When he won in 2025, Zohran Mamdani vowed that his mayoralty would be “defined by transparency.”
Nine months in, his administration has repeatedly failed to live up to that promise. Examples of City Hall’s transparency problem are mounting — from keeping the mayor’s calendar and communications under wraps and using encrypted messaging apps to conduct city business to declining to meaningfully participate in City Council oversight hearings.
Snubbing the Council by refusing to provide access to knowledgeable aides — or, worse yet, failing to participate at all — not only shows a lack of respect for a co-equal branch of city government, it sends a clear and troubling message to the public and its elected representatives that they’re on a “need to know” basis about how the administration operates.
Concern over City Hall’s blatant disregard for keeping the public informed is not a partisan issue. When Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, a progressive Mamdani ally, and Republican Council Minority Leader David Carr agree, it’s impossible to deny something has gone badly awry.
City Hall’s use of Signal, an encrypted app that can erase any record of communication, to spoon feed talking points to social media influencers in blatant violation of its own chief counsel’s directive, makes clear that it has no regard for the public’s right to know.
Failing to provide New Yorkers with a full and clear picture of how city government operates isn’t just a thumb in the eye of the Council and members of the legacy media, it’s a public safety threat.
Case in point: This administration failed to inform the public about not one, but two dangerous outages of the 911 system — one of which lasted nearly seven hours and left nearly 1,700 calls for emergency assistance unable to connect.
The mayor’s explanation for why his administration failed to inform the public of this breakdown — essentially that they were too busy trying to get the system back up to bother letting people know their calls for help were going nowhere — is incomprehensible.
Worse yet, the second outage, which lasted near two hours in May, wasn’t disclosed until Office of Technology and Innovation Commissioner Lisa Gelobter revealed it during testimony at a Council hearing. City officials had ample warning the 911 system is susceptible to potentially life-threatening outages and not only did nothing about it but covered it up.
New Yorkers have also been put at risk by the lack of transparency about what the administration is doing to get multiple Legionnaire’s disease outbreaks under control. Last month the mayor vaguely pledged “sweeping reforms” to combat the disease that killed 11 people on the Upper East Side this past summer, but a second cluster of cases has since emerged, with at least two deaths confirmed to date.
A lawsuit related to a 2025 Legionnaire’s disease outbreak maintains that individuals who succumbed to the disease were infected by bacteria from two city-owned sites. City Hall has been on notice for literally years about this problem, yet the Health Department was somehow unprepared to handle it.
Any of these episodes alone could potentially be explained away. But taken together they paint a deeply troubling picture of an administration that doesn’t take the mayor’s own words about transparency even remotely seriously.
It might be time to call 911 on the Mamdani administration to hold it accountable and provide New Yorkers with the clear, honest, and forthright government they deserve…let’s just hope someone answers the phone.
Walden is chair of NYC Common Sense, a nonprofit coalition formed to champion effectiveness and accountability at City Hall over ideology and identity politics.