Laura Kavanagh, the commissioner of the New York Fire Department, said on Saturday that she would resign after less than two years in the role, giving no explanation for her sudden departure and capping a rocky tenure marked by infighting at the nation’s largest fire department.
Ms. Kavanagh, 42, was appointed to the role by Mayor Eric Adams in October 2022 after serving as interim commissioner for eight months. She was the first woman to oversee the agency in its nearly 160-year history and the youngest to serve in the role in over a century.
“It has been the honor of a lifetime to devote the last 10 years — five as first deputy commissioner and more than two as commissioner — to advocating for the men and women of the F.D.N.Y.,” Ms. Kavanagh said in a statement on Saturday. “While the decision I have made over the last month has been a hard one, I’m confident that it is time for me to pass the torch to the next leader of the finest fire department in the world.”
Ms. Kavanagh said in her statement that she would stay in the role for the next several months to assist in the transition until a new commissioner is named. She thanked Mr. Adams for his support and for the opportunity to serve.
Ms. Kavanagh was named interim commissioner in February 2022 after the previous commissioner, Daniel A. Nigro, retired. She had served as Mr. Nigro’s first deputy and had held several other positions in the department after she joined in 2014.
But shortly after taking the helm in fall 2022, Ms. Kavanagh faced pushback from other top officials in the department, who criticized her lack of firefighting experience.
Last year, four of her top chiefs filed a lawsuit, saying that three of them had been unfairly demoted. The demotions, the suit claimed, created a “grave risk,” because they had left the city with no staff chiefs to properly oversee five-alarm fires and with only a handful of officials with four-alarm fire command experience.
In another suit, a group of former chiefs sued Ms. Kavanagh for what they claimed was age discrimination.
In a social media post on Saturday, Joann Ariola, chairwoman of the City Council’s Committee on Fire and Emergency Management, which has jurisdiction over the Fire Department, said that Ms. Kavanagh “should have never been in this position to begin with.”
James Brosi, president of the department’s Uniformed Fire Officers Association, said in a statement that the union looked forward to working with the new commissioner, but he did not mention Ms. Kavanagh. “An agency as dynamic and vital as the F.D.N.Y. requires strong leadership that adapts to the ever-changing risks we face on the fireground,” he said.
Andrew Ansbro, president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association, another union, urged the new commissioner to increase staffing in the department.
Ms. Kavanagh’s resignation comes one year after the abrupt departure of Keechant Sewell, the former commissioner of the New York Police Department and, like Ms. Kavanagh, the first woman in the agency’s history to hold that title.
Mr. Adams has frequently boasted about his appointment of women to top posts in his administration, among them Ms. Sewell and Ms. Kavanagh.
Though Ms. Sewell did not give a reason for her departure, several senior police officials said at the time that she had been undermined by the mayor and his senior aides, including Philip Banks III, the deputy mayor for public safety.
Several other top ranking officials in Mr. Adams’s administration have resigned or have been reshuffled in the last year. Louis A. Molina, the city’s embattled jails commissioner, was moved into a position under Mr. Banks in October.
When Ms. Kavanagh took office, she pledged to make the Fire Department more diverse in both race and gender. Men had led the department since its establishment in 1865, and the ranks have been predominately white and male for decades. A report from September 2022, just before Ms. Kavanagh’s appointment, found that 76 percent of firefighters were white. Only about 1 percent of firefighters were women, the report said.
Ms. Kavanagh earned a master’s degree in public policy from Columbia University and worked as a senior City Hall official and on political campaigns, including that of former Mayor Bill de Blasio, before joining the Fire Department.
On Saturday, Mr. Adams voiced his support for Ms. Kavanagh, thanking her for her service and praising her for overhauling the agency’s methods for recruiting and retaining employees of color, creating the most diverse force in the department’s history, according to the mayor.
“Throughout her career, Commissioner Kavanagh has been a trailblazer — not only serving as the first female fire commissioner in our city’s history, but leading the department to new heights,” Mr. Adams said.
He added: “While we’ve made it clear that she could have kept this position for as long as she wanted, we respect her decision to take the next step in her career. We thank her for every minute she has given to running the greatest fire department in the world.”
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