For Mayor Eric Adams, the challenge of leading New York City has taken on an almost absurd quality, with his administration peppered in recent weeks by a half-dozen significant resignations, four federal investigations and two federal indictments, including one against the mayor.
Two of his deputy mayors and his police commissioner have resigned. His schools chancellor was just replaced. And he withdrew his pick for the city’s top lawyer when it became clear that the City Council would reject him.
With the flood of departures and chaos leaving a considerable vacuum at the top of City Hall, Mr. Adams must now rely on a flurry of new appointees and promotions to keep a complex bureaucracy running.
Earlier this week, Mr. Adams elevated Maria Torres-Springer, a veteran civil servant, to become his new first deputy mayor. She and three other highly respected women in the administration — Camille Joseph Varlack, the mayor’s chief of staff; Meera Joshi, the deputy mayor for operations; and Anne Williams-Isom, the deputy mayor for health and human services — are expected to largely oversee City Hall’s key administrative responsibilities.
Of them, Ms. Torres-Springer will play the most critical role in the coming months, handling daily operations across a vast bureaucracy of roughly 300,000 city workers with a $100 billion annual budget.
Her promotion seemed to signal a shift from the cronyism that had typified many of Mr. Adams’s significant hires, and was celebrated by a range of civic leaders, including the Rev. Al Sharpton; Kathryn Wylde, the leader of a business group; and progressive officials including Chi Ossé, a City Council member who has urged Mr. Adams to resign.
“New York City is in good hands with her management,” said Richard R. Buery Jr., a former deputy mayor under Bill de Blasio, Mr. Adams’s predecessor, and the chief executive of the Robin Hood Foundation, a charity focused on fighting poverty.
Mr. Adams followed a similar path in finding a replacement for Randy Mastro, a former aide to Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, whose nomination to be the city’s corporation counsel fell through. The mayor said he now planned to nominate Muriel Goode-Trufant, who has spent three decades at the New York City Law Department, to be the city’s top lawyer, and she is expected to be approved by the Council.
But the timing and circumstances of the overhaul — performed under heavy duress on the back side of Mr. Adams’s four-year term — are far from ideal. Some of the mayor’s critics, including some leading Democrats vying to replace him in next year’s primary, say that the belated move to place more qualified people in power has come too late to correct the administration’s earlier mistakes.
They also fear that Mr. Adams’s indictment last month will only worsen his inattentiveness to managing the city and prevent any meaningful long-range planning, given the uncertainty of the mayor’s future. He may still face additional charges, prosecutors have warned, and could go on trial next spring, a few short months before a heavily contested primary.
“We are facing a child care crisis, an affordability crisis, a climate crisis and serious public safety challenges, and there’s no new policy or new ideas coming out of City Hall to address them,” said Lincoln Restler, a city councilman from Brooklyn who served in Mr. de Blasio’s administration. “The people of New York City deserve a city government that is proactively solving problems and not consumed with saving itself.”
Ms. Torres-Springer said in an interview that the city was moving forward on major priorities. At the same time, she and Ms. Varlack were reviewing personnel and policies with “integrity and accountability” in mind and would make recommendations to the mayor.
“It is a complicated time, but the job in my mind is simple: serve New Yorkers to the best of our ability and that’s what we’ll continue to do,” Ms. Torres-Springer said.
Mr. Adams, for his part, seems eager to portray himself as a hands-on mayor in command. On the day after his indictment was unsealed, he suddenly began listing his daily morning meeting with senior administration officials on his schedule. He continues to hold his weekly off-topic news briefing with reporters, but now does so alone so that his deputy mayors “can be doing the business of the people.”
He maintains that none of the recent resignations have anything to do with the federal investigations, even though everyone who has stepped down has been touched by one or more of the inquiries.
At the same time, it is clear that Mr. Adams is being pressured to clean house, including by Gov. Kathy Hochul, who has the power to remove the mayor and has urged him to restore confidence among New Yorkers.
Others who still have Mr. Adams’s ear include a trio of longtime advisers who are trying to help him survive his mounting political and legal challenges. That small inner circle includes Frank Carone, his former chief of staff, and Evan Thies and Nathan Smith, two political consultants.
Mr. Thies and Mr. Smith, who prefer to advise the mayor behind the scenes and are not paid, speak regularly with Mr. Adams, and had initially counseled him not to bring so many loyalists with him to City Hall when he became mayor, according to a person familiar with the matter.
But Mr. Adams stuck with his friends. “I’m going to hire the best people for the job that I have known throughout my years in government and their talents,” the mayor told reporters in his first month in office. “And the reason I can do that is because I’m the mayor.”
Mr. Carone, who now runs a lucrative consulting firm, was at Gracie Mansion with Mr. Adams on the night the federal indictment was revealed, telling reporters as he left that the mayor would never resign.
Mr. Carone said this week that he still believed the mayor and his top officials were the “best team to address the challenges New York City is facing.”
“If I can bring my years of experience in problem-solving to be helpful in this moment, it is my responsibility and obligation,” he said.
Mr. Adams will also rely closely on his lawyer Alex Spiro, a prominent defense lawyer who has represented famous clients including the billionaire Elon Musk and the actor Alec Baldwin.
The mayor’s chief adviser, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, also seems intent on remaining at City Hall, even though she is now under investigation by the Manhattan district attorney’s office regarding the city’s leasing of commercial properties.
Ms. Lewis-Martin, a friend of Mr. Adams’s for nearly 40 years, has been known as the mayor’s political enforcer and was widely viewed as the second most powerful person at City Hall. But she had appeared to have lost some status even before her phones were seized by investigators at the airport last month.
Some critics of the mayor say the administration’s recalibration is not enough, even as they express admiration for Ms. Torres-Springer.
“Our analogy is you can’t throw all the pirates overboard and leave Captain Hook and the first mate on board — that’s not cleaning house,” said John Kaehny, the executive director of Reinvent Albany, a good government group, referring to Mr. Adams as the captain and Ms. Lewis-Martin as the first mate.
Ms. Torres-Springer acknowledged in a recent podcast interview that there had been “real volatility, and there’s pain and loss and all of that,” but she said she was confident the administration was focused on improving the city.
There are plenty of major issues on the horizon, including an overhaul of trash collection, an expansion of composting and an ambitious rezoning proposal known as the City of Yes that is before the City Council.
And underpinning all of that work are the hundreds of thousands of city employees who have continued to do their jobs in spite of the headlines.
“We are the permanent government, no matter who the mayor is,” said Henry Garrido, the executive director of District Council 37, the city’s largest municipal employees union.
Still, Mr. Garrido, whose union endorsed Mr. Adams in 2021, stressed that there was a need for clear executive leadership.
“At some point, decisions have to be made around budget and the direction the city is going to go in,” Mr. Garrido said. “I think those things have to happen sooner rather than later.”
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