Julie Menin, a long time woman-about-government, on Wednesday afternoon assumed the speakership of the New York City Council, where she is poised to serve as a structural counterweight to the democratic socialist mayoralty of Zohran Mamdani.
Around 1:30 p.m., the City Council elected Ms. Menin, 58, to the position, where she will wield power over a legislative body that describes itself as a coequal branch of government to the mayor. She will oversee a staff of about 800, with her headquarters in City Hall’s East Wing — just across the rotunda from the mayor’s office.
A centrist Democrat, Ms. Menin, 58, has become the first Jewish Council speaker, and says she will be the first in the body’s history to use its subpoena power to investigate bad actors in the city’s business community. (In an interview, she mentioned debt collectors and the insurance industry as examples of potential investigatory targets.)
Unlike her immediate predecessor, she said she was also willing to wield that power to investigate city agencies, and said she was particularly interested in looking into some of the no-bid contracts of the prior mayoralty.
Ms. Menin is less ideologically aligned with the sitting mayor than most Council speakers have been. In fact, Mr. Mamdani’s preferred candidate for the post was not Ms. Menin, but rather Crystal Hudson, a member of the Council’s progressive caucus.
But Ms. Menin gathered enough support from her fellow Council members to wrap up the race for speaker weeks earlier than is typical. The fight for the position normally stretches into at least December and sometimes January, but Ms. Menin claimed victory the day before Thanksgiving.
She did so by starting early, and garnering pivotal support from powerful unions, such as Local 32BJ of the S.E.I.U. and the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, as well as from Representative Gregory W. Meeks, the chairman of the Queens County Democratic Party.
Her colleagues view Ms. Menin, who has run two city agencies and the city’s census efforts, as an ambitious politician, and many say they would not be surprised if she waged a campaign for mayor in four years, when she will be unable to run for re-election because of term limits.
But Ms. Menin flatly denied that she planned to do so.
“This idea that I would run for mayor in four years, I am absolutely ruling out,” she said Wednesday.
Ms. Menin’s predecessor, Adrienne Adams, spent much of her tenure fighting to restore budget cuts made by former Mayor Eric Adams to cherished city organizations, like libraries and cultural organizations. Ms. Adams also worked to stabilize city government as Mr. Adams, and his administration, became engulfed in corruption scandals and state and federal indictments.
Ms. Menin said she was hopeful that, working with Mr. Mamdani, she would be able to mount a much more proactive agenda.
“Every single New Yorker should want city government to function at the highest levels, and so that means not having tit-for-tats or silly dramas,” she said. “The conversations that I’ve had with the mayor have been very productive and I look forward to working with him.”
Corey Johnson, who served as speaker during Mayor Bill de Blasio’s second term, described Ms. Menin’s plans to use subpoena power to investigate businesses as “novel and innovative.”
Ms. Menin’s other near-term goals include scouring city-owned sites within her first 100 days to see if any could be used for affordable housing, and devoting $180 million a year to college funds for New York City kindergartners.
Under her plan, kindergartners would each get $1,000, with those in higher-need districts receiving $3,000. By the time those children graduate from high school, their funds will be worth “tens of thousands of dollars,” Ms. Menin said, and they will be able to spend them on higher education.
Ms. Menin said the program would be an outgrowth of a smaller pilot program she established, as commissioner of what was then called the Department of Consumer Affairs, that she said has seeded over 340,000 college savings accounts.
“If we really want to tackle income inequality,” she said, city leaders will need to grapple with the income disparity between those with college degrees and those without.
Like the mayor, Ms. Menin, an Upper East Side mother of four, said she was committed to a dramatic expansion of publicly funded child care in New York City.
During the interview, she sought to underscore the overlap between her policy goals and Mr. Mamdani’s, and repeatedly sidestepped areas of difference.
“I want to restore people’s faith in government,” she said. “That is where I think there is a lot of commonality and opportunity.”
But conflict might bubble up between the two given their ideological differences, and their split on issues involving antisemitism.
Ms. Menin said she “certainly” did not support the online comments made by Mr. Mamdani’s new director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, including the director’s contention that homeownership is “a weapon of white supremacy.”
“I don’t agree with them at all,” she said, adding, “I’m focused on running the Council.”
“So,” she continued, “I’m not going to comment on every tweet that an appointment of the mayor makes, because I don’t think that that’s particularly productive.”
She said that after Mr. Mamdani canceled an executive order that embraced a contentious definition of antisemitism that equated some criticism of Israel with hatred of Jewish people, she called him and the two had a “productive conversation.” Mr. Mamdani is a longtime critic of Israel who does not support its existing status as a state with laws privileging Jews. He has repeatedly vowed to protect Jewish New Yorkers from antisemitism.
Ms. Menin said Mr. Mamdani had seemed open to a bill she plans to pass that would establish a perimeter around houses of worship and schools, to avoid situations like a demonstration in front of a synagogue in November where anti-Israel protesters chanted “death to the I.D.F.” and “globalize the intifada” in front of a synagogue on the Upper East Side. The synagogue was hosting an event by Nefesh B’Nefesh, a nonprofit organization that helps Jews move to Israel and to settlements in occupied territories.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Mamdani had no immediate comment.
The definition Mr. Mamdani rejected, from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, “is a tool to define antisemitism,” Ms. Menin said. “It’s one tool that can be utilized. It’s obviously not the only tool.”
Ms. Menin said her mother and grandmother hid in a cellar in Hungary for almost a year during the Holocaust. Her grandfather was killed.
In 2024, she helped start a program that sends all eighth graders in public and charter schools on field trips to the Museum of Jewish Heritage. She noted that as chair of her local community board, she was also an outspoken supporter of a plan to build a mosque near ground zero.
“We have the first Muslim mayor and now the first Jewish speaker,” she said. “This is a time for communities across the city to come together.”
Dana Rubinstein covers New York City politics and government for The Times.
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