In The News
In the News
Last year, after Comptroller Brad Lander criticized City Hall’s handling of the migrant crisis, Mayor Eric Adams denigrated him as “the loudest person in the city.” It’s only one of many issues they’ve clashed over, from budget cuts to Rikers Island, since the Brooklyn Democrats both ascended to citywide office in 2022. The tension is partially by design: As the city’s chief financial and accountability officer, the comptroller is tasked with auditing the mayoral administration. Lander has done so with zeal, issuing report after report on problems with homeless sweeps, police technology, emergency contracting, and more, causing Adams to at times lash out.
Now, Lander will challenge Adams for mayor in next year’s Democratic primary.
Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller, will announce on Tuesday that he intends to challenge Mayor Eric Adams in next year’s Democratic primary, setting up a rare matchup between the two most prominent citywide elected officials.
Mr. Lander is one of a handful of Democrats seeking to run to the left of Mr. Adams, a moderate whose approval rating has fallen to a record low.
A New York City pension fund has adopted standards aimed at encouraging the landlords it invests in to limit rent increases and provide 30 days’ notice for eviction filings. The city’s four other pensions could follow.
New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, who is in charge of the city’s public pensions, said he started hearing from tenants a few years ago in his previous role as a city council member. People in his district were facing steep rent increases after their buildings were acquired by an investor. He learned that the Texas Permanent School Fund, a sovereign-wealth fund that supports education in its home state, had money in Brooklyn rental properties by way of its private-equity investments. The idea of a Texas fund affecting housing in New York didn’t sit well.
New York City Comptroller Brad Lander said Gov. Kathy Hochul’s abrupt cancellation of congestion pricing was not only unwise but potentially unlawful, and he promised Wednesday to carry out legal action if congestion pricing does not go into effect on the originally planned June 30 date. A coalition of advocacy groups and legal experts joined the comptroller outside of the Dinkins Municipal Building on Centre Street to advocate for the implementation of congestion pricing.
“We are here to make it clear that if congestion pricing is not implemented as mandated on June 30th, we are ready and able to take action,” said Lander.
Comptroller Brad Lander took aim at the NYPD’s ShotSpotter technology Thursday, calling the citywide network of sound sensors designed to detect gunfire an ineffective waste of resources.
The New York City Comptroller’s office announced the findings of an audit on June 20 that claims ShotSpotter often sends cops on wild goose chases. Shootings were correctly identified just 13% of the time, according to the comptroller’s audit, wasting officers’ time by sometimes more than a half-hour on a bogus activation — leading to thousands of hours wasted over a given year.
Mayor Eric Adams’ “cruel” policy of kicking migrant families out of shelters after 60 days has uprooted children from schools and imperiled newcomers’ efforts to become self-sufficient, City Comptroller Brad Lander charged on Thursday.
An investigation by his office concluded the implementation of the so-called 60-day rule — which Adams rolled out last fall — has been “haphazard and arbitrary,” and has undermined migrants’ ability to obtain work authorization and employment.
City Comptroller Brad Lander has won back nearly $3 million in back wages for 332 temporary employees working at some New York City Health + Hospitals facilities, according to settlement documents released today.
Seven months after New York City was inundated by more than eight inches of rain, an investigation found that the city’s public communications were, in some cases, “woefully limited” and its infrastructure inadequate to the challenges of extreme weather.
The 44-page investigation by the office of Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller, noted that 63 percent of the Department of Environmental Protection’s 51 specialized catch-basin cleaning trucks — a key part of the city’s arsenal to prevent floods — were out of service when the storm hit.
Correction Department managers haven’t given enough justification to renew the contract of a company that provides TV, movies and other entertainment to detainees at Rikers Island and other New York City lockups, the city comptroller says.
City Comptroller Brad Lander refused to renew the contract for Securus Technologies, which has a sole-source contract to supply entertainment to tablets detainees use in the city’s jails. Securus also supplies the tablets themselves, under a separate contract.
By Ben Brachfeld and Camille Botello
City Comptroller Brad Lander filed suit against two companies that contracted with the MTA to clean subway cars, alleging they stiffed their employees out of more than $2.5 million in wages, amNewYork Metro has learned.
The lawsuits, filed Wednesday in the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings, accuse two contractors, Fleetwash and Ln Pro, of stealing wages from cleaners that the Comptroller’s office had already ruled they were entitled to. The MTA onboarded legions of contract workers to clean subway cars at terminal stations at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, during an unprecedented yearlong period of nighttime closures for the system.
By Jan Ransom and Amy Julia Harris
New York City has poured tens of millions of dollars into a program to treat severely mentally ill people on the streets and in the subways for nearly a decade without ensuring that it was operating effectively, according to an audit made public on Wednesday by the city comptroller.
The program, known as intensive mobile treatment or I.M.T., was meant to help hundreds of the city’s most vulnerable residents by providing them with medication, psychiatric treatment and connections to housing and other services.
New York City Comptroller Brad Lander urged Tesla Inc.’s board to take action on Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk after he endorsed antisemitic views on his social media platform X.
In a letter sent Monday to the chair of Tesla’s board, Lander said he was concerned about Musks’ statements and the board’s silence surrounding them. Musk had last week agreed with a post that said Jewish people hold a “dialectical hatred” of white people.
New York City Comptroller Brad Lander is calling for an overhaul of the city’s Citi Bike contract after a review by his office found the popular bikeshare service has become less reliable since ride-hail company Lyft took over in 2018.
Citi Bike riders are dealing with more unusable stations and broken bikes than ever before — especially in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color — Lander’s office said in a report released Wednesday.
New York City’s pension funds sued the Fox Corporation and its board on Tuesday, accusing the company of neglecting its duty to shareholders by opening itself up to defamation lawsuits from the persistent broadcasting of falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election.
The lawsuit, filed in the Delaware Court of Chancery, is the most significant shareholder action since Fox settled a blockbuster defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems in April for $787.5 million. The city’s five pension funds represent nearly 800,000 current and retired workers and are worth $253 billion.
City Comptroller Brad Lander is urging Mayor Eric Adams’ administration to beef up the Big Apple’s storm preparedness as his office released a new report finding “big gaps” in the city’s response to Tropical Storm Ophelia last fall.
The report — dubbed “Is New York City Ready for Rain?” — analyzed several aspects of the city’s flash-flood readiness following the storm on Sept. 29 last year, including its operations, interagency coordination, public communications and the state of its stormwater infrastructure.
City Comptroller Brad Lander took the unusual step Thursday of refusing to register Mayor Adams’ plan to switch the city’s 250,000 retired workers into a privatized, cost-cutting version of Medicare.
In a statement, Lander said he’s using a rarely-invoked City Charter authority to reject a contract inked by Adams that’d let private health insurance giant Aetna administer a Medicare Advantage Plan for the city’s retired workforce. Lander said he’s doing so because he’s concerned about “the legality of this procurement” due to a pending lawsuit filed against Adams by a group of retired municipal workers who fear his Advantage plan would ruin their health care benefits.
New York City Comptroller Brad Lander rejected a $432 million no-bid contract that Mayor Adams’ administration awarded to health care provider DocGo to provide services to the thousands of migrants the city has struggled to support since last year.
In announcing the decision Wednesday, Lander pointed to several issues connected to how DocGo was selected—foremost among them being how the city arrived at the contract’s cost.
There’s something eating at New York City Mayor Eric Adams. His name is Brad Lander.
Several times over the last year, Adams has launched into diatribes against the city comptroller, a little-known position outside the five boroughs that commands expansive oversight powers over the executive branch. During his 1.5 years in office, Lander has served as a rhetorical counterbalance to City Hall messaging and penned reports highlighting shortfalls in governance. Last week, he released his first major audit of the administration.
More than 2,300 homeless New Yorkers were forcibly removed from the streets in encampments sweeps last year — but just three of them wound up receiving permanent housing afterward, according to an audit that City Comptroller Brad Lander announced Wednesday.
Perhaps more than any other American city, New York relies on a growing army of delivery workers who have braved successive waves of Covid, extreme weather and toxic air as remote work has reshaped the economy. Now, they’re getting a raise.
Starting July 12, New York City’s app-based delivery workers must be paid at least $17.96 an hour, not including tips — the first such minimum pay-rate in the country for an industry that exploded in popularity during the pandemic. The increase, which will go into effect nearly two years after the City Council passed a set of bills designed to improve conditions for the workers, was announced by Mayor Eric Adams over the weekend.
A developer in New York City is paying up after violating the conditions of a tax break by shorting workers at two luxury apartment buildings in the outer boroughs.
New York Attorney General Letitia James’ office announced the settlement Thursday in conjunction with city comptroller Brad Lander and the building employees union 32BJ SEIU.
The agency in charge of running New York City’s ferry system failed to report nearly a quarter-billion dollars in costs during the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio, the city comptroller announced on Wednesday in a 50-page audit.
“We rely on the city to be honest in how much things cost so that we can make clear, shared decisions about where the money is going,” the comptroller, Brad Lander, told reporters. “When hide-the-ball is played with any amount — certainly with a quarter of a billion dollars — you can’t have confidence that your city is providing the truth.”
City Councilman Brad Lander, who will take over as city comptroller Jan. 1, ended his time on the council with a bang by helping to shepherd the long-awaited Gowanus rezoning across the finish line. The effort was years in the making. City officials expect it to bring about 8,000 housing units to the Brooklyn neighborhood, more than 3,000 of which will be affordable.
By The New York Times Editorial Board
The New York City comptroller serves as the fiscal watchdog, which is serious business in a city with a budget of nearly $99 billion. The office oversees the city’s roughly $240 billion in pension funds, approving its contracts and investigating its agencies.
As New York recovers from the Covid-19 pandemic, it will need a steady and experienced hand focused on ensuring that its residents and businesses recover from the trauma caused by the disease. The health and vitality of the city’s economy isn’t just a local matter; New York is a major economic engine that the entire nation needs firing on all cylinders for recovery to succeed. This is a job for Brad Lander, a veteran councilman from Brooklyn who is among the hardest-working and most effective public servants in the city.
Brad Lander, a former housing advocate, succeeded Bill de Blasio as the City Council member from Park Slope in Brooklyn four years ago.Credit...Karsten Moran for The New York Times
Brad Lander, a cerebral and unassuming city councilman from Brooklyn with a degree in anthropology, has abruptly become the sort of person who endlessly fascinates scholars of the modern metropolis: a power broker.
Allies greet him with mazel tovs and hugs. Supporters ask if he will run for mayor in 2021. An old friend, spotting him at a social gathering, bows deeply — a not entirely facetious acknowledgment of Mr. Lander’s new status as a kingmaker in City Hall.