Unlike the 'burbs or less walkable cities, we can walk to late night McDonald's when we have a hankering and don't need to hop into a car drunk. Makes sense.

That's the Adams plan. Cull government staff --> announce major plan requiring well staffed office with appropriate budget --> point to the city being unable to accomplish lofty goal --> move it into the hands of private companies and consultants

>do the departments that fix this stuff have the juice?

No, they don't. And that is Adams intent. This plan heavily involves ignoring inspections and easing licensing requirements. The big issues caused by lack of safety and oversight won't come to light for a few years, after Adams no longer has to worry about reelection.

The Trumps have been fleecing and conning New York contractors and workers for decades. It's long past time that this was made a hard place to be a Trump.

Agreed. City staff see the vision over time between administrations and do a lot of work. Then a new administration begins and they scrap the work and restart something that gets dropped again later. Very rarely do they promote agency staff into commissioner positions. Instead the pick their friends who have little to no experience and are starting from scratch.

It's very hard to have consistency and a cohesive vision for the public when politicians only hop in to promote their own agenda.

You think city workers become state and federal workers because the city gets state and federal budget? Are you for real? This was a wild reach to not admit you were wrong about the types of public workers we are talking about. City workers aren't just state and federal workers who live in NYC.

I can just tell you regularly yell at service staff everywhere you go. What a wild generalization about hundreds of thousands of workers who clean up after your ass all day on one way or another.

>Once confronted with the complexity of intergovernmental affairs

...They pass a local law requiring a Task Force and the creation of a new agency/department that is supposed to wrangle information from every agency that inevitably does a bad job because it's staffed by people who themselves also don't understand how the city works. It's a tale as old as time.

>state and federal agencies

...this is about city agencies. And you can look up salaries online for every city employee. They are not overpaid. And don't bother yelling about how the mayoral appointed positions are paid, because they aren't civil or public servants.

Oh, I know. I. Know.

Which is why I'll always regret Kathryn Garcia not winning. Electeds don't understand how the city works (truly, many of them have no idea how anything works) and often treat staff with contempt. She actually had experience as a real city agency staffer who understood what works and what doesn't. Eric Adams and perpetual elected officials use city workers as pawns, they don't really care about how things work or whether things break when they're term limited out.

The irony is that despite the Mayor obviously trying to reduce headcount on purpose, he's simultaneously promising agency plans to promise higher productivity and new programs. But there's nobody to run the programs or hit those numbers. You can't cut city offices and then demand massive speed improvements and more services to the public. They lost massive amounts of institutional knowledge that ran those programs. Public services, especially social services, will suffer. He just refuses to acknowledge that.

They aren't. There is no city office allowing work from home. That is absolutely false. Unless they have a building emergency like bed bugs (lol that happens a lot) and they shut it down for a week while they fumigate. Or unless he's referring to offices that aren't city workers (like comptroller, borough president, state offices, etc.)

There are no city offices working from home. It's not allowed. There is a miniscule amount of people granted medical WFH exemptions, but that's a blip. Whoever told you that was full of it.

>But we did get marijuana

That was a state law, the Mayor had nothing to do with that.

>response method to mental health issues at least.

We didn't get that. He announced it a few days ago with absolutely no staffing or budget to make it happen. It's also likely illegal and will be tossed anyway. His intent was to make a big new splash for the holiday tourist season, that isn't a real policy.

>Half this shit should exclusively be handled at the state level

What do you think the state should be handling that NYC is currently managing?

We have almost 9 million residents and millions more who come to the city every day as tourists or to work here. That isn't an insane number to staff all the different things the city is taking care of at the same time. Like trash, public parks, licenses, zoning, police, fire, etc. Etc.

I wouldn't take any sort of medical advice (physical or mental) from a guy who wears healing crystal beads on his wrist and tells people that his plant based diet can cure cancer.

It's not going to magically adapt, we all agree. We need a City government that is practical and responsive to change and to plan ahead. We don't have that. It'll come back to bite us in the ass.

And what if nobody moves in and pays the rent?

I'm not sure we will ever find a future for the McLargeHuge commercial space. They need to make a decision now on whether to lower rents or remodel spaces.

Just an anecdote of course, but the massive quarter block office building I see out my office window has at least 5 gutted floors. It used to be cubicle farms top to bottom for a bank, I believe. It's been emptied out since late 2019 (started pre-COVID) and not a bit of movement there yet. As the Mega Corps leave to save $$ and keep staff happy, who else would ever come and claim that overpriced space? They're going to have to convert it no matter what, whether it's into smaller offices on the same floor or into housing. I don't know why the Mayor is leading them on and wasting time.

If the City wanted to fix the issue of losing property tax from businesses in Manhattan they should request landlords lower rents and make it more enticing to stay or to rent space there for smaller businesses. Sometimes private business owners are smart. Why would they waste their $$ on bloated Manhattan rent when staff don't even want to be there? Who does that benefit except the rent collectors? Why is the City (well, the Mayor) the last one to understand this?

Yikes. I wonder how many candidates drop out between getting an offer and being onboarded because it takes so long. I've heard up to 6 months for some!

Did you read the report? He mentions hybrid as one of the options at the end but the entire report is just showing the statistics of people who left and what departments and for what apparent reasons.

This is actually very little about hybrid on its own and more about the city having difficulty recruiting (bad pay, no flex) and the mayor's office single-handedly deciding to eliminate positions and not make it easier to recruit. Even if we didn't reinstate the cut positions, the Mayor could single handedly fix the recruiting issue. He refuses to.

Comptrollers can only do the research, get the data and make report. We don't really have a mechanism for them to step in and take over when our Mayoral administration and City Council refuse to, unfortunately.