Mayor Eric Adams’ administration is still pushing elected officials to use a controversial online form to request meetings with agency leaders and certain services — leading some lawmakers to consider legislation to upend the protocol, a key councilmember said on Wednesday.
Lincoln Restler, who chairs the City Council’s government operations committee and represents parts of Brooklyn, said in an interview that he and others are looking at “legislative solutions” to rescind the administration’s policy, which drew immediate blowback from councilmembers including the speaker when it was rolled out in April.
He said scheduling meetings with NYPD officials has been a particular hassle in recent weeks, with multiple precincts declining requests to meet with lawmakers and residents unless the form is completed, and in some instances canceling planned meetings altogether.
“I’m shocked, genuinely shocked, that any administration could think that this is a rational or helpful policy,” said Restler. “It has severely undermined our office’s ability to effectively do our job, and it’s made city agencies much less effective.”
More than 60 elected officials from varying levels of government sent a letter urging Adams to scrap the policy in the spring, saying it was needlessly bureaucratic and could hamstring the delivery of services to constituents. Council Speaker Adrienne Adams publicly denounced the protocol soon after it was reported, telling her members to disregard it and carry on as usual with how they interact with agencies.
Mayoral spokesperson Liz Garcia said on Wednesday that the administration continues to be in contact with local elected officials on permit approvals and other requests they make. The NYPD did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The fight over the online request form came to a head in May, when some councilmembers and Tiffany Raspberry, the mayor’s senior adviser and director of intergovernmental affairs, faced off during a tense Council hearing at City Hall. Raspberry defended the policy, testifying that no requests submitted through the form up to that point had been denied and that the average response time was less than two days. She also said the form was meant for “formal meeting requests and the deployment of agency resources,” not emergency issues or basic constituent requests.
On Wednesday, Deputy Council Speaker Diana Ayala said police officials had told her earlier this week that her office would have to use the lengthy online form to request a simple street permit. She said it amounted to “micromanagement” by the mayor’s team, echoing remarks she made after the protocol was introduced.
But after Gothamist reached out to Adams’ office for comment, Ayala said the mayor’s representatives told her that filling out the form was not required to obtain a street permit.
“In all my years in government, I have never seen anything like it,” said Ayala, who represents parts of Upper Manhattan and the South Bronx. “It can only be defined as an opportunity to make a political point that the mayor is in charge and these are now ‘his’ resources.”
Restler, who led the hearing in May, said the administration has been subjecting councilmembers to a “wildly disparate implementation of this policy by even people at the very same agency.” Raspberry had testified at the hearing that the mayor’s team wanted to “mitigate disparities” in elected officials’ access to agency leaders, as some lawmakers have stronger relationships with them than others.
“Some officials within an agency are encouraging us to complete the form, won’t speak to us without completing the form, won’t share any information without completing the form,” Restler said. “And other agencies are just operating like normal.”
He added, “It’s asinine – it’s utterly backwards. I mean, city agency representatives are afraid to do their jobs [and] work with elected officials because of this totally incoherent directive from City Hall to have elected officials fill out a form for God knows what.”