Behind Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s stunning electoral victory was a grass roots volunteer operation that saw 100,000 volunteers knock on three million doors and make 4.5 million calls to engage voters. Mr. Mamdani announced on Friday that he wants to bring that level of public participation to City Hall.
Sitting in Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, he signed an executive order creating an Office of Mass Engagement to help New Yorkers participate in government decisions and to reach communities that have been marginalized from the process.
Leading the effort will be Tascha Van Auken, who served as Mr. Mamdani’s campaign field director and previously worked for former President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign.
The new office will combine and reorganize several existing city agencies.
“Working New Yorkers know what they need to thrive,” Mr. Mamdani said. “Our job is to make sure government listens consistently and with real consequence.”
Ms. Van Auken said her goal was to bring together existing public engagement efforts that had been siloed in City Hall and to “help build a government that works for all New Yorkers, invites them in and treats their participation as consequential.”
Bringing the director of his political field operation to City Hall raised concerns from some critics that Mr. Mamdani was using the city government to aid a potential campaign for re-election.
Representative Mike Lawler, a Republican in a Hudson Valley swing seat, said on social media that the arrangement would allow Mr. Mamdani to “use taxpayer funds” to have groups like the Democratic Socialists of America and the Working Families Party “essentially operate out of City Hall and have a continuous political campaign.”
Ms. Van Auken previously worked as an organizer for the Democratic Socialists of America and as deputy campaigns director for the Working Families Party. Both groups helped to drive Mr. Mamdani’s victory.
Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York, a nonpartisan government watchdog group, said she did not share Mr. Lawler’s concerns. She said she would rather see the energy from Mr. Mamdani’s campaign used in government rather than driven by outside groups.
Allies of Mr. Mamdani recently created Our Time for an Affordable NYC, a group that seeks to raise money and harness the volunteer energy created by Mr. Mamdani’s campaign.
“I don’t see it as a political operation,” Ms. Lerner said. “I see it as bringing energy into government. If done correctly, it does reinvigorate people’s faith in government, that it can be responsive.”
Mr. Mamdani dismissed the criticism from Mr. Lawler, who had considered running for governor this year. He noted that more than two million New Yorkers voted in the November general election, the highest since 1969, and argued that the turnout demonstrated that many people want to be engaged and are “allowing themselves to believe in the possibility of city government once again.”
At the same news conference, Mr. Mamdani appointed his friend and close adviser, Ali Najmi, as chairman of the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on the Judiciary. The group screens candidates for criminal and family court judgeships and makes recommendations to the mayor, who makes appointments.
Mr. Najmi is an election and criminal defense lawyer who served as Mr. Mamdani’s lawyer during the primary. He is also a co-founder of the Muslim Democratic Club of New York.
Mr. Mamdani said the judicial selection process was too opaque and often based on “who they know, as opposed to the work that they do.” Mr. Najmi said he wanted to broaden and diversify the pool of applicants by reaching out to lawyers who work for indigent clients or children in family court.
“To those attorneys,” Mr. Najmi said, “I want to tell you that you have an opportunity to also become a judge.”
As lead counsel for Mr. Mamdani’s transition, Mr. Najmi urged the 400 people on the committee to sign a five-page nondisclosure agreement. The confidentiality agreement, while not atypical, was much longer than that for former Mayor Eric Adams’s transition, which consisted of a single clause in a larger code of ethics agreement.
Ms. Lerner praised Mr. Najmi as a serious and experienced attorney. She said she hoped to see “a serious and transparent process to bring in new voices for the judiciary that emphasizes skill and experience, irrespective of people’s backgrounds.”
Jeffery C. Mays is a Times reporter covering politics with a focus on New York City Hall.
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