Mayor Adams appointed a transit advocate, Ya-Ting Liu, to fill a new role that was created by Mayor Eric Adams to improve how the city uses and manages its public spaces, including parks, plazas and streets.

From the article:

>She will also focus on citywide issues, such as helping to develop lasting guidelines for outdoor dining. Ms. Liu, who will work from City Hall with a team of four staff members, will take the lead on the mayor’s efforts to create and expand public spaces with $375 million in city funding, including reopening a popular skateboard spot below the Brooklyn Bridge.

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Don’t we already have a whole department called, I don’t know, parks and recreation that’s supposed to do stuff like this?

Did he hire a rat Czar yet?

LOL the anecdote in the beginning of the article is about how this city is either too stupid or too lazy (or both) to change a light bulb in a public space.

I am glad that Adams has promoted one of his City Hall subordinates to "czar" status to tackle pressing city issues such as this.

Literally everything about this new role that is outlined in the Times article is stuff that is already under the purview of existing NYC departments.

Because nothing results in positive outcomes and good use of tax dollars like more bureaucracy to fix inefficiency of existing government.

There's nothing Mayors love more than creating a Task force or Committee or creating a new mayoral agency that is attempted to do what other city agencies already do. This will be a department of 4-5 people with 6 figure jobs. They will accomplish nothing but slow down the process at the city agencies doing the work.

While the new Czar of the Realm formally outranks the Rat Czar, we all know where the real power behind the throne lies

Good luck with Greenstreets!

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>“It’s been eight years of working between agencies trying to get stuff done,” said Ms. King, who looks forward to a more streamlined process in the future. “Think of how many brain cells die in the process. You start to lose your mind.”

This can go both ways. If it's just another bureaucratic layer. Things will get worse.

But if her role will cut through the bureaucracy so that departments spend less effort passing the buck around and more effort solving problems, this might be good.

Let us hope for the best.

I would love to be the rat czar tbh

The "Czar" terminology should have ended with the Obama administration who made it so popular and folksy.

I'm pretty sure that job posting was mostly a joke for press. Surely there are already a few people in the Department of Sanitation who have that job.

The Rats

I think it's common in a lot of public and quasi-public institutions (museums, universities, NGOs, etc.). When the organization has ballooned up to hundreds of staff members and ossified administrative procedures, leadership will launch new initiatives that are usually just existing departments with fewer hoops to jump through, the attention of the executives, and more money allocated via grants for "exciting new work." Consultants and short-term staff (~5 yr tenure) are brought on and paid large sums of money to do work that could have already been done with a re-structuring of existing protocols.

My hunch is that this allows leadership to not actually have to dig down into the institutions they're a part of. They can remain at the highest levels, interacting only with 6-figure salary people (usually hired by the current leadership), without having to actually see how the sausage is made at the place they're in charge of.