even Fruity Pebbles. Things like that. We have now a very large chocolate fountain. The Dubai chocolate’s big here. And then there’s the favorites, the sausages, the cheese dogs – I like a deep-fried pickle. I do like that.

How about struggling farmers? The governor talked about them a lot here at the fair. Is there anything the fair is doing to help them or educate people about their struggles?

We’re not as involved as our greater department because the fair is a part of (the state) Department of Agriculture and Markets. So on a much broader scale, the department I’m an employee of is doing a lot of work to help those farmers. Here at the state fair, we keep the entry levels low. For instance, in our dairy barn, we have a few rotations. We’re providing lunch to all of them – one of them was today. So it’s a small little gesture, but it’s a nice gesture. … I think it’s 400 lunches today, and we’re going to be doing that again throughout the fair. It’s called the rotation when one set of animals comes out and the next one comes in. When the next rotation comes in, we’re going to do that as well, and we’re looking at ways we can further appreciate them in future fairs.

Walking around with the governor too, you really see how politics – of course, they’re present, but they disappear a lot. Do you see politics come into the fair at all during the 13 days?

The fair is a lot of things to a lot of people. For some people, their memory is coming and showing their goat when they were 5 years old, and now they’re here with their grandkids. For some people, it's just they want to come here and just enjoy the music. I do think, for the most part, we see that set aside, and people just come here and find what makes them happy and discover new things. But you know, we do see a lot of it out of here, not included in these walls. There are certain vendors who are on either side, and we don't get involved in that. We don't vet vendors based on what their beliefs are or what side of an aisle they may be on, and you'll see vendors who are maybe selling products that quote unquote, from one party or another, but I don't think it's overwhelming, and I don't think it's prevalent here.

Anything else that you want people to know?

One of the things that in this administration I’m most proud of us doing is really expanding the accessibility of the fair. ADA has been around for a long time. We did not have our first sensory day or our first sensory space until three fairs ago. So this is the third fair, and every year we’ve expanded on it. So I’m very proud that three years ago we had one sensory room. Now, three years later, we have three sensory spaces. We now have the nation's first fully accessible restroom with an attendant, which has an adult changing table that goes up and down, which has a sink that goes up and down, adjustable. I’m really proud that we can offer these things because the fair may not have been accessible for people before. We have sign language interpreters at every concert. For our grounds entertainment acts, one of the shows a day will have sign language services. We also have sign language people on site at all times. So I’m proud that we’re making it truly accessible, because New Yorkers are everything.

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Book excerpt: How David Dinkins’ diverse coalition fell apart

City & State — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 05:00:00 -0400

David Dinkins, the first Black mayor of New York City, narrowly defeated Rudy Giuliani in 1989 with a fragile coalition of voters. The “gorgeous mosaic,” as he liked to describe the city’s diverse communities, that he tiled together in 1989 had fallen apart by the time he sought reelection in 1993. The Dinkins era, as described by author James J. Barney, a Brooklyn native and professor of legal studies in the American Public University System, was a time of transition. Racial tensions were heightened by high-profile police killings, crime was historically high nationwide and the AIDS epidemic was peaking in the early ’90s. Dinkins had to deal with all of that, and keep his core constituencies happy – which was impossible when their goals were in opposition to each other. From the introduction of “A Fragile Alliance: David Dinkins, Coalition Politics, and the Struggle to Govern a City in Crisis,” a new book that comes out Sept. 1 from Fordham University Press, Barney explores Dinkins’ legacy and outlines his main thesis.

Excerpt from A Fragile Alliance: David Dinkins, Coalition Politics, and the Struggle to Govern a City in Crisis by James J. Barney. Copyright © 2026 by Fordham University Press. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

When David Dinkins passed away on November 23, 2020, the public and media response differed markedly from what he had received while in ofﬁce as mayor of New York City. Dinkins’s death sparked an outpouring of largely positive obituaries for a man who had been the subject of harsh criticism by New York City’s tabloid and local press during his time in ofﬁce. Dinkins, a soft-spoken liberal, lacked the bravado and bluster of both his predecessor, three-term mayor Ed Koch, and his successor, Rudy Giuliani. In 1993, many in New York City viewed Dinkins as a well-meaning man who was simply not up for the job, and New York City voters cast Dinkins out of ofﬁce, ending his political career. But the passage of time has led many to reconsider Dinkins’s tenure and legacy, and this book represents one such attempt. By integrating newly released archival collections with underexplored community-speciﬁc news sources, this book critically assesses the limits and possibilities of identity-based liberalism in urban governance.

My thesis is that analysis of the fragile nature of Dinkins’s political coalition and his inability to navigate the complexities of modern liberalism provides insight into the shift from the Great Society liberalism of the 1960s and 1970s to the neoliberalism adopted by Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party at the national level in the 1990s. While this thesis may not seem groundbreaking in 2025, the time of this writing, Dinkins and the initial commentators did not fully appreciate the skill required to assemble a complex political coalition or the difﬁculties of governing during this transition period. Dinkins attributed his failure to white racism, while his detractors cited his incompetence or poor decision making. These assessments overlooked the inherent complexity of Dinkins’s undertakings, the changing nature of liberalism during that era, and the shifting political landscape of the 1980s and early 1990s, which featured the departure of large numbers of white working-class voters from the Democratic Party; the politics of drugs and crime, which confounded Great Society liberals like Dinkins; and the prioritization of other issues like the economy and public safety over appeals to identity.

Dinkins, New York City’s ﬁrst African American mayor, has often been remembered more for his defeat than his achievements. Yet his mayoralty offers a crucial window into the difﬁculty of crafting policy and maintaining a liberal consensus in an era of robust identity politics. Dinkins sought to create a durable electoral coalition that included people from diverse back-grounds. But each constituent of his electoral coalition competed for limited resources in a city plagued by a recession and budget constraints. In such an environment, each part of his coalition advanced conﬂicting goals and agendas, providing a window into both liberalism and the Democratic Party in a time of transition. So, while he may have been a good man with a noble vision for a diverse New York City, he failed, in large part, because he did not forge a universalist message powerful enough to unify the city, providing a warning of the dangers of identity politics.

In the 1980s, when he was Manhattan borough president, Dinkins described New York City as a “gorgeous mosaic” composed of separate and unique neighborhoods that created a complex but beautiful city unlike any other in the world. When he published his autobiography in 2013, Dinkins again described the city as a “gorgeous mosaic.” Yet during his term as mayor in the early 1990s, New York City faced a collection of serious problems that included the lingering impacts of the 1970s ﬁscal crisis and the 1977 blackout, increased racial tension, white ﬂight, a crack epidemic, the apex of the AIDS pandemic, a recession, a real estate slump, and even a secession movement. Together, they rendered New York City nearly “ungovernable.” New York City’s genuine problems were exacerbated by a tabloid and a local press that sensationalized the city’s numerous challenges, creating a sense of malaise and fear that the city was drifting back to the “bad old days” of the 1970s. When Dinkins, who had previously won only one race for elected ofﬁce and who was completing his single term as Manhattan borough president, announced that he would challenge then-mayor Koch, who was attempting to secure a fourth term in ofﬁce, in the 1989 Democratic primary, few, including Dinkins himself, believed that he had a realistic chance of winning.

To the amazement of most political pundits, Dinkins and his gifted political advisor Bill Lynch crafted a diverse and multiracial political coalition that resulted in the election of New York City’s ﬁrst African American mayor. Dinkins’s electoral success in 1989 derived from forging together a diverse political coalition uniﬁed in its opposition to the policies of Mayor Koch.

Dinkins was defeated in 1993 because he was unable to balance the conﬂicting demands of the constituent parts of his coalition.

Dinkins’s political career illuminates the shifting identity of the Democratic Party. Dinkins navigated various crises and sought to hold together a fragile coalition reﬂective of broader trends in the Democratic Party and liberalism in a time of transition from the Great Society liberalism of the 1960s and 1970s to the neoliberalism of the 1990s. The Dinkins coalition, a product of the particularities of New York City, also pointed to the rise of identity politics, which continues to shape the political landscape of the United States. Thus, Dinkins’s brief mayoralty still casts a long shadow on American liberalism and the modern Democratic Party. An examination of his career helps us explore the relationship between government policy, social activism, political coalition building, and governance during the era of identity politics and conservatism. This book does not seek to vindicate or condemn Dinkins. Instead, this book seeks to understand the political conditions that shaped both his rise and his defeat.

Dinkins dealt with various ﬂashpoints during his political rise and his mayoral term from 1990 to 1993. These include the marches conducted by Reverend Al Sharpton into the white neighborhoods of Howard Beach, Queens, and Bensonhurst, Brooklyn; protests by African Americans against a Korean grocer in Flatbush, Brooklyn; the political crisis caused by rising crime and the crack epidemic, with a focus on Washington Heights; the racial riots in Crown Heights; the demands of LGBT and AIDS activists; and the emergence of the secessionist movement in Staten Island. Exploring these episodes provides insight into the Democratic Party in transition and the changing political landscape in the aftermath of the culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s that broke down the New Deal coalition. During these ﬂashpoints, Dinkins failed both to maintain his coalition and to expand his base of support, as he struggled to address the often-conﬂicting demands of African Americans, ethnic whites in the outer boroughs, white establishment liberals, women, and the LGBT community. This failure led to Giuliani’s victory in 1993.

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Opinion: Legionella community outbreaks are hard. Politicizing them makes them harder.

Demetre Daskalakis — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 05:00:00 -0400

Legionella outbreaks are among the most challenging public health events cities like New York face. They move quickly and demand action before answers are known. They require scientists, laboratorians, epidemiologists, clinicians, communications professionals, building owners, elected officials and community members to work together under pressure. I led many of these responses while at the NYC Health Department and supervising the Legionella team at the Centers for Disease Control.

In my experience, when outbreaks become a politicized football, they become even harder.

The recent Upper East Side Legionnaires' disease outbreak was a tragedy. By late July, New York City identified 92 cases, 79 hospitalizations and seven deaths associated with the cluster. Additional deaths confirmed weeks later brought the total to 11. More than 180 cooling towers were tested, dozens were found to be harboring Legionella bacteria and the Health Department mobilized hundreds of staff members in response.

Every death matters. Every hospitalization matters. Every family deserves answers. At the same time, families are not served when response efforts are contradicted, ridiculed and questioned during an emergency for seemingly political reasons.

Legionella investigations are already messy. The public expects a single source, mistake or moment when it all becomes clear. But the reality is complex. Legionella bacteria are naturally occurring in the environment. Finding it is not the same as proving it caused illness. Determining a cause takes weeks, and certainty remains elusive even after it’s controlled. Whichever cooling tower or towers is responsible for this outbreak, public health officials stopped it from causing more infections, severe disease and deaths weeks ago.

That complexity is frustrating. It is also why public health agencies must communicate frequently, honestly and transparently, and not be undermined by politicians. Legionnaires’ disease is treatable. The number one message to impacted communities must be to get to a medical professional immediately if you have flu-like symptoms.

In this case, the NYC Health Department issued repeated public updates, held town halls and press briefings, distributed thousands of educational materials, updated online dashboards, ran advertisements and shared information with clinicians and residents. Overcommunication is critical because the timeline creates confusion. Residents see additional hospitalizations or deaths and wonder whether the outbreak is ongoing when these outcomes often reflect the long clinical course of severe illness rather than ongoing exposure. Public health agencies must explain that distinction clearly, because people deserve information even when it’s evolving.

According to the Health Department, more than 90% of patients developed symptoms before July 7, just days after the investigation began, before many of the final remediation activities and before the full scope of contaminated towers was understood. That means the core public health work that supports stringent regulation and sanitation swiftly cut off the source. The decline may reflect a combination of factors, including rapid early intervention, heightened awareness among clinicians, accelerated testing of cooling towers, immediate precautionary actions and years of infrastructure, surveillance and preparedness work that rarely receive public recognition. Long before outbreaks make headlines, there are disease detectives reviewing reports, laboratorians processing specimens, inspectors enforcing regulations, clinicians recognizing patterns and emergency response teams preparing for the next cluster.

This work is difficult to see because it is measured in events that never happen. The greatest successes are crises averted. But that does not mean there isn’t a story to tell – and no matter how thorough the response, there is always room for improvement. Finding those opportunities requires difficult conversations.

We should ask whether regulations need strengthening and whether inspections happen frequently enough. We should ask whether resources are adequate and whether lessons from the Central Harlem outbreak were fully incorporated. Honest evaluation is not an attack. It is how systems improve.

But there is a time and place for that, and it’s not in the middle of an emergency when clear, consistent communication from everyone is a must. Dehumanizing public health workers as “minions,” claiming they “failed” New Yorkers before the outbreak is over or saying it’s “shameful” that they wouldn’t follow unscientific guidance isn’t just poor choice of words. It distracts from the message that mattered most: to seek care if you feel sick. It weakens trust in that message when following it can be the difference in life or death.

Politicization creates the illusion that every public health event happens because someone failed, hid information or did not care enough. That may generate headlines, but it rarely generates solutions. Most importantly, it confuses New Yorkers.

When residents hear competing claims from elected officials, advocates, commentators and public health experts, it becomes harder to know who to trust. People can mistakenly conclude that basic facts are disputed when they are not. They may start believing health authorities know less, or more, than they actually do or that uncertainty itself is evidence of incompetence. Proposing an unproven course of action during an emergency – like pushing for blanket remediation of every cooling tower in the area while falsely claiming the CDC supports this approach – makes people question who and what information they can trust.

During an outbreak, trust is not a luxury. It is essential.

During my time at CDC, my office was shot at because of the politicization of vaccines. That reinforced something I learned from responding to HIV, mpox and COVID-19: politicization has real-world consequences. One year ago, I resigned from the agency in protest because politicization of public health hurts people’s health – and as a physician I could not stay to see it weaponized by politics.

When public health professionals become targets rather than partners, the damage extends beyond workers. It affects recruitment, retention, morale, and ultimately, the public's health.

Scientists and health officials should be held accountable, questioned and scrutinized. But they should not be demonized for difficult work under uncertain conditions. The people responding to outbreaks are not the enemy. They are the reason outbreaks end.

The Upper East Side outbreak should prompt reflection, improvement and continued investment in prevention. It should motivate us to strengthen surveillance, improve compliance and refine communication strategies. It should inspire thoughtful debate about what worked and what did not. But it should not become another example of public health as political theater.

Legionella outbreaks are hard. But let's not make the work harder by turning them into politics. When we do that, everyone loses, especially the New Yorkers we protect.

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Editor’s note: Spotting Samuelsen’s strategy

Jeff Coltin — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 05:00:00 -0400

A few weeks ago, City & State ran a great op-ed by a former Central Park horse carriage driver, Anita McGill. She grew up in the industry – her family owned the Hell’s Kitchen stables where the horses started each morning and went to sleep each night (standing up, of course). But she was breaking with her world. The streets were dangerous now, and it was time for the City Council to pass the ban on horse carriage rides.

A week later, an item appeared in Politico. Somebody had dug up that McGill’s husband had gotten in a car crash in a company vehicle on Christmas Eve, 2015. Another employee got in a car crash in a company truck in 2020. And McGill herself once paid a ticket for having an open beer in a car, though she said she was the passenger.

Now I don’t know for sure how that story got placed. But there’s only one man I could think of who could have the means, the motive – and frankly, the desire – to drop this irrelevant piece of opposition research on a private citizen who was advocating for a piece of legislation. And that man is Transport Workers Union International President John Samuelsen.

Samuelsen is a true New York character, a union boss straight out of central casting. But as Rebecca C. Lewis writes in this week’s cover story, he’s not just some goon – he’s incredibly charming with his allies, incredibly tough on anybody he thinks is screwing his workers and a serious political strategist.

Folks like McGill might think they’d be safe from bomb-throwing. But if politics is war, Samuelsen is the field commander, and they’d be better off avoiding enemy territory as long as he’s around.

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State audit finds room for improvement in NYC’s AI governance

Annie McDonough — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 16:30:00 -0400

The capabilities of artificial intelligence have grown leaps and bounds in three years. But in the three years since state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli found “incomplete and ad hoc approaches” to AI governance in New York City agencies, progress on filling in the gaps has been comparatively modest.

In a new follow-up report to his office’s 2023 audit on AI governance in New York City agencies – such as guardrails for use and systems to assess risks – DiNapoli found the city has “made progress on AI oversight efforts” but that work remains on some important oversight and accountability measures. “The city still does not maintain a complete inventory of AI tools used across agencies, lacks consistent citywide standards and has not established a formal process for public concerns related to AI systems,” he said in a statement to City & State.

The initial audit, which spanned January 2019 to November 2022, surveyed AI governance systems at a sample of city agencies including the Administration for Children’s Services, the New York City Police Department, the Department of Education and the Department of Buildings.

Recommendations that DiNapoli issued to the city in 2023 have only been partially implemented as of this April, his office found in the new report. The city has made progress on steps like developing definitions for AI, publishing preliminary use guidance on generative AI, convening a citywide steering committee and starting a risk-assessment process for AI tools. But one recurring concern raised in the report is the voluntary and self-reported nature of some of the city’s policies, from risk assessments conducted on a “consultative or voluntary basis” to relying on city agencies to self-report what AI tools and systems they use.

“We appreciate the state Comptroller’s partnership and focus on this important topic and are reviewing the report and its recommendations,” Ray Legendre, a spokesperson for the city’s Office of Technology and Innovation said in a statement. “This March, our annual Local Law 35 report featured a record number of algorithmic tools documented. Under the leadership of Chief Technology Officer Lisa Gelobter, we look forward to building on this foundation and advancing the responsible use of AI tools in city government.”

New York City isn’t alone here. DiNapoli released a report last year finding that New York state does not have an effective AI governance framework in place for its agencies.

New York City has pursued multiple strategies for how to use and control AI tools, from then-Mayor Bill de Blasio’s creation of an algorithms management and policy officer and publishing of an AI Strategy document, to then-Mayor Eric Adams’ AI Action Plan. As City & State previously reported, Mayor Zohran Mamdani hasn’t brought about any kind of sea change in agencies’ use of AI, though he’s expressed some skepticism about AI.

But the city’s use of AI has been highly scrutinized – nowhere more than in New York City Public Schools, which has delayed its release of guidance on how students and teachers can use AI. Some advocates have pushed for a moratorium on generative AI use in schools until appropriate guidance can be worked out. With classes set to start on Sept. 10, that guidance has yet to be released. Mamdani told City & State last week that news on that is coming “soon.”

Under Mamdani, the Office of Technology and Innovation hasn’t produced its own vision or new guidance for how city agencies should use or engage with AI tools, though existing uses appear to largely continue. Thanks to laws passed by the City Council last year, the administration is required to create a new Office of Algorithmic Accountability that will be tasked with analyzing algorithmic tools used by city agencies (which will include AI), evaluating their risks and creating a process for public complaints. That office was due to be created by June.

City Hall told City & State last month that the office was moving ahead and that six positions have been allocated in the budget, but no further announcements on the office’s work or plans have been made.

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New York is still helping Dolly Parton give books to kids

Jeff Coltin — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 15:33:01 -0400

Dolly Parton is being remembered not just for her hooks and her looks – but for her books.

The Queen of Country Music’s “Imagination Library” program sends out a book each month to kids aged 0 to 5 across the United States and four other countries. Parton died last week, but New York had already doubled down on the program months ago, and is administering $1 million in grants through the Office of Children and Family Services to sign kids up and distribute the books on the local level.

“We value the science here in New York state,” OCFS Commissioner DaMia Harris-Madden said. “We know that early exposure to language and reading and books are really essential for the healthy development of our children and their brain development.”

Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library selects the books and sends them out, but requires local partners to cover the costs. OCFS already awarded more than $600,000 this year in grants to nonprofits, libraries and school districts, which Harris-Madden said would send books to more than 170,000 kids in the state. There’s another $400,000 to award, and the agency is accepting solicitations of interest through Sept. 28, focusing on nonprofits in New York City.

The funding is well short of the $3.5 million, or even $7 million that some proponents sought to make the program go truly statewide. But New York’s $1 million investment comes at a time when several other states have pulled back funding and sought private philanthropy to fill the gap.

“Dolly’s program really does help to get to some of the marginalized children … where we want to close the achievement gap,” Harris-Madden said. “So I’m a fan of both of her music, her acting and what she’s doing for the community.”

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Despite early promises of transparency, Hochul has dragged her feet in releasing her detailed public schedules

Rebecca C. Lewis — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 14:13:31 -0400

Upon taking office five years ago, Gov. Kathy Hochul promised an unprecedented era of transparency. That hasn’t led to speedier schedule releases in recent years.

Her office last week released a tranche of nine months worth of detailed public schedules, offering further insight into who she has met with and what she did during that period of time. But the schedules only go through June 2025, making even the most recently released ones about 14 months out of date. On top of that, they exclude details on hundreds of campaign-related events and calls, which they deem “private.”

The detailed public schedules contain far more information on who the governor has met with in her official capacity than what her office may be willing to advise in the moment. That includes meetings closed to the press, such as a recent sit-down with New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch that Hochul didn’t advise. Such a meeting would likely make it into the documents posted by the governor’s office after the fact – you may just need to wait months or even a year to get your hands on it.

At the beginning of her tenure, Hochul’s office had committed to releasing those documents about once a quarter. Until last week, the website with the governor’s past schedules were nearly two full years out of date. Hochul’s office last released three months of schedules in January this year, which only went through September 2024. Prior to that, Hochul went roughly a year without releasing any detailed public schedules.

Sprinkled throughout the months-old and months-late public schedules are also over 400 “private events” that contain no information on who Hochul was calling or meeting with. Of the new nine-month batch of schedules, she had the most in October 2024, where she had 81 such “private events.” Typically, they indicate nongovernmental campaign or fundraising action by the governor, including calls to prospective donors and more elaborate fundraising events. Some days had back-to-back “private events” lasting no more than 15 minutes.

Rachael Fauss, senior policy adviser at Reinvent Albany, said the Hochul administration hasn’t exactly been making good on her early tenure promise of transparency. “I think these are the types of things that lapse. … It just either lapses or the politics get such that they decide to wait on releasing them,” she said. “It should just be a routine thing, because it would save everybody a lot of time, and it’s of interest because people want to know who the governor is meeting with.”

Fauss also noted that the Hochul administration’s Freedom of Information Law process is just as burdensome and time consuming as it was when the governor first took office, requiring filers to send paper appeals if their requests are denied after months of delays. “The later a record is, the less relevant it is,” she said, both of FOIL delays and the age of the schedules being released now. “At a certain point, it defeats the whole purpose of the request. When you get the record, it's no longer relevant.”

When Hochul last released a small batch of schedules in January, New York Focus reported that the governor’s office routinely declined to release her far more detailed Outlook calendars, which would contain more information about those “private events” censored on the government schedules. Hochul’s office also has rejected FOIL requests for even the more basic public schedules in the past, citing the fact they would (eventually) post those online.

For example, the response to a FOIL request filed by City & State in November 2023 for detailed public schedules between Oct. 15 and Nov. 8 was to “consult the (public schedule) website periodically, as updated calendars become available.” At the time of the response, in February 2024, the website only had schedules through September 2023.

In a statement, Hochul spokesperson Jen Goodman did not offer an explanation for the delays in releasing the detailed public schedules, nor on why the administration deviated from releasing the documents on a quarterly basis. She also did not address the “private events” redacted on the schedules. “The Administration engages in a rigorous process to ensure an accurate record of the Governor’s calendar is available to the public,” she said in a statement. “We have released nine months of records in recent weeks and remain committed to improving transparency and accountability across state government.”

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John Samuelsen and the art of strategic petrol bomb-throwing

Rebecca C. Lewis — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 05:00:00 -0400

John Samuelsen is always on. But in rare moments of downtime from organizing workers or traveling to organize workers, the Transport Workers Union international president likes to read.

Currently, Samuelsen is reading “Some Principles of Maritime Strategy,” the 1911 treatise by British historian Julian Corbett. “I’ve read ‘Art of War,’ unlike every other freakin’ union president that just doesn’t put it on the bookshelf behind their Zoom background,” he said over Turkish tea in southern Brooklyn, noting he’s probably read the Sun Tzu strategy book at least 20 times. But Corbett’s book on naval warfare is presenting him with new tactics to consider.

“I’m applying that to all these political fights that I’m in, where nothing is static. Everything’s changing, and reading this book on maritime law strategy has really helped me,” Samuelsen animatedly explained. “It’s really wild.”

And Samuelsen finds himself in plenty of fights. The bombastic trade unionist is known for his pugilistic public persona and imposing physical presence. But he’s also known to be basically the same guy in private as he is out on the streets. One labor operative described him as a “curmudgeon” and a “crazy uncle.” But those who have worked with him – and even against him – know Samuelsen isn’t one to be ignored.

“He would be a chess master if he isn’t already,” said Lisa Daglian, executive director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Council to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. He’s always thinking five steps ahead, she said. That ostensibly applies to his seemingly quixotic – and increasingly personal – fights against the likes of Gov. Kathy Hochul, and New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin and council members planning to ban horse carriages in Central Park. Many observers just don’t see his vision – or worse, think he’s completely lost the plot.

But for Samuelsen, whose idols include the likes of TWU founder and labor icon Mike Quill and Irish radical James Connolly, the big, public and very old-school union fights are his bread and butter. While that style may be something of a dying breed in the evolving world of labor politics, Samuelsen’s brand of union leadership appears to still be working for him. Unlike other leaders of major unions in New York, he hasn’t faced a significant insurgent challenge, even after some setbacks.

Despite his over-the-top insults, dogged protests and ads so audacious they border on satire, Samuelsen insists there is a well-thought out plan. “I don’t throw petrol bombs without seriously considering why I’m throwing that petrol bomb, what my goal of throwing that petrol bomb is, what I’m trying to accomplish, what the counterpunch is going to be (and) who’s going to throw a petrol bomb back at me,” he said.

“Piss and vinegar”

Although Samuelsen came from a working-class, Gerritsen Beach, Brooklyn, family with two union-member parents, that wasn’t what instilled the union bug in him. And leading TWU Local 100 – let alone the roughly 165,000-member international union – isn’t necessarily where the New York City subway track worker saw himself when he first started in 1993. But that’s not to say he didn’t envision his future before it happened. Samuelsen recalled his first day of training as a track worker, when TWU Local 100 representatives came to speak.

“I immediately thought to myself, ‘These are the freakin’ guys that are running this extremely impressive union? The vaunted Transport Workers Union Local 100?’” Samuselsen said. “And I was looking at these guys. They were the most unimpressive crew of people, and I immediately thought to myself, ‘I can beat these guys, and I can do a better job than them.’” He was in his mid-20s at the time.

Track work is inherently dangerous – even more so when Samuelsen started in the ’90s. “I had to learn how to organize, and workers had to band together to prevent bosses from ordering us out – in the pursuit of production – and to work in unsafe conditions,” he recalled. And he learned quickly – his and his fellow workers’ “lives depended on it.” And he realized he was good at it. “And others realized I was good at it, and I got elected very quickly as a shop steward,” he said.

So began his ascent.

Former state Sen. Diane Savino, a lifelong member of the labor movement who chaired her chamber’s Labor Committee, first met Samuelsen when he was still a budding union leader at the turn of the century. She had enrolled in a Cornell University labor studies class to sharpen her organizing skills at the same time TWU Local 100 had sent some of its new officers to take the course – including Samuelsen.

“He was larger than life,” Savino recounted. “He was filled with piss and vinegar then.” In 2001, Samuelsen was a lower-level union officer who’d recently joined leadership on an insurgent slate led by now-former TWU Local 100 President Roger Toussaint. The reform slate wanted to return to the ideals of Quill they felt the leadership didn’t uphold. “He was quite a character then, (and) has been that same person ever since,” Savino said. “He’s just gone on further.”

That included challenging Toussaint for leadership of the local in 2009, and, after Toussaint dropped out of the race, Curtis Tate, Toussaint’s hand-picked successor. Samuelsen came out victorious, and held the position until he won a full term as international president in 2017.

In the aftermath of the contentious 2009 election, Samuelsen made a conscious decision to put an end to the union’s warring factions. Tate told City & State they shared “a mutual desire to see our local united and to advance.”

“There never was any bad blood between John and I,” he said. Now the union’s international administrative vice president, Tate said he and Samuelsen maintain a close friendship and working partnership. “We actually kind of complement each other,” he said. “I’m a lot more laid back. … John is way more dynamic and animated – and sometimes I pull him back a little, so we balance each other out.”

That “dynamic” style of picking fights with management and duking it out in the court of public opinion has gained Samuelsen loyalty from his members. When then-Mayor Eric Adams backed the push to ban horse carriages last year, Samuelsen shared with City & State his text message to the mayor, calling him a “backstabber.” It was followed with a $1 million ad campaign attacking the mayor. And Samuelsen relishes confronting bosses face-to-face, like when he threatened “absolutely vicious strike action” during testy 2019 contract talks with American Airlines.

“I know (MTA Chair and CEO) Janno (Lieber) doesn’t appreciate his tactics, but look – to get people to go and protest in front of someone’s home means that they will follow you anywhere,” Daglian said, referring to coordinated protests of not just Lieber, but politicians as well. Hochul has also been greeted by an entourage of TWU protesters at transit-related events. “I don’t think he does anything on a whim when it comes to representing his members or taking care of the membership at large,” Daglian said.

Samuelsen has remained popular among members as he’s racked up a number of wins over the years. Transit workers in New York City enjoy generous contracts that he helped negotiate. Membership has grown under Samuelsen’s stewardship as well, from roughly 115,000 people about a decade ago to the 165,000 members now. Some of the newest workers to join the ranks are New York City Ferry workers.

That loyalty extends even outside of Samuelsen’s home base of TWU Local 100. He was welcomed with open arms for a photo shoot at the American Airlines terminal at LaGuardia Airport in August, where union workers gladly ferried him across the tarmac and provided him with access to a hangar.

“If he was a weak president, you wouldn’t want to be seen with him,” said Victor Gonzalez, the TWU Local 501 president representing airline workers at several East Coast airports and San Juan.

Horses and snakes

Samuelsen’s evolution into the union leader he is today has included picking plenty of fights with politicians and bosses, and engaging in aggressive campaigns against them. But he insists they aren’t personal. “I fully embrace the concept that I criticize behavior,” Samuelsen insisted. “I don’t criticize people. I don’t dislike people. I dislike behavior.” Hochul, however, seems to be an exception. Not five minutes into a 2 1/2-hour sitdown interview, Samuelsen made the unusual accusation that the proud Irish American governor was actually Welsh.

“Loads of Welsh built the Erie Canal alongside the Irish, and I think she’s mixed up,” Samuelsen said. “Plus, we don’t want to have to claim her.” (Per Hochul’s office, her family arrived in America from Ireland well after the Erie Canal was completed.) Samuelsen also leans heavily on his Irish heritage, with family hailing from Derry (and yes, he has watched “Derry Girls”). He was even recently named next year’s grand marshal for the New York City St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

Samuelsen has attacked Hochul’s Irish-ness before. Twice now, the TWU has run St. Patrick’s Day ads calling the governor a snake akin to those of legend driven out by St. Patrick. “Now we wish St. Patrick would come back and rid New York of Governor Kathy Hochul,” Samuelsen said in the ad that first ran amid a contract dispute in 2024 involving Metro-North Railroad workers, and ran a similar ad this year ahead of still-ongoing negotiations for a new contract for transit workers.

Samuelsen’s attacks can often feel awfully personal – even if they’re not personally motivated. Former New York City Transit President Sarah Feinberg still remembers how he went after both her and former MTA Inspector General Carolyn Pokorny in 2021 “in such personal terms” when they suspended several subway track inspectors for allegedly failing to perform their duties and then lying about it. Samuelsen tacitly accused both of racism, saying at the time “two privileged white women have just turned the lives of seven people of color totally upside down.”

More recently, Samuelsen has waged war against Menin and City Council Member Christopher Marte, who is championing legislation to ban horse carriages, the drivers and owners of which are represented by the TWU. The speaker had remained largely neutral on the long and contentious fight until recently, and, per a source close to Menin, had a positive working relationship with Samuelsen; TWU even backed her for speaker last year. The same source said Menin gave Samuelsen a heads up that she would schedule a hearing on the bill before she had decided to support it.

That’s when their relationship turned – Samuelsen and the TWU have since attacked Menin publicly, saying in one ad, “Thanks for the betrayal, Julie!”

Yet Samuelsen calls out politicians who go against his workers, no matter the consequences. “Every politician, every CEO who intentionally inflicts harm on a member of the Transport Workers Union should check for skeletons in their closets before taking that step,” he added as a warning in a subsequent text, “and they should expect to be the subject of a prolonged multifaceted strategic fightback campaign.”

But Samuelsen’s attacks on Menin and Feinberg seem benign compared to the public campaign he is waging now against Hochul. Recent offensive strikes have included writing a letter requesting the New York State AFL-CIO not endorse the governor for reelection while laying out recent labor debacles and starting a super PAC to oppose her in November.

He said the intense beef transcends a single contract dispute or disagreement. As Samuelsen tells it, he used to get along with Hochul when she was lieutenant governor. Then came alleged betrayals in two successive contract negotiations since she became governor (including the Metro-North negotiation that resulted in the “snake” attack in 2024).

The last straw for Samuelsen – “where I just gave up on trying to have any kind of relationship with her” – came at the end of last year when Hochul vetoed legislation to require two-person train crews on the New York City subways. According to Samuelsen, Hochul not only rejected the bill despite its broad support in the Legislature, she wrote a veto message arguing the bill would have caused reductions in service and hindered the MTA’s “ability to benefit from capital investments.” Samuelsen took that as an “absolute attack” on transit workers. “And then I just went” – Samuelsen said, finishing the thought with an aggressive middle finger – “that’s where we’re at. She’s untrustworthy.”

“This governor is focused on results, not petty personal politics,” Sean Butler, a spokesperson for Hochul, said in a statement to City & State. “Governor Hochul has delivered for New York’s transit riders and the workers who move them like no governor has before. She rescued the MTA from its fiscal cliff, committed billions in additional funding, strengthened transit worker protections and oversaw a historic reduction in subway crime.”

Letting loose

Nearly everyone who spoke about Samuelsen for this story agreed he has a sharp strategic mind and can equally be a formidable opponent or fierce ally. But the end goal of the vitriolic and uphill fights he is waging currently – including against Hochul – have left many scratching their heads, even those with confidence in Samuelsen’s ability to think five moves ahead.

The letter he wrote to New York State AFL-CIO President Mario Cilento urging the umbrella labor organization not to endorse Hochul for reelection didn’t prevent the powerful group’s members from voting to endorse the governor within a day of the letter. Nor did Hochul lose any of her many, many high-profile union endorsements. But even as Samuelsen may agree that, generally, Democrats are better for working people than Republicans, that doesn’t mean he will rubber-stamp every Democrat just because their opponent might end up winning.

“Anytime anybody talks about endorsing a pro-trade union Republican – ‘Well, we can’t do that because, the lesser of two evils institutionally are the Democrats’ – well, it’s the most stupidest freakin’ notion ever, and I just won’t entertain it anymore,” Samuelsen said. He stepped in to prevent some of his locals from backing Republican Lee Zeldin against Hochul four years ago, he said, but isn’t stopping anyone from endorsing her current opponent Bruce Blakeman.

Samuelsen hasn’t taken much heat from other union leaders for his actions, either. “He is strategic and will stop at nothing to protect and enhance the lives and well-being of his members,” Cilento said of Samuelsen in a statement to City & State. “I have the utmost respect and appreciation for his dedication and commitment to the cause of organized labor.”

Still, Samuelsen’s continued attacks on Hochul are unlikely to encourage her to sign the two-person train crew bill this year after the Legislature passed it a second time in June. In fact, Samuelsen fully expects her to veto it again. And whether he admits it or not, the tide seems to have finally turned on the horse carriage fight with a ban appearing increasingly likely – particularly after 18-year-old tourist Romanch Mahajan was fatally thrown off a runaway horse-drawn carriage in June. So it raises the question: What is his endgame?

It’s not the first time Samuelsen’s strategizing has left people puzzled. His staunch opposition to congestion pricing despite the monetary benefit to the transit system his workers serve seemed like a contradiction. But before he quit the advisory council tasked with making the rules for the program out of protest, Samuelsen’s loud advocacy for New Yorkers underserved by the subway had an impact.

“We have congestion pricing,” said Danny Pearlstein, policy and communications director at the Riders Alliance. “It’s successful, and part of that success stems from John standing firm on the need for expanded bus service.” Though Pearlstein and other advocates might not have agreed with the tactics, he acknowledged the program is now better thanks to advocacy from Samuelsen.

In other words: Just when it looked like Samuelsen had lost the plot, he turned out to be right.

Old school vs. new school

Even after becoming TWU’s international president, Samuelsen has remained heavily involved in the machinations of Local 100. That includes having a hand in contract negotiations. “John was literally and figuratively sort of looming in the background,” former New York City Transit President Richard Davey told City & State of negotiations in 2023. “That may have been their strategy, but I’m not sure (then-Local 100 President) Richie (Davis) and the negotiating team were fully empowered to come to the deal because John was so in the shadows.” And while less involved in this year’s MTA contract negotiations, per a source familiar with the talks, Samuelsen’s level of involvement in a local dispute, the source said, is “unusual” for most international presidents.

Describing Samuelsen, the same source said, “I think Samuelsen has this romanticized view of a union leader as agitator and fighting modernism, and it’s very old-fashioned and outdated in many ways.” And it’s not necessarily wrong. With his singular focus on economic populism and the livelihood of workers, Samuelsen is part of an increasingly uncommon breed of white, working-class labor leaders in the mold of his idol Mike Quill, even as he describes himself as “the opposite of an idealogue.”

Samuelsen agreed he’s an old-school agitator, but rather than see it as a sign of antiquity, he lamented the idea that he’s outside the norm. “I am combative, but I’m telling you that if every other union leader was getting into these explosive confrontations that are justified the way the TWU has, I wouldn’t appear to be larger than life,” Samuelsen said. “And it’s a shame that I appear to be larger than life, because the only reason that’s happening is because the labor movement has become lackluster.”

Feinberg suggested this style is all Samuelsen knows. That may be true. But Samuelsen sees no reason to change if he’s still fighting the good fight and delivering for his members. “This world is not for everybody, and the TWU is a different union,” he said. “If you don’t want to … pick smart fights and defend workers, then just go back to your tools or retire.”

Now 58, Samuelsen, too, will retire one day, when he becomes “too exhausted or burnt out.” But based on the verve with which he reacted to learning his LaGuardia tarmac shuttle driver wasn’t in a union, that day isn’t anytime soon. He requested someone find out how many drivers there were. “(Even) if there are 10, we’ll organize them,” Samuelsen asserted without question. After all, he’s always on.

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The 2026 Labor Power 100

City & State — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 05:00:00 -0400

Organized labor is on the march. Unions are enjoying strong public support, with approval ratings at the highest level in decades. Union membership is steady at 10% in the U.S., and more than double that rate – and rising – in New York state, which trails only Hawaii nationally. New York unions have notched organizing victories, adding New York City Ferry workers, public defenders and “Sesame Street” writers to their ranks.

Labor leaders have also been flexing their muscles on the policy front. Public sector unions secured more generous benefits in Albany, perhaps most notably reforming the state’s Tier 6 pension benefits. State legislation banning surveillance pricing, protecting construction workers and requiring transparency around artificial intelligence use have advanced with labor support, while New York City lawmakers have introduced measures that would dismantle Amazon’s last-mile delivery network, shield retirees’ healthcare benefits and set a $30 hourly minimum wage.

The Labor Power 100 highlights the union leaders and worker advocates on the front lines of these and countless other battles – from organizing campaigns and contract negotiations to political and policymaking pushes.

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NYC-DSA approves $95k leader salaries

Peter Sterne — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 08:59:11 -0400

The New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America approved a resolution on Saturday to begin paying full-time salaries to its elected co-chairs Grace Mausser and Gustavo Gordillo, the socialist organization confirmed to City & State.

The resolution, titled “Full-Time Paid Leadership Pilot: Organizing a Socialist Agenda through Mayoral and Electoral Coordination,” calls for Gordillo and Mausser, who are currently volunteers, to receive annual salaries of $95,000 plus benefits. The pay is meant to professionalize the leadership and compensate Gordillo and Mausser for leading NYC-DSA full-time – for at least as long as they continue winning reelection to their current positions. (The next co-chair elections are in November, and both Mausser and Gordillo are running for reelection.)

As full-time co-chairs, according to the proposal, Gordillo and Mausser will be expected to: “Represent NYC-DSA before government officials, including but not limited to the Mayor’s Office and Department leadership;” “Build and support the political relationships with our City Council, State Assembly, State Senate, and Congressional elected officials;” “Jointly plan communication, endorsement, and event strategy with the elected official slate;” and “Ensure legal compliance of NYC-DSA operations and program activities.” DSA has grown in size and prominence with Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s win, and both Mausser and Gordillo have been making frequent media appearances.

“As our organization grows, our co-chairs are now responsible for coordinating with the mayoral administration and our many elected Socialists in Office, representing democratic socialism to an audience of millions, and coordinating campaigns and initiatives to engage and empower thousands of members,” NYC-DSA Secretary Julie Swoope said in a statement. “This is a full-time job, and by making these positions paid, we’re ensuring that working people can continue to lead our organization.”

City & State’s Heard Around Town newsletter first broke the news about the proposal to pay NYC-DSA’s co-chairs last month. Since then, the New York Post reported that Gordillo – who described himself as a working-class union electrician – had a more privileged background than many had realized. His father bought Gordillo’s house in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn for nearly $1 million in 2019, and Gordillo was kicked out of IBEW Local 3 for failing to pay dues, making the prospect of NYC-DSA paying him close to six figures a bit more awkward.

While Gordillo previously worked as an electrician, Mausser’s day job is at a nonprofit.

But NYC-DSA can afford it. The socialist group has embarked on a successful drive to get many of its more than 15,000 members to pay more monthly dues – and even got Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to renew her dues after a seven-year lapse.

According to a budget document presented to DSA members alongside the resolution, NYC-DSA’s monthly revenue is about $84,700. Most of that comes from dues – with more than $27,000 coming from national DSA (as a share of the monthly national dues paid by New York City-based DSA members) and over $45,000 coming from optional dues that NYC-DSA members pay directly to the local chapter. Other sources of revenue include $7,500 per month from merch sales and $50,000 per year from an anonymous donor. (A spokesperson for NYC-DSA declined to name the philanthropist.) Full-time salaries and benefits for both co-chairs will cost about $20,000 per month – bringing NYC-DSA’s total monthly expenses to about $65,000.

Over the past week, members of each of NYC-DSA’s geographic branches discussed and voted on the resolution. In every case, it passed overwhelmingly. While the New York Post reported that some DSA members in the South Brooklyn branch objected to the idea of paying Gordillo, members of that branch still voted 81%-19% in favor of the resolution, according to results shared with City & State. It also passed with 87% of the vote in the Lower Manhattan branch, 83% in Queens, 80% in North Brooklyn, 82% in Central Brooklyn, 75% in Flatbush and 67% in the Bronx and Upper Manhattan.

On Saturday, NYC-DSA’s highest leadership body, the Citywide Leadership Committee, passed the resolution by a vote of 51 to 10. Gordillo and Mausser are expected to receive their first salary payments in mid- to late September.

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