City & State New York - Politics

Council members want answers about last month’s courtroom birth

Sahalie Donaldson — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 05:00:00 -0400

More than half of the members in the New York City Council sent a letter to Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, the city’s district attorneys and administrative judges Thursday urging the city to investigate why a handcuffed woman was forced to give birth in a Brooklyn courtroom last month.

The letter, organized by the council’s progressive and women’s caucuses, comes several weeks after a 33-year-old woman named Samantha Randazzo went into labor during her May 15 arraignment at Brooklyn Criminal Court. At nine months pregnant, she was handcuffed behind her back as she waited to be arraigned for low-level drug and trespassing charges. While NYPD officials say the handcuffs were removed while Randazzo was in active labor, her baby was delivered by a court officer without any medical equipment, and she was reportedly in full view of multiple court staff. . Mere hours earlier, she was discharged from Coney Island Hospital despite being in police custody and heavily pregnant. Randazzo ultimately delivered a healthy baby a little before midnight.

“This horrific and degrading incident is the result of a series of systemic failures that reinforced conditions which put the people of New York needlessly in harm's way,” the letter, which was shared exclusively with City & State, reads. “We’re calling for an internal investigation into the circumstances that kept a nine-month pregnant mother in police custody for over 30 hours for an offense in which police and the district attorney have discretion to issue an appearance ticket.”

The incident stirred a wave of outrage last month as public defenders and legal advocates blamed city and state agencies for what they charged were a multitude of systemic failures. At least three people have died from medical issues in custody while waiting to be arraigned over the past year. Two died in Brooklyn holding cells over the past two months alone.

Sam Raskin, a spokesperson for the mayor, said that the Mamdani administration is reviewing the factors that led to the courtroom birth incident and discussing how to potentially respond, including “reviewing the policies and protocols practiced by the NYPD, NYC Health + Hospitals, the courts, and other relevant entities.”

"What Samantha Randazzo went through was horrifying and completely unacceptable. No one should be forced to give birth in a courtroom, and the fact that this happened demands serious scrutiny,” Raskin said. “We must understand how these failures occurred and what potential changes are necessary to prevent something like this from occurring again."

Twenty nine council members signed onto the letter. Speaker Julie Menin is not one of them, but several members of her leadership team are: Majority Leader Shaun Abreu, Majority Whip Kamillah Hanks and Deputy Majority Whip Elsie Encarnacion.

In addition to calling for an investigation, the letter urged the city to station EMS workers in courthouses, to ensure the Civilian Complaint Review Board automatically begins investigating any deaths that occur in custody and more broadly, to “stop the surge of quality-of-life policing and the practice of custodial arrests and detainment for low-level charges.” It also calls on the city’s district attorneys to more infrequently prosecute low-level violations or to issue desk appearance tickets.

While the state currently has a series of laws that ban the shackling of incarcerated pregnant people while they are in labor, they don’t apply to local police authorities. An incident in 2018 in which a handcuffed woman went into labor in a Bronx holding cell spurred the NYPD to update its rules on restraining pregnant people, though they have continued to generate backlash. A package of legislation up for consideration in the state Legislature is aimed at further improving the treatment of pregnant people while they are incarcerated. One such measure would ban handcuffing people in labor who are detained by police.

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AI and crypto take center stage at NY-12 debate

Annie McDonough — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 22:38:19 -0400

The race to replace retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler in a powerful Manhattan congressional district got “feisty” in a PIX 11 debate Thursday night.

Assembly Member Alex Bores, one of the leading candidates in the Democratic primary for New York’s 12th congressional district, faced the brunt of his opponents’ attacks. Assembly Member Micah Lasher, who is narrowly leading Bores in a recent PIX 11/Emerson College poll, and Jack Schlossberg, social media commentator and grandson of President John F. Kennedy and polling in third place, went after Bores on similar ground, alleging that he is beholden to not just the artificial intelligence industry but the cryptocurrency industry.

“There’s one candidate on this stage that’s been standing up to Big Tech for more than a decade, one candidate on the stage who has voted consistently for regulation of artificial intelligence, one candidate on this stage who is not backed by any of the big AI companies,” Lasher said in the first 30 seconds of his first answer of the evening. “That candidate is not Alex, that candidate is me.”

The first question, which was about how candidates would protect jobs in the age of AI, left an obvious opening for Lasher, and then Schlossberg, to go after Bores. While an Open AI-funded super PAC has spent millions in opposition to Bores – who successfully fought for a major AI regulation in New York state – another super PAC linked to Anthropic has spent in support of him. “The most important question is whether the regulators are disinterested, and whether or not they are in the pocket of the AI industry,” Schlossberg said.

Lasher also pointed to a super PAC backing Bores and funded by crypto billionaire Chris Larsen – and Bores receiving an “A” rating from a pro-crypto group – as proof he’s beholden to that industry too.

Bores brushed off the claims as MAGA talking points. “They’re so feisty today,” Bores later said of his opponents after multiple digs at his financial backers. Former Republican and Trump antagonist George Conway, polling in fourth in the recent poll, referred to it later as a “triangular firing squad.”

If the strategy risked leaving viewers with the impression that Bores is the candidate the others are most concerned about, it also sought to shake up one of Bores’ dominant narratives in the race: That he is a candidate who will stand up to Big Tech. Schlossberg and Lasher argued that the spending in support of him by Anthropic executives and Larsen would make him beholden to the industry. Bores countered that Open AI would be thrilled if any of his opponents won.

Lasher didn’t lay off in the post-debate spin room, telling reporters, “I commend Alex for doing a very good job perpetrating a fraud on the voters.”

The middle-of-Manhattan Democratic primary is one of this spring’s most competitive, and far and away the most expensive. In addition to the candidates’ own hefty campaign chests, outside spending totals more than $7.5 million in support of Lasher and $129,000 against him, and more than $6.3 million in support of Bores and more than $4.1 million against him.

The Democratic primary candidates in the June 23rd race – at least the four who were on the debate stage Thursday – agreed on a lot in the race. They all support banning congressional stock tradings, banning private immigration prison contracts, taking former Mayor Ed Koch’s name off the Queensboro Bridge,bridge, even “Knicks in four.”

Schlossberg sought to distinguish himself as the only candidate committing outright to supporting legislation blocking offensive military aid to Israel.

Conway largely stuck to his unwavering campaign theme during the debate. None of the other candidates’ proposed policies – which he incidentally called “great” – matter unless President Donald Trump is out of office. “A lot of the debate was weird and beside the point,” he told reporters afterwards.

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Avila Chevalier attended the Oct. 8 pro-Palestinian rally Lander condemned

Jeff Coltin — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 17:15:42 -0400

One of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s endorsed congressional candidates cut ties with the Democratic Socialists of America for promoting a controversial pro-Palestinian rally the day after Hamas attacked Israel. The other candidate attended that rally.

Brad Lander said at a NY1 debate Monday he canceled his decades-old DSA membership after the socialist organization “advertised a rally that I thought was heinous, that spoke about Hamas in ways that I just thought were vile.” He was referring to the gathering in Times Square on Oct. 8, 2023 organized by leftist groups like The People's Forum and Al-Awda New York, where rallygoers held signs such as “Resistance is Justified when People are Occupied.”

The rally was widely criticized by political leaders who saw it as condoning the violence by Hamas fighters, who killed nearly 1,200 Israelis the day before. Gov. Kathy Hochul called it “abhorrent and morally repugnant” when it was announced. NYC-DSA even distanced itself from the rally, and apologized for the “confusion” caused by its social media post advertising the event. All of the democratic socialist legislators, including then-Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani, avoided the rally.

But Darializa Avila Chevalier, who is now running for Congress against Rep. Adriano Espaillat, was there in Times Square.

“I can only say I have been advocating for the human rights of Palestinians for my adult life. And as someone who has seen a pattern, whenever anything happens on the ground (in Israel), there's always a really outsized reaction that costs thousands of people their lives,” Avila Chevalier told City & State on Thursday. “And that is what I was worried about.”

By the time people were rallying on Oct. 8 2023, Israeli forces had immediately responded to the Hamas attack with airstrikes on Gaza, killing hundreds of people.

“At the core of it all for me is human dignity. And I think so often we get lost in the ‘well on this date, and on that date’ when it's all cyclical, if we don't get to the core of how we disregard the human rights and dignity of some people over others,” she said.

Photographs and video from the rally, including one published by The New York Times, show Avila Chevalier at the rally. Her presence there was previously reported by Canary Mission, a controversial website that serves to blacklist pro-Palestinian activists. The site doxes even civilian activists who are not prominent leaders or public figures. In fact, Avila Chevalier was relatively unknown in 2023. But the Columbia University alumna, who’d organized with Students for Justice in Palestine as an undergraduate, soon took a leading role in pro-Palestinian activism on campus.

Avila Chevalier launched her campaign against Espaillat in November, soon after Mamdani won the mayoral race. She earned NYC-DSA’s endorsement in January, and she exploded onto the national political scene when Mamdani endorsed her last week in a joint television interview on MS NOW.

NYC-DSA and Lander’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

But Avila Chevalier and Lander are now working together, appearing in a campaign TV ad, along with Mamdani and congressional candidate Claire Valdez. In the ad, which aired after the Knicks finals game, Lander passes a basketball to Avila Chevalier, before the group stands together in front of a basketball hoop.

The 32-year-old Avila Chevalier’s politics and past statements have earned more attention as she appears to gain ground on Espaillat. Her social media posts calling to abolish the police and open borders reflect someone willing to take more radical stances than even most socialist elected officials. A 2022 X post, first reported by Politico, shows her criticizing DSA’s racial justice organizing and “anti Palestinian racism” after the national organization sanctioned its Palestinian Solidarity Working Group.

Asked about those social media posts on WNYC Thursday, Avila Chevalier said she’s “grown considerably” in the years since, adding, “I'm not interested in relitigating the politics of my tweets, which are politics of the past.”

Lander’s shock at the October 8 rally Avila Chevalier attended is not the first time the progressive pair have disagreed on pro-Palestinian activism. Avila Chevalier said she ranked Lander fifth in the mayoral race – at the bottom of her ballot – as a subtle protest of his politics, City & State first reported. She criticized Lander in a candidate questionnaire for not being sufficiently supportive of Mahmoud Khalil, a fellow pro-Palestinian activist who the Trump administration attempted to deport for his role helping to organize Columbia campus protests.

The difference highlights the nuances between two candidates who are both challenging Democratic incumbents who they accuse of being too soft on Israel.

Lander, who is running against Rep. Dan Goldman, identifies as a liberal Zionist who has harshly criticized the Israeli government for its violence against Palestinians while defending its existence as a Jewish state.

Avila Chevalier, meanwhile, has been unequivocal in condemning Israel as an apartheid state committing genocide.

At a March forum with the Broadway Democrats political club, she declined to condemn Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, when asked directly.

“The premise of that question, to me, ignores the 75 years of occupation that the Palestinian people have been subjected to and the conditions that folks were were living under before this genocide began,” she responded in part. “Palestinians have been living under a state of dispossession, of exile, of apartheid for 75 years.”

But Avila Chevalier may be changing her rhetoric as she gets closer to election day. Asked on WNYC Thursday she said “yes, I do condemn Hamas,” but noted that “As far as I know, the U.S. does not send a single dime to Hamas. What we fund is the Israeli military.”

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Nobody’s happy about Mamdani’s scaled down Puerto Rican event

Jeff Coltin, Fariha Rahman, and Chantal Mann — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 15:30:38 -0400

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is reworking an annual Puerto Rican cultural reception at Gracie Mansion ahead of the Puerto Rican Day Parade in Manhattan on June 14, opting for a smaller breakfast instead of a full-scale fiesta, according to two people familiar with the plans. And Puerto Rican leaders are up in arms over the break with tradition.

“We are excited to welcome community members and leaders to Gracie Mansion for a reception celebrating Puerto Rican Day and the generations of Puerto Ricans whose organizing, culture, and contributions continue to strengthen New York City. The gathering will recognize the vital role Puerto Ricans and Nuyoricans play in the civic, cultural, and economic life of our city,” City Hall spokesperson Dora Pekec said in a statement, promising “more details to come soon.”

Mamdani’s now planning a daytime event over the weekend, Pekec told City & State. The tension was first reported by the New York Post.

But that scheduling causes its own political problems. Rep. Adriano Espaillat has already had a Saturday morning breakfast reception scheduled, where he’s honoring retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez. Six months ago, Mamdani might have been welcomed at the event, but the mayor has since picked political fights with both senior Latino members. He has endorsed Espaillat’s challenger in the Democratic primary, and broke with Velázquez to endorse against her preferred successor, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso.

While Mamdani is endorsing Latino candidates in each race, throwing his support behind Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez, the Congress members and their supporters have taken it personally. And holding a competing breakfast at Gracie Mansion – about a mile away from Espaillat’s at El Museo del Barrio – would be seen as adding insult to injury.

Velázquez declined to comment. “Congressman Espaillat has participated in the Puerto Rican Day Parade since before his tenure in Congress and has hosted his annual Puerto Rican Day Parade breakfast each year,” Espaillat spokesperson Candace Person said in a statement.

Pekec said the mayor would find a different time. “There is not a possibility with it interfering with Espaillat’s,” she said after this story was initially published.

After all, the reception has traditionally been held at Gracie Mansion on the Thursday before the parade, with former mayors Eric Adams and Bill de Blasio hosting large celebrations in the back garden of the mansion. City government officials, nonprofit workers and high ranking Puerto Rican leaders are typically in attendance.

Mamdani has avoided doing the near-constant flag-raisings and cultural celebrations of his predecessor Adams, and is even declining to erect a large tent in the backyard of Gracie Mansion, where previous mayors have held parties, The City Reporter first reported. That choice is now causing tension, and other identity groups may feel similarly aggrieved as the summer goes on.

But he’s still hosted several receptions at the mayor’s residence in his five month tenure, including a St. Patrick’s Day breakfast ahead of the Manhattan parade, a Greek Independence Day celebration and a Jewish American Heritage Month night time reception (although he skipped marching in the city’s Israel Day parade.)

Now City Hall’s having to clean up after an email from a Mamdani administration official spread around Puerto Rican leaders.

“We will not be hosting a reception at Gracie Mansion,” Álvaro López, Brooklyn Borough Director for the Mayor’s Office of Mass Engagement wrote in an email sent Monday afternoon to a community leader, obtained by City & State. “In an effort to celebrate the National Puerto Rican Day in the company of as many working-class New Yorkers as possible, Mayor Mamdani and our administration are prioritizing his attendance at the 5th Ave Parade (in Manhattan) and the Knickerbocker Parade (in Brooklyn) on June 14th instead of hosting an invitation-only reception.”

Pekec disavowed the email and referred to her statement saying a reception was on. López did not respond to a request for comment.

Puerto Rican leaders across the city are rebuking the mayor’s decision to go against tradition.

Lorraine Cortés-Vázquez, a former commissioner for the New York City Department for the Aging and current board member of the National Puerto Rican Day Parade, said that the reception has happened for decades and that City Hall has clear protocols on how to host these events.

Cortés-Vázquez also told City & State that the board had not received any communication from the mayor’s office regarding the change of plans, even after the initial email – which has since been disavowed by the administration – spread around social media, and she took particular issue with that insinuation that event attendees don’t classify as working-class New Yorkers.

“I would just suggest that the mayor have some facts behind making some of those decisions as to knowing what the data is in terms of the income levels of Puerto Ricans,” Cortés-Vázquez said. “Suggesting that Puerto Ricans are not part of the working class is totally a misnomer and a misstep on their part to put that out publicly.”

Political analyst Eli Valentin called the decision “highly disappointing” and “hard to defend,” and told City & State that he has received messages from Puerto Rican leaders that echo his sentiments, describing the move as “‘yet another example of how Mamdani is not considering the concerns and traditions of the Latino community in New York.”

The disorganization, in addition to the split with Velázquez and Espaillat, had Puerto Rican leaders questioning the commitment of the mayor’s office to the community.

“My hope is that they’re working through this because the Puerto Rican community is extremely important in the City of New York and I think having it at Gracie Mansion shows that respect for the Puerto Rican community,”: said Camille Rivera, a Puerto Rican Democratic consultant, who worked on Mamdani’s campaign. ““It is of the people, not necessarily the elite … I’ve been there when it’s been celebrated before, and it’s a beautiful occasion.”

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Hochul to select man she granted clemency to help oversee state prisons

Rebecca C. Lewis — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 13:44:06 -0400

Gov. Kathy Hochul is set to nominate Alexander Dockery, a formerly incarcerated person whom she previously granted clemency, to a newly-expanded, five-person state board tasked with overseeing conditions at correctional facilities in the state, according to sources. His nomination to the state Commission of Correction is one of a number the state Senate will need to confirm before the end of the legislative session that lawmakers and the public are finally beginning to get information on.

A prison reform omnibus bill signed by the governor last year newly requires the commission to have at least one formerly incarcerated person to serve on it. It also expands the commission from three to five members, a change that went into effect last month – though Dockery will still only be the third commissioner. The changes came amid intense scrutiny of prison conditions following the beating death of Robert Brooks at Marcy Correctional Facility in December 2024.

Criminal justice advocates applauded the move. “It would signal a major shift in how New York understands leadership, redemption, public safety, and the lived expertise of formerly incarcerated people,” Anthony Dixon, the deputy director of the Parole Preparation Project who himself was previously incarcerated, said in a statement. “This is the kind of appointment that can widen imagination, challenge old assumptions and open doors to a more humane, accountable, and forward thinking corrections system.”

Hochul commuted Dockery’s sentence in 2023, one of her periodic clemency actions. Dockery had served about 23 years of a 25-to-life sentence on a series of nonviolent burglary and trespassing charges. While incarcerated, he earned his GED, as well as his associate’s, bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Hochul’s office said at the time that Dockery intended to pursue his Ph.D. upon his release.

Dockery’s nomination will likely be the most notable of the state Senate confirmations this year, but it’s hardly the only one. Democrats are also expected to approve John Kagia, currently the acting executive director of the state Office of Cannabis Management, to serve in the position permanently. City & State first reported Hochul had tapped Kagia for the role in February.

The role has undergone turbulence practically since its creation. The governor ousted the first executive director, Chris Alexander, as part of her overhaul of the agency following a sluggish roll out of the legal adult-use market and other mismanagement causing lawsuits and delays. Hochul then fired Kagia’s immediate predecessor Felicia A.B. Reid last year over a significant snafu around policing illicit cannabis sales; Reid never underwent state Senate confirmation.

State senators are also set to confirm two dozen appointees to the state Court of Claims, as well as a handful of interim Supreme Court justices.

Following their confirmation hearings, each of Hochul’s nominees are expected to receive approval from the full state Senate. It’s rare for lawmakers to reject her picks, and even rarer to do so without some kind of prior public indication.

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Mamdani’s Charter Revision Commission schedules a flurry of meetings

Sahalie Donaldson — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 05:00:00 -0400

The Charter Revision Commission recently launched by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani will convene for its first three public hearings on consecutive days next week.

While the 15-member panel technically meets for the first time on Thursday, June 4, that’ll be a logistical meeting, not a hearing, with commission chair Patrick Gaspard expected to address listeners and share the group’s goals for the weeks ahead. Public testimony, which will form the basis of whatever ballot questions the commission ultimately moves to put before voters in November, will officially kick off on Tuesday, June 9 at 5 p.m. at New York Law School. The following two hearings will take place on June 10 at Fordham University in the Bronx and June 11 Brooklyn Law School.

Each of the upcoming hearings will be based around their own theme, according to a notice shared by the mayor’s office with City & State. True to the title Mamdani gave the group, the Commission on Government Efficiency’s meetings will focus on proposals to smooth longstanding bureaucratic frictions. The first hearing will center on “streamlining government for infrastructure projects and public realm improvements,” the second on “streamlining government for small business and community organizations” and the third on “modernizing government and streamlining government technology.”

News of the first set of hearings comes less than a week after Mamdani announced he’d be forming the group, which he’d staffed with a bevy of people from across the city’s political ecosystem. There’s been a lot of questions about what the panel will ultimately focus on, spurred in large part by the ongoing battle between the Mamdani administration and the Charter Revision Commission convened by former Mayor Eric Adams on his final day in office.

Using a new provision passed by state lawmakers in the state budget deal, Mamdani disbanded the zombie-like commission the night before calling his own. The move has so far had little effect on the group, at least not in the eyes of its remaining members, many of whom are allies to the former mayor.

With former first deputy mayor Randy Mastro at the helm providing pro bono legal representation, the group has continued to insist that it has a legal right to exist. Whether it does or doesn’t remains to be seen – Mastro hasn’t sued yet.The group is lumbering forward in the meantime, meeting for its second public hearing Tuesday night. Only one person from the public showed up to testify. With only seven members in attendance, less than a quorum, the commission was unable to take any official actions.

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Mamdani and AOC endorse DSA legislative candidates – but not the same ones

Peter Sterne — Sun, 31 May 2026 13:37:55 -0400

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed a slate of five state legislative candidates on Saturday, just two days after he endorsed an insurgent challenger to Rep. Adriano Espaillat on the same night Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez released her own slate of four state legislative endorsements.

Between the two of them, Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez have now endorsed almost all of the candidates backed by the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America – but they have mostly not endorsed the same candidates. Instead, their slates appear to be complementary. Mamdani is backing DSA’s state legislative candidates running for open seats and congressional candidates whom it would be politically difficult for AOC to endorse, while AOC is backing DSA’s challengers to Assembly incumbents whom Mamdani isn’t willing to endorse.

Ocasio-Cortez’s team didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Mamdani’s declined to comment.

NYC-DSA has endorsed 10 candidates in New York City: congressional candidates Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, state Senate candidate Aber Kawas, Assembly Member Diana Moreno and Assembly candidates Samantha Kattan, David Orkin, Christian Celeste Tate, Eon Huntley, Illapa Sairitupac and Conrad Blackburn.

Four of those candidates are challenging incumbent Assembly members: Orkin (who’s going after Assembly Member Jenifer Rajkumar in Queens), Celeste Tate (challenging Assembly Member Erik Dilan in north Brooklyn), Huntley (challenging Assembly Member Stefani Zinerman in Bedford-Stuyvesant) and Conrad Blackburn (challenging Assembly Member Jordan Wright in Harlem).

Four others are running for open state legislative seats: Moreno (who won a February special election for Mamdani’s old Assembly seat), Kawas (running for the seat held by state Senate Majority Leader Michael Gianaris, who’s retiring), Kattan (running for the seat held by Valdez, who’s leaving to run for Congress) and Sairitupac (running for the seat held by Assembly Member Grace Lee, who’s leaving to run for state Senate).

Both Mamdani and AOC endorsed Moreno earlier this year before her special election, and on Saturday, Mamdani endorsed the other three NYC-DSA candidates running for open seats – but he didn’t endorse any of the four Assembly challengers. City & State previously predicted that the mayor was most likely to endorse candidates running for open seats.

A person familiar with his thinking told Hell Gate, which first reported his latest state legislative endorsements, that the mayor refrained from endorsing any Assembly challengers in order to avoid antagonizing Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, who fought for some of Mamdani’s priorities during budget negotiations and doesn’t like it when his members face primary challenges.

Of course, AOC doesn’t have to worry about pissing off Heastie, and she endorsed three of NYC-DSA’s Assembly challengers: Orkin, Celeste Tate and Huntley.

On the flip side, AOC has not endorsed either of NYC-DSA’s congressional candidates Valdez or Avila Chevalier, while Mamdani backed both of them. Valdez is running to succeed retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez – against Velázquez’s preferred successor, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. And Avila Chevalier is trying to unseat Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the powerful chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

AOC may be reluctant to cross Velázquez, who has acted as a political mentor to her, or to back a primary challenge against a fellow member of New York’s Democratic congressional delegation, but Mamdani has no such qualms.

Collectively, Mamdani and AOC have backed nine out of the 10 New York City members of NYC-DSA’s slate. Only one slate member doesn’t have an endorsement from either of the socialist stars: Blackburn, who’s trying to unseat Wright, the president of the Manhattan Young Democrats and the son of Manhattan Democratic Party head Keith Wright.

Mamdani and AOC splitting up the NYC-DSA slate ensures that all the DSA candidates can put a famous face on their flyers (well, except for Blackburn) while minimizing the potential political backlash for Mamdani and AOC. U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who doesn’t have to worry about upsetting state legislative leaders or the New York congressional delegation, has endorsed all of the NYC-DSA slate except for Avila Chevalier, plus several other progressive candidates across the city and state.

Still, Mamdani’s decision not to endorse the entire slate has upset many of his socialist comrades.

More than 500 NYC-DSA members – including the co-chair of national DSA and leaders of the socialist group’s electoral strategy – signed an open letter calling on Mamdani to endorse the full NYC-DSA slate. “If you endorse only a few DSA candidates, you will tell thousands of your supporters to sit on the sidelines as oligarchs organize to sabotage your mayoralty and block all attempts to tax the rich,” reads the letter, which was published before Mamdani made his endorsements. “You will tell New Yorkers that there is no mass organization capable of taking on the oligarchy, only individual politicians fighting lonely fights.”

Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez have also endorsed a number of non-DSA candidates this cycle. AOC has endorsed Assembly Member Jessica González-Rojas, who’s challenging state Sen. Jessica Ramos in Queens. (While Mamdani has again avoided endorsing against a legislative incumbent). And Mamdani has endorsed Brad Lander, who’s challenging Rep. Dan Goldman in Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. (While AOC has again avoided endorsing against a congressional incumbent). Mamdani also backed Lindsey Boylan’s unsuccessful bid for an open City Council seat in Manhattan earlier this year. And both Mamdani and AOC are supporting Brian Romero, who’s running to succeed González-Rojas in western Queens, and Eli Northrup, who’s running for an open Assembly seat on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

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Who else might Mamdani endorse?

Peter Sterne — Fri, 29 May 2026 19:04:46 -0400

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani shook up the political scene Thursday night when he endorsed Darializa Avila Chevalier, the little-known challenger to Rep. Adriano Espaillat who’s backed by Justice Democrats and the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, the mayor’s political home. And there are more big endorsements coming, ahead of the June 23 Democratic primary.

The mayor had previously endorsed DSA-backed Assembly Member Claire Valdez, who’s running to succeed retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez against Velázquez’s preferred successor, and Brad Lander, who’s challenging Rep. Dan Goldman. And after endorsing Avila Chevalier, Mamdani said he won’t be wading in to any more congressional races. (Sorry to Kennedy scion Jack Schlossberg, who’s been campaigning on the fact that he endorsed Mamdani before the primary.)

People close to Mamdani and NYC-DSA told City & State that the mayor plans to endorse a number of state legislative candidates as soon as this weekend, and we can make some educated guesses about which candidates he’ll endorse.

(Editor’s note: Mamdani announced a slate of five endorsements on Saturday morning, after this story was initially published. As first shared with Hell Gate, he is backing Samantha Kattan, Aber Kawas, Illapa Sairitupac, Eli Northrup and Brian Romero.)

Let’s start with NYC-DSA’s slate of candidates. In New York City, the socialist group has endorsed eight Assembly and state Senate candidates. Mamdani has already endorsed Assembly Member Diana Moreno, who won the special election to succeed him in the Assembly back in February. What about the other seven candidates?

Three NYC-DSA candidates are running for open seats: Samantha Kattan (for Valdez’s western Queens seat), Aber Kawas (for retiring state Sen. Mike Gianaris’ western Queens seat) and Ilapa Sairitupac (for Assembly Member Grace Lee’s lower Manhattan seat). It’s pretty safe to assume the mayor will back all of them.

The other four NYC-DSA candidates are challenging incumbents – and that’s where it gets awkward, since endorsing against incumbents could strain his relationships with legislative leaders like Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie. It’s not a coincidence that Mamdani didn’t make any moves before the state budget was passed.

The most likely challenger for Mamdani to endorse is David Orkin, who’s trying to unseat Assembly Member Jenifer Rajkumar, who was a close ally of former Mayor Eric Adams. It’s rumored that Mamdani helped recruit Orkin to run for Rajkumar’s Queens seat, and Rajkumar isn’t especially close with Albany leadership, making this a pretty safe endorsement for the mayor. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Orkin on Thursday night, providing even more political cover for Mamdani.

AOC also endorsed DSA-backed candidates Christian Celeste Tate and Eon Huntley. Celeste Tate is challenging Assembly Member Erik Dilan, who previously fended off a DSA challenger in 2022 but whose father, erstwhile state Sen. Martin Dilan, was unseated by DSA’s Julia Salazar back in 2018. Huntley is challenging Assembly Member Stefani Zinerman for the second time, after losing to her by less than 7 points in 2024. Zinerman’s Bedford-Stuysevant district is in the heart of Black Brooklyn, and she has powerful friends like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and state Attorney General Letitia James, which may make Mamdani think twice before backing Huntley. But Mamdani endorsed Huntley the last time he ran against Zinerman, so he might feel obligated to do so again.

The DSA-backed challenger that could be the most politically complicated for Mamdani to endorse would be Conrad Blackburn, who’s challenging Assembly Member Jordan Wright in Harlem. Wright is the president of the Manhattan Young Democrats and his father Keith Wright is the head of the Manhattan Democratic Party. The Wrights backed former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic mayoral primary but switched their allegiance to Mamdani after he became the Democratic nominee. The mayor has already shown he’s willing to endorse against establishment politicians who endorsed him in the general election – just ask Espaillat – but Mamdani might not be inclined to cross a politically powerful family like the Wrights if Blackburn is unlikely to win.

That said, it’s unlikely that Mamdani would endorse everyone on the NYC-DSA slate except for Blackburn. More than 500 DSA members have signed an open letter calling on Mamdani to endorse the full NYC-DSA slate, and Black DSA members have specifically called on the mayor to support Black socialist candidates who are challenging more moderate Black incumbents.

Mamdani could also endorse a handful of candidates who are not part of the NYC-DSA slate – like Eli Northrup, Assembly Member Jessica González-Rojas, Brian Romero, Shamsul Haque and former Assembly Member Yuh-Line Niou.

Northrup is running for an open Assembly seat on the Upper West Side. JGR is looking to unseat state Sen. Jessica Ramos, who infamously backed Cuomo over Mamdani in the Democratic mayoral primary – and there’s no love lost between the mayor and Ramos. Romero, who previously worked as JGR’s chief of staff, is now looking to succeed her in the Assembly. All three of those candidates – Northrup, JGR and Romero – have already been endorsed by AOC. But one potential strike against Romero is that he insisted on running for the seat even though Mamdani and DSA favored a different candidate.

Haque, a former New York City Police Department detective, was a prominent surrogate for Mamdani during the mayoral campaign and is now running for an open Assembly seat in Queens. His main opposition is Patrick Martinez, who’s backed by the Queens Democratic Party. Niou is an ex-lawmaker with a good but not especially close relationship with the mayor who’s running for an open state Senate seat in Lower Manhattan with the support of the New York Working Families Party. Mamdani is more closely aligned with Niou than he is with her main rival, Assembly Member Grace Lee, but Lee is favored to win and the mayor may opt to just stay out of the race.

All of these impending endorsements are all quite frustrating for Rep. Nydia Velázquez, who’s seemingly made a point of endorsing against DSA candidates this year, ever since Valdez and Mamdani bucked her succession plans.

Velázquez told City & State she has endorsed “people that I know, people that are rooted in community,” pointing to Jasmin Sanchez, who’s running against Sairitupac in lower Manhattan. “She has been organizing and working on housing issues and protecting public housing forever.”

And what does she think about Mamdani’s plans to endorse a slate of legislative candidates?

“Look, who am I to tell him not to do it?” she said. “He will face the outcome of those (races). It's not guaranteed, it's not a given. And going forward you need your allies and the coalition that put you there. He didn't win because of the socialists. He won because he was able to put together a coalition.”

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Mamdani’s EDC, still leaderless, still stressing out the NYC business community

Annie McDonough and Sahalie Donaldson — Fri, 29 May 2026 17:19:07 -0400

Five months in, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration still hasn’t appointed someone to lead the city’s Economic Development Corporation, having passed over multiple candidates for the position.

A number of prominent city leaders have been interviewed for the position over the transition and in the early months of the Mamdani administration. According to four sources familiar, they include Lindsay Greene, president and CEO of the Brooklyn Navy Yard; James Katz, Gov. Kathy Hochul’s deputy secretary for economic development and workforce; and Julie Stein, executive director of the Union Square Partnership.

“It’s the type of thing where the longer you don’t hire for it, the narrative gets harder out in the world,” said one person with knowledge of internal deliberations. Business leaders have also expressed concern about the fact that several senior leaders at EDC have departed the agency since Mamdani’s term began – a shift that two sources familiar with the agency said goes well beyond typical turnover between administrations.

“It’s just a shame because there’s some great people there doing great work, but there’s a lot to do to craft an agenda, have a plan, execute on the plan, have the right leadership, do the budget work, make sure projects don’t stall – all of it,” the person with knowledge of internal deliberations said.

The search is ongoing but members of the city’s business community and others eager to see a more defined economic development vision from Mamdani are concerned it’s not happening with enough urgency. Two people with knowledge of the deliberations said the search appeared to be starting at square one earlier this month. Steve Fulop, president and CEO of the business advocacy group Partnership for New York City, said he got the sense from the person spearheading the search this week that new leadership isn’t imminent.

Fulop and members of the Partnership had a general meeting on Wednesday with Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su, who oversees EDC and is leading the hiring process. “Of course, the question came up about EDC leadership. She expressed that there’s been interim leadership there for four months and she’s very closely involved with what's happening there,” Fulop said. “As it stands right now, it didn’t seem yesterday like a sense of urgency or any great deal of insight that some sort of announcement is imminent.”

Jeanny Pak, the agency’s chief financial officer, has been serving as interim president and CEO since Andrew Kimball departed from the position in January.

“Well, we are back here again – and I am still here,” Pak said with a laugh at a City Council executive budget hearing for the agency on Friday, confirming she is also still serving as CFO. When asked at the hearing about the lack of a permanent president, Pak said that she didn’t know the reason for the delay or if there was a timeline for appointing someone permanent. “The president is the mayor's decision, and so we look forward to his decision,” she said. In the meantime, she said the agency has been able to move forward at its normal pace with its existing work as well as with work on new priorities from Mamdani. “We really have not stopped,” she said.

Asked about the hiring process timeline, City Hall did not provide any specifics. “Economic justice demands that we focus on economic growth and on who benefits from that growth. EDC is critical to that focus and has been since day one of this administration,” Su said in a statement provided by City Hall. “I have worked closely with EDC and Interim President Pak over the last 5 months on a daily basis to move forward critical economic development, infrastructure and affordable housing projects across all five boroughs, while launching bold new projects – from modular public restrooms to city-run grocery stores.”

“Many folks in the business community, and who are concerned about economic development, would love to see a long-term president in that position. EDC is an incredibly important agency for managing the city’s assets and in developing a long-term economic strategy, particularly given economic uncertainty in our future,” Council Member Virginia Maloney, who chairs the Committee on Economic Development, told City & State in advance of Friday’s hearing. “In the interim, I’ve been working really closely with Jeanny Pak who … has been doing a great job with the leadership at EDC to push forward initiatives.” Maloney said that work includes housing at Willets Point moving forward, and preparations for the FIFA World Cup.

The city’s economic development arm, EDC is a powerful city agency and nonprofit that since 1991 has had a guiding hand in projects like the High Line, Yankee Stadium, the city’s ferry system and the Brooklyn Marine Terminal. As a partner with the private sector, the agency has been criticized as being too friendly with powerful business interests.

Observers have attributed the delay in finding new leadership in part to the fact that Su only officially started as deputy mayor on March 1 after she moved from California to the city. Prior to that point, she’d been working as an unpaid volunteer and senior adviser to the fledgling Mamdani administration. But the bigger, underlying reason, they say, has to do with conflicting visions for the agency.

“I think they need to decide what message they’re trying to send, because they’ve interviewed a lot of people who would be good for the conventional version of EDC and they haven’t picked any of them,” another source with knowledge of the deliberations said.

Members of the city’s business community, and others who want to see Mamdani focus more on job creation, have raised concerns for months that the mayor either isn’t prioritizing the agency or doesn’t have a concrete vision for economic development. The New York Times reported on a memo circulated by Su in February that outlined a vision for the agency focused more on economic justice. Interviewees were reportedly asked about how they would hold companies that receive public benefits accountable and measure economic equality, according to the Times. At the time, former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan was conducting interviews with some candidates. These sorts of questions have continued under Su.

Some are eager to see the Mamdani administration give EDC direction and new leadership, and argue that the mayor shouldn’t view it as the shady corporate-handout agency it’s sometimes cast as. (Among other things, EDC garnered hostility from New York’s political left when it worked in the de Blasio administration to bring an Amazon headquarters to Queens – a city-state deal replete with hefty tax incentives that ultimately failed.)

They also argue that it could be helpful in advancing some of the policies Mamdani has identified as priorities. The agency is already working on rolling out Mamdani’s plan for city-owned grocery stores.

Randy Peers, president and CEO of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, noted that it's not all doom and gloom for the business community. “The team in place, meaning the professional staff, are really, really good at what they do,” he said. “I don’t want that to be lost in this sort of higher level discussion about who leads EDC.”

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For Kathy Hochul, a late budget isn’t a problem – it’s a successful tactic

Rebecca C. Lewis — Thu, 28 May 2026 15:05:04 -0400

At the start of the year, when Gov. Kathy Hochul presented her State of the State and executive budget, many in Albany believed that 2026 could have been a return to timely budgets after four years of progressively later spending plans. Based on what the governor presented, nothing stood out to lawmakers or other political observers as something that could cause weekslong delays like the past several years.

Hopes were uncharacteristically high – but Hochul wound up leaning on her now-signature tactic: maximizing her budget policy wins at the expense of the spending plan being her most delayed one yet, launching a prolonged victory tour to tout how her actions will benefit New Yorkers in an election year.

That sluggish process left lawmakers frustrated, and they finished voting on the latest budget in 16 years Wednesday night, nearly a full two months after the April 1 deadline. That’s 19 days later than last year, and nearly three weeks after Hochul declared victory on the spending plan with a “general agreement” announcement. And much to lawmakers’ chagrin, only six scheduled legislative session days remained to get through most other priorities, as well as other typical end-of-session necessities like home rule measures and confirmation votes.

Upon taking office, Hochul promised a new era of collaboration with the Legislature on the heels of a particularly poor relationship between former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and lawmakers. But that didn’t stop her from figuring out how best to use the executive-led state budget process to her advantage, abandoning her predecessor’s focus on timeliness in favor of delay to get what she wanted.

“She’s absolutely utilizing this tactic to increase her victories and her success,” Jeff Lewis, a longtime former Hochul adviser, told City & State. “And when has she not gotten what she wanted thus far with that tactic?” He argued the delays this year were a testament to Hochul’s willingness to make hard decisions, and the entrenched interests that make something seemingly simple like auto insurance reform far stickier than anticipated.

Blair Horner of the New York Public Interest Research Group had a slightly less charitable view of Hochul’s strategy from the past several years. “She’s getting nonbudget victories, and that’s the problem,” he said. “She holds the budget hostage and says, ‘We’re not going to deal with the budget until you deal with my nonbudget priorities.’” He said he’s not sure why things ultimately devolved the way they did despite early optimism, but added that in an election year, the tactic has allowed Hochul to keep the spotlight on her for longer, and highlight her own narrative on how she’s fighting for New Yorkers.

According to Democratic consultant Jake Dilemani, a governor never would never explicitly aim for a late budget, especially in an election year when it would provide Republicans fodder to attack Hochul over dysfunction. The governor has repeatedly said – including to reporters on Thursday – that she always aims to have an on-time budget. But Dilemani said that, given a choice between avoiding potential attacks on the process and having the strongest series of policy victories to bring to the campaign trail, the answer is clear: “At the end of the day, the legislative achievements (and) the policy coming out of Albany is way more salient and more electorally useful than a late budget is harmful.”

The delays left legislators particularly exasperated. “I don’t know if it's on purpose or not, but of course I'm frustrated,” state Sen. Gustavo Rivera told City & State shortly after the budget finished passing in his chamber. “This is not the way this process should work … I mean, there’s just no time to do anything, and this was not the way this should work. This is way too difficult, way too complicated.”

Rivera called himself “naive” for commenting a few weeks before the budget deadline that he felt confident the budget would get done in a relatively timely manner, adding to his annoyance with how things ended up this year. “I sincerely and strongly believe that we need to change the constitution, because the constitution – Silver v. Pataki – gives the governor way too much power during this process.”

State Senate Deputy Majority Leader Mike Gianaris gave Hochul the benefit of the doubt on whether she was purposefully messing with the Legislature. “If this was Andrew Cuomo’s governorship, I would say it was intentional for some Machiavellian purpose, but that’s not my experience with Kathy Hochul,” he told City & State Tuesday. “But … if someone is interested in the Legislature not doing its job, this would be an effective strategy. I hope that’s not what’s going on.”

Gianaris won’t be in the chamber next year, but many of his members will be, like state Sen. Michelle Hinchey. “I think everybody feels – and I would hope the governor feels it too – that this is an unsustainable process that we’ve kind of gone through,” Hinchey told City & State. She added that there is an appetite in the Democratic conference to spend time doing a “postmortem” and discussing potential process changes for the future.

In the Assembly, Speaker Carl Heastie has not been shy about his aggravation with the process, though not the governor herself, whom he said was just leveraging the tools at her disposal. On the day Hochul announced a budget deal, he declared he was “never doing this again” with regards to policy before finances. And his members have faith he’ll stick with making changes next year. “As far as I’ve been here, Carl Heastie has never broken one promise to me as the speaker,” Assembly Member Brian Cunningham told City & State. “I think he was frustrated with the way it went down (and) he was very adamant about this not being a return to normalcy … I think there’s an opportunity for us to take a step back and actually do something next year that can be very different.”

Assembly Member Michaelle Solages criticized a process that limits how much time legislators have to actually legislate. “We’re closest to the people, we’re individually elected for a district and we actually represent what the people need,” she said. “So this should be a process where it’s co-equal branches all working together to produce a document we can be proud of … The process does need to change, I agree with the speaker.”

Whether those changes happen are a big if, especially as Hochul continues to defend her budget strategy. Speaking to reporters in Albany after signing the final two budget bills Thursday, Hochul touted her success and brushed off the legislators’ concerns about how little time they have to do other work. “What has stopped the legislators since January from passing bills?” she questioned. “A lot of time there.”

“They will still pass an enormous number of bills.” Hochul added. “I will have the opportunity to spend my next six months reviewing them, as I always do.” And the governor pointed to an op-ed from state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins published Thursday morning laying out various wins for her members in the enacted budget that benefits more than just herself electorally. “(Stewart-Cousins) laid out what all her members and other members can run on as well,” Hochul said.

Hochul said the process in place allows her to best deliver on issues New Yorkers care about. “These are priorities that are not just Kathy Hochul priorities,” she said. “They're my priorities because they're important to New Yorkers, and I'm the vehicle to get that done.” And she stood firm that she still aims for a timely budget every year – including next year. “I’m shooting for April 1,” she said.

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Pro-veterans PAC launches $1M ad spend to boost Conley in NY-17

Kate Lisa — Thu, 28 May 2026 05:00:00 -0400

A progressive PAC that backs veterans running for office is spending $1 million to air a TV ad supporting Democrat Cait Conley in the final stretch of the closely watched primary that will determine Rep. Mike Lawler’s opponent this fall.

VoteVets is running a 30-second spot – shared exclusively with City & State – highlighting Conley’s generational ties to the 17th Congressional District. Conley, a former election security official who served on the National Security Council in the Biden administration, left the Hudson Valley and completed six deployments overseas. But the 16-year U.S. Army veteran caught flak for moving back to the district from Virginia last year to run for the swingy seat. The ad will run solely on cable networks in the district, targeting audiences on ESPN, HGTV, Lifetime and Hallmark, as well as during live Yankees and Mets games.

“From combat zones to the Situation Room, she knows where she comes from,” the narrator says, in a nod to both Conley’s service and Hudson Valley roots. But as has been common in the race, VoteVets was unable to resist taking a swipe at President Donald Trump: “Cait’s running for Congress to take on Trump’s corruption, rein in ICE, and bring down costs for Hudson Valley families.”

Conley and Rockland County Legislator Beth Davidson are the front-runners in the June 23 primary, but candidates Effie Phillips-Staley, John Cappello and Mike Sacks will also appear on the ballot. VoteVets, which endorsed Conley almost a year ago, also commissioned a poll that shows her with a 7-point lead over Davidson among voters who are familiar with both leading candidates. Conley's lead grew to 20 points over Davidson – 44% to Davidson’s 24% – after voters were given informed, positive introductions to both candidates, according to the polling memo. The poll, conducted by the Global Strategy Group, has a margin of error of 4.4 percentage points. A total of 500 likely Democratic primary voters were surveyed in the district from May 7 to 12 via live telephone interviews.

“The momentum we are feeling on the ground is palpable,” Conley said in a statement to City & State. “This poll confirms what we already know: NY-17 voters are ready for a fighter. We're fighting to lower costs for Hudson Valley families and protect our democracy from those who seek to exploit it for their own gain. With less than four weeks to go, we are not taking our foot off the gas for one minute.”

Davidson’s campaign declined to comment on the poll. Other polls conducted in the race last month, as reported by The New York Times, have shown Davidson in the lead over Conley.

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It’s time for Zohran’s Charter Revision Commission

Jeff Coltin and Sahalie Donaldson — Wed, 27 May 2026 17:57:58 -0400

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani created his own Charter Revision Commission on Thursday, tasking the 15-member panel with crafting a series of government efficiency proposals to put before voters.

City & State was first to report the mayor’s plans Wednesday night. On Thursday morning, Mamdani officially announced its formation, dubbing it the Commission on Government Efficiency, or COGE – a reference to the controversial Department of Government Efficiency previously helmed by Elon Musk. He tapped Patrick Gaspard, the former president of the Center for American Progress and one of the mayor’s outside advisers, to serve as its chair. Other prominent commission members include District Council 37 Executive Director Henry Garrido, former Manhattan borough president Ruth Messinger, New York State Association for Affordable Housing President Carlina Rivera, longtime government veteran Marc Shaw, de Blasio alum Emma Wolfe and Kathryn Wylde, the former president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City. The commission also includes Marco Carrión, Susan Kang, Kapil Longani, Theodore Moore, Ana Oliveira, Dawn Pinnock, Esther Rosario and Barika Williams. Politico New York was first to report the commission’s makeup.

The formation of the new commission comes after Gov. Kathy Hochul and state legislators included a provision in the state budget that allowed Mamdani to simply disband the existing Charter Revision Commission convened by former Mayor Eric Adams on his last day in office. The mayor did so on Wednesday evening, signing a measure to dismantle the group – a decision likely to spur a legal challenge from the panel, which former first deputy mayor Randy Mastro is providing pro bono legal representation to. Prior to Mamdani taking action, Kayla Mamelak Altus, a spokesperson for the commission, said the group will “pursue all appropriate legal remedies” if the mayor attempts to dismantle it.

That commission, composed of many of Adams’ allies and former staffers, has so far barreled forward without the support of the Mamdani administration despite the mounting opposition. Days after announcing it would focus on issues like fighting antisemitism, housing and land use reforms, protester interference outside of houses of worship, barring elected officials from raising their own salaries and opening up the city’s primary elections, the group convened for its first public hearing Wednesday night at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. Questions about its legality and feasibility have circulated since the start. Now, with the passage of the state measure, and Mamdani moving to dismantle it, its future appears even more unlikely.

Mamdani’s commission could come at a political cost. When Adams convened his first Charter Revision Commission on May 21, 2024, it was harshly criticized by City Council members and good government groups as a rushed process that didn’t allow enough time to seriously consider the charter before the July deadline to get questions on the ballot. Mamdani’s commission is being formed even later, and would have even less time. The group could technically wait to introduce ballot proposals next year instead if members choose to do so, though this is unlikely. Under the City Charter, a commission can exist for a maximum of two general elections before it is automatically disbanded, according to the good government group Citizens Union.

Public hearings for Mamdani’s commission are slated to kick off on June 9. Over the next couple of months, the group is expected to hold 10 of these meetings in which members will gather input on how to potentially review the city charter. There’s little insight at this point into what proposals the commission will ultimately seek to adopt. According to the Mamdani administration, the group is expected to focus on “removing outdated bureaucratic barriers that slow infrastructure projects and delay services; equipping City agencies the authority, enforcement tools, and flexibility they need to deliver programs effectively; and modernizing government to improve efficiency and saving, reserve and budget practices.”

The creation of a new commission could also mean there are three charter revision commissions acting concurrently. There’s the latest one, there’s Adams’ – which Mamdani nullified – and there’s one convened by New York City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams in January, 2025. That commission met and released a report, but it was blocked from placing questions on the November ballot by another, previous commission convened by Eric Adams, which took precedence. It’s unlikely that the group will make another attempt this time around.

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The 2026 state legislative primary races to watch

City & State — Tue, 26 May 2026 05:00:00 -0400

With hotly contested midterm elections at the congressional level and a testy Democratic state comptroller contest, there’s already plenty to talk about ahead of next month’s primary elections. But in the ongoing game of musical chairs that is New York politics, there’s also no shortage of competitive state legislative races this primary season. While that’s in part due to retirements and incumbents looking to move up the ladder, it’s also due to the upcoming enforcement of a cap on legislators’ outside income, leading some to prepare to leave public office in favor of hanging on to their side hustles.

There’s sure to be an unmistakable changing of the guard in Albany come January, but less certain is what that will look like. Many of these races are in New York City, but there are plenty throughout the state too. While some races pit establishment Democrats against the left, others pit the left against the far left. And affordability will continue to be a major theme across the board. Here are the 2026 state legislative primary races to watch.

– Sophie Krichevsky

This story has been updated to include Hiram Monserrate and Michael Bailey’s candidacies and to mention Rajkumar’s labor support.

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Trump takes aim at Hochul and Jeffries at Lawler campaign event

Kate Lisa — Sun, 24 May 2026 15:00:00 -0400

Striving to appeal to voters in one of the most competitive House races in the country, President Donald Trump on Friday campaigned for Rep. Mike Lawler in Rockland County – taking aim at top House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Gov. Kathy Hochul a day after the state Legislature passed sweeping reforms to restrict local officials from assisting federal immigration agents.

Trump took the stage at Rockland County Community College to stump for Lawler as he faces a tough reelection bid this November. “He’s a pain in the ass, you’re lucky to have him,” Trump said of Lawler to a screaming crowd of at least 1,500 people.

At least four protesters disrupted the president at different times throughout his nearly 90-minute speech and were escorted out by police. Trump’s visit marked the first time a sitting president had visited Rockland County for a public event since President Gerald Ford hit a campaign stop at the county courthouse in 1976, Lawler told the crowd before Trump arrived.

The Hudson Valley congressional representative defended Trump’s visit to reporters before the event. “Having the president of the United States come to your district is a wonderful opportunity for the community, no matter who the president is, just like when Joe Biden showed up three years ago, I was there,” Lawler said. “And when Donald Trump’s coming, I’m here.”

Lawler recounted intense negotiations between himself, Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson to lift the State And Local Tax, or SALT, deduction cap last year. Lawler threatened to torpedo Trump’s landmark tax and spending plan, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill. And he said Trump replied, “Give Lawler all the salt he wants.” In the end, the cap was raised from $10,000 to $40,000 for single and joint filers.

Lawler’s tale showed how his strategy impressed the president, who has seemingly deepened his respect he has for the incumbent House Republican. Trump has endorsed Lawler for a third term and repeatedly posted about the race on his social media site Truth Social.

Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, who’s running against Hochul with Madison County Sheriff Todd Hood, also stumped for Lawler and sang his praises to potential voters.

Blakeman and Trump met in the Oval Office two weeks ago to discuss a range of topics, including New York elections and the state’s high utility costs. “Tell those New Yorkers we need to drill, baby, drill.” Blakeman recalled Trump telling him during the visit. Trump has asked Hochul to lift the state’s gas fracking ban, but she has so far refused.

On Friday, Trump railed against the immigration reforms included in this year’s state budget, which he said obstructs federal immigration enforcement.

“Bruce, hopefully you’ll get that unpassed very quickly,” the president said, later adding he’s going to work with Blakeman because he’s going to win. “Bruce, you’re going to be the next governor, I’m telling you right now,” he said. He later posed a warning to Hochul. “You better watch yourself, Kathy,” Trump said. “You’ve got a big race.”

Hochul later responded to the president’s threat on social media. “I won’t be intimidated by Trump – or any spineless MAGA coward like my opponent Bruce Blakeman,” her office posted on X. “While they’re busy screwing over New Yorkers, I’m fighting like hell to lower costs and protect New Yorkers from his attacks. Game on.”

Earlier in his speech, Trump said Jeffries inspired him to coin the word “Dumacrat,” a portmanteau of “Democrat” and “dumb.”“He’s a very low-IQ person,” Trump said of Jeffries, who has led national Democrats in a redistricting war against Republicans. “Very low IQ.”

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Raga cosponsors pro-Palestine bill his senate opponent helped write

Peter Sterne — Fri, 22 May 2026 17:34:50 -0400

The controversial “Not on Our Dime!” legislation originally introduced by then-Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani has attracted three new sponsors – including Assembly Member Steven Raga, who’s now running for state Senate against the activist who helped write the bill.

Raga appeared at a press conference in Long Island City Friday morning alongside a group of socialist elected officials backed by the New York City Democratic Socialists of America – state Sens. Jabari Brisport and Kristen Gonzalez, Assembly Members Diana Moreno and Claire Valdez and New York City Council Member Alexa Avilés – to promote the bill’s reintroduction. (Raga is a member of NYC-DSA but not endorsed by the group.)

The legislation is targeted at nonprofit organizations registered in New York that facilitate illegal settlements in the West Bank or are implicated in Israeli war crimes in Gaza. It would allow the state attorney general’s office to strip those organizations of their tax-exempt status and create a private right of action for people harmed by those organizations’ actions to sue for monetary damages. When Mamdani first introduced the bill three years ago, it garnered intense backlash from supporters of Israel; state legislative leaders said it would never be brought to a vote, and 25 state lawmakers signed a letter accusing Mamdani of demonizing Jewish organizations. Mamdani didn’t attend the press conference, but he contributed a supportive quote to a press release about the legislation, saying, “I am grateful that (the bill sponsors) are carrying this work forward. They are fighting to ensure public funds reflect the needs and values of everyday New Yorkers.”

Raga’s decision to cosponsor the legislation comes as he runs a contentious race to succeed retiring state Sen. Michael Gianaris in western Queens. His main opponent for the senate seat is Aber Kawas, a pro-Palestinian activist backed by NYC-DSA who helped conceive of the legislation and worked with Mamdani to introduce it years ago.

Kawas was also present at the Long Island City press conference, and both she and Raga were all smiles as they told City & State how their shared support for the bill transcended their primary battle.

“I think we're just running for an open seat, but I think there are some things, some important bills that can help not just alleviate pain here in New York, but across the world, and it's our job to make sure that we're pushing the way, signing on to them,” Raga said after the press conference.

Asked why he hadn’t supported the bill when it was first introduced three years ago, he joked that Moreno “is more convincing than Zohran” and then gave a not entirely convincing answer about wanting to wait until the language of the bill had been finalized. “I just wanted to make sure this was the last version of the bill,” he said.

For her part, Kawas is just happy to have another elected official cosponsoring the bill she helped create. “As organizers, what we ultimately want is for people to grow and sign on to the bills that we help propose and help introduce,” she said – before joking that maybe she just needs to run against more state lawmakers to get them to sign on to the bill.

The Not on Our Dime! Act now has the support of nine Assembly members: Moreno (who replaced Mamdani as the lead Assembly sponsor), Raga, Valdez, Sarahana Shrestha, Phara Souffrant Forrest, Marcela Mitaynes, Emily Gallagher, retiring Assembly Member Nader Sayegh and Jessica González-Rojas, who is also running for state Senate. It’s currently backed by three state senators: Brisport (the lead Senate sponsor), Gonzalez and Julia Salazar. And it’s guaranteed to get at least one more senate sponsor next session; both Kawas and Raga told City & State they would back the bill in the senate if they’re elected.

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Pat Ryan’s Patriot PAC endorses nearly 100 candidates across NY

Rebecca C. Lewis — Fri, 22 May 2026 04:00:00 -0400

Rep. Pat Ryan is endorsing a slate of local candidates statewide through his Patriot PAC – but don’t read into his decision to get involved too much, according to Ryan. Despite his name being on many lips for statewide office, he’s hoping to help steer a new generation of “service-minded” Democrats for the love of the democracy game.

This slate includes a total of 85 candidates running for everything from town council to state Senate across 26 counties. That’s up from 17 total counties Ryan’s Patriot PAC endorsed in last year, after forming the PAC in September to support candidates from “public service backgrounds” such as military veterans and teachers. He called the efforts in 2025 “hugely successful” – three-quarters of the candidates Patriot PAC supported won their races – and said he hoped to build on the momentum this year.

“It's just been really rewarding to get to know these candidates, see them working hard and then support them in these races,” the Hudson Valley Democrat told City & State. “The goal is just to get more service-minded candidates who have... walked the walk on true community service, and almost definitionally haven't come up through the traditional political machinery.”

Interestingly, one of Ryan’s endorsed candidates is state Sen. Jeremy Zellner, who embodies the “traditional political machinery” as the longtime chair of the Erie County Democratic Party who practically oversaw his own selection by the party to run in a special election earlier this year (Zellner recused himself from the nominating process). Asked about that particular endorsement, Ryan did not explain his specific reasoning for weighing in in that race. “I think the core idea is less about the political dynamics of an individual race and more about… the individual caliber of the candidate,” he said.

Patriot PAC is indeed supporting a range of candidates Democratic primaries – some incumbents, some insurgents and some running for open seats. Ryan backed Assembly Member Jessica González-Rojas, for example, who is seeking to unseat state Sen. Jessica Ramos. He also endorsed Assembly candidates Ryder Kessler and Eli Northrup, both running for open seats in Manhattan.

The PAC additionally endorsed a number of candidates running to flip Republican-held seats in the state Legislature, including state Senate candidate Lisa Kaul from Poughkeepsie and Assembly candidate Chloe Pierce in the Capital Region.

It’s an awful lot of races to get involved in, and hyper local to boot in many cases. They’re the kind of elections one might expect someone with statewide ambitions might choose to influence. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has similarly endorsed big slates in the past – though has yet to make many local endorsements yet this year. But Ryan said that’s not why he’s doing it.

“I just think we have to fucking win right now,” he said. “It is such an existential amount of harm being done, and risk that constituents are facing. Everybody has to do the maximum that they can in this moment to win.”

The goal for Ryan, he said, is to have the Democratic Party be a big tent, which includes more moderate candidates like himself, and progressives like Ocasio-Cortez and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whom he endorsed after the 2025 primary.

“The way the governor (Kathy Hochul) and the mayor have operated together in broadening the coalition is a great example of that,” Ryan said. “I've tried to model that – Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and I have done a bunch together… We don't agree on every single thing, but we're focusing on the things we agree on, and people have really responded to that.”

Ryan said he hasn’t given thought about the prospect of running for governor or U.S. Senate, even if he admitted his desire for expanded influence on the direction of the Democratic Party. “For me personally, I want to have the maximum influence to win these races and get the party in a better place,” he said. “I don't think that's about a seat or a position.”

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As expected, budget immigration protections fall short of full New York for All proposal

Rebecca C. Lewis — Thu, 21 May 2026 15:33:46 -0400

Lawmakers are set to approve a series of new immigrant protections agreed to as part of the state budget that stops short of enacting the full New York for All Act that immigrant rights advocates have pushed for. Legislators say they will use the last two weeks of the scheduled legislative session to push for additional protections that get closer to the full bill that they say Gov. Kathy Hochul has resisted. But lawmakers have so far refrained from using the levers of power at their disposal to force the governor’s hand on an issue the sponsors have painted as of dire importance.

The Legislature printed the updated version of the Public Protection and General Government budget bill Wednesday night, the second of nine unfinished budget bills to reach the floor since the April 1 budget deadline passed. It includes the governor’s “Local Crimes, Local Cops” Act and several other provisions to limit local cooperation with federal immigration agents and prevent local jails from housing immigrants on behalf of the federal government. It also would ban immigration agents and other law enforcement from wearing masks, and permit New Yorkers to sue U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials for alleged civil rights violations.

At its core, the legislation bans what are known as formal 287(g) agreements that local law enforcement can enter into with ICE. They permit local police to work with ICE, ranging from sharing information and honoring detainer requests to deputizing officers to act as federal immigration agents and permit them to enforce civil immigration law. A number of local police and sheriffs’ departments have signed such agreements.

Compared to the governor’s original proposal from January, the final version also will prohibit informal agreements with ICE and Customs and Border Patrol that functionally act like a 287(g) information sharing agreement. During the Thursday Assembly debate on the issue, Assembly Member Catalina Cruz explained the bill treats informal agreements as patterns of cooperation between local law enforcement and ICE, rather than one-off instances of cooperation.

But to the chagrin of both immigrant rights advocates and lawmakers who have worked on immigration issues, the final budget language does not explicitly forbid all informal cooperation between federal officials and local law enforcement. “The legislative package falls short of offering comprehensive protections by continuing to permit informal law enforcement collusion with ICE and Border Patrol,” Murad Awawdeh, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, said in a statement. Though he also praised the bill’s advancements, he stood firm in calling on lawmakers to pass New York for All in its entirety.

Legislators tried to negotiate with the governor to include language in the budget that would ban all informal collusion with ICE and CPB by local law enforcement. But after rejecting Hochul’s initial proposal that would have permitted cooperation if police had probable cause for a crime, legislative leaders and the governor could not come to an acceptable agreement to deal with those informal communications.

“We did not have three willing partners willing to go that far,” state Sen. Andrew Gounardes, sponsor of the New York for All Act, told reporters Thursday morning. “And so we have more work to do to make sure that we have three willing partners so that this doesn't happen again.” He asserted that the budget legislation would not have prevented a situation like one that happened to Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a blind immigrant who was found dead after his transfer by local Western New York police to CPB.

A spokesperson for Hochul did not immediately return a request for comment, but her office has previously highlighted instances when the governor has tried to negotiate with legislative leaders on the issue, including removing language around law enforcement cooperation they disagreed with.

Gounardes and state Sen. Julia Salazar said they’ll push to get the full New York for All Act passed before they leave for the year. “I'm really proud that the Senate acted swiftly and early this session (and) convened a group of senators who wanted to focus on immigration policy,” Salazar said. Gounardes added that their chamber was “ready to pass the bill.”

But neither the state Senate nor the Assembly has passed the New York for All Act yet. That’s despite widespread support among Democrats, with Gounardes quipping “almost every Democrat” spoke at a rally for the legislation in April. “As much as we may have wanted to pass this, these are also complicated issues,” he said Thursday.

Both Gounardes and Salazar pointed to the fact that the governor still needs to sign legislation. “We do need all three parties in order for something to become law, and so I think that what we’re doing today is really important, and we have to continue to try to get all three parties to a place where we can go further in protecting all New Yorkers,” Salazar said.

But lawmakers do have options to force the governor’s hand. While the governor does need to sign bills that pass both chambers in order for them to become law, legislative leaders can bait the governor into either going on the record vetoing a measure, or to sign it to avoid bad press. Usually, they wait until Hochul “calls it up” before sending the legislation over for her signature or veto. The reason is that once it hits her desk, the governor has 10 days to decide how to act. Legislative leaders historically don’t send bills until she is ready as a courtesy.

Asked why lawmakers did not employ a more aggressive tactic on an issue they considered so important, Gounardes suggested things might have been different had the budget process not dragged on. “The budget calculations this year really, I think, warped a lot of what other legislative strategy we may have tried to employ on this issue and other issues,” he said.

But ultimately, Gounardes went back to placing the blame on Hochul. “We want to be in a place where we’re actually passing things that we know are going to help people, and that we can actually put those protections in place immediately,” he said. “And we don't have three partners that can do that on this particular issue right now.”

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Levine: AI is a ‘New York story’ – for better or worse

Annie McDonough — Thu, 21 May 2026 05:00:00 -0400

Will the artificial intelligence revolution help or hurt New York’s economy? New York City Comptroller Mark Levine – and a team of economists – puts the odds at about 50/50.

What’s certain is that New York will feel the effects one way or the other. “Wall Street has done well in no small part because we are financing the AI boom. That begs the question, what happens if that bubble bursts?” he told reporters this week. “I don’t think people appreciate how much this is a New York story.”

A new report from Levine’s office released Thursday morning lays out five different possibilities for how the current AI boom could affect hiring, tax revenue and wages in the city in the next few years. The report’s findings are based on a February analysis by Moody’s Analytics that evaluated similar scenarios in a national context. Levine’s office adapted and updated it for the local economy.

The most likely scenario – estimated at 35% likelihood – would see moderate job, wage and tax revenue growth – producing what the report refers to as an “AI-Empowered Economy.” An even more optimistic scenario – estimated at 15% likelihood – foresees a “productivity boon” that raises corporate profits without widespread job displacement. (Levine said their report built off of Moody’s projections, which were calculated by taking an average of its seven authors’ estimates, as well as that of Claude, a large language model.)

But three other possible scenarios, together totaling 50% likelihood, predict that AI will have negative outcomes for employment and tax revenue. That could look like AI investment falling flat, producing fewer private sector jobs, lower adoption and less tax revenue, a 25% likely scenario, per the report. Another scenario, at 20% likelihood, foresees that AI adoption will happen even faster than anticipated, producing more widespread replacement of jobs and an increase in unemployment. The worst case scenario, and deemed the least probable at 5% likelihood, is an “AI shockwave” that envisions the most significant job displacement and resulting tax revenue losses.

Throughout each scenario, Levine said, concerns about income inequality are what keeps him up at night. “I’m worried (that) the gains of the years ahead will flow to the people who own stock and not to people who live off wages,” he said.

All scenarios, Levine argues, demonstrate a need for New York City to massively grow its budget reserves to prepare for outcomes that economists can only guess at. Levine has already pushed to fortify the city’s budget reserves, but argues his office’s findings in the new report are reason to double down. Specifically, he has called for the city’s Revenue Stabilization Fund, often called the rainy day fund, to be built to 16% of the city’s tax revenue, which this fiscal year would equate to $13.5 billion, or roughly $11.5 billion more than is currently in the rainy day fund. While this year’s budget process is well under way, Levine suggested the city could find deeper savings to build reserves by curtailing growing spending on the CityFHEPS rental voucher program and combining city schools with declining enrollment.

Levine has also called for rules to be established to govern when funds can be withdrawn from the rainy day fund – for example a recession. Among those triggers to allow withdraws should be AI disruption, he said.

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Blakeman says unions will back Republicans this year

Peter Sterne — Wed, 20 May 2026 17:52:32 -0400

Republican gubernatorial nominee Bruce Blakeman has a plan for the GOP to win back the governor’s mansion: organized labor.

“The Republican party is going to get unprecedented support from union workers because they share our values and not the values of Kathy Hochul and Mamdani the Commie,” the Nassau County executive said in his speech at the New York Republican State Committee’s annual gala Tuesday night at The Plaza in Manhattan.

Blakeman pointed to a number of recent strikes – including last year’s wildcat strike of corrections officers, the nurses’ strike earlier this year and the recent Long Island Rail Road strike – to suggest that unionized workers were unhappy with the governor.

“We just had a little strike here on Long Island, on the Long Island Rail Road. Think about it. The first strike by (those) railroad workers in 30 years,” he said. “Republicans (and) Democrats never had the problems Kathy Hochul had with labor. Corrections officers (were) fired because they brought to the attention of the governor the unsafe conditions, that prisoners are running our prisons. She fired them when they went on strike. I will hire them all back! Governor Hochul wanted out-of-state nurses to break the picket lines of our nurses.”

Despite Blakeman’s hopes, it’s unlikely that the very progressive New York State Nurses Association will endorse him just because they’re frustrated with Hochul. The more conservative corrections unions and LIRR unions very well could, but the idea that members of labor unions would line up behind a Republican candidate over the Democratic incumbent is almost certainly a fantasy.

So far, Blakeman has garnered little labor support besides police unions. Hochul has had a sometimes rocky relationship with organized labor, but she has largely made up with the traditionally Democratic constituency. She does not have unanimous labor support – “she is not a trade-union supporting Governor, she is the Bosses’ Governor,” outspoken Transport Workers Union International President John Samuelsen told the New York Post in February – but her campaign told City & State she’s already been endorsed for reelection by more than several unions, including heavy hitters like 32BJ SEIU, District Council 37, the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, the Civil Service Employees Association and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.

A campaign spokesperson for Hochul referred City & State to a statement from Vinny Alu, business manager of Laborers Local 66. “Union members know they have a proven ally in Governor Hochul,” Alu said. “Her administration has prioritized developing, protecting, and expanding opportunities for working families across New York State. By contrast, Bruce Blakeman has yet to show that he would fight to maintain the wages, protections, and opportunities this union workforce has earned. He can pretend to stand with labor but New York’s workers are not buying it.”

Blakeman’s pro-labor posturing is somewhat at odds with his appeals to the anti-union Conservative Party – he shouted out Conservative Party Chair Gerard Kassar from the stage – and felt out of place with the rest of the gala, whose main theme seemed to be “New York should become Florida.”

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Republicans have contrasted the increasingly conservative Florida with Democrat-controlled New York. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was the guest of honor at the NYGOP gala, and the event featured plenty of cracks about New Yorkers escaping to “the Free State of Florida” to escape leftist policies.

“When I got the invitation, I was excited to come because, quite frankly, I've got a lot of people in my state that have a lot of roots here,” DeSantis said in his keynote speech. “How can I turn down an opportunity to address some of my future residents? … Honestly, I should go, in some respects, to the New York Democrat convention, just to thank them for their failures, and how that's driven business and opportunity in my state.”

DeSantis later suggested that Florida could serve as not just a foil to New York, but a model for the state’s Republican minority. He said that when he was first elected in 2018 with a slim 35,000-vote margin, Florida was a swing state – “every major race for the previous decade was decided by 1 percentage point or less” – and Democrats had a registration advantage of close to 300,000 voters. In the years since, Florida has turned bright red and registered Republicans now outnumber registered Democrats by 1.5 million.

Blakeman and state GOP Chair Ed Cox told the crowd they were confident they will be able to beat Hochul this year, after former Rep. Lee Zeldin came within 7 points of unseating her four years ago. At one point, DeSantis joked that he wished he could have given Zeldin some of the votes he received from ex-New Yorkers who had moved to Florida over the past decade, which could have given him a winning margin.

In addition to DeSantis and Blakeman, the event also featured speeches from Republican attorney general candidate Saritha Komatireddy, state comptroller candidate Joseph Hernandez and congressional candidate Mike LiPetri, who is challenging Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi on Long Island.

The crowd included numerous other Republican congressional and state legislative candidates – as well as ex-Gov. David Paterson, a longtime Democrat who has increasingly been cozying up to the right. Paterson left the event early, but a person seated at his table later told City & State that the former governor has been a frequent presence at GOP events in recent years.

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Budget voting starts, but the state’s not at the finish line yet

Rebecca C. Lewis — Wed, 20 May 2026 15:10:55 -0400

Gov. Kathy Hochul announced a “general agreement” on the state budget on May 7, the latest she has ever done so. Now, two weeks later, the state Legislature has finally printed one of the remaining nine budget bills, setting lawmakers up to at least begin actually voting. But the process is still slow-going as legislators grapple with what is already the tardiest spending plan in nearly two decades.

Both the state Senate and Assembly on Wednesday took up the Education, Labor and Family Assistance budget bill, better known as ELFA. The Assembly passed it by a vote of 110-34 largely along party lines. It offers final – and official – details on a number of education and labor issues that have come up during negotiations. Lawmakers are expected to vote on the Public Protection and General Government bill on Thursday, which will include long-awaited details on new protections for immigrants, before breaking for Memorial Day Weekend.

As the Assembly hunkered down for a lengthy debate on ELFA, Assembly Ways and Means Chair J. Gary Pretlow likened the situation to a baseball game. “We’re in a nine-inning game, and we are in the first inning,” he said on the chamber floor.

Out of the 10 pieces of legislation that make up the state budget, only one has passed so far – the debt service bill approved ahead of the April 1 deadline in order to prevent the state from defaulting on its loans. An updated and final version of ELFA was introduced Wednesday morning, just hours before lawmakers would begin voting. The other eight bills are still outstanding.

Speaking in Manhattan, Hochul struck a somewhat blasé tone, despite the budget’s extreme and growing lateness. “My budget is done, but they’re just still voting on it,” she said to reporters at an unrelated press conference. But despite her continued insistence the budget is buttoned up outside of voting, last-minute items are still making their way into the plan, and some controversial issues are still getting worked out.

Case in point: News broke Wednesday morning that the budget would include a new provision that would prevent lame duck New York City mayors from calling charter revision commissions that would convene after their departure from office. Although it’s a hot topic in New York City right now thanks to a commission from former Mayor Eric Adams, some lawmakers only just found out the budget would touch on the issue.

Assembly Member Jo Anne Simon told City & State that Democrats in her chamber were first briefed on the matter on Tuesday. Despite the sudden curveball, she still said New York City members were generally on board. “Consider how (Adams) left. It was very much under a cloud,” Simon said. “I don’t want to continue that cloud.”

Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie told reporters on Wednesday New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani asked that leaders add the measure in during the budget’s extended overtime. “Things come up all the time,” Heastie said when questioned about the late addition. The provision is expected to be included in Public Protection and General Government on Thursday, language for which still hasn’t been printed.

Even potential delays to implementing the New York City school class size law – a high-profile topic that deals directly with education one might reasonably expect to find in ELFA – didn’t appear in the lone new budget bill introduced since April 1. A source with knowledge of the issue said the matter is still being debated; it hadn’t come to a resolution before the bill drafting commission printed the final ELFA language.

Heastie didn’t discuss the class size law with reporters on Wednesday, but did indicate other items still need to be locked down. Asked about specifics on a new pied-à-terre tax in New York City, for example, Heastie said, “That’s next week, we haven’t closed the revenue yet.” On healthcare spending and the division of funds between nursing homes and hospitals, Heasite said, “I think it’s close, but I don’t think that’s final.”

Also related to healthcare, Heastie reiterated his skepticism that the state has the money for a remedy to help over 450,000 New Yorkers set to lose health insurance through the Essential Plan in July. But he said such a measure is “not at this point” in the state budget – suggesting that’s not out of the question.

The updated ELFA language introduced Wednesday does, however, confirm that all school districts will receive at least a 2% increase in Foundation Aid, above the minimum 1% increase Hochul originally proposed in her January spending plan. Schools voted on their budgets without final funding details yesterday.

The bill additionally confirmed prior reporting that lawmakers would extend mayoral control of New York City schools for another two years, as well as a five-year delay to a mandate for schools to roll out zero-emission buses.

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Eric Adams’ Charter Revision Commission to hold hearings

Sahalie Donaldson — Wed, 20 May 2026 04:00:00 -0400

The Charter Revision Commission convened by former New York City Mayor Eric Adams on his final day in office has scheduled a handful of public hearings across the city, setting the stage for the legally precarious group to consider a series of controversial potential changes to the City Charter over the next month.

Since its inception, the group has been interested in opening up the city’s primary elections – something a previous charter revision commission pursued, but ultimately dropped to prioritize several land use and affordable housing-related measures instead. While open primaries remain a priority for the 13-member panel, the group will also consider initiatives to “address anti-semitism, hate crimes, and protester interference with houses of worship,” additional housing and land use reforms aimed at spurring more affordable housing and prohibitions to bar elected officials from raising their own salaries while they are in office, according to Kayla Mamelak Altus, a commission member and Adams’ former press secretary. In addition to former first deputy mayor Randy Mastro offering the group pro bono legal services, the commission is composed of many of Adams’ allies.

Specifics about how the commission might address these initial topics are unclear. Mamelak Altus noted the four issues were recommended by staff as a starting point. “The public comes and tells the commission what needs to be considered in the City Charter for the ballot proposals,” she said. Details about the four public hearings, which were scheduled in every borough other than Manhattan, and starting topics are expected to be published in the city record Wednesday.

All have been hot topic issues in the early months of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s tenure. Critics, including Adams himself, have accused the mayor of not doing enough to crack down on antisemitism, pointing at things like his revocation of an executive order that adopted a broad definition of antisemitism and another that barred city employees from boycotting Israel. Mamdani has also been critical of legislation directing police to come up with a plan to implement protest buffer zones outside of schools (which Mamdani vetoed) and houses of worship (which he let stand).

After the City Council began moving forward legislation that would have automatically increased pay for elected officials last year, Mamdani and City Council Speaker Julie Menin announced that they would form a commission to consider the possibility instead. (The mayor has said he would not take a pay raise.) And the non-partisan, open primary system that the commission and its supporters have been mulling from the start is something that Democratic socialists like Mamdani generally oppose, as it is thought to benefit candidates who are closer to the political center.

Much is still unknown about the commission’s future and its ability to get any proposals onto the ballot. There is little if any precedent of a charter commission established by a former mayor operating without approval from the new administration. And while there are ways for Mamdani to kneecap the group, it has managed to barrel forward regardless – at least so far. The 13-member panel voted in acting leadership at a meeting in late April after the person Adams initially appointed for the role of chair failed to file the necessary paperwork in time. Despite Mamdani not including any funding for the commission in his preliminary budget proposal, the group has explored the possibility of soliciting alternative revenue streams and is currently relying on donations and volunteers as Mastro continues to push the mayoral administration for support.

“Our administration and the Law Department are considering all options as it relates to the Charter Revision Commission,” said Dora Pekec, a spokesperson for the mayor.

All of the locations for the upcoming public hearings were donated. The first, scheduled for May 27, will take place at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. That’ll be followed by another hearing on June 2 at God’s Battalion of Prayer in Brooklyn and another on Staten Island at the Jewish Community Center on June 9. The last that’s currently scheduled will be held in Queens at the Glow Community Center on June 23. Mamelak Altus said the commission is still seeking a location to hold a meeting in Manhattan.

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NYC Council will not override Mamdani’s first veto

Holly Pretsky and Sahalie Donaldson — Tue, 19 May 2026 22:10:00 -0400

Editor’s note: This story was originally published Tuesday May 19 at 10 p.m. before it was clear whether the council would override Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s veto. It was updated Wednesday May 20 at 8:55 a.m. after the speaker’s office confirmed the council would not override.

Rather than attempt to override Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s first veto, the New York City Council will reintroduce a new version of the controversial bill that would require the police department to create and publicize plans for security perimeters around educational facilities during protests.

Taking feedback from council members into account, the new version of Intro 175-B will more explicitly only apply to schools in a departure from the current, more broad language about educational facilities. The legislation will be introduced and heard in the coming weeks, according to the City Council speaker’s office. The plan to pass the new measure was first confirmed by the New York Post.

The original bill passed the council with 30 votes, four shy of a two-thirds majority needed to override the mayor’s veto. Efforts from Speaker Julie Menin’s office to persuade people to flip their no votes and override – or stick with their yes votes on the bill – carried well into Tuesday, according to multiple council members. One City Council source claimed Tuesday night that the speaker had enough votes to override, but might not do so given her narrow margin.

Multiple members, including one Democratic council member who previously voted against the bill, said they were hoping for a new version.

Overriding Mamdani’s veto would have set a precedent of council solidarity and independence for the years to come. It would also be a major showing of strength for Menin, who has positioned herself as a foil to the democratic socialist mayor. But the legislation has also underscored internal divisions within the council, spurring the majority of the progressive caucus to vote against it. A new version would likely be less divisive internally.

Menin sponsored a near identical version of the legislation that pertained to houses of worship, which easily passed with a veto-proof majority last month. Both bills have spurred criticism that they infringe on the rights of protesters, though the bulk of concerns have been directed at the educational facilities version due to its overly broad language. Opponents of the bill in question say that it’s aimed at suffocating pro-Palestinian protests similar to the ones that took over college campuses in recent years. Supporters frame it as an important safety measure particularly in light of rising antisemitism incidents and argued that it would increase transparency and foster dialogue between protesters and educational facility leaders.

“Some of these advocacy organizations are making what I think are very bad faith statements, statements that are not rooted in the text of the bill, but rooted in whatever experiences they have,” said Council Member Eric Dinowitz, the bill‘s sponsor. “It simply requires transparency and accountability and community engagement.”

The legislation wouldn’t do much. While an initial version would have required the police commissioner to submit a plan to create protest barriers of “up to 100 feet” around the entrances and exits of educational facilities within 15 days of passing, the version that actually passed the council was so watered down as to be almost meaningless. The current version requires the commissioner to submit to the mayor a plan within three months on “whether and when to use a security perimeter” and leaves it up to the commissioner to decide the extent of the barrier.

As Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said at a recent civic engagement group’s breakfast, "The laws recently passed by the City Council do not change the NYPD’s authority or ability to establish frozen zones, buffer zones, or security perimeters around sensitive locations. Whatever one’s views on those laws, the fundamental responsibility of the NYPD remains unchanged."

At an unrelated press conference Tuesday, Mamdani reiterated concerns he’s previously shared about the legislation.

“When organized labor and community organizations across the city raised concerns around the constitutionality of this legislation as well as the impact it would have on so much of what is at the core part of how organizing takes place especially given its incredibly broad definition of educational institutions … it’s important to hear those concerns,” Mamdani said. “That’s why I did veto the legislation."

Asked whether he was having individual conversations with council members to gauge whether they were still opposed, the mayor said he has “made his feelings very clear.”

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Hochul said what??? Blakeman AI video may have violated election law

Rebecca C. Lewis — Tue, 19 May 2026 17:30:00 -0400

Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, the Republican nominee for governor, posted an artificial intelligence-generated campaign video that may run afoul of a 2024 law aimed at curbing deceptive political communication. His campaign denied the video violated election law, but added a disclaimer about AI after City & State inquired anyway.

On Friday, Blakeman posted a video meant to criticize Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani over green energy mandates. The AI video was in the style of the raunchy adult cartoon South Park that included a fictionalized Hochul and Mamdani at an angry town hall. “Higher utility costs are actually a good thing because they encourage behavior change,” Mamdani says. “The transition may cause temporary hardship,” Hochul later chimed in.

The voices sound like the two elected officials. But they never said those words – the video recreated their voices through AI. And when Blakeman originally posted the video on social media, it didn’t include a disclaimer that it was created with AI or otherwise manipulated.

As part of the state budget in 2024, Hochul and lawmakers included a provision to update the state’s election law regarding deceptive media to include a provision about artificial intelligence. Under the law, “materially deceptive media” includes “any technological representation of speech or conduct” created or modified “by or with software, machine learning, artificial intelligence or any other computer-generated or technological means.” Such media requires a disclaimer that the audio, video and/or images have been manipulated.

The law includes exceptions, including for parody or satire. After City & State inquired about the video, Blakeman spokesperson Madison Spanodemos said that exception applied to the campaign’s video. “This video is satire and requires no legal disclaimer,” she said in a statement. "We’ve added one anyway because, unlike Kathy Hochul, we have absolutely nothing to hide.” The campaign updated the post on X to include the tag “Made with AI,” though the disclaimer still does not appear in the video itself as described in state law.

The election law provision is still fairly new and remains untested, so a judge would need to determine whether the video violated the statute. But election attorney Sarah Steiner told City & State one cannot simply add a label of parody to something controversial. She said that avid political observers may be able to recognize that Hochul and Mamdani never said what they did in the video, but the average viewer could reasonably believe it’s legitimate audio used in the animated video. “If you have to be that discerning to understand that it isn't real, forget whether we're calling it satire or not, that's misleading,” Steiner said. “It's just misleading.”

According to Peter Loge, director of the Project on Ethics in Political Communication at George Washington University, the question raised by the Blakeman video and its portrayal of the two New York executives has less to do with whether media was created or altered using AI and more to do with with the deceptive nature of such media. “The means of deception matters less than the deception itself,” he said in an email to City & State. “The ad doesn't have any proof the governor or mayor said those things, which should raise questions among voters.”

But Loge added that the attention given to AI muddies the waters. “If everyone thinks everything they don't like is AI generated, but that everything they like is true, then we can't have the honest conversations that democracy relies on,” he said.

The state Democratic Party criticized Blakeman in a statement to City & State. “It’s obvious why Bruce Blakeman’s campaign is centered around lying and faking: his Trump-first MAGA agenda is toxic, and he knows it,” said state Democratic Party spokesperson Addison Dick. “AI slop cartoons about your opponent, comparing Trump to your wife, hiring an armed MAGA militia in your backyard – give it a rest, Bruce. Please.”

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GOP candidates have their strategy for November: ‘Stop Zohran Mamdani.’

Megan McGibney — Tue, 19 May 2026 14:11:58 -0400

In front of a rally of over a hundred New Yorkers gathered on the Brighton Beach boardwalk in Brooklyn Sunday afternoon, several Republican candidates stood in front of a banner that echoed what they all had to say: Stop Mamdani.

“Zohran Mamdani represents everything that is going wrong in New York City,” said Assembly Member Michael Novakhov, who hosted the rally. “He represents the radical, antisemitic, anti-police, anti-American movement that has taken over today’s Democratic Party. And let's stop pretending otherwise. This is no longer the party of working people. This is a party controlled by radical activists, communist ideologists … agitators and people who make excuses for hatred and terrorism when Jews are the targets, that is the truth.”

The catalyst of Sunday’s rally was to get signatures on a petition to run on an independent ballot line: Stop Mamdani. Novakhov is preparing for a rematch with Democratic District Leader Joey Saban after narrowly defeating him last year. And he and the other candidates plan to run on the Stop Mamdani line along with their usual Republican and Conservative Party lines.

But the rally also served to stir up energy to fight Mamdani and his policies. And if Sunday was any indication, it’s a strategy the right is leaning into as it gears up for November.

“Right now we have a mayor who hates the police,” said state Sen. Steve Chan. “He hates you. He hates the Jews. We ran away from what this mayor is telling us that we should love. No, we don't love socialism. No, we don't love communism. This guy in office right now, he hates you, he hates the Italians, he hates the Chinese, he hates excellence, he hates the cops, he hates the military. Does this guy like anybody?”

Chan is facing a serious reelection challenge from Democratic District Leader Larry He. The Southern Brooklyn district backed former Gov. Andrew Cuomo over Mamdani 46% to 40% in the November mayoral election, while Republican Curtis Sliwa got just 13%. In 2024, Donald Trump won the same district by nearly 15 points.

Democrats are hoping to flip Chan’s seat on the way to winning back a supermajority in the state Senate. And Chan isn’t taking that kindly.

“Don’t you listen to any of them,” Chan said. “They’re full of shit.”

Across the water, on another beachfront boardwalk, a different set of Republicans were also turning up the heat. On Staten Island’s South Beach, GOP gubernatorial nominee Bruce Blakeman was joined by Rep. Nicole Malliotakis and Assembly Members Mike Tannousis and Mike Reilly and talked about New Yorkers leaving for other states due to high costs. But even as Blakeman’s running against Hochul, it only took him a couple minutes to mention the mayor.

“We’re here in Staten Island because we are united in our effort to keep a check on Zohran Mamdani,” he said. He is bad for New York City. He is bad for Staten Island.”

In fact, Blakeman’s been campaigning just as much against Mamdani as he has against Hochul. The state Republican party sent a mailer this month showing the mayor and governor holding hands, pledging Blakeman would “protect you from the Hochul-Mamdani tax hikes.” In a May 15 X post, Blakeman shared another graphic of Hochul and Mamdani. That same day, Blakeman posted an AI-generated “South Park” spoof blaming Mamdani and Hochul for high utility bills.

Republican candidates elsewhere in the city are using the same strategy. Alina Bonsell, who’s running a longshot campaign for state Senate on the east side of Manhattan, is collecting signatures to run on the Block Mamdani ballot line.

Mamdani is new, but the strategy isn’t. Republicans unhappy with then-Mayor Bill de Blasio created a Stop de Blasio line in 2016.

Voters mostly avoided that line a decade ago. And Andrew Bard Epstein, a political consultant who advises Mamdani, said lashing out at this mayor won’t help Republicans. “Tens of millions of dollars were spent against the mayor last year using these same divisive, desperate talking points,” Epstein said. “They didn’t work then and they won’t work now. The mayor’s affordability agenda is broadly popular with voters across New York state, and so is he. Republicans will try to make him the bogeyman at their peril.”

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Actually, the LIRR strike may not be that bad for Hochul politically

Rebecca C. Lewis — Mon, 18 May 2026 14:47:40 -0400

An election-year public union strike is probably many governors’ worst nightmare. Faced with the first Long Island Rail Road strike in three decades, shutting down the nation’s largest commuter rail system, Gov. Kathy Hochul is surely no different in that regard. And she and Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, her likely Republican opponent as she seeks reelection in November, are both playing the political blame game. But Hochul’s historically poor performance on Long Island combined with existing ire from transit unions means it’s a low bar for her to clear if she wants to come out of the commuting crisis on her feet.

Blakeman wasted no time over the weekend to attack Hochul over the strike, which began Saturday at midnight. “Both Republican and Democrat administrations had labor peace with our workers, and let me say this to you, when you look at Kathy Hochul's track record when it comes to labor relations, she is the worst governor in the history of New York State,” Blakeman said in Long Beach on Sunday.

In response, the Hochul campaign took equal aim at Blakeman. “While Governor Hochul is focused on affordability, protecting commuters, and getting trains running again, ‘100% MAGA’ Blakeman is doing what he always does: rooting for dysfunction and higher costs so he can score political points with Donald Trump,” Hochul spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said in a statement. "Blakeman spent years jacking up property taxes and making Long Islanders’ lives more expensive – New Yorkers can’t afford his leadership, and neither can his own constituents.”

Although Hochul has indeed had a somewhat rocky relationship with a number of major unions in the past thanks to her original pick to lead the state Court of Appeals, she has largely mended those fences. That hasn’t included influential transit unions like Transport Workers United Local 100, which has been locked in lengthy and contentious contract negotiations with the governor. While the union isn’t one of the five representing the striking LIRR workers, it’s a bellwether transit union with an outspoken international president in John Samuelsen.

And Samuelsen hasn’t been shy about his – and his members’ – disdain for the governor. He has made clear that his union, which represents many subway and bus workers in New York City, would not back Hochul this year for reelection. “Gov. Hochul is a straight-up enemy of the TWU and a disaster for blue-collar New York,” he wrote in a letter to members reported by the New York Post in February. “The International TWU will not just go along to get along. We will not support her simply because she’s a ‘Democrat.’”

The strike also primarily impacts Long Island commuters, a voting base with whom Hochul has significant ground to make up. She lost Nassau County by over 10 percentage points and Suffolk County by 17 percentage points in 2022 when she ran against Republican Long Islander Lee Zeldin for governor. In Blakeman, Hochul has yet another challenger from the island. And Republicans continue to have a stronghold in both counties, even as Democrats flipped Nassau’s swing congressional districts in 2024.

But Larry Levy, executive dean of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University, said the strike could turn out to either be a boon or a bust for Hochul depending on how long it lasts, and how it resolves. “If she is perceived as handling the situation weakly, indecisively, incompetently or (in) any way negatively, it can hurt her narrative as a tough leader … looking out for the pocketbook (LIRR) commuters and other New Yorkers,” Levy said in a text message to City & State. “If she is seen as handling things well, particularly a settlement that doesn’t look like she’s caving into demands of the unions … she will improve her political standing.” But he added it’s too soon to tell for now.

Hochul told reporters on Sunday that she doesn’t want to “divert this into a campaign event” – but that didn’t stop her from laying the blame for the strike squarely at the feet of President Donald Trump for cutting off mediation late last year. “Let me be clear: This strike would not have been possible if the Trump administration had not taken the highly unusual step last fall of releasing labor unions from mediation,” she said. “Unfortunately for our commuters, the direct consequence of this action is the strike we have today.”

The last time the LIRR went on strike, then-Gov. Mario Cuomo lost his bid for a fourth term to George Pataki – the last Republican to hold statewide office in New York. The history looms large today. “What’s clear is that both Hochul and Blakeman are trying to spin the situation to fit ongoing narratives,” Levy said. “Results of the outcome (of) this tit for tat will continue even after the settlement.”

But Democrats still seem optimistic that the strike doesn’t serve as a harbinger that 2026 will be a repeat of 1994. “I don’t know if that was what caused Mario Cuomo to lose the governorship,” state Senate Deputy Majority Leader Mike Gianaris told reporters in Albany on Monday. “Coincidence,” he added.

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