Friday, March 20, marked the 79th day of Zohran Mamdani’s term as mayor. amNewYork is following Mamdani around his first 100 days in office. We are closely tracking his progress on fulfilling campaign promises, appointing key leaders to government posts, and managing the city’s finances. Here’s a summary of what the mayor did.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani has appointed three members to a commission that will review pay for New York City elected officials, after nearly a decade without raises and after lawmakers last year pursued salary hikes through legislation instead.
Carl Weisbrod, a former city planning official and founding president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation, will chair the Quadrennial Advisory Commission. The other members are Dr. Lilliam Barrios-Paoli, a former deputy mayor for health and human services, and Larian Angelo, a former first deputy director at the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget and former New York City Council finance director.
The appointments complete a commission that Mamdani and City Council Speaker Julie Menin announced on Jan. 23 as an alternative to proposed legislation that would have automatically increased compensation for elected officials. The panel is expected to review salaries for City Council members, citywide elected officials and district attorneys and issue recommendations for consideration by the mayor and speaker.
Any pay changes would still require City Council approval.
“Carl, Lilliam and Larian have each spent their careers serving this city with integrity. I am confident they will approach this responsibility with the seriousness and independence it demands, and I look forward to carefully reviewing their recommendations,” said Mamdani, who has previously said he would not take a pay increase. Menin has agreed to do the same.
“The Quadrennial Commission plays an essential role in ensuring that any compensation decisions are made independently and transparently,” Menin said in a statement welcoming the appointments.
The move comes after years without a charter-mandated review of elected officials’ salaries. The last such commission was convened in 2015, and the last full review took place in 2016.
That lapse became more politically charged last year, when the City Council considered legislation to raise pay for its members and other top officials. Under that proposal, City Council members, the mayor, the public advocate, borough presidents and the comptroller would have received 16% raises, while district attorneys would have gotten a 6% increase.
For Council members, that would have meant a raise from $148,500 to $172,500 — their first increase since 2016. The council members said the proposed figure reflected the rising cost of living, the growing demands of the job, and salary increases in the private sector, nonprofit world, and among elected officials in comparable cities such as Chicago.
Discussing the legislation in December, government watchdog groups, including Citizens Union and Common Cause, said they were not opposed to raises themselves but criticized the Council’s attempt to move them through legislation rather than an independent commission.
At a hearing on the proposal, Citizens Union Executive Director Grace Rauh said the approach broke with longstanding city practice. She said the City Charter requires the mayor to convene an independent commission every four years to study and make recommendations on elected officials’ salaries — something Mayors Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams both failed to do.
Rauh also argued that moving the legislation during the lame-duck period between Election Day and Jan. 1 risked undermining public trust and could invite legal challenges. As that debate continued, the Council moved to formalize a timeline for future reviews.
On March 10, the Council approved Introduction 502-B, introduced by Deputy Speaker Nantasha M. Williams, which would require the mayor to convene a quadrennial commission in 2026, then between Jan. 1 and Jan. 15 of 2030, and every four years after that.
Under the bill, each commission would have 75 days from the date of its convening to make recommendations on compensation for city elected officials and to send them to both the mayor and the Council. The mayor could approve, disapprove, or modify those recommendations before transmitting them to the Council, but would not be required to do so. The Council would retain the authority to alter compensation levels before adoption.
“Today’s vote advances the Charter-outlined process for reviewing elected official compensation,” Williams said after the bill passed. “The last full review took place in 2016, and this legislation provides the structure for the Council to revisit that question in a clear and transparent way.”
New commissioner: Mamdani nabs council’s finance boss
Earlier on Friday, Hizzoner appointed Richard Lee as commissioner of the New York City Department of Finance, successfully luring away the City Council’s top budget negotiator during a fraught budget season.
Lee’s appointment lands in the middle of tense negotiations between the mayor and Speaker Julie Menin over a preliminary budget clouded by a major fiscal gap. As head of the Council’s Finance Division, Lee had been central to the body’s budget strategy even as Mamdani defended a spending plan built around reserve drawdowns, a proposed property tax hike, and hoped-for help from Albany.
The Council wasted little time replacing Lee. On March 19, Speaker Julie Menin appointed Nathan Toth as finance director, handing budget strategy, negotiations, and planning to a veteran city fiscal official who previously spent 15 years in the Council’s Finance Division before leaving for the Department of Design and Construction.
The hiring of Lee comes as Mamdani faces growing scrutiny over his approach to closing the city’s budget hole. The mayor has argued that Albany should do more to help, including by raising taxes on wealthy New Yorkers and large corporations, and recalibrating how much money the city receives from the state.
That strategy has drawn skepticism from several directions. Moody’s recently revised the city’s outlook to negative, citing persistent budget gaps, a move Mamdani dismissed as premature. Council leaders have also pushed back on his reliance on reserves, deepening the divide between City Hall and the speaker’s office as negotiations intensify.
Prior to his role with the council’s financial division, Lee was budget director for the Queens borough president and previously worked in budget and legislative affairs for then-Council Member Leroy Comrie.
In announcing the appointment, Mamdani pointed to Lee’s experience with the city budget at a time when New York is facing mounting fiscal pressure.
“His command of the City’s budgeting process makes him uniquely qualified to lead the Agency and ensure that our City continues meeting New Yorkers’ needs,” said Mamdani.
Lee called the appointment an honor and said he sees the job as part of a broader fight over affordability, and said the city’s financial system should work for working-class New Yorkers, immigrants, small businesses, and outer-borough communities.
Lee replaces Jeffrey Shear, who had served as acting commissioner since Jan. 1 after previously holding the department’s number two post as first deputy commissioner.