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.
“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.” 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. 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.
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.