Mayor Eric Adams prides himself on a busy schedule.
“We need to do some off-topics because I got a jump in a minute,” Adams said in March, a phrase he uses often.
But this grind includes plenty of grins and photo opportunities amid challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic, rising crime and a housing crisis.
Adams’ ribbon cuttings have included the North American headquarters of a project management software company, a new middle school in Queens, and Ghostface Killah’s Staten Island coffee company.
“We want a killah coffee in the morning,” Adams said in a May TikTok posted to his account.
Distant and obscure politicians who have had an audience with Adams include the mayor of Uskudar – a borough of Istanbul, Turkey – and at least one of Paris’s 163 councilors.
Then there are shows, galas and dinners for groups like the German-American Chamber of Commerce and the Fujian Gongyu Chamber of Commerce.
An NY1 review of Adams’ schedules after nearly nine months in office revealed that no event seemed too small – even for the mayor of a city facing crisis after crisis.
While the six months of private and public schedules obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request do not provide a complete picture of Adam’s itineraries, they do shed light on how he fills his days and nights by embracing the social and the Political mixed up.
NY1 recorded 2,091 planning commitments from the mayor between January 4 and June 30, an average of more than 11 per day.
The count does not include blocks of time labeled “Travel,” “Administration,” or opaquely “Stopping for the Mayor.”
A NY1 check of just its public schedules for the following three months, July 1 through Tuesday, finds 300 events.
“The fact that Mayor Adams is making himself available to New Yorkers every day and attending events that previous mayors have refused is something we are very proud of,” said Adams spokesman Fabien Levy. “Mayor Adams gets up early every morning and often finishes his nights very late when inspecting the subway system or homeless shelters.”
On Tuesday, several New Yorkers at the Jacob Riis homes, where tenants were briefly kept in the dark over an arsenic scare, said they believe Adams is more interested in taking pictures than in their well-being.
“Most of the time I saw the mayor was [the election]. He was really visible there,” said community leader David Brasuell. “Otherwise he was visible to the water thing in the last few weeks because, as I said, his back was against the wall.”
