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      One Final Day of Campaigning

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      The elections for mayor in New York City and Buffalo could signal the direction of the Democratic Party in the state.It’s Monday. We’ll take a last look at the campaigns and the candidates. Did I mention that tomorrow is Election Day?Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesFrom Buffalo to Brooklyn, the contests voters will decide tomorrow pose fresh tests and create fresh tension about the identity and direction of the Democratic Party in New York.Eric Adams, the likely next mayor of New York City, has presented himself as both a “pragmatic moderate” and “the original progressive.” A former police captain who fought for reforms from within the system, he disdained the “defund the police” movement. He has said that public safety was a prerequisite to prosperity and has reached out to the city’s big-business community. And he defeated several more liberal candidates in the June primary.A different face of the Democratic Party has emerged in the closely watched contest for the mayor of Buffalo. India Walton, a democratic socialist, defeated the incumbent, Byron Brown, in the June primary. Brown is now running as a write-in candidate in what has become a proxy battle between left-wing leaders and more moderate Democrats. Walton has referred to Brown as a “Trump puppet” who has become complacent about Buffalo. His campaign has questioned her character and painted her proposals as “too risky,” a message that she countered was fearmongering.My colleague Katie Glueck writes that power dynamics are now being renegotiated at every level of government. “There’s a battle of narratives in New York,” said State Senator Jabari Brisport, a Brooklyn socialist. “New York is in the midst of finding itself.”Curtis Sliwa as the Republican in the raceIn New York City, Adams’s opponent is Curtis Sliwa, who presents his main qualifications as his decades of patrolling the subways and leading the Guardian Angels, the beret-wearing vigilante group he founded.What a Sliwa mayoralty would look like is an open question, a question that also trails Adams. Sliwa is a Republican newbie — he registered as a Republican only last year — and when he announced his candidacy, some people wondered whether it was just another publicity stunt.Attention-getting soon defined Sliwa’s campaign. He went to an apartment building in Fort Lee, N.J., where Adams co-owns an apartment with his partner, to suggest that Adams did not live in New York. On Twitter, Sliwa called Adams’s residency “the biggest unanswered question since Big Foot, Loch Ness Monster & Bermuda Triangle combined.” (Adams has said that his primary residence is a townhouse he owns in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.)Sliwa’s tactics were no surprise to those who have followed his career. “For the most part, the person you see in public making bad rhymes before the camera is now the actual person,” said Ronald Kuby, a lawyer who once co-hosted a talk-radio show with Sliwa and is now a trenchant critic. “It’s just one long, desperate and reasonably entertaining cry for attention.”A likely district attorney who has been a police adversaryAlvin Bragg, who is favored to be the next Manhattan district attorney, spent time last week in a virtual courtroom. He was questioning a police lieutenant about the day that an officer held Eric Garner in a fatal chokehold.For the last several years, Bragg has represented Garner’s family in their continuing fight for details about what happened before Garner, who was accused of selling untaxed cigarettes, died in 2014. The Garner case underscored some of the messages of Bragg’s campaign. He has said that he will not pursue some low-level crimes.He has also spoken frequently about police accountability. The district attorney typically works closely with the New York Police Department. Bragg’s involvement in the Garner inquiry — which highlighted a shameful episode for the department — suggested that his relationship with the police is likely to be more adversarial than that of his predecessors.Where Republicans stand a chanceIn some New York City Council races, Republicans are trying to win over voters who cast their ballots for Republicans for president and Democrats in local races. In a race in a Brooklyn district that is home to many Orthodox Jews and Russian and Ukrainian immigrants, Donald Trump Jr. recorded a robocall for the Republican City Council candidate, Inna Vernikov.“They’re trying to make it about the presidential election,” said Steven Saperstein, the Democrat in the race. “People in this district understand and they know that national elections are one thing, but on the local level you have to vote for the person.”In Queens, Democrats hope to flip the last Republican-held City Council seat in the borough. The Democrat in the race is Felicia Singh, a teacher who has been endorsed by the left-wing Working Families Party. She is running against Joann Ariola, the chairwoman of the Queens Republican Party.Voting maps and environmental rightsThere’s more on the ballot than the mayoral elections. All 51 City Council members will be chosen in New York City. And five potential amendments to the State Constitution are also on the ballot.One would redraw the state’s legislative maps, which occurs every 10 years. Among other things, it would cap the number of state senators at 63. Michael Li, a senior counsel at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, told my colleague Ashley Wong that the cap was necessary to prevent gerrymandering.Another ballot measure — a so-called environmental rights amendment — would enshrine a constitutional right to clear air, clean water and a “healthful environment.” The language is vague on just what a “healthful environment” is or how such a standard would be enforced.WeatherIt’s a new week, New York. Enjoy the sunny day in the high 50s, with clouds moving in at night and temps dropping to the mid-40s.alternate-side parkingSuspended today (All Saints Day) and tomorrow (Election Day).The latest New York newsSexual harassment and assault by detainees are compounding the crisis at Rikers Island.And in case you missed it …Complaint against Andrew Cuomo: Craig Apple, the Albany County sheriff, defended the decision to file a criminal complaint against Cuomo, who resigned as governor in August. Apple said he was confident that the district attorney would prosecute even though Apple had not coordinated the filing with prosecutors. The district attorney, David Soares, has not committed to going ahead with the case.Apple also rejected accusations that the filing was a “political hit job.”Cuomo was charged with forcible touching, a misdemeanor that carries a penalty of up to one year in jail, in connection with allegations that he groped a female aide’s breast. Cuomo’s lawyer, Rita Glavin, said he had “never assaulted anyone.” Cuomo is scheduled to be arraigned on Nov. 17.Letitia James’s candidacy: James, the New York attorney general who oversaw the inquiry into the sexual harassment claims that led to Cuomo’s resignation, declared her candidacy for governor. She begins the campaign as Gov. Kathy Hochul’s most formidable challenger. Others, including Mayor Bill de Blasio, may throw their hats in the ring, too.James, the first woman of color to be elected to statewide office in New York, is seeking to become the first Black female governor in the country. As attorney general, she made headlines for suing the National Rifle Association and investigating President Donald Trump. “I’ve sued the Trump administration 76 times — but who’s counting?” James said in the video announcing her campaign.Hochul, who is from the Buffalo area and is white, was the first governor in more than a century to have deep roots in western New York. Either would be the first woman elected governor.What we’re readingNew York’s Irish Arts Center is moving from a former tenement to a $60 million state-of-the-art performance facility.Inevitably, the last of the authentic delis have been joined by an increasing number of designer delis.MetROPOLITAN diaryDiscovering schavDear Diary:I was shopping for groceries with my mother at a supermarket in Riverdale. I noticed a dozen or so jars of something called schav lined up against a wall in the Jewish food section.I had never seen it before. It looked like a greenish vegetable soup.When we got out to the street, I asked my mother what it was.Before she could answer a man who was walking in front of us turned around.“What?” he said, looking me right in the eye. “You don’t know what schav is? You eat it with a cold boiled potato and it’s delicious!”— Nancy L. SegalIllustrated 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.Melissa Guerrero, Rick Martinez and Olivia Parker contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More

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      What Does It Mean to Be a New York Democrat These Days?

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      A series of Election Day contests may serve as a barometer of how far left Democratic voters in New York State want their party to go.Last November, the often-fractious Democrats of New York papered over their sharp differences to celebrate Donald Trump’s defeat, a development that briefly united the party’s relatively moderate leader, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, with the state’s ascendant left wing.One year later, New York Democrats are in a vastly different place. Mr. Cuomo has resigned in disgrace and faces the prospect of a criminal trial. President Biden is in the White House, and the center-left politics that propelled his campaign have been embraced by the new governor, Kathy Hochul, and the likely next mayor of New York City, Eric Adams.And all across the state, a series of Election Day contests are setting up fresh tests and tensions over the direction and identity of the Democratic Party.In New York City, Mr. Adams, who is heavily favored to win Tuesday’s election, has already declared himself the face of the Democratic Party, and many national Democrats have elevated him.Mr. Adams, a former police captain who fought for reforms from within the system, has described himself as both a “pragmatic moderate” and “the original progressive.” But he is also a sharp critic of the “defund the police” movement; he makes explicit overtures to the big-business community; and he defeated several more liberal rivals in the primary.A very different face of the Democratic Party may be emerging in Buffalo: India B. Walton, a democratic socialist, who defeated the incumbent Democratic mayor, Byron W. Brown, in the June primary. Mr. Brown, a former state Democratic Party chairman, is now running as a write-in candidate in a closely watched rematch that has become a proxy battle between left-wing leaders and more moderate Democrats.Then there are the Democrats, from Long Island district attorney candidates to the occasional New York City Council hopeful, who face serious opponents in races that will offer early tests of Republican Party energy in the Biden era.After an extraordinary summer of political upheaval, power dynamics are now being renegotiated at every level of government, shaped by matters of race, age, ideology and region. The influx of new leadership has implications for issues of public safety and public health, for debates over education and economic development — and for national questions surrounding the direction of the party.“There’s a battle of narratives in New York,” said State Senator Jabari Brisport, a Brooklyn socialist. “You do have Eric Adams getting elected in New York City, then you have a socialist like India Walton getting elected in Buffalo, right in Gov. Hochul’s backyard. New York is in the midst of finding itself.”The mayoral race in Buffalo between India Walton, center, and the incumbent, Byron Brown, has become a proxy battle between left-wing leaders and more moderate Democrats.Libby March for The New York TimesThe most consequential New York election this year is the race for mayor of the nation’s largest city, which will be decided on Tuesday as Mr. Adams competes against Curtis Sliwa, the Republican founder of the Guardian Angels.Backlash to New York City’s vaccine mandates in more conservative corners of the city, and the prospect of a relatively low-turnout election, inject a measure of unpredictability into the final hours of the race and could affect the result margin, some Democrats warn — but in a city where Republicans are vastly outnumbered, Mr. Sliwa is considered a long shot.The more revealing contest regarding the direction of the Democratic Party is taking place about 300 miles away in Buffalo.That mayoral race is unfolding in raw and divisive terms: Ms. Walton has referred to Mr. Brown as a “Trump puppet” who has become complacent about Buffalo, while his campaign questions her character and paints her sweeping proposals as “too risky” for the city, a message she has cast as fearmongering.In a sign of just how high tensions are running, Jay Jacobs, the state party chairman, sparked outrage when he used a hypothetical candidacy of the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke to argue that the party was not obligated to support every nominee, including Ms. Walton. He later said he “should have used a different example and for that, I apologize,” but stood by his decision not to endorse her.The contest has drawn attention from statewide and national figures as well as a number of Democrats considering runs for higher office.Jumaane D. Williams, the New York City public advocate who formed an exploratory committee for governor, has campaigned for Ms. Walton and urged other Democrats to endorse her, as New York’s U.S. senators have, even as other party leaders have stayed out. Ms. Walton is one of many local candidates who amplified ideas popular with the party’s left — on issues from reallocating funds from the police budget to how best to protect tenants — and won primaries this summer, continuing a trend that began three years ago with the primary victory of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another Walton endorser.“There’s a lot of appetite for these kinds of policies,” Mr. Williams said.The Democratic Party has unquestionably moved to the left in recent years — on issues like criminal justice reform and combating climate change — and Mr. Williams argued that internal divisions are often more a matter of tactics than of substance.“The policies that are being pushed are not really what’s at issue,” he said. “What’s at issue sometimes is how far into political risk, how far past the establishment leaders, how far past, when the executive or leader of the House calls and says no, how far would you push past?”But plainly, there are policy differences among Democrats, too, and in New York those distinctions are especially vivid around matters of public safety. “Do you want to defund the police?” demanded Representative Thomas Suozzi of Long Island, when he campaigned for Mr. Brown in Buffalo.“No!” the crowd replied.“Do you want to let criminals out of jail no matter what they did?” he continued, as the crowd shouted their objection.“We will lose if we let them win,” he said, referencing those who he declared were seeking to push Democrats in an “extreme” direction. “We will lose the American people, we will lose New Yorkers, we will lose Buffalonians if we adopt that type of extremist agenda.”Jesse Myerson, a spokesman for Ms. Walton, rejected the notion that her ideas were extremist, while suggesting that left-wing contenders have been especially successful at energizing voters.The politicians who are “driving new voter registration, the ones driving small-dollar donations, the ones driving more volunteers to knock doors and make calls, you’ll find that they are Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Cori Bush,” he said. “And other politicians whose vision closely aligns with India Walton’s, and not the pro-corporate Democrats.”But Mr. Suozzi, a potential candidate for governor next year, argued in an interview that if Ms. Walton wins, “that’s a national story that is bad for Democrats.”Gov. Kathy Hochul, a former congresswoman from Buffalo, has likened herself to President Biden, who won the election as a relatively center-left Democrat.Nicole Craine for The New York TimesMajor 2022 races in New York will also help shape the narrative about the direction of the party. Ms. Hochul, who succeeded Mr. Cuomo after his resignation this summer, is running for a full term. Letitia James, the state attorney general who has closer ties to New York’s institutional left, is challenging her, and others including Bill de Blasio, the New York City mayor, may jump in, too. And a young, diverse class of incoming New York City Council members is preparing to reshape City Hall, with machinations around the council speaker’s race in full bloom.But one of the biggest national stories coming out of New York has involved Mr. Adams, who would be the city’s second Black mayor. He won the primary on the strength of support from working- and middle-class voters of color and declared that America does not want “fancy candidates,” despite his own close ties to major donors.Some national Democrats have embraced him, believing that he offers a template for how to promote both police reform and public safety — though whether that lasts will hinge on how Mr. Adams, who has faced scrutiny over issues of transparency, finances and past inflammatory remarks, governs if he wins.Still, Representative Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, who chairs the House Democratic campaign arm, has described Mr. Adams as “a rock on which I can build a church.” “What Eric Adams’s victory showed me is that the Democratic Party, at its best, is a diverse blue-collar coalition that doesn’t fall victim to elite or academic notions about what makes sense in the real world,” he said.Mr. Adams and Ms. Hochul — a former Buffalo-area congresswoman — have both likened themselves to Mr. Biden.The comparison, allies say, is as much about tone, faith in relationship-building and a sense of pragmatism as it is about a particular policy agenda. But if the two Democrats presumed to be the most powerful leaders in New York are considered relative moderates, that hardly reflects the entirety of New York’s incoming leadership.In New York City, there are signs that the likely next comptroller, some presumptive City Council members, the public advocate and possibly the likely new Manhattan district attorney will be to the left of Mr. Adams on key issues, setting up potential battles over how to create a more equitable education system, the power of the real estate industry and big business, and the role of the police in promoting public safety.Ms. Hochul, for her part, came to office with a reputation as a centrist, but she has pursued a number of policies that have pleased left-wing lawmakers. Rana Abdelhamid, who is challenging Representative Carolyn Maloney, noted that Ms. Hochul has embraced proposals like extending the eviction moratorium — a sign, Ms. Abdelhamid suggested, of the power of the left: “Because of this progressive movement and because of the organizing and because of progressive electeds really gaining momentum.” The race for governor, already underway, will accelerate as soon as Wednesday as the political class heads to a conclave in Puerto Rico. That election will become the next major battle over the Democratic direction, in a midterm year that is historically difficult for the president’s party. But many political leaders say the question is emphatically not whether New York remains a Democratic stronghold — it is about what kind of Democrats win.“It’s going to be either blue or dark blue,” said former Representative Steve Israel of New York. “If you have more Hochuls and Adamses being elected, it’s a lighter shade of blue; if progressives and ‘The Squad’ surge across the state, obviously it’s a deeper blue. The fact is, it remains blue.”Julianne McShane More

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      Reform New York City’s Board of Elections Now

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      If you built a laboratory solely to concoct the most inept, opaque and self-dealing election board imaginable, you would have a hard time outdoing the real-life specimen currently functioning — or more often malfunctioning — in New York City. From massive and illegal voter purges to broken-down voting machines and misaddressed ballots, the fiascoes of the city’s 10-member Board of Elections, which serves an electorate larger than that of most states, have been the stuff of national disgrace for decades.The latest debacle, still raw in voters’ minds, came on Primary Day in June, when the board mistakenly included about 135,000 test ballots in its first full tally of mayoral votes. The error was caught and corrected, but only after hours of confusion and chaos that reminded New Yorkers once again just how decrepit and unreliable their electoral system is.City investigations going back more than 80 years have repeatedly found the agency rife with waste, neglect and incompetence. But the complaints don’t come only from the outside. As one former staffer described it, working for the elections board is like “working in an insane asylum.”If the board somehow survives the Nov. 2 general election without any major screw-ups, it will be thanks to the fact that the outcome in the mayor’s race is all but preordained, and so any errors are likely to be of little consequence.Alas, just as predictable as the board’s chronic incompetence is the refusal of elected officials to do anything about it. Why would they? Many of them are complicit in protecting the city’s twisted political machine that values insiders over voters and incumbency over democracy.The result is an election board that operates like a mafia without the guns. It is staffed with the friends, family members and other unqualified cronies of party bosses. It flouts city laws and actively resists serving the needs of voters in favor of a handful of political power brokers. Worst of all, it operates in an accountability-free zone where even the biggest bungles carry no consequences.Most other large cities and jurisdictions don’t have these problems. As detailed in a new report by the Brennan Center for Justice, they take elections seriously by hiring professionals who know what they’re doing and training those who don’t. Their boards are much smaller and their commissioners can be removed by the same people who appointed them. They provide sufficient funds to run elections smoothly, and they make voting data easily available to the public. All of this is good government 101.It’s not like New York doesn’t know how to do these things. Many of the city’s largest and most important agencies — from education to law enforcement — conduct national searches for their leaders. By contrast, elections commissioners are appointed with virtually no public notice or process. This may please back-room politicians, but it makes New York City a national laughingstock.Maddeningly, the city can’t truly reform this system without state action. Good, then, that New York State has at long last started to drag itself out of the electoral Dark Ages. In 2019, the state adopted an early voting period more than a week long, as well as other measures to encourage turnout and make voting easier. This year, the voters can get in on the action themselves by approving two ballot measures, Proposals 3 and 4, that would allow the state to implement two popular voter-friendly reforms: same-day voter registration and no-excuse absentee balloting.When it comes to the city election board itself, the good news is that most of the board’s dysfunction can be fixed right now, through state law, and without having to resort to the cumbersome process of amending New York’s Constitution.Topping the list of reforms is the need for professionalism and accountability: The commissioners should have résumés that show real experience in administering elections, and they should be appointed, and removable, by local officials who directly answer to the voters. There’s nothing like the threat of real consequences to encourage the hiring of competent people.Reducing the size of the board would help too, by investing more responsibility in each individual commissioner. Dumping the requirement that Democrats and Republicans be equally represented at nearly every level of the agency, not just among commissioners, would allow for staff hires based on actual ability rather than partisan bean counting.Why hasn’t all this happened already? Ask New York State lawmakers, many of whom have long been happy to maintain a status quo that works great for them and their friends, even as it disenfranchises everyone else. But that is starting to change. State Senator Zellnor Myrie, who heads the Elections Committee, has spent months touring the state holding public hearings on election administration reform; he hopes to propose legislation before the end of the year. The Assembly and Gov. Kathy Hochul need to get on board with these efforts and enact major reforms without delay. New Yorkers have waited long enough for functional elections.The bottom line is that the elections board, entrenched in a perpetual culture of self-dealing, cannot fix itself. And while its incompetence has been part of the New York political landscape for generations, this year’s primary calamity should be the final straw. At a moment when the legitimacy of the democratic process is under assault across the country, the nation’s biggest city — home to more than 5.5 million registered voters — must be leading the charge by modeling how an election should be run. At the very least, it should not be bringing up the rear.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      A South African Town Lacks Water and Electricity. But Mayors? It Has Two.

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      Dysfunctional and collapsing rural towns may test voters’ loyalty to the ruling African National Congress party in nationwide municipal elections on Monday.LICHTENBURG, South Africa — Walking through what could be the charming tree-lined streets of Lichtenburg in South Africa’s rural heartland, pedestrians skirt around piles of uncollected trash. Shop fronts darkened by electricity blackouts line the main road. A recently built community center has been stolen, brick by brick.Mayor Daniel Buthelezi believes he can turn the town around. So does Mayor Tsholofelo Moreo.Two men simultaneously claim to be the mayor of Lichtenburg, a community of about 182,000 people 150 miles west of Johannesburg. Both are members of the African National Congress, or the A.N.C., the party that rules South Africa and this neglected town. More

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      Eric Adams, the Likely N.Y.C. Mayor, Has The Times's Endorsement

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      Barring political cataclysm, Eric Leroy Adams, a former police captain turned Democratic politician, will become New York City’s next mayor.For Mr. Adams, Brooklyn’s charismatic borough president and the Democratic nominee for mayor, winning the general election on Tuesday is likely to be the easy part. Democrats outnumber Republicans in New York City nearly seven to one. The real challenge comes in January, when the new mayor will begin setting the pandemic-scarred city back on its feet.If he is elected, Mr. Adams will enter City Hall with very few of the advantages that Bill de Blasio enjoyed eight years ago. He may have to guide the city’s recovery without the same generous surpluses and steady economy, for example. Unlike Mr. de Blasio, Mr. Adams only barely won the Democratic primary. To govern effectively, he will also have to find a way to reassure those who didn’t vote for him — which includes a large portion of voters in his own party — that he will be a mayor for all New Yorkers.Since the Democratic primary, a great deal of the mayoral race has focused on crime. Mr. Adams has staked his campaign in large part around law and order, while also supporting police reform. That may seem strange for a Democratic politician in liberal New York City. Coming from Mr. Adams — who served in the Police Department for 22 years, rising through the ranks to become a captain, even as he publicly fought to reform the department — it is more complicated.Photo Illustration by Mark Peterson/Redux for The New York TimesIn many ways, Mr. Adams, who is Black and grew up in South Jamaica, Queens, represents the unaddressed hunger of Black communities for both safer streets and better policing. If Mr. Adams can better protect communities that bear the burden of gun violence while also bringing accountability and reform to the city’s Police Department, as he has promised to do, that will be a triumph.The city is also facing other, arguably even greater, challenges.The top priorities for the next administration ought to include ensuring that the city’s roughly one million public school students recover from a year of lost learning in the pandemic, particularly the 600,000 students who learned remotely last year. Even as the pandemic recedes, the city’s public school system needs significant help: more aid for some 100,000 homeless students in the city, sweeping reforms to improve schools in low-income communities and progress in integrating some of the nation’s most segregated schools.Photo Illustration by Mark Peterson/Redux for The New York TimesPhoto Illustration by Mark Peterson/Redux for The New York TimesIn order to fund better schools and all the rest of the good that the administration is capable of doing, it is vital that New York regains a solid financial footing. That means working with businesses large and small to restart the economic engine that can power progress.That progress should include building far more affordable housing, especially in wealthy areas with good transit where less city subsidy is needed to create units for poor and middle-income New Yorkers.The city should speed its plodding march toward reclaiming its streets from cars for pedestrians, restaurants and cyclists. Of course, ultimate success there depends on getting the beleaguered subway system back on its feet. That means maintaining a good relationship with the governor, who holds the real power over the city’s transit system. The endless cycle of fruitless bickering between the former governor and current mayor helped no one.The next administration will also need to work alongside the state government to close the jail complex on Rikers Island, holding fast to reforms that prioritize mental health services and modernize detention facilities, while still keeping the city safe.All this work must be done while continuing to shore up this waterfront city against the rising tides of climate change.There are also several policy areas in which we hope Mr. Adams will change his mind over the next four years from promises made on the campaign trail. We hope he will take a greater interest in racially integrating the city’s public schools. We also hope he will adopt a tougher approach to ensuring that ultra-Orthodox yeshivas that have been the subject of serious complaints from parents and former students actually meet basic state education standards.If the polls and history are any indication, Mr. Adams has little competition at the ballot box Tuesday in Curtis Sliwa, a Republican and the founder of the Guardian Angels who has laid out few detailed proposals for what he would do in office. Voters intent on differentiating the two need look no further than the fact that Mr. Adams supports the city mandates requiring thousands of city workers to get vaccinated. Mr. Sliwa not only does not support the mandate, but recently marched alongside workers protesting the policy.Mr. Adams has our endorsement.We’re encouraged by the passion Mr. Adams shows for championing the needs of working-class New Yorkers, who have for too long been left out of the city’s success. Some of Mr. Adams’s most thoughtful ideas include straightforward policies and changes that stem from his own personal experiences. His promise to create universal screening for dyslexia — a learning disability Mr. Adams dealt with as a child — is an encouraging example of how he viscerally understands the role city government can play in a child’s life.Photo Illustration by Mark Peterson/Redux for The New York TimesSeveral years ago, Mr. Adams overhauled his diet and is now a vegan. For plenty of politicians, that would be a biographical detail. Mr. Adams has parlayed the story into a call to arms (as well as a cookbook), and a poignant example of the connection between racism and health for Black Americans. He has said he is determined to improve the quality of food in schools, jails and shelters.“When we feed people, we should only feed them healthy food,” he told Times Opinion’s Ezra Klein. “They go to the government because they don’t have any other choices. So it’s almost a betrayal when you know someone has no other choice but to eat what you give them, and you’re giving them food that feeds their chronic diseases.”For some voters, this may be a distant priority. But there are millions of New Yorkers who need a mayor who so clearly understands the impact of municipal government on their everyday lives.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Curtis Sliwa Has New York’s Attention Again. Was That Always the Point?

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      When New Yorkers feared their subway and streets amid a crime wave in the late 1970s, Curtis Sliwa donned a red beret and seized the moment, pioneering a movement of citizen patrols — the Guardian Angels — that made him famous. He was 24.If ever he risked fading from public view in the years after, Mr. Sliwa found increasingly outlandish ways to hold onto the spotlight: faking his own kidnapping, wearing a red wig on television to impersonate a New York City Council speaker, even getting arrested while waving court papers at Mayor Bill de Blasio outside Gracie Mansion.Not surprisingly, perhaps, some people questioned whether it was just another publicity stunt when Mr. Sliwa, who registered as a Republican last year, announced that he was running in the party’s primary for mayor. Yet he won, riding his decades-old name recognition and casting his time patrolling the streets and his leadership of the Guardian Angels as his main qualifications for becoming mayor.With Election Day approaching on Tuesday, he is trying to ride that celebrity again in his campaign against a heavily favored Democrat, Eric Adams.“I’ve been shot, stabbed, beaten in the streets of New York City, locked up 76 times,” he said at a recent campaign stop. “I’ve been David versus Goliath from Day 1 in my entire life.”But an examination of Mr. Sliwa’s career reflects a record far messier and more complicated than the comic-book hero image he has worked to foster. Interviews with more than 40 current and former members of his group, critics and other associates portray a charismatic figure whose frequently clownish acts belie a sharp intellect and keen media savvy. They also reveal a string of missteps in his public and private lives that have harmed his credibility, and a comfort with physical aggression, machismo and racist and sexist rhetoric that has made even some who are close to him uneasy.What a Sliwa mayoralty would look like is anyone’s guess — an unpredictability he shares with his opponent, Mr. Adams. Would he dress up in costumes for news conferences? Tackle a purse snatcher on the street?His campaign platform calls for hiring thousands of police officers, placing homeless people in psychiatric beds at hospitals, expanding the gifted program in the city’s schools, overhauling the property tax system and eliminating the killing of animals at shelters. He has said less about creating jobs or reviving New York’s flagging economy, closing the city’s gaping budget shortfall or addressing the inequalities that the pandemic laid bare.Mr. Sliwa confronting his Democratic opponent, Eric Adams, at the second mayoral debate.Pool photo by Eduardo MunozBut for a Republican, the underpinnings of any policy decisions would spring from an unusual place. Mr. Sliwa said he grew up reading Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals,” an influential blueprint for liberal activism. And although he has named Rudolph W. Giuliani as the ideal New York mayor, he said in an interview that he identifies most closely with Huey P. Long of Louisiana, the Depression-era Democratic governor and senator known for his progressive politics, and for allegations of corruption and demagogy. Mr. Sliwa said he appreciated Long’s populism but added: “He was also a real scoundrel, you know, and pretty crooked.”After winning the primary, Mr. Sliwa brought the full force of his publicity-seeking skills to bear in the general election campaign. He showed up at a New Jersey apartment building to suggest that Mr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, lived there and not in New York. He also carried a milk carton bearing his opponent’s picture on to the B train in Brooklyn, asking passengers, “Have you seen this man?”Although he struggled at times to break through in the media, Mr. Sliwa made a splash at the final debate, seeming to put Mr. Adams on the defensive by accusing him of being too willing to meet with gang leaders in the past. (Mr. Adams said he had met with them to encourage them to leave gangs.)In the campaign’s final days, Mr. Sliwa has continued to court controversy, becoming a cheerleader for city workers who are resisting Mr. de Blasio’s vaccine mandate and appearing at protests.Few who have followed Mr. Sliwa’s career are surprised. “For the most part, the person you see in public making bad rhymes before the camera is now the actual person,” said Ronald Kuby, a lawyer who once co-hosted a radio show with Mr. Sliwa as his liberal foil and is now a pointed critic. “It’s just one long, desperate and reasonably entertaining cry for attention.”Making headlinesMr. Sliwa, left, with a group of Guardian Angels in 1984.Joe McNally/Getty ImagesMr. Sliwa, 67, loves to tell stories. He has not always been a reliable narrator.He can hold forth on the history of Brooklyn political bosses in one breath and in the next recount a showdown with an Oregon religious sect. He will describe the used car commercial he shot with the Times Square performer known as the Naked Cowboy. He can demonstrate a wrestling move called the Sicilian backbreaker that he says he used to subdue wrongdoers.There was the time on a trip to Washington when he was thrown into the Potomac River by parties hostile to the Guardian Angels. The time he assaulted an undercover police officer he mistakenly thought was attacking a mechanic. And the time he buried a kindergarten classmate in a sandbox for pulling on a girl’s pigtail once too often.Pinning down facts can be difficult, as intertwined as many tales told by Mr. Sliwa — and by others about him — have become with Guardian Angels lore.But he was born in Brooklyn in 1954. When he was growing up in Canarsie, his father, a sailor with the United States merchant marine and a liberal Democrat, and his mother, a churchgoing Catholic, encouraged him and his two sisters to embrace public service. His younger sister, Maria Sliwa, recalled him as a fiercely intelligent child. “He would inhale books,” said Ms. Sliwa, who works for his campaign. “He didn’t have to study, and he’d get an A.”Yet Mr. Sliwa dropped out of high school. He married briefly in his early 20s and moved to the South Bronx, where he worked as a night manager at a McDonald’s on East Fordham Road — regularly chasing robbers out of the restaurant, he said. With a stream of shockingly violent crimes playing on the evening news, an idea took hold. Soon, he had banded with a dozen other young men, and they began to patrol the subway in red berets. In 1979, the group became known as the Guardian Angels.City officials quickly branded them vigilantes.“He wanted to play cops and robbers with the so-called Guardian Angels, who were underage, untrained, and had no business trying to police the subways,” said Bill McKechnie, who led the transit officers’ union at the time and became Mr. Sliwa’s nemesis.The public took a different view. As the Guardian Angels’ exploits were recounted in the city’s newspapers, many New Yorkers cheered them on: The group’s members returned a wallet full of cash to its rightful owner. They tried to stop a mugging. They saved a token booth clerk. Mr. Sliwa kicked a shotgun from the clutches of a much larger man, while falling off a subway platform.Mr. Sliwa spent his days giving interviews, sometimes on national television. With his second wife Lisa, also a leader of the Guardian Angels, he was photographed for magazine stories. The group became the subject of a TV movie in 1980. Soon, he expanded to cities across the United States, and then to other countries.Mr. Sliwa and his second wife, Lisa Evers, on their wedding day, Christmas Eve, 1981. Bettmann Archive, via Getty ImagesIn later years, Mr. Sliwa would parlay his fame into lucrative radio and TV contracts. By the late 2000s, he was earning about $600,000 a year and had married his third wife, Mary. In 2006, they bought a $1.6 million apartment on the Upper East Side.Some who have patrolled with Mr. Sliwa say that he inspired them into activism and was a strong leader who always stayed at the front if they ran into danger.“People think Curtis is only there when the cameras are there,” said Keiji Oda, the group’s international director, who joined as a college student. “Curtis likes the camera, nobody denies that. But he is always there, even without the reporter.”But other former members became embittered by his tactics. Some accused him of faking heroics for headlines; he called them liars. Others grew angry about group members who had gotten hurt in the line of duty, with some saying training was inadequate.Six members of the Guardian Angels died. The first, Malcolm Brown, was 19 when he was fatally shot trying to stop a robbery in 1981. Malcolm’s mother, Ruthie Nelson, said in an interview that she believes her son might still be alive if he had not joined the organization. “He wanted to make a difference, but in hindsight I would have done anything I could to deter him from joining the group,” she said.In an interview, Mr. Sliwa said he was sorry for Ms. Nelson’s loss, but that all members joined the group voluntarily.Then came a revelation so damaging to Mr. Sliwa’s credibility that, by his own admission, he has never recovered. It followed a bout of conscience he said he had after nearly being fatally shot by a member of the Gambino crime family, whose leaders Mr. Sliwa had skewered on the radio.Upon seeing the outpouring of well wishes from New Yorkers in 1992, Mr. Sliwa confessed to The New York Post that he had made up stories to burnish the Guardian Angels’ image. The return of the wallet had been staged. There was no man with a shotgun on a subway platform.More recently, he said in an interview that he had invented the stories to gain traction against his critics and that he deeply regretted it. “If I could do it again, I would never do it,” he said. “It has followed me everywhere.”A second actBill McKechnie, a former leader of the transit officers’ union, has kept newspaper clippings about Mr. Sliwa’s fabrications. Saul Martinez for The New York TimesEventually things began to take a turn for Mr. Sliwa.His third wife, Mary, with whom he had a son, had become a formidable fund-raiser for the Guardian Angels, helping to organize golf games, poker tournaments and lavish galas that attracted prominent figures like Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. The group was raising more than $1 million a year, tax filings show.Mr. Sliwa and his third wife, Mary, in 2010. Bobby Bank/WireImage, via Getty ImagesBut Mr. Sliwa was having an affair with another woman, Melinda Katz, who is now the Queens district attorney. They had two sons who they say were conceived through in vitro fertilization while he was married to Mary, leading to a messy breakup.Less than a year after they divorced, in 2012, the marital breakdown exploded in the tabloids. Mary Sliwa sued her former husband and Ms. Katz, accusing them of scheming to divert hundreds of thousands of dollars to support Ms. Katz and their two children and calling Mr. Sliwa “an inveterate, world-class liar.” The suit was later dismissed.Ms. Katz ended their relationship in 2014 and declined to discuss it beyond issuing a statement: “Curtis is the father of my children and obviously holds a very special place in their lives,” she said.Melinda Katz, who is now the Queens district attorney, with Mr. Sliwa in 2014. He is the father of her two sons. WENN Rights Ltd, via AlamyMr. Sliwa now pays about $15,000 in monthly child support for his three sons, a large share of the $400,000 annual income listed on a copy of the 2019 tax return that he provided to The New York Times. He also had judgments of nearly $250,000 recorded against him in 2016 for debts to his divorce lawyers, and he said he could not afford to pay $2,600 in taxes, penalties and interest owed to New York State by a company he used for paid speaking engagements. “I don’t have two nickels to rub together,” Mr. Sliwa said.As his romantic relationships were imploding, his career as a commentator was also heading in the wrong direction.A frequent guest on NY1 news segments, Mr. Sliwa had begun wearing costumes and incorporating props to ridicule elected officials. As time went on, the skits flirted with and sometimes crossed the line between satire and racism and sexism. In a 2010 NY1 appearance, bantering about the outgoing governor, David A. Paterson, who is Black, Mr. Sliwa broke into street slang and said, “My brother, my brother, give me some skin.”He mocked the New York City Council speaker, Christine Quinn, by wearing a bright red wig, which Ms. Quinn described as a sexist attack; he wore a sombrero and waved miniature Mexican flags while criticizing undocumented immigration; and he commented on the physical appearance of another female council speaker in sexually explicit terms.In 2018, NY1’s new owners let him go, but Mr. Sliwa continued doing talk radio on the conservative AM station WABC, where he takes phone calls and holds forth on culture, politics and relationships.Mr. Sliwa with the lawyer Ronald Kuby, his radio co-host, in 1998. “It’s just one long, desperate and reasonably entertaining cry for attention,” Mr. Kuby said of Mr. Sliwa’s career.Librado Romero/The New York TimesHe acknowledged mistakes but he also lamented what he called a “snowflake culture” that made his brand of political satire unacceptable. “I’m not a wallflower, OK?” he said. “I don’t know how you do satire and parody and do costumes and not offend people.”Mr. Sliwa said he had been sleeping on the floor at WABC when he met his fourth wife, Nancy. They live together in her small studio apartment with, by the latest count, 17 cats.Then, in March 2020, he said he would run for mayor, hoping to capitalize on his background at a time when New Yorkers were worried about crime. He took a leave from his radio show and went on to defeat his Republican opponent, Fernando Mateo, in June.Mr. Sliwa has waded into the culture wars during the campaign, lambasting Black Lives Matter protesters, and saying that looters had hit him in the jaw with a ball-peen hammer after the murder of George Floyd. His campaign hired a consultant who wrote a supportive opinion piece about the far-right Proud Boys group. And Mr. Sliwa falsely stated that subway crime had reached record highs and pledged to take “the handcuffs off the police.”At his second debate with Mr. Adams, Mr. Sliwa continued the provocations, falsely claiming that a City Council member who was born in the Dominican Republic was not a U.S. citizen.Mr. Sliwa has strolled the city’s neighborhoods in the final weeks of the campaign, sometimes receiving the sort of reception he might have gotten at the height of his fame 40 years ago.He was on a subway in Washington Heights on a recent Tuesday when a man in an army jacket called out to him. “I’ve got a lot of respect for you,” said the man, Frank R. Hooker Jr., a filmmaker who said he had followed Mr. Sliwa’s career since he was a child. Then he added: “I wish you were a Democrat, that’s the only thing.”Campaigning at a barbershop in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood. “Most people don’t think of me as anything but Curtis Sliwa,” he said. James Estrin/The New York TimesMr. Sliwa didn’t miss a beat. He urged Mr. Hooker to vote for him on an independent line.“Most people,” he said, “don’t think of me as anything but Curtis Sliwa.”Susan C. Beachy contributed research. More

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      New York's Five Ballot Measures: Explained

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      Breaking down the five proposals New York voters will see on their ballots, all involving potential amendments to the state constitution.If you’re reading this, you are probably well aware of New York City’s mayoral election and the other city races being contested this year. But you may be less familiar with the five potential amendments to the State Constitution that are also on the ballot.The ballot questions include measures involving legislative redistricting, changes to voting laws, environmental policy and New York City’s civil courts. Any that are approved would take effect on Jan. 1, 2022.According to the political website Ballotpedia, New Yorkers approved 74 percent of state ballot measures from 1985 to 2020.Registered voters can weigh in on the proposals by casting ballots during early voting, which runs through Sunday, or on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 2. The Board of Elections’ poll site locator has information on where and when to cast your ballot.Here is a rundown of the five ballot measures and what they entail. The full text of each can be found on the Board of Elections’ website.1. Changes to the state’s redistricting processThis measure involves the drawing of legislative maps, which occurs every 10 years. Among other things, it would cap the number of state senators at 63, require that all New York residents be counted in the U.S. census regardless of their citizenship status, and count incarcerated people at their last place of residence rather than where they are detained.Michael Li, a senior counsel at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, said that maintaining the existing number of state senators was necessary to prevent gerrymandering, the practice of manipulating congressional district lines for political gain. Freezing the number, Mr. Li said, would prevent the creation of new districts that could be exploited for partisan purposes.The measure would also scrap the current requirement that two-thirds of state lawmakers must agree to pass redistricting plans, in favor of simple majorities in both the Assembly and Senate.The proposal’s opponents, including The League of Women Voters of New York State, have focused on this point, saying that allowing a simple majority to make such decisions could diminish a minority party’s voting power.“It’s not giving other parties a fair shot at having any sort of say in this process,” said Jennifer Wilson, the group’s deputy director.Mr. Li argued that it was difficult to say with any certainty whether the new district maps would be better or worse for minority parties because the process is complicated.“We’ll see how this new system works,” he said. “It may be that New York needs more reform after we see what the maps look like.”2. An environmental rights amendmentThis measure would give New Yorkers a constitutional right to clean air, water and a “healthful environment.” The proposal language is vague on what a “healthful environment” is or how the standard would be legally enforced.Eddie Bautista, the executive director of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, said the measure was especially important for Black and brown communities because they experience disproportionate rates of pollution..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-m80ywj header{margin-bottom:5px;}.css-m80ywj header h4{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.5625rem;margin-bottom:0;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-m80ywj header h4{font-size:1.5625rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}“We can’t exercise our right to free speech if we’re having trouble breathing,” Mr. Bautista said. “If you want to have a right to speak, you have a right to breathe. This is a long overdue and welcome addition to the Constitution.”Critics of the measure have cited its broad language as a concern, arguing that the lack of specificity could lead to unnecessary lawsuits. State Senator Dan Stec, a Republican who represents the North Country region, said in a statement that the proposal would place the burden of enforcement on the courts.New Yorkers approved 74 percent of statewide ballot measures between 1985 and 2020, according to Ballotpedia.Amir Hamja for The New York Times“Businesses, including farms, are very concerned what this will mean if adopted, especially at a time of tremendous challenges and uncertainty because of Covid-19,” Mr. Stec said. “We owe it to the voters to at least offer them something more clearly defined.”But environmental advocates said the proposal’s language only poses a risk to those who know they may be polluting the environment.3. A push to allow same-day voter registrationThe measure, one of two ballot related to voting rights, would eliminate a rule that requires voters to register at least 10 days before an election.If passed, the measure would make it possible for state lawmakers to adopt same-day voter registration, something that 20 states already have.The measure would be particularly beneficial to voters who do not start paying attention to local politics until late in the election cycle, said Jan Combopiano, the senior policy director for the Brooklyn Voters Alliance.“It really hurts people who get activated and interested in an election late in the game, and there’s no reason to punish those people,” she said. “They haven’t been paying attention until maybe the last month — that’s like human nature.”4. Making it easier to cast absentee ballotsThe second proposed change to the voting process would erase the requirement that those who request absentee ballots explain why they are doing so.Under current law, mail-in ballots are only allowed for voters who expect to be away on Election Day, or who have an illness or disability that would prevent them from voting in person.There was an increase in absentee ballots cast last year because of the coronavirus pandemic; Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo issued an executive order automatically providing all New Yorkers with absentee ballot applications.Ms. Combopiano said that, if approved, both of the measures related to voting would increase participation in elections by making it easier to cast ballots. Expanding access to absentee voting specifically would make it easier for New Yorkers to take their time and make more informed decisions, she said.5. Changes to New York City’s civil courtsThis measure would double the monetary limit for claims filed in New York City’s civil courts to $50,000 from $25,000. This would enable the courts to consider more small claims, reducing the burden of such actions on the state’s Supreme Court.In theory, the measure is meant to make it faster, easier and less expensive for people to resolve disputes legally.Although the change would be likely to increase the efficiency with which lawsuits are resolved, it might also increase the workload for the city’s civil courts, which are already understaffed, said Sidney Cherubin, the director of legal services at the Brooklyn Volunteer Lawyers Project.If the measure passes, he said, the state would to have to help the civil courts handle the probable surge in cases, perhaps by hiring more judges or increasing the funding for the system.“What we anticipate is quicker resolution for litigants,” Mr. Cherubin said. He added: “It’s not going to cure all the issues, but it takes us a step in the right direction.” More

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      Adams vs. Sliwa: A Guide to New York's Mayoral Race

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      With the New York City election just days away, we cut through the personal attacks to show where the main candidates, Eric Adams and Curtis Sliwa, stand on the issues.Eric Adams, left, and Curtis Sliwa will face off in New York’s mayoral election on Tuesday.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesThe final weeks of the New York City mayor’s race have been dominated by personal attacks between the two leading candidates. Eric Adams, the Democratic front-runner, called his Republican opponent, Curtis Sliwa, racist and a “Mini-Me of Donald Trump.” Mr. Sliwa has criticized Mr. Adams as an elitist and “Bill de Blasio 2.0.”It should be no surprise that the two candidates also have very different visions for the city as it emerges from the pandemic.Mr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, wants to trim the police budget by cutting back on overtime pay; Mr. Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels subway patrol group, wants to hire 3,000 more officers. Mr. Adams is a cyclist who wants to build 300 miles of new protected bike lanes; Mr. Sliwa wants to remove bike lanes. Mr. Adams wants to keep vaccine mandates for city workers and indoor dining; Mr. Sliwa would reverse both.There are some areas of common ground: Both want to expand the gifted and talented program for elementary schools instead of ending it. Both have called for hundreds more “psychiatric beds” at hospitals to be used for people with mental health problems who are living on the streets. Both want to bring back the Police Department’s plainclothes anti-crime unit, which was disbanded under Mayor de Blasio.The candidates have also proposed somewhat overlapping economic recovery initiatives focused on getting New Yorkers back to work and removing regulations for small businesses.Whoever wins on Tuesday will face enormous challenges when he takes office in January. Here are the candidates’ plans for the city.— Emma G. FitzsimmonsEric AdamsAge: 61.Born: New York.Professional experience: Brooklyn borough president; former state senator and police captain.Mr. Adams has long had his eye on becoming mayor. He first ran for office in 1994 and was briefly a Republican during the Giuliani administration.Salient quotation: “The city betrayed Mommy,” Mr. Adams said as he voted for himself during the primary in June, explaining that the city has failed poor Black families like his.Personal detail: Mr. Adams is vegan and has eaten a plant-based diet since discovering he had diabetes at age 56.Curtis SliwaAge: 67.Born: New York.Professional experience: Founded the Guardian Angels subway patrol group; has been a conservative radio host.Mr. Sliwa has never run for office before. He became a Republican last year, once led the Reform Party of New York State and was a Democrat earlier in his life.Salient quotation: “Who at the age of 67 is running around wearing a red beret and a red satin jacket and going out there like a crime fighter and a superhero from our days reading comic books?” he told The Times earlier this year.Personal detail: Mr. Sliwa lives in a studio apartment on the Upper West Side with his wife — his fourth — and 16 cats.TransportationSubway ridership has not rebounded to prepandemic levels, a problem for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.Brittainy Newman for The New York TimesNew York City’s recovery from the pandemic will depend heavily on mass transit and other transportation. But the subway is facing a looming financial emergency, with ridership significantly below prepandemic numbers.Like his predecessors, the next mayor’s influence over the subway system will be limited: The subway and its daily operations are overseen by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is largely controlled by the governor.Still, both Mr. Adams and Mr. Sliwa say that it is crucial to restore confidence in the subway system and bring back riders. To do so, they are both targeting public safety underground. Though subway crime was down for the first nine months of the year relative to the same period in 2020, felony assaults there are up not just compared to last year, when ridership was very low, but also compared with 2019. A string of high-profile attacks has pushed the issue to the forefront.Both candidates want to deploy more police officers in the subways and direct homeless and mentally ill people off the trains and toward services. Mr. Sliwa, who has falsely stated that subway crime has reached all-time highs, wants to add 5,000 city police officers to patrol the system, some of them redirected from other duties. He also proposes relocating mentally ill and homeless people from the trains to psychiatric facilities or homeless shelters, though he has not explained how he would do so.Mr. Adams, a former transit police officer, wants the Police Department to shift officers from other roles to subway patrol, though he has not stated a specific figure. He also seeks to restore the department’s homeless outreach unit, which was defunded by Mr. de Blasio, and have mental health professionals team up with police officers. He also seeks to invest in better cell service, Wi-Fi and surveillance cameras in stations to help deter crime.The mayor’s largest sway over transportation in the city is in control over its streets, where there have been severe congestion and a surge in traffic deaths. Here, the candidates have markedly different approaches.Mr. Adams has thrown his support behind the state’s plan to enact congestion pricing in parts of Manhattan, which would charge a fee on vehicles in the area and aim to both reduce traffic and provide new funding for the transit system. Mr. Sliwa opposes it.Mr. Adams says he favors redesigning streets to address safety issues, including by encouraging alternatives to car travel. Over four years, he wants to build 300 new miles of protected bike lanes and 150 miles of new bus lanes and busways with a particular focus on transit deserts and busy corridors like Linden Boulevard in Brooklyn.Mr. Sliwa has accused the city of a war on vehicles and has proposed removing underutilized bike lanes that he says could better serve as parking spots. He has called for eliminating speed cameras but wants the Police Department to enforce traffic laws more actively and would provide funding to help it do so.— Michael GoldEducationThe first day of the academic year at P.S. 25 Bilingual School in the South Bronx.Anna Watts for The New York TimesMr. Adams’s most concrete education proposal may also be one of his least-discussed plans: blow up the school calendar and introduce year-round schooling. A 12-month academic year would be logistically complex and likely to be unpopular with some families and teachers. It would also require an overhaul of the teachers’ union contract, and significant funding to pay for many more educators to work outside of the traditional year.Mr. Adams has also made screening young students for dyslexia and other learning disabilities a priority. Asked how he would approach the task of desegregating schools, Mr. Adams said he would focus on making sure that children with disabilities and other challenges were not separated from their peers unnecessarily. He also said he would dedicate more funding to struggling school districts, a strategy used by Mr. de Blasio that produced disappointing results under his $773 million Renewal program for low-performing schools.The Democratic nominee has said he would keep the city’s gifted-and-talented program, despite Mr. Blasio’s announcement that he would seek to eliminate the current system. Mr. Sliwa has also said he would keep gifted classes.Mr. Adams also reiterated his support for keeping the admissions exam that dictates entry into the so-called specialized high schools, and said again that he would add five more specialized schools. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg tried a similar strategy in an effort to diversify the schools in the early 2000s, but the schools have enrolled fewer Black and Latino students in recent years. Mr. Adams also said he would “replace” the current admissions process for competitive middle and high schools, without offering more details.Mr. Sliwa said he would transform struggling schools by bringing vocational training programs into more high schools and add financial literacy courses to high school curriculums.Asked how he would combat racial segregation in schools, Mr. Sliwa said he would focus on reducing class sizes, an expensive project that several mayors have struggled to implement, and increase teacher bonuses, particularly for educators willing to teach in low-performing schools. Mr. de Blasio has already tried the latter proposal, with mixed results. And the powerful United Federation of Teachers has viewed bonuses based on performance with skepticism for many years, frustrating Mr. Bloomberg and, to some extent, Mr. de Blasio.— Eliza ShapiroHealth CareA vaccination site in August in the South Bronx. The mayoral candidates differ on their approaches to vaccine mandates. James Estrin/The New York TimesBoth Mr. Adams and Mr. Sliwa say they share a goal of making health care more accessible and affordable for average New Yorkers. But many of the details of their ideas — and how they want to go about making them happen — differ.Mr. Adams said his top priority would be to focus on ending the racial inequities that made Covid-19 “a tale of two pandemics, where Black and brown New Yorkers died at twice the rate of white New Yorkers.” He wants to enroll all New Yorkers who lack health insurance in low-cost plans run by the city’s public hospitals. He also wants to create more community health centers, put housing assistance and social services in hospitals and introduce a citywide network that would better distribute care for indigent patients between private and public hospitals, particularly in emergencies.Healthy eating is a particular passion of Mr. Adams. He is motivated by his own experience of waking up almost blind, with full-blown diabetes, at age 56 and says he reversed his illness by switching to a vegan, unprocessed-food diet. He has written a book, “Healthy at Last,” about his journey, and wants to scale up a clinic at Bellevue Hospital that he helped spearhead which focuses on treating disease by changing lifestyles.“One of the most important things we can do to prevent chronic diseases is to provide better access to quality, healthy food for underserved New Yorkers,” he said.Mr. Sliwa has not published a health care platform. But in a statement, he said his focus would be bringing down costs for working-class New Yorkers “across all demographics, from our young to elderly.” To do this, he focused on involving the private sector, with “public-private partnerships to increase access to medicine, treatment and other remedies” Like Mr. Adams, he also wants to encourage healthy eating and exercise in public schools.The plight of mentally ill homeless New Yorkers is a particular concern of Mr. Sliwa’s as the founder of the Guardian Angels, which has spent decades patrolling the city’s subways. “Increased access to psychiatric resources will ensure that no New Yorker is left behind in our road to emotional and physical recovery,” he said.The candidates are at odds on coronavirus vaccine mandates. Mr. Adams said he wanted to “double down” on the city’s vaccine mandates and its “Key to NYC” policy, which requires vaccination for indoor dining and entertainment. Mr. Sliwa has railed against such mandates at political rallies, though he is vaccinated and says he wants others to be. “Vaccine mandates only serve to hamper down our revitalization efforts for small businesses and restaurants,” he said in a statement.— Sharon OttermanLaw EnforcementMr. Adams seeks to cut back the Police Department’s budget while Mr. Sliwa wants to expand the force.Dakota Santiago for The New York TimesNew York’s next mayor will inherit a police department — the largest police force in the country — at what is perhaps its most critical juncture in recent memory. Following a national reckoning over police brutality spurred by mass protests over the murder of George Floyd, public pressure has mounted to trim back police department budgets and shrink forces, even as violent crime rates have reached historical highs in big cities across the country.In New York, the crisis has been particularly acute: 2020 was the bloodiest year for the city since the notorious 1990s, and while gun violence rates have leveled, they remain well above prepandemic levels. Transit crime has risen, in part because of emptier subways.Much of the department’s future depends on whether the budget shrinks. The City Council voted last year to shift $1 billion from the N.Y.P.D.’s annual budget, a decision that incensed police unions and advocates of criminal-justice reform alike. On this, the two candidates could not be more opposed: Mr. Adams advocates strategically cutting back the Police Department’s budget and footprint; Mr. Sliwa wants to reverse budget cuts and expand the force.“I believe we can save at least $500 million annually through strategic civilianization of N.Y.P.D. units,” Mr. Adams told The Times, referring to officers spending significant parts of their day doing civilian jobs or clerical work, like moving trucks and barricades, or doing crowd control.Mr. Adams called the increase in gun violence “the most pressing challenge facing the New York City Police Department.” He said that the Police Department was bloated and that he would pare back its overtime, but he also endorsed reinstating gang and gun task forces, the latest iteration of which were disbanded last year amid mounting public complaints that the units were abusive.Mr. Adams also supports creating a requirement that new officers live in the five boroughs and an incentive for current officers — who are allowed to live in surrounding counties — to move back into the areas they police.Mr. Sliwa, meanwhile, wants to fully reinstate $1 billion to the budget and hire more police officers, who he says should be diverted to high-crime areas. He also advocated reinstating the N.Y.P.D.’s anti-crime unit.“We need to put $1 billion back into the police budget and hire more cops,” he said. “Under current city leadership, our police force has become reactive to crime, not proactive in crime prevention.”— Ali WatkinsEconomyInitiatives to spur economic recovery in New York City are foremost in many people’s minds.James Estrin/The New York TimesThe next mayor of New York will take over an economy still struggling to mount a robust and sustained recovery 19 months into the pandemic. More than in any other large American city, New York’s extreme income inequalities were brutally exposed.The city’s unemployment rate is 9.8 percent, down slightly from early summer but still stubbornly high and nearly double the national rate. Two major drivers of the economy in the city — office workers and tourists — remain at home, cutting off significant sources of spending.And if office workers continue to work remotely after the pandemic, even if it is just a few days a week, it would most likely reshape the city’s economy for years to come.Mr. Adams and Mr. Sliwa have proposed somewhat overlapping recovery initiatives, both pledging to use the city government to help get New Yorkers back to work and to eliminate regulations they claim hurt small companies and deter the creation of new businesses.Mr. Sliwa has sought to cast his major campaign proposal of a property tax overhaul as potential fuel to jump-start the economy. His plan would provide tax deductions to some homeowners, place a 2-percent cap on annual property tax increases and eliminate tax breaks for wealthy institutions like hospitals, universities and Madison Square Garden.The plan would require approval from the State Legislature. It also mirrors an initiative announced by Mr. de Blasio in early 2020 to overhaul the property tax system, which ultimately lost political momentum when the pandemic emerged.Another top initiative by Mr. Sliwa would to test the feasibility of establishing universal basic income; he aims to set up a pilot program that would provide $1,100 a month to 500 New Yorkers.To help small businesses, Mr. Sliwa said the city would offer up to $45,000 in low-interest loans and extend tax incentives to companies with fewer than 50 employees that operate in the city outside Manhattan.Under Mr. Adams, the city would create a jobs program driven by real-time data from private businesses about their current openings and the skills they require, connecting applicants with employment opportunities that best match their skills. The city would also streamline its own hiring system with an online portal that would simplify the process of applying for municipal jobs.The ultimate goal, Mr. Adams said, would be to position New York City as a leader in the jobs of the future, especially in scientific research and cybersecurity, two industries that were growing before the pandemic. He also wants New Yorkers to work in renewable energy, part of his effort to make the city a major hub of wind power.— Matthew HaagHousingThe pandemic has left hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers struggling to pay rent. Brittainy Newman for The New York TimesThe next mayor will take the reins of a city with a chronic shortage of affordable housing, which is in turn a main driver of homelessness. More than a quarter of city residents spend more than half their income on housing, and the number of single adults in the city’s main shelter system has risen 60 percent during Mr. de Blasio’s tenure.On housing, Mr. Adams says he will focus on adding more lower- and middle-income homes in wealthier neighborhoods with good transit access and good schools — what he calls a reversal of gentrification. He would push to legalize unpermitted basement and cellar apartments, an idea that has proved difficult to execute in the past. Mr. Sliwa favors building more housing in manufacturing zones.The pandemic has left hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers struggling to pay rent. A state moratorium on evictions has kept many in their homes, but it is set to expire in January, threatening some renters with homelessness. Mr. Adams says he will let the State Legislature reassess the need to extend the moratorium, while Mr. Sliwa would press the state to better distribute millions of dollars in rent relief to landlords to address residents’ rent debt.The city’s public housing system, NYCHA, is also in dire trouble: It faces a backlog of over $40 billion in capital needs. Mr. Adams says he will push to let developers build on existing NYCHA land — a plan that he said could address less than a quarter of those needs. Mr. Sliwa says he will make sure repairs are done faster, and train and employ NYCHA residents to make repairs themselves.While both candidates emphasized the need for more permanent housing, Mr. Sliwa also wants to increase the capacity of the city’s shelters, which many homeless people avoid because they say they are dangerous and unpleasant. Mr. Sliwa says he would add police officers and social workers to make shelters safer. Mr. Adams opposes expanding shelters.The homelessness crisis is also a mental- health crisis. People with serious mental illnesses who live on the streets and in the subways have committed violent assaults and hate crimes that have grabbed headlines and raised alarms in recent months.Both Mr. Adams and Mr. Sliwa stress the importance of reversing a decline in hospital psychiatric beds and accelerating the creation of so-called supportive housing that includes on-site social services for mentally ill people. Mr. Adams touts a plan to convert thousands of empty hotel rooms into supportive-housing apartments.— Andy Newman and Mihir ZaveriIllustrations by Eden Weingart

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