In The News
In the News
In the latest campaign effort to convey his vision for a safer New York City, Brad Lander today released a new “explainer” video breaking down his plan to end street homelessness for people with serious mental illness. Watch the full video here.
Lander will also be participating in the annual Homeless Outreach Population Estimate (HOPE) event tonight to continue to spread awareness on street homelessness.
Today, Brad Lander reaffirmed and extended his longstanding commitment to ensuring that New York City’s 250,000 municipal retirees retain the healthcare benefits they were promised, and that they are not forced onto a privatized Medicare Advantage plan, which would constrain them to a smaller network of providers and increase denials of care.
As part of his commitment to clean up corruption, restore faith in our public systems, and make New York City better-run, New York City Comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander today announced the most sweeping and transparent public integrity plan of any mayoral candidate in the 2025 race. In stark contrast to the current administration, as Mayor, Lander will bring to City Hall the transparency, integrity, and honesty he has demonstrated as Comptroller.
As part of his commitment to make New York City more affordable, New York City Comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander today announced an innovative solution to help tackle New York City’s affordable housing crisis by using existing housing more effectively. The plan, “HomeShare NYC,” will connect homeowners who have extra space in their homes with New Yorkers seeking to rent housing at affordable prices – like a CUNY student renting from empty-nesters or a senior.
The 2025 mayoral campaign in NYC is finally starting to ramp up, so we thought it’d be a good time to check in with some key observations about where the race is now. In the past nine days, Brad Lander has amassed the biggest war chest, unveiled by far the most impressive political coalition, and released the most serious plan to solve subway and street safety in this campaign.
Brad Lander announced today the first round of hires to his campaign team for Mayor of New York City. The team includes a diverse mix of longtime and new staff members, who bring deep expertise in city politics and in their respective fields.
Brad Lander announced today that his campaign has unlocked public matching funds for his mayoral bid, solidifying his position as having raised the most money in the race for New York City mayor. Today’s announcement and filing brings Lander’s total raised for the campaign (including matching funds the campaign has received or is eligible for) to $5.4 million.
Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller who is running for mayor, will unveil his signature campaign issue on Monday: trying to end homelessness on the streets and subways for people with severe mental illness.
Mr. Lander’s 75-page-plus plan calls for expanding subway outreach teams and embracing a “housing first” model that has been successful in other cities, including Houston and Denver. Mr. Lander would focus on roughly 2,000 homeless people with serious mental illness and place them in vacant apartments known as single-room-occupancy units, or S.R.O.s.
New York City Comptroller Brad Lander will kick off his 2025 campaign for Mayor with a fundraising event at Brooklyn Bowl in Williamsburg on Wednesday, January 8. Over 60 hosts are supporting the event, with a diverse group of elected officials, including NYC Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, and New York State Senate Finance Chair Liz Krueger urging New Yorkers to contribute to Brad’s campaign.
Brad Lander announced today that he has hired renowned political veteran Alison Hirsh to run his campaign for Mayor of New York City. Effective December 31, 2024, Hirsh will leave her role as Chief Strategy Officer in the Office of the Comptroller to manage the campaign full time.
“There’s no UAW picket line in NYC without Brad Lander there, he stands with us without fail,” said Brandon Mancilla, Director of UAW Region 9A. “Brad knows the city, how it works, and how to help working people. Today we are proud to stand with him and endorse him in our UAW champion mayoral slate!”
At the close of the campaign finance filing period ending October 7, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander has raised a total of $4.5 million for his 2025 mayoral account, including expected matching funds. This puts him in a strong position to hit the $7.93 million spending cap for a Primary or Special election.
“I’m deeply grateful for the broad, grassroots support for our vision of a safer, more affordable, more livable, and better run city,” Lander said. “This support means we will have all the resources needed to communicate our plan to deliver the strong, honest, steady leadership New Yorkers deserve.”
New York City Comptroller Brad Lander today announced he is running for Mayor in 2025, to deliver a safer, more affordable, more livable, and better-run city for all New Yorkers. Lander, elected City Comptroller in 2021, is a bold government reformer and innovator, husband and dad, who was previously a member of the City Council for 12 years and was hailed as “among the hardest-working and most effective public servants in the city.”
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.