New York’s Second-Most-Powerful Position

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New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani got the most votes of any mayoral candidate since the 1960s in last November’s election. This month, New York City Councilmember Julie Menin put up impressive numbers of her own, with a unanimous vote of the 51-member council to make her its next speaker.

Menin has represented Manhattan’s upper east side on the city council since 2022. Prior to that she led an influential Manhattan community board, worked as the city’s commissioner for both consumer affairs and media and entertainment, and served on the 9/11 Memorial Board. She formed a nonprofit to help rebuild Lower Manhattan after her own restaurant was damaged during the terrorist attacks.

As council speaker, she’ll play a key role in shaping the city’s massive budget, which is bigger than that of all but half a dozen states, and building consensus for or against Mamdani’s ambitious mayoral agenda. By some estimates the council speaker is second in importance only to the mayor.

“The speaker position is, no question, the second-most-powerful position in the City of New York,” says former speaker Christine Quinn, who led the council during eight years of Michael Bloomberg’s administration. Quinn and Bloomberg were known to have a good relationship, Quinn says, partly because they knew how to “disagree agreeably.” The two would review the council agenda when they met, typically three times a month, and if there was an item that the mayor was planning to veto or a veto the council was planning to override, they’d say, “OK, what’s next?” Based on Mamdani’s performance on the campaign trail, and his recent meeting with Trump, Quinn says he seems to know how to operate that way. She says Menin does too.

The Quinn-Bloomberg partnership contrasts with the most recent dynamic, when Mayor Eric Adams and council speaker Adrienne Adams had a tense relationship, which played out through a series of rival charter revisions. The strength of the Menin-Mamdani relationship could help determine how much of Mamdani’s agenda gets accomplished in the next few years.

Still, if the council speakership is the second-most-powerful job in New York, it’s a distant second. The portion of the budget that councilmembers directly control, with grants for park projects, libraries, nonprofits and cultural organizations in their districts, is nominally large at around $500 million. But it’s couch-cushion change in the scheme of the city’s overall budget, which topped $120 billion last year. Menin will have a lead role on the budget negotiating team that settles the details of the city budget this spring. But the council’s role is fundamentally reactive to the mayor’s budget proposal, which is expected in the coming weeks. Some of Mamdani’s biggest agenda items, such as making bus travel free, will hinge more on what the state government and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority go for than on the city council.

New York’s city council is overwhelmingly Democratic, with just five Republicans among its 51 members, but it has various progressive and moderate factions within the Democratic majority. Menin is seen as being more moderate than Mamdani. She’s highlighted their differences on a few issues, including the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, targeting Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. But she’s also said the historic firsts of the moment — Menin is New York’s first Jewish council speaker and Mamdani is its first Muslim mayor — provide a unique opportunity for unity. She is aligned with some of the mayor’s priorities, among them expanding childcare in the city. She doesn’t expect to set the city’s policy agenda.

“Being speaker is a management job,” she said at an event last December after she’d locked up the votes to get the job. “It is managing a very large and critical and diverse institution.”

The current version of the New York City Council was established in 1989. It has not proven to be a springboard to higher political office. The council’s first speaker, Peter Vallone, was the Democratic candidate for governor of New York in 1998, but he lost badly to George Pataki, the Republican incumbent. Since 1989 no city councilmember has gone on to become mayor, though several speakers have tried. Christine Quinn ran in 2013, coming in third in the Democratic primary behind the eventual winner, Bill de Blasio. The last speaker, Adrienne Adams, came in fourth in the mayoral primary last spring.