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By Jeff Coltin
Apropos of almost nothing, New York City Mayor Eric Adams mocked city Comptroller Brad Lander as “the loudest person in the city” Thursday as he escalated tensions between the city’s top officials, with Adams claiming Lander wasn’t doing enough to get the city federal money for asylum-seeker costs.
“Brad Lander, the loudest person in the city, has yet to go to Washington to deal with the No. 1 issue that this city faces. Think about that for a moment,” Adams said at an unrelated press conference Thursday morning. Adams proceeded to briefly mock Lander, imitating his voice saying “I think Eric should –.”
Apropos of almost nothing, New York City Mayor Eric Adams mocked city Comptroller Brad Lander as “the loudest person in the city” Thursday as he escalated tensions between the city’s top officials, with Adams claiming Lander wasn’t doing enough to get the city federal money for asylum-seeker costs.
“Brad Lander, the loudest person in the city, has yet to go to Washington to deal with the No. 1 issue that this city faces. Think about that for a moment,” Adams said at an unrelated press conference Thursday morning. Adams proceeded to briefly mock Lander, imitating his voice saying “I think Eric should –.”
Adams went off on Lander for nearly two minutes, set off by a reporter asking him about City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams’ lobbying trip to the Capitol this week with her leadership team. He said he touched base with the speaker and she’d be briefing him, then added, “by the way, did Brad go down?” Adams said Lander was the “loudest person, who is in charge of our finances… He has not gone to Washington, D.C. and fought on behalf of New Yorkers to get their fair share.” Adams closed with some sharp advice: “Stop trying to be the shadow mayor, and be the comptroller and go to Washington, D.C., Brad, and get us our fair share.”
Lander is more progressive than the mayor, with longstanding ties to the city’s left-wing figures and institutions that are most critical of the mayor. The position of comptroller is an independent office and, in part, a financial watchdog. So Lander has used the role like many others before him as a check on the mayoral administration, most recently reiterating his call for the troubled Department of Correction to be taken over by a federal receiver. Lander has also publicly questioned how Adams’ administration has housed and served tens of thousands of asylum-seekers in the past year, saying the city has spent too much on emergency measures, with little long-term planning.
That was the focus of Lander’s response to the mayor’s comments. “What I’ve consistently been loud about is the mayor’s failure to focus on the most urgent thing that City Hall can do to help people move out of shelter: legal services to help people file their asylum applications so they can get work authorization,” he said in an emailed statement. “In fact, it was my conversations with federal officials as I have been pushing for more resources over many months that highlighted the urgency of that work. Encouraging those charged with oversight to leave the city or take their focus off City Hall will not help us take effective action to reduce the shelter population or enable asylum-seekers to contribute to the long-term thriving of our city.”
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Lander’s political allies at the left-leaning group Jews for Racial and Economic Justice didn’t take kindly to Adams’ caricature of the comptroller.
“There’s a longstanding stereotype presenting Jewish men as weak, nasally, effete, and it’s hard to see this impression and not be reminded of that. There’s also a pretty clear and ugly pattern in contemporary politics of wielding accusations of antisemitism against Black politicians and we are not interested in participating in that,” said Sophie Ellman-Golan, director of communications at JFREJ. “There are numerous reasons to oppose Mayor Adams that center on his actual policies and are not open to interpretation: defunding public schools and libraries while giving an additional $1.85 billion to the NYPD, for example.”