NYC lawmakers pan Mayor Adams over 'inane' process for interacting with agency leaders

The Adams administration is continuing to defend its new protocol directing elected officials to fill out a lengthy online form to request meetings and other engagements with city agency leaders, despite significant pushback from members of the New York City Council and other lawmakers.

The administration’s latest comments on the protocol, which was unveiled just three weeks ago, arose during a Council oversight hearing on Wednesday that featured a few testy exchanges between councilmembers and Tiffany Raspberry, the mayor’s senior adviser and director of intergovernmental affairs.

At one point, Raspberry said she hoped Councilmember Lincoln Restler, who chairs the Council’s governmental operations committee and organized the hearing, would “take some time to meet with us outside of this public forum” to discuss the policy further.

“Do I have to fill out a form?” Restler shot back.

“You can always call me up and have a conversation with me,” Raspberry replied.

“That was not an answer to the question,” said Restler.

Multiple councilmembers told Gothamist last month that Adams’ office was rolling out a new process for lawmakers to access agency commissioners and their executive teams. Councilmembers including Speaker Adrienne Adams called the move unnecessarily bureaucratic and said it was prone to disrupt the delivery of city services to their constituents. The speaker even instructed councilmembers to ignore the request form and “conduct business as usual.”

More than 60 elected officials from various levels of government sent a letter to Adams earlier this week in which they urged him to reverse the policy. And Councilmember Jennifer Gutiérrez, who chairs the Council’s technology committee, told the mayor’s team that the multipage form is subject to the city’s Open Data law, meaning that any data collected through it must be made publicly available. The form states that submitting a request does not guarantee a meeting or appearance with an agency head.

But Raspberry said that none of the dozens of requests made via the online form so far — including more than 50 from councilmembers' offices — have been denied. She added that she could not “envision a scenario” where the administration would reject a request, and that the average response time has been between 24 and 48 hours.

“Change is hard,” she said, echoing previous comments by Adams about the process helping streamline city services. “Change is often met with resistance.”

Public Advocate Jumaane Williams said at the hearing that the protocol could “stymie vital interaction” between public servants and set a “dangerous precedent” limiting oversight of city agencies. He called for city officials to discuss any new policies before implementing them, as the form's rollout took many lawmakers by surprise.

According to Raspberry, the form is not meant for basic constituent or informational requests or emergency issues, but rather for “formal meeting requests and the deployment of agency resources.” She said it would “mitigate disparities” in elected officials’ access to agency leaders, since some lawmakers have particularly strong relationships with decision-makers.

Still, the interactions between Raspberry and Restler, the committee chair, were sometimes fractious, including when Raspberry sought to defend her integrity as a member of the mayor’s administration and reminded Restler that he had once met her late mother. The councilmember responded that his critiques of the protocol, which he called “inane” in his introductory remarks, “were not personal.”

Raspberry said Adams’ office completed a legal analysis of the online form before putting it into practice. She said the administration had intended for the form's rollout to be more thorough than what elected officials reported experiencing, but things were made difficult after multiple news outlets broke the news of the policy.

“I think that this form has sort of become like the boogeyman in the room,” she said. “And I don’t know if you’ve ever opened it, or looked at it, but it’s not that complicated.”

Most of the lawmakers at the hearing appeared unconvinced about the form’s use — including Councilmember Gale Brewer, who said she had no plans to use the form.

“It sets a cold blanket, shall we say, on the work between city government and the people who want the city, just like you, to succeed,” she said.