When the newly seated City Council meets next week, one of its first major decisions will be how to respond to 19 vetoes former Mayor Eric Adams issued on his last day in office, which block measures that would have expanded street vendor licenses, barred ICE from maintaining offices at Rikers Island, and given the city’s police watchdog direct access to officers’ body camera footage.
Adams' move on New Year’s Eve amounted to a final thumb in the eye of a City Council he'd feuded with throughout his administration.
“My team has worked diligently and in good faith to find common ground with the City Council on our shared priorities, but the Council, once again, proved unwilling to temper its reckless legislation,” Adams said in a statement.
Presumptive Council Speaker Julie Menin blasted Adams’ last-minute vetoes in her own statement.
“Rather than working collaboratively with the Council, the Adams administration has too often sidelined the legislative process,” she said. “For years, agencies failed to provide basic data, commissioners skipped hearings, and meaningful negotiations were pushed to the last minute.”
All but one of the bills — a controversial rule that would have given community groups and nonprofits first dibs to purchase certain distressed residential properties — initially passed with enough votes to overcome a veto.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s office did not respond to a request for comment about his predecessor’s last-minute vetoes. However, Mamdani had previously signaled support for increasing the number of street vending licenses, arguing it would help decrease “halal-flation,” a reference to rising prices at the city’s food carts.
The Council had passed the bill to expand street vending along with a second piece of legislation that would have created a new Division of Street Vendor Assistance to help connect vendors with resources and services.
The legislation prohibiting ICE from operating on Rikers Island came in response to a pledge Adams had made early last year to allow immigration agents to open an office on the island. That move was later stalled due to a lawsuit brought by the City Council.
The bill granting the Civilian Complaint Review Board direct, real-time access to body-cam footage has been a longtime priority of outgoing City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams. The police union has characterized it as an “unfair overreach.”
Among the other bills Adams targeted in his last-minute move were a piece of legislation that would have required police to get a guardian’s permission before collecting DNA from a minor, and a rule that would have prohibited services like Uber and Lyft from deactivating a driver’s account without just cause or economic reasons.
Adams sought to frame his vetoes as common sense. In his statement he argued that the bills would have worsened the city’s housing crisis, created new unfunded mandates, an “untested new licensing regime” for vendors and violated state laws regarding labor and law enforcement.
The city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection knocked Adam’s decision on a number of the vetoes, including the vendor licenses and the ride-share bill, posting on X that it was “wrong to let a software algorithm decide when to fire a worker, and it should be illegal.”
The City Council is scheduled to have its first meeting on Wednesday.
Menin has already pledged to override another veto. On Christmas Eve, Adams returned a bill that sought to open a new 18-month “lookback” window for victims of sexual abuse to file claims and potentially revive hundreds of sex-abuse lawsuits against the city.
