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[Want to get New York Today by email? Here’s the sign-up.]It’s Tuesday. Weather: Watch out for showers and thunderstorms most of the day. The temperature will fall from the mid-70s in the morning to the mid-60s by evening. More
Voters on Tuesday will participate in the city’s first mayoral election using ranked-choice voting, a system that may delay the declaration of a winner until mid-July.When the New York City mayoral primary campaign began, the city was steeped in grave uncertainty about its future. Candidates laid out radically different visions for how they would guide a still-shuttered metropolis out of overlapping crises around public health, the economy and racial injustice. More
New Yorkers are using a new voting system citywide for the first time, but in interviews, many seemed characteristically unfazed: “It’s real easy if people just learn how to read.”A New York City mayoral race that began over Zoom during the height of the pandemic came down to street campaigning in its final hours on Monday, with as many as half a million voters preparing to cast ballots when polls open on Tuesday. More
The party’s growing irrelevance in urban and suburban areas comes at a considerable cost, sidelining conservatives in centers of innovation and economic might.When Jerry Sanders finished his second term as mayor of San Diego in 2012, he was the most prominent Republican city executive in the country. A former police chief close to the business community, Mr. Sanders appeared to be a political role model for other would-be Republican mayors, a moderate who worked with the Obama administration on urban policy and endorsed gay marriage at a pivotal moment. More
Last week I wrote about why I thought Eric Adams is very marginally preferable to Andrew Yang in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary. Yang is likable, and I can see why people have gravitated to his sunny vision of a vibrant, business-friendly city. But electing a totally inexperienced mayor buoyed by hedge fund billionaires and singularly focused on public order seems potentially calamitous. Not because public order isn’t important — everyone wants a safe city — but because it has to be balanced with a commitment to justice. More
On the eve of Tuesday’s primary, the top candidates for mayor of New York City issued their sharpest criticism of the campaign.On the final full day of New York City’s mayoral primary campaign, the leading Democratic candidate, Eric Adams, called a top rival a “liar” and a “fraud.” More
The Trump Organization, which had a 20-year contract to operate a public golf course in the Bronx, claims it was unfairly targeted.The Trump Organization sued New York City on Monday, saying the city had wrongly terminated a lucrative golf course contract for political reasons after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol in Washington.The suit, filed in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan on the eve of the mayoral election, argued that the January decision by Mayor Bill de Blasio to end the company’s 20-year contract to run the public golf course in the Bronx had no legitimate legal basis and was meant only to punish former President Donald J. Trump.“Mayor de Blasio had a pre-existing, politically-based predisposition to terminate Trump-related contracts, and the city used the events of January 6, 2021 as a pretext to do so,” the suit said.In a statement, the company said that the course was “widely recognized as one of the most magnificent public golf experiences anywhere in the country.”A spokesman for the mayor, Bill Neidhardt, responded, saying: “Donald Trump directly incited a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. You do that, and you lose the privilege of doing business with the City of New York.”Mr. Trump was impeached this year for inciting the riot, his second impeachment, but was acquitted by the Senate after leaving office.After the attacks on the Capitol, the city abruptly ended several contracts with the Trump Organization, including agreements that allowed the company to operate the Central Park Carousel and two ice-skating rinks in the park.The move came as a wave of other businesses also backed away from Mr. Trump after the attacks on the Capitol, including the P.G.A. of America, which announced it would no longer hold one of its major tournaments at a New Jersey golf club owned by the president.The contracts in Central Park had already been set to expire in April. The lawsuit centers on a city-owned course in the Ferry Point section of the Bronx, called Trump Golf Links at Ferry Point. The Trump Organization was in its sixth year of running the course, which opened in 2015.Overall, the contracts had garnered the Trump Organization about $17 million a year, Mr. de Blasio said in January.Although Mr. de Blasio said then that the decision to sever ties was made because Mr. Trump incited rioters at the Capitol, the city offered a more contractual basis for the decision: The Trump Organization had defaulted in its agreement on the golf course because it had not attracted a major tournament and was unlikely to do so in the future, given the P.G.A.’s decision.The mayor insisted at the time that the city was on “strong legal ground,” but the Trump Organization vowed to fight back, saying the move was a form of political discrimination.Mr. Trump had been hailed by city officials years ago for refurbishing Wollman Rink in Central Park. Travis Dove for The New York TimesNow, the organization has made its case in an 18-page petition saying that it was never obliged to attract an actual tournament but merely to maintain “a first class tournament quality daily fee golf course.” The petition included several statements from professional golfers, including Dustin Johnson and Bryson DeChambeau, attesting to the course’s being “first class” and “tournament quality.”A spokesman for the city’s law department said that it would “vigorously defend” its decision to terminate the contract and that it “looked forward to selecting a new vendor for Ferry Point.”There is little love lost between Mr. Trump and Mr. de Blasio. The former president has called the Democratic mayor and 2020 presidential contender “the worst mayor in the history of New York City.” Mr. de Blasio, in turn, embraced Mr. Trump as a foil during his own ill-fated presidential run, even attempting to give the president a nickname, “Con Don.”The city initially celebrated its collaboration with Mr. Trump when the rising real estate developer first won the contract to refurbish Wollman Rink in Central Park in the 1980s. Mr. Trump’s company finished the project under budget and ahead of its deadline, and city officials embraced him; one even joked about planting a “Trump tree” in the park.“I’m not used to having nice things said about me,” Mr. Trump said at the time.The contracts were renewed during the tenure of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. But Mr. de Blasio, a progressive Democrat, staked out a position against Mr. Trump, one that put him in line with his many liberal constituents.The lawsuit comes as Mr. Trump and his company are facing an unrelated criminal investigation from the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which is examining whether the former president and his employees committed financial fraud in recent years.Prosecutors appear to be in the final stages of investigating Allen H. Weisselberg, Mr. Trump’s long-serving chief financial officer, and could criminally charge him this summer, The New York Times previously reported.Mr. Weisselberg, who has worked for the Trump family since 1973, was listed as the contact for the company on the city’s contract for the Central Park carousel.Ben Protess More
Not even 10 minutes into Andrew Yang’s inaugural trip in his campaign van Monday morning and there was a problem. The air conditioning had given out, so the vehicle sporting Mr. Yang’s grinning face on its side had pulled over next to a gas station on Staten Island.“We’ll be OK,” Mr. Yang said, reassuring the driver and campaign staff members who were worried about sticking to schedule on the humid morning. “Just go to the next thing.”It was, in a way, the perfect encapsulation of his optimistic monthslong pitch to voters. New York City, facing a nexus of crises, would be OK as long as anxious voters went on to the next thing: him.To reinforce the message, Mr. Yang, a tireless campaigner, planned to spend his last day before polls opened on Tuesday traveling to all five boroughs in a van dubbed the “Yangatron.” The nickname referred to Mr. Yang’s answer in an interview that his favorite previous New York mayor would be a “Voltron”-like amalgamation of several of them.Mr. Yang, who has vowed to be the city’s cheerleader-in-chief if elected, posed for selfies with voters at Staten Island’s ferry terminal and gave the thumbs-up to commuters sprinting to grab the boat to Manhattan.But in recent weeks, he has also painted a dire picture of the city’s future if one of his chief rivals, Eric Adams, wins. As the van left the gas station, Mr. Yang called the possibility of an Adams administration “deeply concerning” and criticized Mr. Adams for describing ranked-choice voting as a tool for suppressing the Black and Latino vote.“Imagine an administration that is led by someone who cuts corners and breaks rules and is constantly under investigation and then attacks whenever he’s criticized and then invokes race as the rationale for any criticism that’s directed toward him,” Mr. Yang said, “and then you imagine hundreds of managers taking their cues from this person.”“That kind of administration would be mired in dysfunction and questions and investigation almost from Day 1,” he added.Mr. Yang expressed fewer concerns about other candidates. He has asked his supporters to rank Kathryn Garcia second. On Sunday, he offered positive comments about Maya Wiley. And he said at a campaign stop in Brooklyn Monday that he had ranked five candidates on his ballot and that his campaign “may have some announcements coming out” about the issue.Mr. Yang said that, win or lose, he hoped to leave New Yorkers with the lasting message that they should not tolerate a government that failed to properly work for them.“So many of us here in New York have just been settling for agencies and elected officials that are just barely getting by,” he said, as the campaign van cruised over the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, its air conditioning problem apparently fixed. “And we’re all just sort of slumping into it. And our politicians have become people who are just apologizing.” More
