City lawmakers subjected one of Mayor Eric Adams’ top aides to a barrage of criticism on Wednesday during a contentious hearing about his administration’s new policy requiring elected officials to fill out a form to request meetings with or action from city agency leaders.
The launch of the so-called Elected Officials Agency Engagement Request portal earlier this month blindsided City Council leaders including Speaker Adrienne Adams, who said the process would upend the decades-old practice of lawmakers directly contacting agency officials to request a meeting or seek help for a constituent issue.
Critics see the move as gatekeeping by a micromanaging mayor. But Tiffany Raspberry, Adams’ senior advisor and director of his intergovernmental affairs office, characterized the form on Wednesday as an effort to streamline services, centralize requests and level the playing field to ensure that newly elected officials are not disadvantaged compared to government veterans with more extensive contacts.
“The form is not intended to stand in the way of elected officials picking up the phone to reach out to a commissioner, borough commissioner or any other official in the administration,” said Raspberry, who is seen as the face of the new policy.
She downplayed the form’s impact, saying it had to be used only for formal meeting and service requests rather than inquiries for constituents or requests for information. Raspberry said she could not foresee any reason why a request made through the form would be denied.
That did little to dissuade City Council members. Brooklyn lawmaker Lincoln Restler, a frequent critic of Adams’, called the form “inane” and a “dangerous politicization of city government to prevent city agencies from doing their job based on the political whims of the mayor.”
Restler said he had spoken to more than a dozen Adams administration officials who admitted to being “embarrassed” by the policy, and referenced a Daily News report that Police Commissioner Edward Caban privately expressed reservations about it. Indeed, opposition to the policy has been unusually widespread — more than 60 officials from both parties at the city, state and federal levels signed onto a letter to Adams on Tuesday, urging him to reconsider it.
Restler said he and his colleagues have needed to use the form to request meetings on issues like illegal dumping, a cannabis store near an elementary school and requests for agency heads to attend local events. Raspberry countered that the administration has fielded 182 requests since the form went live this month and responded to all of them, with an average turnaround time between 24 and 48 hours.
“It’s unfortunate that you are not open to exploring how efficient this is,” Raspberry told Restler. In another tense moment, Raspberry added that “It’s hurtful to hear you reduce the work we’re trying to do in the Adams administration.”
Mayor Adams himself has defended the form, saying earlier this month that it was meant to give each elected official the same amount of attention from city agencies. At one point, Adams appeared to tell reporters that he was personally reviewing each submission made using the form, but Raspberry said Wednesday that the mayor only “has access to the form and reserves the right to look at it whenever he wants to.”
Restler and fellow lawmaker Gale Brewer both suggested the administration should have focused instead on improving the Green Book, a widely used reference guide of city employees that has suffered from infrequent updates.
“Half of city government, I have their cell number,” said Brewer, a Manhattan council member who has spent decades in city government. “So the notion that to talk to them, I have to fill out a form — you can’t imagine how it feels.”
Raspberry defended the form as part of Adams’ well-known affinity for new technologies — although Restler rejected the idea that “a multiple-page Microsoft Office form is new technology.”
Others who joined the hearing to testify against the form included former Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger and former Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum, now the executive director of good-government group Citizens Union, who called it “unnecessary and unreasonable red tape.”
Nick Garber , 2024-05-01 23:22:36
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