{"id":369816,"date":"2026-10-10T15:36:25","date_gmt":"2026-10-10T15:36:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/369816\/"},"modified":"2026-10-10T15:36:25","modified_gmt":"2026-10-10T15:36:25","slug":"mamdanis-transparency-pledge-comes-up-empty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/369816\/","title":{"rendered":"Mamdani’s transparency pledge comes up empty"},"content":{"rendered":"

When he won in 2025, Zohran Mamdani vowed that his mayoralty would be \u201cdefined by transparency<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nine months in, his administration has repeatedly failed to live up to that promise<\/a>. Examples of City Hall\u2019s transparency problem are mounting \u2014 from keeping the mayor\u2019s calendar and communications under wraps<\/a> and using encrypted messaging apps to conduct city business<\/a> to declining to<\/a> meaningfully participate in City Council oversight hearings.<\/p>\n

Snubbing the Council by refusing to provide access<\/a> to knowledgeable aides \u2014 or, worse yet, failing to participate at all \u2014 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\u2019re on a \u201cneed to know\u201d basis about how the administration operates.<\/p>\n

Concern over City Hall\u2019s 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<\/a>, it\u2019s impossible to deny something has gone badly awry.<\/p>\n

City Hall\u2019s use of Signal, an encrypted app that can erase any record of communication, to spoon feed talking points<\/a> to social media influencers in blatant violation<\/a> of its own chief counsel\u2019s directive, makes clear that it has no regard for the public\u2019s right to know.<\/p>\n

Failing to provide New Yorkers with a full and clear picture of how city government operates isn\u2019t just a thumb in the eye of the Council and members of the legacy media, it\u2019s a public safety threat.<\/p>\n

Case in point: This administration failed to inform the public about not one, but two dangerous outages of the 911 system \u2014 one of which lasted nearly seven hours<\/a> and left nearly 1,700 calls for emergency assistance unable to connect.<\/p>\n

The mayor\u2019s explanation for why his administration failed to inform the public of this breakdown \u2014 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 \u2014 is incomprehensible.<\/p>\n

Worse yet, the second outage, which lasted near two hours in May, wasn\u2019t disclosed until Office of Technology and Innovation Commissioner Lisa Gelobter revealed it during testimony<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

New Yorkers have also been put at risk by the lack of transparency about what the administration is doing to get multiple Legionnaire\u2019s disease outbreaks under control. Last month the mayor vaguely pledged<\/a> \u201csweeping reforms\u201d to combat the disease that killed 11 people on the Upper East Side this past summer, but a second cluster of cases<\/a> has since emerged, with at least two deaths confirmed to date.<\/p>\n

A lawsuit related to a 2025 Legionnaire\u2019s disease outbreak maintains that<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Any of these episodes alone could potentially be explained away. But taken together they paint a deeply troubling picture of an administration that doesn\u2019t take the mayor\u2019s own words about transparency even remotely seriously.<\/p>\n

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\u2026let\u2019s just hope someone answers the phone.<\/p>\n

Walden is chair of NYC Common Sense<\/a>, a nonprofit coalition formed to champion effectiveness and accountability at City Hall over ideology and identity politics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When he won in 2025, Zohran Mamdani vowed that his mayoralty would be \u201cdefined by transparency.\u201d Nine months…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":369817,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[98,100,99,9,24,63,299],"class_list":["post-369816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369816"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369816\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/369817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}