STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — A pair of high-profile Staten Island public servants are calling it quits after decades in government.
Former Borough President James Oddo and former State Sen. Diane Savino served in former Mayor Eric Adams administration, and were out of their jobs Thursday with the swearing-in of Mayor Zohran Mamdani marking the end of two decades-long careers.
Oddo served in various positions through Adams’ 4 years, lastly as the city’s buildings commissioner since April 2023. Savino spent her time in the mayoral administration as a senior advisor focused largely on the administration work to advance legislation it saw as vital to its agenda.
Her job in the Adams administration followed nearly 20 years as a state senator, and over a decade working in city government that saw her start in 1990 a caseworker with the Child Welfare Administration.
She said that she hopes when historians look back on the administration that they remember it for its work instead of the scandals that marred Adams’ time as the city’s mayor.
“Nobody really gave him (Adams) credit, and that’s largely as you know, because everything else took up all the oxygen in the room — the investigations, the resignations, the FBI raids, the indictment, everything overshadowed everything that he did,” Savino said. “In spite of it all, I think the history books will look back at some point and say that he made some positive changes in the city and I think that’s largely a result of the dedicated people who stuck around when everybody else jumped off the what they thought was a sinking ship.”
Specifically, Savino pointed to things like lower crime rates than when Adams took office, the long-needed push to containerize the city’s trash, and the administration’s navigation of the migrant crisis that saw tens of thousands of people pour into the city.
On Staten Island-centric accomplishments, she said the good of Adams’ administration could be seen most easily in the development of the North Shore Action Plan, a revitalization of the Island’s waterfront.
She also pointed to less praised but vital quality of life efforts, like the clearing of 220 tons of trash from a portion of the old North Shore Branch of the Staten Island Railroad that had plagues Port Richmond for years.
A re-examination that will take time
The former Democratic state senator, who served Staten Island’s North Shore and part of Southern Brooklyn from 2005 to 2022, compared Adams to the city’s only other Black mayor, David Dinkins.
For years following Dinkins’ mayoralty from 1990 to 1993, much of the city’s political class maligned him as an ineffective mayor, but he’s undergone a re-examination in more recent years, particularly for his work helping bring down crime.
The city’s expansion of its afterschool programs and the hiring of thousands of police officers were both the result of Dinkins’ initiatives.
“It took people a while, because they could only focus on what they thought were the negatives of his [Dinkins’} administration,” Savino said.
She believes that re-examination will take a bit longer because of the modern, immediate accessibility of information, and because of Adams’ own combativeness with the city’s press corps.
It took the city’s most recent mayor a little more than a month in office to take on the mostly-white City Hall media for his perception of their racial biases.
“I’m a Black man that’s the mayor, but my story is being interpreted by people that don’t look like me,” he said Feb. 15, 2022. “How many Blacks are on editorial boards? How many Blacks determine how these stories are being written?”
The combativeness didn’t stop there with Adams administration limiting the media’s open questioning of him to a single press conference each week.
That press conference usually kicked off with a time-consuming announcement touting the administration’s latest self-identified accomplishment.
Savino said the overall strategy of taking on the city’s media class was something that never made much sense to her.
“You cannot get into a pissing match with people who buy ink by the barrel or bandwidth by the megabyte and expect to win,” she said. “It just got worse and worse with each passing month, so when the people whose responsibility it is to tell your story hate your guts, well your story’s not going to come out too well.”
Staying above the fray
The future retelling of Adams’ time as the city’s mayor will also have to account for the scandal, chaos and general oddities that consumed much of the ink and megabytes Savino referenced.
At least publicly, the former state senator’s time in the administration saw her stay largely above the issues that led to Adams’ undoing. She credits the work needed to keep city government running, and borrowed a phrase from her former boss.
“‘Stay focused, no distractions, and grind.’ You stay out of it,” she said. “I learned early on, when I got there, that there was so much work that needed to be done. I just stayed…away from people.”
Likewise, former Borough President Oddo, who did not respond to a request for comment for this article, stayed largely out of the chaos that led to the first one-term mayoralty in decades.
In a New Year’s Eve post on X, Oddo thanked the staff at the Buildings Department for their hard work during his time as commissioner.
It’s not clear what’s next for the longtime public servant, but his time in the Adams administration caps off a decades-long career in public service that saw him work his way up from City Council staffer to councilmember for the Mid-Island to the whole Island’s borough president.
Savino said she plans to enjoy her retirement from public service but left the door open to future consulting opportunities. She said that as a new mayoral administration takes the reins of city government, everyone across the five boroughs should be rooting for its success.
“I just hope that we all recognize that it’s not in anyone’s interest for this guy to fail, she said. ”You may not agree with him, but we shouldn’t be wishing for each other to fail, because that just impacts all of us who are staying here, who are homeowners, who have kids in school, or, rely on government services. Failure is not helpful to those of us who depend on government to be functional.”