NEW YORK — A challenger to Mayor Eric Adams rolling out an ethics plan as he formally announces Thursday — a clear play for voters frustrated by the indicted incumbent’s scandals.
Top of former City Comptroller Scott Stringer’s list: a proposed ban on political donations from anybody doing business with the city and a one-year waiting period for lobbyists getting city jobs.
“Corruption isn’t just a failure of governance. It really is a betrayal of the people,” Stringer said in an interview. “City Hall has been working for the privileged few. They’re working for the few, not the many, and when I’m there, we’re going to reclaim the city, and this is how we’re going to do it.”
His ethics platform, which he shared in advance with POLITICO, also includes restrictions on limitless independent expenditures.
Stringer formed a campaign last year to run against Adams, and is formally launching his bid with a media blitz, a fundraiser on the Upper West Side of Manhattan — Stringer’s home turf — and a series of policy proposals. One includes reclaiming neglected housing from landlords and hiring 3,000 more cops. The latter underscores the degree to which Democrats’ views on policing have shifted: Stringer himself called for cuts to police budgets when he was a candidate for mayor last cycle.
“If you allow yourself to get stuck in 2021,” Stringer said when asked about moving away from his previous positions, “then you’ve been asleep for the last four years of what’s actually happening in this city.”
Stringer has spent more time as an elected official than anyone else running for mayor, most recently serving two terms in the watchdog role of comptroller during Mayor Bill de Blasio’s tenure. A serious ethics plan could help bolster Stringer’s campaign’s tagline: “Vision. Experience. Competence.”
Stringer’s ethics platform includes a proposal to prohibit those doing business with the city from making any campaign contributions or giving to independent expenditure committees, which spend heavily to influence city races. Adams benefitted from millions of dollars in independent spending on his behalf in 2021.
And Stringer proposes “strict penalties” on those who break the rules.
Currently, lobbyists, contractors and others in a city business database are limited to giving $400 to mayoral campaigns, and those donations can’t be matched with public financing.
Stringer is also pushing for “transparent budgets,” including budget lines for each municipal capital project, and a faster procurement process that makes vendors’ proposals available for public review. He’s unveiling these proposals on the same day Adams will release the city’s preliminary budget.
City Comptroller Brad Lander is focusing on procurement reform in his mayoral bid as well.
“There has not been the accountability that should have been in place for the Adams administration,” Stringer said. “Brad has been asleep at the switch for the last two years.”
Lander campaign spokesperson Dora Pekec said Stringer repeatedly praised Lander’s work before they became 2025 opponents. “Given that Brad is outpacing him in fundraising, political support and momentum in this race, it’s no surprise he’s suddenly changed his tune, and is aiming his sad, desperate arrows up at Brad now,” she said.
Stringer’s plan also proposes a two-way lobbying ban. Most city employees are already prohibited from lobbying their former agencies for a year after leaving the job. He’d extend that to two years, in line with a bill under consideration by the City Council.
He also wants to block city agencies from hiring people who have lobbied them in the past year, “breaking the cycle of insider influence.”
This would be a “first-in-the-nation restriction,” Stringer’s plan says. That’s because it’s not a good idea, John Kaehny, executive director of the government ethics watchdog Reinvent Albany, said.
City law requires many people to register as lobbyists, not just those who work for actual lobbying firms, but in-house advocates at nonprofits as well. “If you put this rule in place, it means you would take out the management level of every single advocacy group in New York City from being able to serve in government,” Kaehny said. Stringer’s plan would mean no advocates from New Yorkers for Parks or the Central Park Conservancy could join the Parks Department, Kaehny said.
Stringer said he would not hire any lobbyists into his mayoral administration. But the campaign is not adhering to the donor restrictions he wants to impose, having accepted contributions from several lobbyists including from firms Capalino and Oaktree and the real estate developer RXR.
Since leaving office in 2021 and losing that year’s mayoral primary, Stringer has been consulting for a variety of clients. He declined to share his client list, telling POLITICO he would do so when he files his required financial disclosure report due later this month.
Government reform platforms generally play well to the voters Stringer is vying for — college-education, left-of-center Democrats in Manhattan who turn out for off-cycle primaries.
They also highlight the weaknesses of the incumbent mayor.
Federal prosecutors indicted the mayor on bribery and campaign finance-related charges in September, he was pushed to oust several aides whose homes were raided in separate matters and his chief adviser stepped down last month one day before she was charged in a city bribery scheme.
Stringer’s last mayoral campaign was derailed by an alleged ethical lapse of his own, when he was accused of sexually harassing a campaign volunteer 20 years earlier. He denied all wrongdoing and sued the former volunteer, Jean Kim, for defamation. That case is ongoing.
Stringer declined to comment on the particulars and sounded confident when asked what he learned from the 2021 campaign.
“The difference between 2021 and 2025,” he said, “is I’m going to win this time.”