Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll catch up on what the City Council did amid the firestorm surrounding Mayor Eric Adams’s indictment last week.
After the 57-page indictment against Mayor Eric Adams was unsealed last week, phrases like “unprecedented territory” and “uncharted waters” were heard often, because no mayor in the modern history of New York City had faced criminal charges while in office.
That is not to say that Adams’s predecessors were scandal-free. Mayor James Walker became the flamboyant subject of the biopic “Beau James,” with Bob Hope as “a frank playboy who somehow managed some clean figure-skating around notorious civic corruption,” The New York Times said in its review. Walker resigned and fled to Europe with his girlfriend in 1932. And, in 1950, Mayor William O’Dwyer resigned to become the United States ambassador to Mexico, as a police corruption scandal raged.
Amid the will-he-or-won’t-he questions about whether Adams would resign or be replaced by Gov. Kathy Hochul, the mayor insisted that he was innocent of the charges, gibing at what he called a “story,” just as he had referred to the federal investigation leading up to the indictment as a “review.”
Still, at the City Council, “business as usual” went on, Councilman Shaun Abreu said, discussing what he did on Thursday, the day the charges against Adams were unsealed. Abreu said that the “feeling at City Hall was somber and shocked” but that the Council had remained “focused on doing the work.”
The work that day included passing a bill that called for birth control for rats.
“I’m very excited about this,” said Abreu, who introduced the bill in April.
Rats have figured in Adams’s time in City Hall. There was his fight against summonses relating to rats at the rental property he owns in Brooklyn. And there were also his efforts to carry on the fight against rats citywide by naming a “rat czar.”
Putting out rat poison, as the city has done for decades, “doesn’t get us far,” Abreu said. “When two rats can reproduce 15,000 descendants in a year, you can’t kill your way out of this. You have to shut off the food supply.”
Which is difficult, although the city has required businesses to put their trash in bins since March because garbage is a major source of nourishment for rats. The city imposed trash containerization rules on food-related businesses — restaurants, bars, delis, bodegas, grocery stores and wholesalers — in the summer of 2023.
Abreu’s bill called for trying something different. “I’m not saying rat contraceptives are going to be a magic wand,” he said, “but we should see if they work.”
The bill proposed a pilot program using a compound that targets ovarian functions in female rats and sperm production in males, Abreu said. “Over time, this would help make sure that rats can’t reproduce.” He said the compound was sweet, so it would attract rats.
He also said the substance was not harmful to other animals, which is why the measure became known as Flaco’s law. That was a tribute to the Central Park owl that had rat poison in his system when he flew into an Upper West Side building in February and died. A necropsy said that Flaco had been exposed to four different rodenticides that are routinely used in New York City.
“We saw what happened to Flaco,” Abreu said. “We know there is a better way” to reduce the rat population.
The Council also approved a bill to decriminalize jaywalking, which can carry a penalty of up to $300.
Mercedes Narcisse, the City Council member who introduced that measure, said that the criminal summonses for jaywalking disproportionately affected Black and Hispanic New Yorkers.
“I have never heard a New Yorker exclaim, ‘I am so glad they caught that jaywalker,’” said Narcisse, whose district in Brooklyn includes Canarsie, Marine Park and Sheepshead Bay, during a City Council committee hearing on the measure in July. She said that lifting the criminal penalties on jaywalking would mean that “we can redirect resources to more pressing public safety concerns.”
Her concerns were echoed by the Legal Aid Society. “Make no mistake, jaywalking enforcement has never concerned public or traffic safety,” the group said in a statement after the Council passed the bill, adding that the way jaywalking had been enforced “only perpetuated biased policing.”
Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group, said that 85 percent of jaywalking tickets issued in 2022 went to people of color. The group, using city data, also found that one in three tickets was handed out within three feet of a New York City Housing Authority building, even though Housing Authority properties take up only 4 percent of the land in the city.
Margaret Forgione, first deputy commissioner of the city’s transportation department, said in June that 200 people had lost their lives in the past five years while crossing streets in the middle of a block or against the light. She said that number amounted to about 34 percent of all pedestrian fatalities. But she said that “we do support” reducing the penalties for jaywalking and making it an infraction subject to a civil summons, not a criminal one.
An aide to Narcisse said there had been no word from City Hall on whether Adams would sign the jaywalking bill. Similarly, Abreu said he had “no idea” if Adams would sign the rat birth control bill. A City Hall spokeswoman did not answer the question directly on Friday.
But the mayor doesn’t have to sign the bills. Any bill passed by the City Council becomes law automatically after 30 days, with or without his signature, unless he vetoes it.
Over the weekend
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The schools chancellor and the first deputy mayor, key figures at City Hall whose phones were seized by federal investigators, were married on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. The chancellor, David Banks, and the first deputy mayor, Sheena Wright, were said to have been planning their marriage for some time. But legal experts said they could now claim spousal privilege, which would let them avoid testifying against each other in court, if a case were to reach that point. Neither Banks nor Wright has been charged with wrongdoing.
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Adams spoke at a service at the Emmanuel Presbyterian Reformed Church in the Bronx on Sunday.
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And experts said that while the prosecutors who are pursuing Adams appear to have some solid evidence, the case has potential pitfalls. Prosecutors could bring additional charges.
Weather
Expect a partly sunny day, with temperatures in the low 70s. The evening will turn partly cloudy, with temperatures in the low 60s and a chance of rain late.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Oct. 3 (Rosh Hashana).
The latest New York news
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East Village Radio returns: Frank Prisinzano and Jorge Parreira have resurrected an underground local radio station — in a tiny storefront studio on First Avenue — after shuttering it nearly a decade ago.
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From the Rubin to the Brooklyn Museum: The Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room at the Rubin Museum, a collection of more than 100 works of art and ritual objects arranged to recreate an elaborate private shrine, will move to the Brooklyn Museum after the Rubin closes its building in Chelsea.
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New Yorkers in oil (paint): Some 32 paintings by Adam Dressner, a lawyer turned portrait artist, now hang in Grand Central Terminal. Many of Dressner’s subjects are people he met in Washington Square Park.
METROPOLITAN diary
Pickled
Dear Diary:
I was a freshman in college coming home from my weeknight shift hosting at a SoHo restaurant.
As I sat on the uptown 1 train with my backpack and big black headphones, a man a few seats away from me pulled a jar of pickles out of a plastic shopping bag.
He opened the jar and ate two or three before extending the jar to me.
“Pickle?” he said.
I thanked him but declined, gesturing to the meal in my own plastic bag I was bringing home from work.
He shrugged and continued eating pickles and sipping pickle juice.
— Cara Denton
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Geordon Wollner and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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The post As the Mayor Is Indicted, the Council Passes Rat Birth Control appeared first on New York Times.
