New York Metropolis Comptroller Brad Lander, 55, is on the marketing campaign path on this 12 months’s crowded mayoral race towards incumbent Eric Adams.
In his present function, Lander serves because the “metropolis’s funds watchdog” and is primarily answerable for funds, investments, and public pension funds. Earlier than being elected comptroller in 2021, he spent 12 years as a councilmember and co-founded the Metropolis Council’s Progressive Caucus.
Lander was amongst one of many first to announce their mayoral bid again in July 2024. He’s raised greater than $1 million ($1,185,781) in personal funds so far and over $3 million ($ 3,674,414) by means of town’s public matching funds program, in response to marketing campaign finance newest filings.
Because the countdown to the June major begins, the Amsterdam Information caught up with Lander over the cellphone. Right here’s what he needed to say about his marketing campaign to this point. (Questions and solutions have been shortened or edited for area and readability.)
AmNews: Since you might be principally the cash man for town, I figured I’d begin with the cash questions. By way of fundraising you, Eric Adams, Zohran Mamdani, and Scott Stringer are just about the highest fundraisers within the race, and in response to marketing campaign finance, you may have about 92% in-district donors and 81% small donors. Are you able to discuss a bit bit about the way you handle that?
Lander: I really like the New York Metropolis marketing campaign finance system, and the inducement it provides to boost cash from on a regular basis New Yorkers, so I am going everywhere in the metropolis for home events. Final evening, I had one in Sunnyside, Queens. Tonight, it’s in Morningside Heights in higher Manhattan. We’ve had home events in all 5 boroughs and it’s simply a good way to marketing campaign. You’re elevating cash however you’re speaking to dozens of New Yorkers, listening to concerning the issues that frustrate them, about what they need from a mayor. So a lot better than dialing for {dollars} from rich individuals who need one thing.
AmNews: Candidates like Mayor Adams, former Governor Andrew Cuomo, and New York Metropolis Council Speaker Adrienne Adams have an identical base of working-class Black and Brown voters. How do you propose to enchantment to this viewers?
Lander: I’m pleased with the work I’ve executed alongside working-class Black and Latino New Yorkers over the past 30 years. Even earlier than I used to be on the Metropolis Council, I spent 15 years working in inexpensive housing and neighborhood improvement. The Fifth Avenue Committee was based by Black and Latino working-class New Yorkers. People like Barbara Bethel … individuals who taught me what it means to be a New Yorker as a result of when their buildings have been deserted by their landlords, they fought to save lots of them and switch them into inexpensive co-ops owned by the individuals who stay there. That’s my complete profession: combating alongside people who’ve been screwed by town [and] landlords, [and for] financial equality.
Within the council, I helped desegregate center faculties in District 15, and handed laws that makes us the primary metropolis the place Uber and Lyft drivers and deliveristas have a residing wage.
In 2021, after I received for comptroller, there was an evaluation that confirmed that I received a lot of the voters who voted for both Maya Wiley or Kathryn Garcia within the mayor’s race. I truly over-performed in outer-borough communities of shade, and a few of that was as a result of I had nice endorsements from [Public Advocate] Jumaane Williams, U.S. Rep. Nydia Velasquez, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), and former Assemblymember Nick Perry.
I labored actually exhausting to dramatically enhance the quantity of pension funds which might be managed by Black and Latino and Asian ladies asset managers, and to combat for extra Minority- and Girls-Owned Enterprise Enterprises (M/WBE) contracts. We put out an amazing report on the racial wealth hole, and I’ve laid out plans for making town extra economically and racially inclusive.
AmNews: As comptroller, I believe folks anticipate you to be very fiscally accountable. How do you propose to keep away from funds cuts and fights with the Metropolis Council as we’ve seen with Adams, who additionally considers himself pretty money-savvy?
Lander: However he has not been clear or sincere with New Yorkers in his budgeting, and this has been an enormous frustration of mine. Yearly, the funds Mayor Adams has put out has included numerous issues everybody knew wasn’t true. We under-budget on shelters, police extra time, and the price of particular schooling by actually billions of {dollars}. Then he dressed up and overestimated dramatically what we have been going to spend on sheltering companies for asylum seekers, after which advised folks that was going to trigger cuts at libraries, Metropolis College of New York (CUNY), and parks that we didn’t have to have.
I put out a set of commitments to formidable proposals to modernize town’s fiscal framework and practices, and that features sincere and clear budgeting, the place the preliminary and government funds inform the reality about what we’re prone to spend so the council and the mayor can have an actual dialog.
I’ve known as again and again for, and am dedicated as mayor to, making investments within the metropolis’s wet day fund through a formulation so it’s not the very last thing that the council and the mayor get to and we’re saving for a wet day routinely.
AmNews: One of many greatest issues that individuals have is confronting the federal administration and President Trump about points like immigration and congestion pricing. How would you method it?
Lander: Let me take the instance of this $80 million that they took out of our checking account. I believe that’s essentially the most direct hostility that the Trump administration has had for New York. Elon Musk ordered the Federal Emergency Administration Company (FEMA) to withdraw $80 million from New York Metropolis’s checking account. That was my workforce that found it and raised the alarm. Sadly, that was proper in the meanwhile when Eric Adams was being compromised by the Justice Division’s effort to drop the lawsuit towards him, and his administration didn’t converse up and inform folks about it and combat to get it again. I pressured the regulation division [and] mentioned in case you don’t go to court docket to get that cash again, then I’m gonna discover a strategy to do it.
I’m happy to say that final Friday, the regulation division filed papers that I imagine will get our $80 million again. Individuals have seen me combat for town on their behalf towards the Trump administration once they come to hurt us.
I’ll get up for our sanctuary legal guidelines. When somebody has been convicted of a severe or violent offense, our legal guidelines facilitate cooperation, however to not permit U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) brokers into our faculties or shelters or public hospitals. I can be a mayor who fights like hell for New Yorkers.
AmNews: Talking to your critics, folks have described you as de Blasio 2.0 or extremely progressive and — extra harshly — “gentle on Hamas” and anti-Jewish. How would you reply to folks like that?
Lander: Let me separate these out. One, I work exhausting on daily basis to make the federal government ship for the folks of this metropolis. It’s job one of many mayor, it’s job one of many comptroller, it’s what I did as a council member. I don’t suppose it is a time for ideological lanes. It is a time for sincere, efficient authorities that really delivers a safer, extra inexpensive, and better-run metropolis. That’s the marketing campaign I’m operating. That’s the work I’ve executed over the previous few years and that’s what I’ll do as mayor.
On questions on antisemitism and Judaism, I’ll say this: I’m a proud Jewish New Yorker and the highest-ranking Jew within the New York Metropolis authorities. It’s a deep a part of my id. Since I used to be a child, I’ve beloved what New York Metropolis has been for my folks. It has been a haven after we have been going through oppression and conflict and pogroms all all over the world. It’s made it attainable for us to thrive right here in a method that’s extraordinary. Not us alone … that’s why now we have to construct a metropolis that’s protected for everybody.
I assist Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. For it to be a spot of security and democracy the place Jewish folks can flourish and thrive, it has to come back to mutual recognition and peace with its Palestinian neighbors.
AmNews: To throw a hypothetical curveball at you, let’s say the mayor stepped down or was eliminated and the general public advocate was interim mayor. If he determined to run for reelection as mayor, do you suppose your friendship would or might survive if he entered the race?
Lander: I’m fortunate to have a deep private and political friendship with Public Advocate Jumaane Williams. It goes again to earlier than we have been on the Metropolis Council. I do know it’s exhausting to foretell each hypothetical, however yeah, I’m very assured our friendship would survive.
AmNews: In that sense, is there anybody that you possibly can see your self cross-endorsing, since now we have ranked-choice voting?
Lander: Sure, that is vital. If one month out within the [2021] election, Maya Wiley or Kathryn Garcia had endorsed one another, one in every of them can be the mayor now and we wouldn’t have a mayor that now we have to fret about working for Donald Trump and never for us. I’m dedicated to not making that mistake once more, so I’m constructing the broadest coalition. It’s important that we would not have both Eric Adams or Andrew Cuomo — neither of these two corrupt chaos brokers — as our subsequent mayor. So I’ll method your ranked-choice voting strategically as we see how the race and the sphere evolves.
AmNews: Is there the rest about your proposals or platform that you just wish to spotlight?
Lander: My three huge proposals within the race are to finish avenue homelessness for folks with severe psychological sickness, which we are able to do and can make this a safer metropolis; a laser concentrate on inexpensive housing, which I labored on my complete profession; and increasing common childcare, assembly the promise we made to have a seat for each three-year-old.
That’s defending tenants from eviction, that’s constructing extra inexpensive housing, and it features a actual concentrate on getting again to inexpensive homeownership, particularly multifamily co-ops just like the previous Mitchell-lama program, which we used to construct and principally stopped doing 50 years in the past. Most of what passes for inexpensive housing is rental housing owned by personal builders, [which] doesn’t create homeownership alternatives for working-class and middle-class households. These have largely evaporated. It’s particularly a problem for youthful Black households who wish to put down roots and keep right here.
In 1996, my spouse and I have been capable of purchase a co-op in Brooklyn for $125,000. That’s why we have been capable of construct a household right here. That was attainable 30 years in the past, and we have to make it attainable once more. These are the massive proposals I’m making that I believe actually converse to folks’s utter frustration with the price of residing and with security within the neighborhoods.
