the clearing of 220 tons of trash<\/a> from a portion of the old North Shore Branch of the Staten Island Railroad that had plagues Port Richmond for years.<\/p>\nA re-examination that will take time<\/p>\n
The former Democratic state senator, who served Staten Island\u2019s North Shore and part of Southern Brooklyn from 2005 to 2022, compared Adams to the city\u2019s only other Black mayor, David Dinkins.<\/p>\n
For years following Dinkins\u2019 mayoralty from 1990 to 1993, much of the city\u2019s political class maligned him as an ineffective mayor, but he\u2019s undergone a re-examination in more recent years, particularly for his work helping bring down crime.<\/p>\n
The city\u2019s expansion of its afterschool programs and the hiring of thousands of police officers were both the result of Dinkins\u2019 initiatives. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt took people a while, because they could only focus on what they thought were the negatives of his [Dinkins\u2019} administration,\u201d Savino said. <\/p>\n
She believes that re-examination will take a bit longer because of the modern, immediate accessibility of information, and because of Adams\u2019 own combativeness with the city\u2019s press corps.<\/p>\n
It took the city\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m a Black man that\u2019s the mayor, but my story is being interpreted by people that don\u2019t look like me,\u201d he said Feb. 15, 2022. \u201cHow many Blacks are on editorial boards? How many Blacks determine how these stories are being written?\u201d<\/p>\n
The combativeness didn\u2019t stop there with Adams administration limiting the media\u2019s open questioning of him to a single press conference each week.<\/p>\n
That press conference usually kicked off with a time-consuming announcement touting the administration\u2019s latest self-identified accomplishment.<\/p>\n
Savino said the overall strategy of taking on the city\u2019s media class was something that never made much sense to her. <\/p>\n
\u201cYou cannot get into a pissing match with people who buy ink by the barrel or bandwidth by the megabyte and expect to win,\u201d she said. \u201cIt 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\u2019s not going to come out too well.\u201d<\/p>\n
Staying above the fray<\/p>\n
The future retelling of Adams\u2019 time as the city\u2019s mayor will also have to account for the scandal, chaos and general oddities that consumed much of the ink and megabytes Savino referenced.<\/p>\n
At least publicly, the former state senator\u2019s time in the administration saw her stay largely above the issues that led to Adams\u2019 undoing. She credits the work needed to keep city government running, and borrowed a phrase from her former boss.<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2018Stay focused, no distractions, and grind.\u2019 You stay out of it,\u201d she said. \u201cI learned early on, when I got there, that there was so much work that needed to be done. I just stayed…away from people.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
In a New Year\u2019s Eve post on X<\/a>, Oddo thanked the staff at the Buildings Department for their hard work during his time as commissioner. <\/p>\nIt\u2019s not clear what\u2019s 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\u2019s borough president.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just hope that we all recognize that it\u2019s not in anyone\u2019s interest for this guy to fail, she said. \u201dYou may not agree with him, but we shouldn\u2019t 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.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. \u2014 A pair of high-profile Staten Island public servants are calling it quits after decades…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":88076,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[9,24,63,134,136,135],"class_list":{"0":"post-88075","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-staten-island","8":"tag-new-york","9":"tag-new-york-city","10":"tag-nyc","11":"tag-staten-island","12":"tag-staten-island-headlines","13":"tag-staten-island-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88075","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=88075"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88075\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/88076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}