Julie Menin on Leading the City Council, Working with Mayor Mamdani, and Tackling Challenges Facing the City

The New York Editorial Board's interview with new New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin.

Julie Menin, a Manhattan Democrat recently elected by her colleagues to serve as City Council Speaker, spoke with The New York Editorial Board on the morning of January 22, 2026. Menin, chosen to lead the legislative body for the 2026-2029 term, was first elected to the City Council in 2021 after having led the city’s consumer and worker protection agency, its media and entertainment office, and its 2020 census operation. (photo by Juan Manuel Benítez)

Participating journalists: Juan Manuel Benítez, Nicole Gelinas, Christina Greer, Ben Max, Akash Mehta, Myles Miller, Harry Siegel, Liena Žagare.

Full Transcript

Ben Max
First, thank you for being here.

Julie Menin
Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

Ben Max
I will very lightly moderate things. We’ll just have a good open conversation. And we really appreciate you being here.

Julie Menin
Well, I appreciate the invitation, particularly this early in the tenure.

Juan Manuel Benítez
Thank you for being with us today. So I’ve always seen you as someone who is really outcome-oriented and very much so in executing ideas and programs, like when you were census director here in the city. And so what is the main outcome that you want New Yorkers to judge you by once your speakership is over in four years?

Julie Menin
Well, thank you for the question and thank you again for inviting me. I am outcome-oriented. I just believe city government needs to work for New Yorkers and I think it emanates from my background as a lawyer and a small business owner and former commissioner. I think right now faith in city government is at an all-time low because of the last administration. I think we’ve seen tremendous amounts of corruption, waste, fraud, abuse.

We’ve also seen an incredibly fractured relationship between the past mayor and speaker. That doesn’t really inure — with warring charter revision commissions and things of that nature — which really doesn’t inure to the benefit of New Yorkers in terms of moving issues forward. So to answer your question, what would be the outcome to me? Getting city agencies to function again at the highest levels of city services, which is the least that New Yorkers should expect from city government.

You have all of these city agencies that have been hollowed out by the last administration. And so I am someone who spends a tremendous amount of time looking at the Mayor’s Management Report, because when I served as commissioner, it was something that I was very focused on, which is we have to be data driven, we have to look at the data and the outcomes.

And so I believe success will be, if we can get city agencies really performing at the highest levels — on social services, on everything from sanitation, public safety, the Department of Education. It’s very exciting what the work that we’re going to do around childcare, that we’re working with the mayor on pre-K, 3K. I mean, I could give you dozens and dozens of examples of what happened in the past four years where city government was not working for New Yorkers. I mean pre-K and 3K alone are a perfect example of that.

Why did we have to have situations where parents would have to travel an hour and a half to drop their child off when there really were seats that were located nearby? I mean, it just was a dysfunctional system and I’m someone who tries to get government to function in an orderly way at the highest level. So that is one of the outcomes. There are a lot of other outcomes, of course, that I think one should measure success by, but that is one of them.

And I guess the other one that I would say in terms of outcomes is: it’s my belief that the City Council is largely a reactive body. And by that I mean on the budget, you see a budget dance always between the Council and the mayor. And certainly in the last iteration of the Council, there was a focus on restoring the mayor’s budget cuts, which obviously was so important.

I mean, there were just draconian cuts to education, to libraries, to cultural institutions, all of which the Council so rightfully restored. But we need to move beyond that and have our big picture, big idea priorities that we are trying to get through. On land use, we’ve also largely been reactive. We wait until ULURP comes before us. I think ULURP is a broken system. I think there’s a negotiated settlement with a different outcome each and every time. But my main point is that we are reactive. We’re not in a proactive body. So what I view, again, success in the next four years is if we can push forward an agenda, a proactive agenda, on land use, on the budget, on oversight, which are our core critical functions.

Juan Manuel Benítez
So you mentioned [getting] city government to function, which with your oversight role, obviously you’ll try to do that and we’re going to be talking a lot about affordability and housing. But what are two decisions that you plan on making this year that are going to impact New Yorkers’ lives immediately. We know housing, land use, all those things…But what are those two decisions that you’re going to make this year that New Yorkers will be, Huh, now I know what the speaker does in the city and whatever she’s doing, her job is impacting me in a positive way?

Julie Menin
So the first is healthcare. Medical debt is the leading cause of debt for New Yorkers. And several years ago, the Council passed my bill to create the nation’s first municipal office of healthcare accountability, which lists the price of every medical procedure at every New York City hospital. Because, for example, if you’re a woman and you’re giving birth by C-section and you go to one New York City hospital, you’ll be charged $55,000 for that C-section. At another New York City hospital, that same C-section is $17,000. Or a routine colonoscopy is $12,000 at one hospital, $2,000 at another. I could give you hundreds of examples. This new office that was created under my legislation is now embedded at DOHMH [the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene] and it lists the price of every medical procedure at every New York City hospital. One of the main focuses that I would like to focus on is lowering skyrocketing healthcare prices.

We as a city government spend approximately $11 billion a year on public sector healthcare, $11 billion. And just five years ago, that number was $6 billion. It has literally almost doubled in five years. It is unsustainable. So I want to utilize our purchasing power. We’re actually the second largest purchaser of healthcare in all of New York state. I want to harness New York City’s purchasing power to drive down costs because this is going to make a difference. It’s not only going to make a difference in terms of the New York City budget, and it’s estimated that we could save $2 billion a year by harnessing our purchasing power, but it’s also going to make a difference for all New Yorkers because now that we know what hospitals are charging, which is what this office did, and it did many other things, but that is one of the primary things. It allows New Yorkers to save money whether you work in the public sector or the private sector or whether you’re uninsured and you really need to know what these hospitals are charging.

So healthcare pricing is something that I have, and I formerly was a healthcare regulatory attorney, so it’s something I’m deeply passionate about. We have to address this issue. And so to me, this is one of the many things that we can do that I think will make a measurable difference in New Yorkers’ lives.

The other one, of course, we’ve been working on childcare in the New York City Council since 2022. We passed a package of bills on childcare. I had five bills in the package. The bills were literally called the Universal Childcare Act. It was supposed to put New York City on a path to universal childcare in five years. They were largely not fully implemented by the last administration. Now we really have an opportunity and an obligation. In order to get to universal childcare, it does require the city being able to first of all build more childcare facilities and addressing some of the payment issues that have served as obstacles.

We have a number of bills. Some of them are my bills that I’m actually giving to colleagues to pass — these bills are going to loosen the red tape of restrictions around building childcare facilities like the second-floor restrictions and things like that, as well as make it easier in general for the payment system. So I think childcare, again, on average $21,000 a year, we’ve had several hundred thousand parents have to leave the workforce, which has an economic and fiscal impact to the city as well. But I’m very focused as we have been for years on universal childcare and excited to finally make that a reality and we’re working obviously closely with the mayor and the governor on that.

Christina Greer
So you’ve stated…“I want my vision of leadership…to be as focused on dissolving division as it is on uniting all coalitions.” So how do you plan to do that explicitly as a moderate Democrat with a Democratic Socialist mayor and calls where many people think that you should be the counterbalance to—

Julie Menin
Well, I don’t think I’m an ideological person. I find these labels to be sort-of a false narrative in the sense that I have done progressive things: paid sick leave, living wage, when I served as commissioner of the Department of Consumer Affairs. This idea of moderate-progressive, this is about just government functioning. I think Mayor LaGuardia said it best: There’s no ideological way to pick up the trash. What we need to do is restore faith in government, get government functioning at the highest of levels. And that’s not an ideological issue. That’s an issue that every single New Yorker should hopefully agree on. In terms of divisions, I think as the first Jewish speaker, one of the things that I’m focused on is trying to unite communities. I spoke in the speech where my colleagues elected me about the fact that I am the daughter of a Holocaust survivor.

And at the same time, I’m very focused on trying to unite Jewish, Muslim, all communities across the city. And I’ve talked in particular when I chaired community board one for seven years after 9/11, one of the issues that I was really focused on was the Islamic cultural center mosque where I physically, literally wrote the resolution backing the project and got the community board, board one, to back the project. And that was something that was really important to me. I mean, our country is built on these principles of freedom of religion, and we saw such divisive hate and Islamophobia around the Islamic cultural center mosque that was really despicable. And I will tell you at the time that many elected officials called me and said, Why are you taking a stand on this? Why is the community board doing anything? Well, we took a stand on it because it was the right thing to do and that’s what leadership is.

I think we have a historic opportunity with the first Muslim mayor and the first Jewish speaker to bring the temperature down. We’ve got to, first of all, bring the rhetoric down. I a hundred percent fully support the right to peacefully protest. That is sacrosanct. That is what our country is built on. It is so incredibly important. And I think one of the things that’s been lost, particularly in the last couple years, is the fact that yes, you have the right to peacefully protest but you don’t have the right to intimidate and harass. And there is a distinction, I believe, in reasonable time, place and manner restrictions.

I’ll give a particular example of that. I served for a number of years on the board at Columbia. I went to Columbia. I was an adjunct professor at Columbia. The former president of Columbia, Lee Bollinger, who’s a real First Amendment scholar, made the decision to bring [then President of Iran Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad to Columbia. It was heavily criticized. However, what Lee did was he gave a really strong speech before introducing Ahmadinejad that gave the context about why this was, to sort-of provide the context of some issues around that. And so again, I believe in the First Amendment right to peacefully protest and we need to have reasonable time, place and manner restrictions. And so I think it’s an opportunity actually to try to bring communities together and I’m excited to hopefully be able to play that role.

Christina Greer
So do you see yourself as a counterbalance to the mayor or a partner with the mayor?

Julie Menin
We’re going to agree on many issues. We agree on childcare, on the absolute urgent need to build more affordable housing. We agree on this affordability crisis, but there will of course be areas of disagreement. There always are between the Council and the administration. And so it is going to be my job as speaker to work with the mayor when we align. And there’s a lot of alignment on affordability, but of course there are going to be areas of disagreement. The Council is an independent, co-equal branch of government. And so it is really both. There are issues again where we will absolutely agree and then there’ll be issues of disagreement.

But I think in the areas of disagreement, what I am most focused on is not repeating what happened for the last four years, which was this tit for tat between the mayor and the speaker — competing charter revision commissions, which doesn’t inure to the benefit of anyone that is not. If you were to ask New Yorkers what is really going to help improve their lives, they’re certainly not going to say, I want to see two charter revision commissions. That doesn’t make any sense. So when we do disagree, and I’ve already had these conversations with the mayor, we’re going to do so in a productive way that is not this interpersonal tip for tat that doesn’t benefit anyone.

Harry Siegel
I’m hoping you can talk a bit, going back to some of your answer there, about your five-point antisemitism plan. I know you’re planning, you told the Forward’s Jacob Kornbluh, to bring that to a vote quickly, like next month.

There’s this question, back to Chrissy’s, about your alignment with the mayor there, whether you need to pass it with a veto-proof majority. And I’m baffled by this idea of having 25 and you said maybe a hundred feet outside of synagogues and schools. It’s already a crime to block people from entering a place, and I’d like to understand how that isn’t just on the face of it a First Amendment violation.

Julie Menin
Yeah, no, that’s a great question. So basically what happened at Park East Synagogue in my opinion was completely unacceptable because there you had a situation where congregants couldn’t really freely worship — enter and exit. This to me is about safe access. The Council in 2008 passed a bill under Speaker Quinn around reproductive health centers and creating safe access. That is really the model that we would utilize here. That model has been legally upheld, it has withstood any type of legal challenge. We’re not trying to penalize free speech at all.

In fact, on the contrary, if we want people to be able to have the right to engage in free speech, the Skokie case is probably one of the seminal First Amendment cases that really talks about it, where Nazis were marching in the town of Skokie, which had a huge population of Jews, many of whom were Holocaust survivors. Was that morally repugnant? Absolutely. Were they legally allowed to silently march? Yes. And in my opinion, Skokie did the best thing possible, which is the town then decided to build a Holocaust museum, which I think was a really beautiful way to address the situation.

So we’re not looking to penalize peaceful First Amendment right to protest. We’re looking to do similar to what was done with the reproductive health centers, a similar type of restriction, which is you’re not allowed to engage in intimidation and harassment around houses of worship or schools within certain bounds. So we are working on the legislation right now. I can tell you as a lawyer, I’m heavily involved in this legislation. We certainly are not going to put forward legislation that does not pass legal muster. So it’s carefully crafted, but it’s crafted on precedent. We already have the precedent around the reproductive health centers and that is a really good model to be able to utilize.

I’m excited to put forward this plan, and the other thing that I would just say is on the five-point antisemitism plan that I announced on Friday, you saw in Borough Park just the other day, 57 swastikas on a playground. I mean, what is happening in the city? I mean this is abhorrent. This is unacceptable. It’s unconscionable. We have to do something about it. Jews are 10 percent of the city’s population and yet 57 percent of hate crimes are antisemitic. We do need to act. The plan that I announced does a number of different things. You asked about the house of worship and school perimeter. Yes, that is one piece of it. But the other critical piece of it is we are creating a hotline to support[sic] antisemitic incidents, because I believe they’re underreported. I know this for a fact because many people tell me that they’ve seen things but they’re not sure: well, who do you call?

And people are sometimes nervous to call. They don’t want to report things. So we think the hotline is a good way so that we can then get the data and it helps to inform our policies. But the other points of this plan are, we’re providing security cameras to all houses of worship, not just synagogues, but all houses of worship that don’t have the budget to do that. We are also providing safety plans to all houses of worship who don’t have the budget to be able to come up with a safety plan. We are giving $1.25 million to the Museum of Jewish Heritage for Holocaust education. About a year and a half ago, I launched a project where we’re bringing 85,000 public school eighth graders to the museum because studies were showing that 34 percent of young people believe the Holocaust is a myth or is exaggerated. So I think again, education is the best antidote to fight hate. And so those are a few of the things that we’re doing in this whole antisemitism package.

Christina Greer
So you chose to relegate Council Member Vickie Paladino to [only] the Committees of Veterans and Emergency Management, and you made very clear that her past incendiary comments weren’t acceptable. What do you see as your role as speaker about the Council members who are inappropriate either in words or actions and/or those who speak out on issues that you disagree with?

Julie Menin
Well, we certainly are not going to curtail any member’s right to free speech. So any member, it doesn’t matter if I personally agree or disagree. We’re not going to curtail First Amendment speech. I made my comments regarding Council Member Paladino last week and so you know what those comments are, they stand. I really believe we need to have a tough, fair, equitable, transparent process around our standards and ethics committee because there was immense frustration in the last four years that there wasn’t a lot of action coming out of that committee. And I think members felt very frustrated by that. And I think that’s something that we definitely need to do. The Council has a very clear harassment policy and that harassment policy is really what needs to govern us. As someone who— I believe in, like, we need to bring some more order and structure in this regard so we’re going to have a really, I think, very fair, balanced but strong ethics committee. Which is what—

Christina Greer
Sorry, who did you assign to the ethics committee?

Julie Menin
Sandra Ung. So basically I combined the rules and the standards and ethics committee into one committee, so it’s now a broader based committee, and Council Member Ung, who is a lawyer, will be the chair.

Ben Max
When you say there was frustration last Council with similar types of things that we just saw—

Julie Menin
There are many things. There were a number of matters that were referred to standards and ethics where members were frustrated that they did not feel there was a sense of accountability and also a sense of transparency around it. The other frustration was if a member was referred to standards and ethics, oftentimes they weren’t made aware of that. That’s a problem too. We have to have the proper processes in place so that there is communication back from the Council’s office of general counsel to the member if they are being subject to a standards and ethics complaint. That has to also happen.

Ben Max
What kind of categories – categories of behaviors — are we talking that weren’t followed up on? Was it more sort-of online comments?

Julie Menin
Yeah, I am somewhat limited legally in what I can say about that. I can just suffice it to say there were numerous referrals to standards and ethics that we’re not really acted on. And I think we need to have the highest levels of integrity and professionalism within the body. Standards and ethics is a very broad based committee. It handles a lot of issues around harassment, violations of the Council’s harassment policy. It handles EEO issues. There are a lot of very serious issues that that committee is charged with. And my intention is to have a very strong, fair, balanced, and transparent standards and ethics committee.

Akash Mehta
I want to return to the theme of making the Council a more proactive governing partner. You’ve talked about using the Council’s subpoena power for the first time to investigate businesses and agencies and contracts. Could you talk more about plans in the works there? Is that going to be a routine part of what the Council does, or saved for emergencies?

Julie Menin
So, I was always struck that the Council never utilized its subpoena power against bad actors that were clearly flouting the Council’s laws in a very significant and material way. When I served as commissioner of the Department of Consumer Affairs, we strongly utilized our subpoena power against for-profit colleges that were scamming New Yorkers, against debt collectors, against Santander Bank. I mean, a number of different areas where we were very aggressive in utilizing the subpoena power. We have a situation where the Council will pass laws and then sometimes they aren’t implemented by the administration, but sometimes they also aren’t implemented by the businesses that we are seeking to regulate. And my background is as a regulatory attorney. So this is something that I care a lot about. I think that we have an obligation, and I talked about this in my speech about a week and a half ago.

We can do two things that might seem inconsistent at the same time. So I want to be able to attract new businesses to our great city. I want to make sure that businesses stay in the city. I want to make sure that we are growing the economy, and there’s a lot of ways that we need to do that. And when I served as Commissioner of Media and Entertainment, I brought film and TV production to the highest levels the city had seen, which is a real job creator for the city. We need to do all of that.

At the same time, you have certain bad actors who are truly flouting the law and engage in predatory conduct. That is where we need to come down harder. And I think perhaps the best example of that that I can give is when I was at Consumer Affairs, I launched a project called the Small Business Relief Package, where we lowered fines intentionally by about one-third on businesses where there was no consumer harm, like a word in a sign is incorrect, or picayune violations.

But conversely, if the business was engaged in predatory conduct and real consumer harm, we came down harder, and we increased consumer restitution to over 70 percent. So that’s what I mean. We want to be really hard on these bad actors that, by the way, are not good for businesses, because the ones that are really engaged in predatory conduct, you’ve got all of these good businesses that are doing the right thing, so they’re creating an unfair playing advantage.

So that’s what I mean by focusing on the use of our subpoena power. The Council has rarely, very rarely, ever used its subpoena power, but it’s certainly never used it in the way that I am intending to. And again, it is not because I want to be clear about this, it is not in any way to try to create an environment where we are not supportive of businesses in the city, because I’m someone who has worked with the business community and tried to grow the economy in many ways. But we are going to come down hard on businesses that are engaged in truly predatory conduct.

Liena Žagare
Could you talk a little bit more about the oversight of city agencies and how is that going to change for you? Which agencies do you believe would benefit from more oversight?

Julie Menin
I think all. Honestly, I think one of the things we saw in the last four years is frequently commissioners wouldn’t even show up to hearings. I served as commissioner of several agencies. There was never a City Council hearing that I personally did not attend and answer questions. That is completely disrespectful to not have commissioners attend City Council hearings, checks and balances, we’re the oversight branch.

So that is something that is going to change. I fully expect that commissioners show up at the City Council hearings and not only show up but be prepared to answer questions because it wasn’t just that the commissioners weren’t showing up, if they did show up or if a deputy commissioner showed up, I can’t tell you the number of times where the most rudimentary basic data points they could not answer. That’s also disrespectful. As commissioner, I would prepare for a long time to be in front of those City Council hearings because that is what you do and you make sure that you know your data cold.

And so again, it was just an eminently frustrating experience the last four years, because if they did show up, they couldn’t oftentimes answer the questions. And then they would say things like, “oh, OK, well, we’ll get you that data.” And yet there’d be no timeline put in the data. So I started in my hearing sometimes saying, “I want the data by the end of the day,” because otherwise we’re not even getting the data.

So I do think that that will change because we’re going to run this Council in a different way, which is, we are going to insist on the commissioners showing up and answering questions and providing the data. Because that’s what oversight is. Everyone should want oversight. Oversight means that you get the city agencies to function at the highest level. So that’s why oversight, I think, is a very important function that we perform.

Akash Mehta
Are there particular city agencies that you’re worried about underperforming right now?

Julie Menin
Yeah. I’m very concerned about the vacancies. You have a situation where many city agencies have been hollowed out. I used to work at the city Law Department. That agency is incredibly important because the city Law Department serves as counsel to every single city agency. By the way, it serves as counsel to the City Council. It performs a number of different functions. It has affirmative litigation, torts, settlements that they’re doing. I mean they have so many different areas that they function on, but that agency has been hollowed out. And so as a result we’re seeing real issues.

You’ve got other agencies where we’re not seeing the same kinds of data metrics. And so whether it’s response times on EMS, whether it’s on sanitation and trash pickup, whether it’s complaints up to 311, I mean that, to me, is…the most basic function of city government, is to have the agencies perform their stated function. So there are going to be a lot of agencies that, I mean, we need to have oversight over every agency that we have the ability to have oversight over and we need to be fair, balanced but have fulsome oversight.

And my old agency, the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP), I’m deeply concerned that we’re asking that agency to do too much with too little. So DCWP — and I was commissioner when we started to morph the agency into the field of worker protection, first with the paid sick leave law, living wage, the carwash workers bill, the Freelance Isn’t Free act — but things keep getting put on that agency, and yet you see in the data, it’s taking that agency longer times to close out paid sick leave cases. It’s taking them longer to close out a lot of cases. So I am concerned about that agency and believe we need to more properly resource it.

Nicole Gelinas
In terms of the city budget, Mayor Mamdani reiterated yesterday, it’s at the feet of Eric Adams’ ‘colossal mismanagement’ that we face these massive budget gaps and that is a key reason why he needs his tax increases. Would you agree with that characterization and what would you have done differently over the past four years to rein Adams in, if you do agree with it in terms of, is there agency spending that should never have happened? Are there raises given out that should not have happened? How would the budget look differently under your speakership?

Julie Menin
Sure. Well first of all with the budget, the Council, as you know, is going to do its own assessment of this. And that will be coming out in the coming months where we are really going to take a very hard look at the budget and come up with our own assessment of where we think things are. So I’ll reserve our comment until we do our own economic analysis.

But I will say that I believe, and we’re actually going to have a hearing on this, I have several bills to eradicate no-bid contracts during emergencies. And what I think happened, by the way, not only in the last administration, but in several administrations, you see mayors utilize no bid contracts to the tune of billions of dollars. So for example, during COVID, the no bid contracting was suspended over a hundred times to the tune of over $7 billion, which is why the city paid sometimes exorbitant rates for protective equipment.

And to me, an emergency should be no more than 30 days. An emergency is an emergency, i.e., it has a short duration in time. So one of my bills that I introduced a number of months ago, six, seven months ago basically states that an emergency is 30 days and it then puts in very specific criteria through which that emergency no bid can be extended. And so as someone who owned a small business, you competitive-bid. You don’t just take the first, no one in their right mind who owns a business would bid something out and then just take the first bid. But that is basically what city government has done for years and years and years.

So to answer your question, I believe there are enormous savings that can be had in the city budget. And what I certainly would’ve done if I had been in charge differently, is I would’ve eradicated the utilization of no big contracts.

I had urged the Council to do that when the asylum-seeker crisis started because the reason the cost balloon to over $4 billion a year is largely because of no bid contracts to DocGo, over a billion dollars to the Hotel Association. You have to competitive-bid. And when I served as commissioner, we always did that you have to do competitive bidding. And so I think there are real savings that we can find in the city budget when we stop the use of these no bid contracts, which are being utilized a lot when we do things like harness our purchasing power, as I mentioned, utilizing our new healthcare accountability office.

And that, by the way, would involve conversations directly with the hospital CEOs because again, for states that have done hospital price transparency such as California, they’ve actually seen a drop of approximately 20 percent in costs on numerous medical procedures. I mean, imagine if we can do that through this new office. So I do believe there are numerous areas in the city budget where we could actually save money. And I look forward to our Council team doing our own analysis on where we think the budget is.

Myles Miller
Can I just follow up on something you said about DCWP? One thing that is seeming to come out of the administration is that they want to focus EDC [New York City Economic Development Corporation] on some of that worker protection work, union jobs, fair wages versus what EDC is known for, which is economic development and all of that. What do you make of that? The changed DCWP has a focus, but that focus gets added in at EDC and a move away from economic development?

Julie Menin
Look, I think DCWP is absolutely an agency that can engage in robust worker protection. I mean, we started it and so because we could never have a city department of labor because we’d be preempted by the state, that is really why we morphed DCWP to start to engage in this worker protection. So I think DCWP has the tools that they need to be able to do robust work or protect, and they are, and we started that. So I think they have the tools they need. I haven’t been briefed on this plan on a switch to EDC, so I don’t really have, I’d have to understand what exactly they’re intending to do before I could comment on that.

Harry Siegel
Another followup there, you were talking about ways to save money within government. The Council has done some pretty ambitious things in recent years that were more press release than practice. And I’m thinking about the right to counsel in housing court. Now there’s nominally a right to counsel for every low-income person there. My understanding from numerous people who I’ve talked to who’ve been through that process is that this sort-of exists in concept but the legal services they get are extremely limited, largely as a budget matter. The money isn’t sufficient to actually have any sort-of competent lawyer — the way one person put it was: who can do more than five minute advice sessions? And I’m interested if that’s on your–

Julie Menin
No, thank you for flagging that. I mean, right to counsel is obviously incredibly important and something that…started under a previous iteration of the Council and that was continued. It’s definitely something we will look at. We want to obviously make sure that if the Council, it has launched a project, that, then New Yorkers are getting the services that they expect from it. So I will take a look at it.

Harry Siegel
It just costs a lot of money.

Julie Menin
Yeah, no, it definitely does. I did a bill last session that gives right to counsel to victims of domestic violence who are engaged in divorce proceedings. So we just launched that. So that is just starting to go, but I appreciate you flagging it and I will definitely go back and look at the overall right to counsel, the original bill and then the expansion to make sure that the services that the Council says are being provided are being provided. I mean, I think that’s really important.

I mean, the other thing I will say that I plan to do is I want to make sure that when the Council is disseminating funding, and I have not been on the budget negotiating team for the Council and the past four years, so I have a different approach that I want to take, which is data metrics. We should not be disseminating funding unless we are clear that organizations have very specific measurables and that they’re meeting those measurables. So when I served as census director in 2020, we disseminated money to approximately 150 community groups on the ground who were the trusted messengers in their community, but we were very clear. We did staggered payments, we had clawback provisions, and we had very tight data measureables. I want to make sure that when we are disseminating City Council funding that we have those same robust and rigid checks on it.

Akash Mehta
Beyond emergency contracting, do you have plans on procurement reform? And in particular, the city spends $28 billion this year on contracting, which is almost as much staff salaries, and a lot of that is extremely opaque. At New York Focus, for instance, we’ve reported on how extremely opaque social services contracts have involved more than a hundred million dollars on MyCity, a social services website that doesn’t really work—

Julie Menin
It doesn’t work, exactly.

Akash Mehta
…Hundreds of millions of dollars for internet connections on Chromebooks almost entirely for kids that already have internet at home. Is the city relying too much on contracts and do they receive enough oversight?

Julie Menin
Yes, they’re relying too much on that. And yes, we’re going to have very robust oversight. On procurement reform, the fact that it costs the New York City Parks Department approximately $4 million to build a bathroom in a park is unconscionable. I mean, that’s absurd. The fact that it takes the New York City Parks Department sometimes a decade just to repair a park — unacceptable.

So we are a hundred percent going to tackle procurement reform. We have to reform the way that procurement is working in New York City by cutting through some of the bureaucracy, the red tape that is jacking up the price and jacking up the length of time. And we also need to just have it more transparent because to your point, it is largely unaccountable and it’s this very bizarre, opaque system that it’s really hard to look under the hood. We’re going to look under the hood, and we’re going to get the answers.

So procurement reform is absolutely something we’re going to tackle. I just took a note when you were talking, because the MyCity portal is also a problem. So I think it was in 2022, 2023, I did a bill to create a one-stop shop for all small business licenses and permits. The idea being that oftentimes if you’re a small business owner, you have to take a day off work, you’ve got to go physically into a licensing center, you have to fill out paperwork. I mean, the whole thing was completely antiquated. And so the idea behind the bill is we will create one website, one app where you could access all city licenses and permits, and by the way, pay fines so that if you’re a current business, you’re not — again, it all needs to be centralized. If you look at what the administration did with that bill, the implementation is not at all what the bill said, and they did it through that MyCity portal.

It’s unbelievably frustrating to see what happened with the MyCity portal. And I think that’s another area of oversight. We need to look into that, like what happened there? And by the way, how much was spent on creating this, all of these outside vendors that were brought in? And then lastly, you mentioned WiFi access. And so in 2022, 2023, I launched a project in my district because I’ve had a tremendous amount of public housing in my district where residents could not access the internet. And so when I was census director, we saw that when approximately a third of New Yorkers truly didn’t have real access to the internet. And so we needed to change that. And so I launched a project that used a federal ACP benefit, and I went to Verizon and Spectrum and got them to lower the price. And then when we paired it with the ACP benefit, we brought the cost to zero and we were able to do events.

So we signed up residents of NYCHA, they could pick whichever plan they want because we can never be plan-specific. And we got so many residents signed up for free WiFi. And I briefed the Eric Adams administration on it and OTI. Then they launched their own project, I think it was called Big Apple Connect, which was approximately $90 million, when we had a program that was free. Why were we spending $90 million when we had a scalable program that could have been rolled out to every resident of NYCHA? So again, these are the areas when we talk about the budget and savings, these are the areas where it is just incredibly frustrating to see what happened.

Akash Mehta
Will you bring the vendors themselves to your hearings in addition to the commissioners?

Julie Menin
Absolutely. Absolutely. And by the way, that’s where our subpoena power can come in, because if we are spending city money on a service and if that vendor is not going to come to our hearing, we do have the subpoena power to compel them to be there.

Ben Max
I think we have a couple questions from me and from Liena…about whether the City Council and the city is over-legislating and overregulating. So we’re interested in your perspective on that.

First from me, it relates to the housing bills that Mayor Adams vetoed on his way out, and a lot of housing experts, including at the agencies, were very concerned that those sort-of overregulated city housing projects and deals in terms of unit size, et cetera. So the Council passed those, Mayor Adams vetoed, now you have to lead the Council in deciding whether to override those vetoes. A lot of concern from housing experts that that’s over-meddling. Are you planning to override those vetoes?

Julie Menin
We’re taking a very hard look obviously at every bill, bill by bill one at a time. I absolutely, and again, these are bills from the last Council, so I now am inheriting this. I will say that I do have some concerns that some of the bills could impede the building and construction of affordable housing. And so I do and have already started going back and looking at that and beginning conversations with the administration on that to see are there ways that some of the bills could be changed so that they wouldn’t have that negative impact of unintended consequences where we’re actually unintentionally hurting the construction of affordable housing, which was certainly not the intent of the bills at all, but sometimes bills do have unintended effects, and so I’m looking at that.

Ben Max
And the other one in that package that’s different. But a lot of concern is the Community Opportunity [to Purchase Act]—

Julie Menin
Right. We’re looking at every single bill. Every single bill. I will have more to say on that soon.

Liena Žagare
Turning slightly to the private sector, what metrics would you be looking at to see if, to know when regulatory changes are hurting the economy and which sectors, industries are you most concerned about?

Julie Menin
So again, we do not want to have a situation where businesses are leaving our city or businesses not wanting to come to the city. So I am very sensitive to that question because it is incredibly important. We want to make sure that we provide an atmosphere for new businesses to locate here.

We have a situation where Texas is now, I mean, in some respects, getting a lot of our financial service business that are relocating to other states, Texas, Florida, and we don’t want that. We want businesses obviously to remain in the city, that the businesses are what creates the revenue so we can build affordable housing and build more schools and build more parks and all of the vital social service programs that we need to do. So it is absolutely imperative that we keep businesses here and that we attract new businesses.

As someone who served as commissioner of media and entertainment, again, one of the first things I did that when I took over as commissioner, the number of TV shows, movies and pilots, every metric had dropped, which is why the mayor asked me to then take over that agency and we were able to bring everything back up.

But we brought it back up by, I worked very hard to reach out to media and entertainment companies to say, New York City’s open for business. We want your business. We want you to come here. And it was very successful and we brought production to an all-time high, and I did the deal to bring the Grammys to New York, which is a $200 million economic benefit.

So I’m very sensitive to, of course, we do not want to have bills that are having those effects. At the same time, I believe you can attract new businesses, keep businesses here, and also at the same time have some of the strongest worker protections in the country. I don’t believe those two ideas are mutually exclusive at all. So when we do regulate, we want to make sure that we’re regulating in a responsible fashion where we’re really getting at the core issues of consumer worker protection, things of that nature.

Myles Miller
Can I just follow up? There’s been so much focus of this new administration on small business, on consumers. Obviously my outlet [Bloomberg News] focuses on big business, economic drivers of the economy. Can you tell me, are you concerned about the effect on big business based off some of these policies? And what will the City Council do to try to keep big business here, work with, I mean, I think [Mayor Mamdani’s] talked a lot about over-reliance on public-private partnerships, but what will the city do to continue working with our largest companies?

Julie Menin
I am a huge fan of public-private partnerships, and I’ve done numerous ones. Probably the biggest public-private partnership that I launched was NYC Kids Rise, where we have seeded every public and charter school kindergartner with a college savings account. We’ve now done over 300,000 of them worth over $60 million. I also launched a public-private partnership around free swim lessons where we are giving free swim lessons to second-grade students and communities in need. So I’m very proud of that program as well.

In terms of the business sector, some of it is through communication. I speak regularly with the business sector. I talk to business leaders. I talk to small businesses, medium-sized businesses, big businesses across the board because again, we need to hear comments from all. Again, I really believe that having robust consumer and worker protection is not antithetical to attracting and keeping businesses here.

That is my approach. It is certainly the approach I took when I was commissioner of Consumer Affairs, which is I worked with businesses, we supported businesses. And the same when I was Commissioner of Media and Entertainment — but when there were businesses that were truly engaged in predatory conduct — like we found with certain for-profit colleges, certain debt collectors and other businesses — we came down incredibly hard. But we also loosened regulations for businesses that really, for example, if one word in a sign was incorrect, we gave businesses 30 days to cure those violations. So I think it is that type of approach–

Ben Max
What about taxes? The mayor wants to increase corporate taxes—

Julie Menin
But that’s not something that the City Council has any jurisdiction ever. That’s an Albany issue. What I’m really focused on again is—

Akash Mehta
Do you have an opinion on that, though? The corporate tax.

Julie Menin
First of all, what I’m trying to do with the City Council is focus on where our powers are, because I don’t want to get distracted. The governor has made clear, at least for this budget, that she’s not moving forward on that issue. She’s indicated in future years she might, but again, that is really an Albany issue.

I’m trying to focus where we actually have our power, and our power is on the city budget. There are, I believe, enormous areas of potential savings. I outlined a few of them: the no-bid contracts, the healthcare savings, there are more savings by the way — these contracts. So I’m going to really try to focus our attention on what we, the City Council, can actually control.

Nicole Gelinas
One place you have a great deal of power, is regulating e-bikes. Do you consider an e-bike to be a motorized vehicle wherein the driver of that motorized vehicle has responsibility for being licensed, meaning being trained somehow, having insurance, and having registration? And would you hold a [vote] on Intro 606, which would do those things?

Julie Menin
Yeah, we definitely need to have regulation in this area. It is probably one of the top constituent issues that I hear from many Council members, including our office as well. Something really needs to be done about this, and so we are going to look at a number of different legislative solutions on it. We have a new transportation chair. Our majority leader, Shaun Abreu, I know he’s going to do an outstanding job leading that committee. I’m really excited about that. And we are going to do something on e-bikes. So we’re still looking at what is the best approach. There also needs to be regulation of third-party apps, because these apps are doing business in our city, and I believe they’re creating a situation where the deliveristas have to do these rapid deliveries that are then endangering the deliverista and the public, and we really can’t have that.

So there was a situation with a company, Gopuff, which was about two years ago in my district, making a promise that they would deliver within 15 minutes, and that was like a guaranteed promise on their website. So I sent them a cease and desist letter saying, you have to remove this claim because the claim, A) violates the city’s consumer protection law, B) I believe the claim, it was a nuisance. It literally violated the state’s nuisance law. Why? Because it’s actually creating a public nuisance. You’re endangering the delivery worker and the public.

And so we are going to, and I did get the claim off, so we are going to do something about e-bikes. I think it’s reached just a point of absolute necessity that we do that. We don’t in any way want to penalize the deliverista. That is absolutely not what we want to do. What we want to do is regulate the third-party apps. We want to create a system where we’re really promoting safety, and so we’re looking at all these different things to come up with the right approach.

Nicole Gelinas
Revel had, they geo-fenced where the scooter driver could not go on the sidewalk or go the wrong way. Should it be a condition of doing business in this industry in New York City, that the e-motorized vehicle has to be geofenced, where it just cannot go the wrong way down the street?

Julie Menin
Again, we are still analyzing options on how to do regulations, so I’m not going to get ahead of our analysis. We’re looking at a number of different approaches where we can have regulation in this area.

Juan Manuel Benítez
I’m going to steal a question from Nicole: I’m curious to know, how did you arrive here today and where’s your security detail?

Julie Menin
I think that they’re out there, I would assume. Yeah. I mean, the security issue is unfortunately very real. It’s a situation where we’ve seen threats to elected officials, New Jersey, Colorado. We saw what happened in Washington DC. So the security issues are real, and so I’m following what the NYPD says. Commissioner Tisch called me when I became speaker and said that they’re the experts on the security. I’m not a security expert, so I don’t pretend to be so, nor would I want to be, again, I have to defer to what the NYPD says.

Ben Max
You put out on social media traveling to City Hall on public transit. Do you still plan—

Julie Menin
Absolutely. Whenever possible, when we can. I think it’s very important that we do that, that elected officials do that. I plan to take the ferry because I want to expand ferry service. I think the ferry is something that a lot of New Yorkers are not utilizing, but we should be expanding it. We should be making it more accessible for people to take the ferry.

I will say on accessibility, we didn’t discuss this, but I’m very pleased that we created this new disabilities committee. Disabilities was actually under — Mental Health, Disabilities, and Addiction was the name of the committee, and I’ve now created a new disabilities committee. I just think that was not, disabilities deserves its own committee, and part of that has to do with accessibility. I think for a lot of our subway stations, they’re not accessible. My father, when he was alive, was in a wheelchair and it was just unbelievably hard to get him anywhere.

And so I look forward to this, but it’s not only about the subways. We need to look at small business access. We need to look at the ferries. We need to really look at all different modes of transportation. We did a program on the buses that we announced maybe the MTA like two years ago about strollers and wheelchairs and the collapsibility of them. So I think that there’s a lot of opportunities around accessibility that really haven’t been focused on, so I’m excited about that.

Julie Menin
So, actually, am I allowed to ask a question or no? OK: so one of the things that I am interested in is how do we promote community journalism? Because when I served as MOME [Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment] Commissioner, we launched this new media center to train community journalists in new media techniques, because what we were seeing unfortunately, is the closure of a lot of community newspapers. And studies were showing that 50 percent of New Yorkers actually derive their news from local community journalism — doesn’t need to be papers, it could be online — but local community journalism. So if there are thoughts on ways we can expand on that to support community journalism — very committed to doing that.

Juan Manuel Benítez
A hundred percent. We’ll have dinner together and speak about that.

Julie Menin
Yeah, I think that that’s very important because unfortunately, we’re seeing local news and the coverage of local news by many outlets shrink, and that’s the problem.

Ben Max
Usually the answer to that is first and foremost, city advertising dollars and where they go. There’s other ways to do it too, and something you might want to look into: maybe 10 years ago at this point, I know Rory Lancman, when he was in the Council, was looking at ways that city government could be helpful to local media, but obviously there’s a balancing act in terms of of government subsidizing journalism in ways that—

Julie Menin
But I think one of the big things that we haven’t talked about is the language access piece. So for example, a lot of the city agencies’ communications are in a small number of languages, generally eight, generally eight to 10. But we need to go beyond that. When we launched a paid sick leave law, I made the decision that we were going to disseminate materials in 26 languages. That had never been done before. People thought, well, that’s crazy. How could we do that? Well no, we have to do that. There over 200 languages spoken in the city. It’s really important. So I think some of it is through language access, and that’s really important because for so many of our, and I’ve just again, focused on the consumer and worker protection portfolio, but for many of those laws, if we are not disseminating materials in numerous languages, if we’re not advertising in local community papers, we’re not reaching, you know, what could be nail salon workers. It could be—

Christina Greer
I mean, I’ve worked with the Amsterdam News, and ethnic media, the community groups that you’ve used for the census and that outreach, in lot of ways that Black media is having Coro Fellows, in getting college or college age students sponsoring them to become journalists in some ways, or to sort-of subsidize that, so I think some of the organizations that you’ve worked with during the census, in 26 languages, could be resources to help train a new cadre of journalists.

Julie Menin
I think that that’s exactly right because I mean, one of the things we did on the census is, and this was at the time really hadn’t been done. We tried to give money to a lot of groups that had never received city money before because when you are not-for-profit, it’s unbelievably hard to access city funds, the city tends to just give money to the same groups again and again and again. And oftentimes really without those stringent data metrics that I mentioned. And so I think it’s very hard for new groups to break in.

So what we did on the census, we gave money to some group called Sure We Can, which were canners, they were canners, that worked in communities where they have been hard to count for the census. So they were unbelievable messengers and they went back there and that was, I think, really exciting.

The last thing I’ll say on the census is that we have to pay more attention to the 2030 census. We have a situation where House Republicans are trying to add the citizenship question back onto the census. I served as executive assistant corp counsel when I was the census director and worked on the citizenship case with our New York Attorney General. We won that case at the Supreme Court and got the question off the census.

But the challenge is that House Republicans are now trying to put it back on, and we won the case on administrative law grounds, meaning that the Supreme Court found that the addition of the question was arbitrary and capricious. So I mentioned that because there is a path now where House Republicans are trying to put it on, if they succeed and that question goes back onto the census, it’s going to have disastrous implications for the city of New York for generations to come, on funding and on Congressional representation.

So I did a bill to create a permanent city Office of the Census that bill passed in December. So I’m going to be very focused, and I haven’t talked to the mayor yet about it, but I’ll be very focused on who is hired to staff that office, who is running that office, how that office is resourced. Because leading into the 2030 census with what is happening in this climate, I am really deeply concerned that we are going to have real issues on the 2030 census. And you’re going to see that play out not only in loss of funding for over 300 vital social service programs like Head Start and SNAP and others, but you’re also going to see it play out in the Congressional seats. I mean, you just saw the redistricting news today.

Juan Manuel Benítez
Do you think former Governor Cuomo dropped the ball in 2020 [on the census]?

Julie Menin
He did not assist on the census, and that was really everyone, and I know journalists focus on, oh, if 89 more people would’ve been counted, we would’ve had an additional House seat.

That is actually, in my opinion, not the way to look at it. The way to look at it is, since 1950 and every decade, New York state has lost a minimum of two House seats. And in 1985, seats, sometimes four seats in some decades, sometimes three, no less than two. 2020 was the first year that we didn’t lose two seats. We lost one. And yes, we came within 89 people of losing zero. It was very frustrating, because the city really was on its own in many respects in dealing with the census.

Ben Max
We’re going to sneak in three more things.

Harry Siegel
Very quickly, just to mention, we talked off the record right before this started about the City Council employee who remains in New York and in federal custody. Understand there are limits on what you can say about that.

I did want to ask you, now that you’re a proto citywide person, I’m just angry at the city about this. There’s been for 10 years a big public movement, signature movement, to have something named in honor of Sonny Rollins. He’s the last surviving person in the iconic great day in Harlem photo, he’s 95, native New Yorker, seminal artistic figure who’s alive, who’d appreciate this honor and it baffles and angers me at the city generally that there seems to be, there was a bill just at one point, just absolutely no momentum toward doing that with this artistic trailblazer.

Myles Miller
We’ll take the Williamsburg Bridge.

Harry Siegel
That’s one possibility. So I’m just putting it out there. I will judge your Council, this government, New York City generally, on whether or not they competently manage to do that.

Julie Menin
Thank you for flagging it.

Akash Mehta
I wanted to get in a question on land use, which is related actually to redistricting in so far as it’s a function of population growth. I wanted to ask you how you’re thinking about land use, which is an area where the Council has an enormous amount of power. You appointed two people who voted against the City of Yes [for Housing Opportunity] to the subcommittees on zoning and also on landmarks and public siting, which oversees the use of city-owned land. So could you talk—

Julie Menin
But the majority, I would say the majority composition of the Council strongly voted in favor of City of Yes. So on those two committees, the vast majority of composition of that Council is strongly in favor of City of Yes. So you’re always going to have different viewpoints within the Council. I was a huge supporter of City of Yes.

I will say on the land use question, one of the things that we’re doing to make the Council proactive instead of simply reactive is we are analyzing the 215 public-library branches to see which sites are suitable to build affordable housing on top of. So we’re doing a whole analysis on this right now. We’ll be releasing a plan on this in the coming months. We are also analyzing the one thousand DCAS sites, some of which are vacant land, some are underutilized or underpurposed buildings.

I believe it’s incumbent upon the Council to issue its own plan on affordable housing, to not just be a reactive player by answering ULURPs, but to actually affirmatively put out our own plan. So we’re looking at both tranches, both the public library branches and the DCAS sites and other sites, so we can really be a leader in identifying sites within various Council districts that are suitable to build affordable housing on.

I’m very excited about this library plan because I think it’s a historic opportunity to ensure that our libraries are fully supported and we have fantastic libraries. And at the same time, many of those sites are incredibly suitable to build affordable housing on top of, not all of them, but many of them. So I think that you’re going to find that this iteration of the Council is very aggressive and proactive on building more affordable housing, because the affordable housing crisis is a key crisis that we have for New York City.

Akash Mehta
You’ll have a seat on the new appeals board that has the power to overrule individual Council members on ULURP decisions. Do you anticipate voting against the local Council members?

Julie Menin
Again, this is a hypothetical. I mean, until we get on that appeals board, I can’t tell you how we would vote yet. But I think what is important here is that this is a Council that is deeply committed to building affordable housing. This is a Council that is going to be proactive about building affordable housing, and we are going to be putting out our own ideas about how to do that. And so I’m very excited about that.

In terms of that appeals board, again, it’s hard to engage in a hypothetical. Obviously I understand that Council members know their districts best, but at the same time, we have an affordable housing crisis. So it is that balance that we need to try to achieve here.

Ben Max
Well, thank you so much.

Julie Menin
Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.