NYC-Mayor: NYT Endorses Former Sanitation Department Commissioner Kathryn Garcia (D)

The New York Times Editorial Board officially made their endorsement today for the next Mayor of New York City and it’s a very compelling endorsement:

All of the candidates in the June 22 Democratic primary are concerned with the welfare of their city and have thoughtful ideas about how to better it. It is Kathryn Garcia who best understands how to get New York back on its feet and has the temperament and the experience to do so. Ms. Garcia has our endorsement in perhaps the most consequential mayoral contest in a generation.

Voters could be forgiven for knowing little about Ms. Garcia. The pandemic has, to an alarming degree, hustled the hustings out of the neighborhoods and onto Zoom. The early polls in the race show that simple name recognition can have a big impact — on the early polls. Many primary voters say they haven’t made up their minds. So we’d like to help them.

A go-to problem solver for the past decade, Ms. Garcia was hard to miss at City Hall — a confident, gravelly-voiced woman who ran an overwhelmingly male Sanitation Department. She has a zeal for making government work better and was often known to show up ahead of a 6 a.m. shift for roll call not to micromanage but to find out how her people were doing.

At the Department of Environmental Protection under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, when swaths of New York City lost power during Superstorm Sandy, knocking out the city’s wastewater treatment systems, it was Ms. Garcia who got them back up and running.

When she arrived at the Sanitation Department as commissioner in 2014, snowplow routes were still maintained on paper. Ms. Garcia modernized the system, finally allowing the agency to track snowplows in real time through the city’s 19,000 lane miles. She cut traffic from commercial garbage trucks in half, making streets quieter, safer and less polluted.

In 2019, in the wake of a lead paint scandal that sickened hundreds of children living in public housing, Mayor Bill de Blasio tapped Ms. Garcia to lead an overhaul of the New York City Housing Authority. That summer, childhood lead poisoning fell by 21 percent from the same period the year before.

When the coronavirus struck, she shifted trash pickup to late night and early morning hours, an effort to protect thousands of city workers and the public they normally interact with. She also managed an operation that has delivered more than 200 million meals to hungry New Yorkers during the pandemic.

The primary is June 22nd. Click here to learn more and get involved with Garcia’s campaign.