Meera Joshi: Portrait of a Civil Servant (An Interview with Vital City)
Deputy mayor for operations // TLC // the lifeguard union // too much public review // and more!
Vital City’s Jamie Rubin interviewed Meera Joshi shortly before the city primaries this year. You can listen to the whole thing here, or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
But I liked the interview so much, and think it has so many useful points, that I transcribed it below so anyone can read it; I edited it lightly for style and clarity.
Meera Joshi is the former deputy mayor for operations under the Adams administration, but her history in government goes back much further than that. Here’s what she and Jamie talked about in the interview:
Meera Joshi’s career and background, transitioning out of City Hall
Time as the head of the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC), medallion crash
Meera Joshi’s career and background, transitioning out of City Hall
Jamie Rubin 00:01
You're listening to after hours with Jamie Rubin, a Vital City podcast. I'm Jamie Rubin.
Jamie Rubin 00:11
We're less than a week out from the mayoral primaries, and while we have a bunch of candidates who have all kinds of different experience, none of them have nearly as much experience in city government—and particularly running parts of city government—as Meera Joshi. Meera Joshi is a really experienced New York City civil servant. She's had a bunch of different jobs in the city government. She was Inspector General for the city's Department of Corrections. She was executive director of the city's Civilian Complaint Review Board, which is the agency that investigates alleged police misconduct. She ran the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission under Mayor de Blasio, from 2014 through 2019 during a very eventful time, and under Mayor Adams, she just finished a long stint as Deputy Mayor for Operations, during which she oversaw the city's infrastructure—basically the public realm and climate portfolio. So as you can tell from her biography, Meera has largely been a very influential, but low key, behind the scenes government official. She came to much more public attention early in the year when there were a series of resignations from the Adams administration in the wake of indictments, and Meera and three of her colleagues effectively took over day-to-day operation of the management of the city's government. They all then resigned in March, effective in April. This is one of Meera's first interviews since she left City Hall, and I thought it would be a great opportunity to get her very fresh thoughts about what it's like to be in City Hall at a very complicated time.
One thing everybody has said to me about you is that I can't imagine she's going to be out of work for more than like, a week. We'll talk later about whether that's in fact true, but how long has it been? When did you step down?
Meera Joshi 01:52
We stepped down March 14—Maria Torres-Springer, Anne Williams-Isom, and myself. I've twice left city government, and you wake up the next morning and it's like, oh, wait, I have one phone. That's the first shock, right? And you can read the papers without having to have that attachment to every single story and figuring out what's the next move. How are we going to respond to that? So living in the [post city-government] world where you write a text message and you're not worried about FOIL, you write it, you know, it's just it's a crazy thing, or going out to a meal and somebody else says, I'll pay the bill, and you don't have to fight them over it. So all these normal human things that you get to do again, they're pretty fun, and I hadn't done them for quite a while, so I was excited about that. And I'm getting to enjoy complete sentences, waiting for people to finish speaking, thinking before I speak. Usually when you're at work, it's always so fast that it feels like a luxury just to think through something really, really well before you say it. And I found out I like my family. I always loved them, but I really like them too. I'm home a lot more. We like each other, so that's a really good thing. And I get to go on some great vacations, so I'm packing those in.
Jamie Rubin 03:21
Those are all good things. But how long was it before you started thinking about what your next job was going to be. Like a minute?
Meera Joshi 03:29
No, no. The kids were good, though. I have a son and a daughter, 20 and 28 and they were both like, don't start working again. So I think it was probably a couple days and I started thinking what comes after.
Jamie Rubin 03:44
You've had a bunch more of these moments than I have. It is an interesting transition. When I left the state after working for Governor Cuomo for five years, I started literally the next week, which was a horrible idea. In fact, when I started my job the office was in the building next to his building.
Meera Joshi 04:05
So you left and had one week, and then started a new job?
Jamie Rubin 04:09
I left at the end of December, and I started January 2, or something. It took six months to decompress. He even insisted on Blackberries, and he liked to text people, and the sound of the Blackberry text—which I don't remember anymore—but it was Pavlovian.
Meera Joshi 04:25
And we had an 8am call every morning. So I was so wired to be ready for an 8am call with all the updates, get ahead of issues, talk about what good was happening that day. It took me a couple weeks to realize I had destressed from that.
Jamie Rubin 04:44
So now you're done. We'll talk later about what you are planning to do next. I mean, you were in a bunch of past administrations. You were in de Blasio’s, you were the TLC chair and CEO during a pretty tumultuous time. How did that compare to the tumultuousness in this go around?
Meera Joshi 05:08
In this go around, I was closer to the flame, right? I'm sure there were all the flames, or different flames, in the de Blasio administration’s City Hall. But when you run an agency, you have an excellent buffer, because you run your own kingdom, and then you come in and check on isolated issues. But having that autonomy is pretty great, even in tumultuous times. In retrospect—not when you're in it—in retrospect, that's the great time to run an agency. You look back and think, that was fun.
Jamie Rubin 05:46
And this time you didn't have the buffer, obviously,
Meera Joshi 05:50
You're right in City Hall, right inside. And I had nine agencies [to oversee as deputy mayor].
Time as the head of the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC), medallion crash
Jamie Rubin 05:54
Okay, so at TLC, you were there during a time when the taxi industry really was upended. What happened specifically?
Meera Joshi 06:06
I was general counsel before I became chair, so I sort of watched the rise of the medallion price at the tail end of Bloomberg. It hit $1.3 million in an auction, and we had the same kind of buyers that were literally churning the market. They'd buy, they'd borrow, they'd buy, they'd borrow, they'd buy, they’d borrow. And the more they bought and borrowed and hiked the price up at an auction, the more they could borrow and keep it going. And the math never made sense. The amount you can lease out a medallion is for capped at $98,000 a year. So why is this thing a million dollars, you know? Well it's a finite market. There was no scrutiny. People got loans. You wanted to borrow $700,000 to buy a medallion? You could get it in 20 minutes. I could not get a mortgage or refinance my house in 20 minutes.
Jamie Rubin 07:10
And they're borrowing from these very specialized companies.
Meera Joshi 07:14
The terms were always like three years and you had to refinance. So they just refinanced every three years, and they were encouraged to take out more money. And for a lot of immigrants, it seemed like the American dream, right? Like the banks were offering them all of this money. So that was a fragile situation that was going to come down eventually anyway, because the banks at some point would have to crack down on this mill basically, much like the mortgage market, but maybe it could last longer because it was finite. But Uber accelerated that, because Uber just offered service, and the taxi business never had to compete on service, because they were the only game in town, and now they had to compete on service. And it has been a real roller coaster to see how they've managed that, and how Uber competing on service—but undercutting all the other main tenants of the business, like treating drivers right, being upfront with passengers—that brought them down and has allowed taxis to survive; they have not necessarily thrived and nowhere near the prices they used to be, but people still drive and make a living driving taxis.
Jamie Rubin 08:26
So during the de Blasio administration, the whole market for medallions crashed and the values went down to like $200,000, which is a problem if you have a million dollars of debt. You can still make money, but against the equity…
Meera Joshi 08:45
But you can never pay the loan off. And the regulators finally woke up and said, nobody's doing due diligence, and they stopped financing the medallions.
Jamie Rubin 08:54
Regulators meaning the Department of Financial Services at the state. So there was real human suffering. At the middle of this.
Meera Joshi 09:06
There were nine suicides, not all of them taxi cab drivers, some of them taxi cab drivers, some of them just for-hire drivers, because of the the influence of Uber and dilution of the market. Through that grieving process I ended up meeting their relatives and really learning more about the story. And some of those relatives are really the advocates for why there's a medallion relief program today.
Jamie Rubin 09:33
A very difficult situation. So you left De Blasio in 2019, and Eric was elected in ‘21, so in between you weren't working for a mayor. You started with the new mayor in January of ‘22 as the deputy mayor for operations. You said you had nine agencies reporting to you. Okay, so what were those?
Working as Deputy Mayor for Operations for Mayor Adams
Meera Joshi 09:58
So it's really the infrastructure of the city, what I call infrastructure services. Let’s see if I can remember them in order of size. I'm going to do it. TLC is probably the smallest. Oh, no, the mayor’s climate office. We always change the name every couple years. We'll call it the climate office. That's probably the smallest then. TLC—I'll go out of order now. DOB, so all the safety regulations. What I call our two municipal construction companies, which is School Construction Authority and Department of Design and Construction. DEP, which handles our water and our air, wastewater and drinking water. And sanitation, snow and trash, which is unusual. In many cities, it's only trash. In New York, it's snow and trash. Transportation, everything that moves. Parks, 30,000 acres of green space.
Jamie Rubin 11:01
That was nine. That sounds like a portfolio that kind of hangs together for the most part.
Meera Joshi 11:07
I think it's all of the things that you touch in your daily life, whether it's because you're putting your trash out, you're walking on the street, you're sending your kids to a building that's a library or school. So it's the stuff that I would say we don't think about, because if it's all working, we're not worried about it. It's the place where silence is golden, right? You're doing your job well when nobody's complaining.
Jamie Rubin 11:36
But there's opportunities for major, very important changes that people will see, and some things that they'll see and maybe be annoyed by, like, for example, composting, which, if you walk into our kitchen, you'll see a big plastic green plastic box. Sometime, you'll have to explain to me why composting is something that I should want to do. I’m still not there, but that's a fun little example.
When I was working for the state, eventually I ended up as the director of state operations, nominally in charge of the day-to-day of the state government, and we had, I can't remember how many employees, but let's call it 150,000 or something. And I realized that one of the big problems was, how do you understand what these people are doing all day long? Because you can't possibly manage an organization of that size. And so I called around to a few people like Dan Doctoroff who had done similar jobs, and got ideas, and I came to my own conclusions about how to do that. What was your answer? You can't really manage what agencies of that size are doing.
Managing large workforces
Meera Joshi 12:39
You can't manage what agencies of that size are doing. I think I had the advantage of running a city agency before working at city agencies, before running a federal agency as well. And so I knew what the structure should be, and I knew the different moments—like the budget moments, the council moments, the hiring requirements, the union negotiations—I didn't always know the substance of how they operated, but I knew the framework within within which they were all operating, and I knew that pretty well. So you really rely on, first of all, getting out in the field, making sure you're seeing what the assets are, whether it is the wastewater treatment plants or the garages or the parks facilities. And I told every commissioner, I said, “Show me your ugliest thing in your portfolio. What's your ugliest asset? What's the thing that needs the most help?” Because oftentimes you could quickly learn a lot by looking at the thing that they need the most help with.
Jamie Rubin 13:40
Give us a couple of examples of ugly assets.
Evaluating agencies via their ugliest assets
Meera Joshi 13:43
Jesse Tisch told took me to a sanitation garage where the roof was falling down. And we went upstairs into the locker room, and we saw everything falling apart. DEP took me to see the instances where they had to do emergency repairs on their wastewater treatment plans, and where, if they had some foresight in the budgeting and capital improvement budgeting, they would have spent less money and had less emergencies. It was really a lot of state of good repair. I think there's two parts of the portfolio, when I say silence is golden, it's the state of good repair stuff. It's just making sure that the machinery is working every day. And then the other part is the evolution part. How are we evolving? How are we doing the infrastructure better and smarter? How are we providing more public space and public amenities through the infrastructure?
Jamie Rubin 14:49
Got it. I mean, you had an unusually, a really high quality group of agency heads. We had Jessica Tisch. You had Rohit Aggarwala. You had Sue Donoghue. Jimmy Oddo. I mean, you had really strong leaders who came up with their own agendas,
Meera Joshi 15:10
Sometimes they came up with their own, sometimes they came from me. But I explained why they were coming from me, and we had to embrace it together.
Jamie Rubin 15:21
Sometimes I assume they came from others, other than you. I mean, you did work for the mayor.
Meera Joshi 15:25
Yes, although I would say when it comes to my portfolio, Mayor Adams was much more hands off than, say, like a public safety portfolio, because he has such intimate knowledge of the police department that it's very natural for him to be very involved in the priorities there. With the infrastructure portfolio, I had a much broader reign, I'd say, about picking priorities. And so there wasn't a tight, set agenda when we walked in. It was about developing the agenda when we got there. Even parks; what we pushed for in parks really came from Sue and I working together—the parks need to be cleaner, longer, so push for a second shift. We never had a second shift of maintenance workers in the city in parks. And that's the difference between a bathroom closing at three o'clock or closing at seven o'clock. When I realized that, I was like, this is an incredible asset that has become even more important after COVID, but our parks department has never operated as though people use the park in the evening.
Jamie Rubin 16:35
That's curious. Well, is it a question of just having more people?
Meera Joshi 16:39
It's funding, and also the understanding that there's a need. So we started a second shift program, changed the way we planted trees, and so we're able to plant more trees than they've done in decades—there was just a backlog [of tree planting]. I said there's a backlog that we will never finish. How about we get rid of the backlog and just start a different method of planting?
Remarks on the idea of “backlogs”
Jamie Rubin 17:03
Sorry, just a quick digression. The idea of backlog is a really interesting thing to me. We have faced this a bunch of different times in a bunch of different places. People focus on this backlog—
Meera Joshi 17:13
If you're never gonna get to it, it’s not a backlog!
Jamie Rubin 17:17
It's dead. The people who owed you rent are dead now, or whatever it is. That tree died six years ago. Yeah, it's funny. It's a thing we have to get it done. It's very Russian bureaucracy literature or something.
Meera Joshi 17:32
It's just a weird way to operate, because it's a fantasy that you're gonna someday get to the end of the backlog, and there will never be a backlog. But you've said it will take 10 years to get to the end of the backlog, as long as no one new comes in.
Dealing with the lifeguard union and restoring control to the parks department
Meera Joshi 17:50
You know at the parks department they broke the lifeguard contract.
Jamie Rubin 17:55
Explain the lifeguard problem.
Meera Joshi 17:57
Sure. So when we got in it was January, and by the first swimming season, it's quickly clear that we're not hiring enough lifeguards for the public beaches and public pools. So there's a core of lifeguards that work year round, and then there's another additional group that you have to hire in preparation for the summer. And the genesis of this problem was really two things. One that was kind of not in our control, which is, there's a nationwide lifeguard shortage; you want to be a lifeguard, you could go lots of places and get paid more money than working at the city. But the stronger and more perennial problem was the leader of the union for the lifeguards had a strict stranglehold on how recruitment, training, hiring, testing, and every aspect of managing the lifeguards was done. And a crazy side letter that I saw which basically laid out that the parks department had no control over these major management things dating back to, I think it was in the 80s I don't remember.
So there's no way to move forward unless you broke that letter. The head of the lifeguard union, Peter Stein—this was one benefit of [his] getting older and less involved in the process. It helped that he was no longer such a force. But I did go to a pool opening, and the lifeguards themselves were so upset with the leadership that [there was] no connection with this leadership that was making all of these decisions. They told me they actually drove to his house and, like, left letters with him because they had no connection otherwise. And so after one bad summer, Sue, myself, Brendan McGuire, the counsel for the mayor, went to the mayor and OLR were like, This is it. We have to do it this year. And it worked out. After coming to a head and mediations we finally got to a settlement where Parks got back a lot of the management responsibilities. So, that was big. And the Staten Island Ferry was another big union one; 14 years they'd gone without a contract, and that finally got settled.
Challenges in government
Jamie Rubin 20:19
You have this unbelievably complicated portfolio, lots of different issues of all kinds. So let's play a game. If you could fix four things—not using magic, no extraterrestrial powers, just human power—[what would they be]?
Meera Joshi 20:40
I could pick four things to fix that would be helpful. But I also start thinking about, how do we think about governing? Because it feels harder and harder, right? We're politicizing some basic, foundational items in New York City. So I'm really interested now in the idea of having a city manager, and we have a mayor, but we have a city manager, and it's kind of the dull job, right? It's the job of pushing things along and handling things, and they're considered a rational person who's going to make decisions that are best for the city, but that allows a certain amount of continuity and progress. It's not a political appointee—I haven't figured out how they get in that position yet, but other cities have this. In Bombay, they have a corporation. They call it the corporation head instead of the mayor.
Fixing the amount of public review we require for projects
But I think primarily the things that hold up city projects the most are around the levels of review that we require.
I'll take the BQE, which is like the mother of all projects, right? You've got different agencies involved. You've got all three levels of government involved. You've got everything from a ULURP, which is a very, you know, local review, to the NEPA process at the federal level. The inquiries in those are often the same, but they don't count for each other. Everybody still wants their own piece of the pie, because the reviews are not so much reviews because we need to see whether everything is right, the reviews are an opportunity for leverage. So one of the things I would change is big buckets of infrastructure projects that have common interest, they have a regional implication, whether it's transportation or resiliency, they are lifted out of this excessive review process. Maybe it is that they just go through the federal process and they don't have as much state and local, in acknowledgement that we should not allow them to be politicized so much because it doesn't help anybody.
Jamie Rubin 22:59
It adds. It's the cost of compliance and all that stuff. But it is, it's just time. Every time somebody gets leverage, they add something to the project, or they change the project, or whatever, they get something that they want— that's never going to be less expensive.
Meera Joshi 23:18
And the time costs a lot too. I mean, I think construction is 13% [of cost] or whatever per day. It's like something astronomical, but you put 60 days extra on a project, and that's, you know, depending on the size of the project, that's multiple millions of dollars.
Get a skilled manager for government roles
Jamie Rubin 23:34
Periodically, people emerge who want to talk about how important it is to have a business person in charge of government. I think that's part of what we're seeing in DC.
Meera Joshi 23:45
Do we have a business person in charge in DC?
Jamie Rubin 23:51
We have capitalists. The problem with running a government agency, government bureaucracies, is you don't have the tools available to you that you have in the private sector. So you just kind of don't have a lot of those levers with most of the people. And that's what most business people are used to using to get their way, frankly, it's not magic. It's just leverage.
Meera Joshi 24:10
But I think in city government or any government, there are different types of business people, and some business people are really good managers, too. And so what I would look for is not a business person necessarily, [but] a really good manager, and they probably have used those skills in the business world, right? And the leverage you have in city government is not money, it's power and the ability to work on bigger projects, and the weird, addictive quality of staying in, and so that actually can be used really well to fuel people, in a way—it's the opportunity to work on so many great projects.
Adams indictments and scandal
Jamie Rubin 24:54
Part of the time that you were working for Mayor Adams, there was a sort of a haze of distractions—scandals, investigations, whatever. That didn't have anything with you, but they were around. Without getting much into them, how did that affect your ability to do your job?
Meera Joshi 25:13
When the indictments first came out, I immediately pulled the commissioners together, my team together, to remind them—many of them have worked for the city for a very long time, some of them had not, and this was very new and different to them—we have a dual role. We work for the Adams administration, and we work for the city, and so that really has to be the thing that fuels our focus on continuing the work. And in some ways, the infrastructure portfolio being a little drier and not as intertwined with many of the headlines helps, and also making sure that they saw progress on their projects, and they saw the benefits that they were bringing to New Yorkers, and got the gratitude of the work that they did. The thing that keeps public servants engaged in and keeps them excited about the work they're doing is there all the time. In a time like in September when the indictments came down, people really dug into that.
Jamie Rubin 26:33
My friend Bradley Tusk and I interviewed you after there was a series of resignations, and it was really you, Maria Torres-Springer, and Anne Williams-Isom, as the three key deputy mayors. After a bunch of resignations, we had you on his podcast, Firewall, and talked about exactly this—what do you do to keep going? What message do you want to send to the city? And I thought you all sent similar messages, and I would encourage people to go back and listen to that on Bradley's Firewall podcast, because it was, I thought, a really interesting and encouraging thing to hear from people about the nature of public service. And I think, and I'll say it again, and everybody said this at the time: in some ways, the city was best run during that period when it was you guys. A lot of the other stuff was out the door, because people resigned, if only to get the distraction out of the way. And it was just a very professionally managed government.
Meera Joshi 27:30
And the three of us got along, so that helps.
Jamie Rubin 27:34
And you were all professionals, it was just different. Everybody could feel it. I think it was just a very different environment. And City of Yes happened during that time—got a lot of stuff done in three years. This is not a political podcast, per se. Eric Adams, whatever is going to happen to him will happen. Maybe he'll be re-elected. Maybe not. I don't think it's accurate to say that he has not gotten anything done.
Mayor Adams’ record as mayor
Meera Joshi 28:05
He’s done a lot. And he's done some things that have evaded Bloomberg and de Blasio, like, we moved further on the BQE than ever before. So that's actually with the federal government to start the environmental review. We've started organics, which takes a third of the trash stream out. I know you hate it, but don't think about that. Containerization, which is a real ripping of the band aid off, and that will continue and be hard. Reforming scaffolding and redesigning the scaffolding so those new, redesigned scaffolds will come. And the key thing, and here I was very particular when we did the modification to the law—that DOB gets the authority to change the design of the scaffolding so they're not subject to the whims of the city council going forward. Now, that's decades that that has been a problem, that we were able to get that done. And then on Queensway, which is a new public park that will one day be in Queens along the old rail line. That's huge, it'll be the high line of the boroughs. Redesigning Fifth Avenue. I have no favorites, but my favorite public space project is underneath the Brooklyn Bridge on the Manhattan side, revitalizing all of that area. Tony Hawk got to skate on the banks, his lifetime dream. He finally got to do it. And ultimately opening up the vaults underneath there, which used to be a library and a restaurant and a beautiful space that everybody who comes over the Brooklyn Bridge will one day get to enjoy.
Jamie Rubin 29:56
He has been a really good housing mayor. Again, this is not an endorsement. It's just we need to put facts in front of people. He's been a very, very good housing mayor. He really has. So we have a mayoral election underway, also not asking you for an endorsement or even a normative assessment of the candidates, but I'm just curious. In your world, your part of the world, have any of the candidates in particular stuck out to you as saying something interesting or meaningful or thoughtful or whatever about the city's infrastructure?
Meera Joshi 30:30
I'm going to say this. It's kind of a boring job in some ways, being a mayor, right? Because it is a management job. What I would like to see is a sense of who they are going to pick to run those agencies, because at the end of the day, that is the make it or break it decision. Who are they going to be, how capable they are going to be, and how expert are they going to be to not only keep the state of good repair going, but to evolve the infrastructure, and so that's the key to it. And I haven't heard a lot about particulars, but they never do. I kind of wish they would start now a little bit, but it's a hard thing to do—but at least give us the broad strokes of what they envision as their management.
2025 mayoral race considerations, who they will hire
Jamie Rubin 31:18
I agree, I've looked for some of that stuff. It's always the same thing, “Oh we’re gonna pick the best people.” One of the things that I've noticed is that despite the fact that you've got at least a couple of candidates who probably would not say they're fans of Mike Bloomberg, they've all adopted the Bloomberg “I'm going to delegate” thing. That's where the world has gone. They all recognize it for whatever reason, that's how you have to do it to be successful. And they talk about delegating to really good people, but they don't, as you say, say, “Okay, here's some of the good people that I would love to have in my administration.” And it drives me sort of crazy, because you never do that when you're running for president, and the reason you don't do it is because the kind of people you would name if you propose, first of all, they're never gonna say yes. And second of all, they are immediately vetted, and everybody looks for the 58 horrible things that they did in their lives, and then you look like an idiot, and they have to say they won't do it, and you've brought yourself a world of political trouble. I don't think that would be true here. I think you could figure out people who would mean something, and make some statements about that—not just saying you're going to bring back Bill Bratton—who could survive vetting. And you know, we may be also in a different time when it's maybe not so important that you did something. You know, we seem to be in the post scandal age here, so more or less.
Meera Joshi 32:41
Look at Jesse Tisch, who I think is great, but because she's a great commissioner, now you start to see some of the candidates saying, “Well, yeah, I'll keep Jesse Tisch,” and that they know that that will bring favor. So that applies to really, every agency.
Jamie Rubin 32:58
Absolutely. Why wouldn't you just keep the people? Okay, what are you going to be doing next?
Meera’s next role at Green-Wood Cemetery
Meera Joshi 33:03
I'm very excited. I'm going to start on a big adventure that is about two blocks from my house. I will be the president of Green-Wood Cemetery. And for the listeners who haven't been to Green-Wood Cemetery, shame on you, now you must go, but it is 478 acres of absolutely exquisite green space in Brooklyn. We have everybody from Leonard Bernstein to Basquiat buried there. There are all kinds of memorials to the people that are there, from huge statues to very small and unmarked and now, in the modern times, green burials. There's also a crematorium. There's only four crematoriums in the city, and one of them is at Green-Wood. The challenge ahead for that with local law 97 will be, how do you electrify that? If we're successful, it will be the first electric crematorium in the nation, so maybe the start of a new movement. But I think one of the most exciting things is it's not just a cemetery. It is a cultural institution. So I have a lot ahead of me, a lot to learn.
Jamie Rubin 34:17
How big is the workforce? [Meera: 100 people?] Anything over three people's management.
Meera Joshi 34:24
I’m really excited.
Jamie Rubin 34:29
They're lucky to have you. One of my favorite New York thrillers has some Green-Wood scenes—A Walk Among the Tombstones. I think it's Green-Wood. It's great. It's from a book by Lawrence Block, who's one of the really great New York noir writers. And there's a whole Green-Wood piece. It's sort of fun. They're very lucky. Meera, thank you, it’s good to talk to you.
Meera Joshi 35:00
Yeah, good talking to you too.
Jamie’s concluding remarks
Jamie Rubin 35:09
I look at everything right now in the context of the mayoral campaign, and specifically the primaries that are taking place here in New York in about a week. It's really striking how little of the candidate dialog on debates or anywhere else, touches on any of the issues that Meera talked about, even though, as she said, these are basically the things that directly impact every single New Yorker every day.
So we hear a lot about housing, public education, and public safety. Well, you may not live in subsidized housing, you may not send your kids to public schools. You may not ever interact with a policeman. But you definitely use the sewers, you walk on the streets, and you dodge bikes, and you depend on the trash collection on a regular cycle. These are all the things that only get attention, as Meera said, in the political realm, when something goes absolutely wrong. Otherwise, we basically take them for granted, and very little seems to go wrong in a public or catastrophic way, which is, in my view, kind of a miracle.
The guts of the largest and most complicated city government in America by far, operates largely without comment from the public. That seems like a good thing. On the other hand, maybe it means that New Yorkers have kind of lowered their expectations over time to the point where flawed service is basically the norm.
If you live in Southeast Queens and you've been waiting a decade for DEP to stop your basement from flooding literally every time it rains, you probably think that the city is on a par with Flint, Michigan, in terms of how it handles rainwater. How else to explain the fact that Jessica Tisch, who was commissioner of sanitation under Mayor Adams, and now, of course, is the police commissioner, was treated as the second coming of Henry Ford because she replaced piles of garbage bags with plastic trash cans, something that basically every suburb in the world seems to have figured out how to do. Or how do you explain the wonder in people's eyes when they talk about the five minutes that they saved in traffic because of congestion pricing? My guess is that the truth is somewhere, as always, in between, but we're getting to the point where a lot of our civic infrastructure is far enough past its useful life that it needs replacement, which means the next set of mayors, the one we're about to elect, and the one after that, and probably the one after that and so on, are going to need to make some really dramatic decisions in areas that the last few were perfectly happy to ignore.
But that may open up some really interesting possibilities, accelerating the pace of overhauling the guts of the city, the BQE, the sewers, landfills, water, wastewater treatment plants, will require much more creative funding and completely redoing the procurement and government processes that control the pace and expense of doing this work, because this is really expensive, time consuming work otherwise, and we simply aren't going to have the time.
Believe it or not, I actually think there's room for a celebrity infrastructure deputy mayor, just like we've had celebrity police commissioners and school chancellors, it's happened before. As a matter of fact, parks commissioner Henry Stern under Mayor Koch and MTA’s Andy Byford under Mayor de Blasio were genuinely popular figures in what were typically under the radar roles. In fact, I really think Meera Joshi could have pulled that off. She's high energy and smart and has real vision.
Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back with another episode of After Hours with Jamie Rubin.
➡️ You can listen to the episode here, or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.