The indictment of Mayor Adams for corruption is an historic opportunity to reboot open government in New York City

As always, thank you for subscribing and amplifying Civic Texts, which will not be sustainable without you. Many thanks to everyone who has supported my work, particularly folks who have subscribed to memberships since our soft launch in April. 

Please keep sharing these newsletters on social media and forwarding them on email. Organic growth by word of mouth and social recommendations is incredibly helpful. You can always write to me with questions, comments, tips, features, or other feedback at alex@governing.digital or call/text at 410-849-9808. 

Good afternoon from Washington, where many eyes remain turned northwards to New York City and an expanding corruption scandal. I'd planned to write about something else, but this is too important to me as a New Yorker, American, and good government advocate to let flow by without comment.

For the first time in American history, a sitting Mayor of New York has been charged with public corruption by federal prosecutors, as detailed in a sprawling indictment unsealed this morning. The investigation began back in 2021, when prosecutors alleged Adams began conspiring with the Turkish government to receive illegal foreign campaign contributions in exchange for abusing entrusted power for his personal benefit. In a word, public corruption.

Mayor Eric Adams has remained defiant last night and today after being charged with bribery, fraud, and soliciting campaign donations, amid growing calls to resign – including from yours truly, for what little good it will do.

The parallels to the indictment and conviction of former Senator Robert Menendez for corruption earlier this year are obvious and notable, with respect to a foreign government – in this case Turkey, in that case Egypt – influencing an elected official. As with that case, accountability for corruption will help rebuild trust in American democracy and the rule of law.

What remains unclear is whether we'll ever see accountability for emolumental corruption from Egypt and other foreign governments, much less conspiracy to defraud the United States.

What is much clearer is that

1) New York City needs a new mayor, ASAP, to stabilize the administration of one of the biggest, most complicated city-states on earth

2) The New York Police Department needs to be placed under a consent decree by the Justice Department to address unconstitutional policing, rampant secrecy, and a pattern and practice of unaccountability for misconduct, and

3) New York City Council will need to invest in strengthening New York’s institutions to check corruption and rebuild shaken trust after a public corruption scandal whose impact will linger long after this administration ends with a bang — or a whimper.

Whether Adams resigns, is forced out by New York Governor Kathy Hochul, or is voted out of office by New Yorkers, this governance crisis cand and should lead to reshaping how the government of one of the greatest cities on Earth works.

New Yorkers deserve so much better.

As it happens, there might be such an opportunity in the days and months ahead – once Adams is gone. Just as it was implausible that a corrupt businessman would be able to lead a domestic or international movement on good governance, it remains implausible that Adams can ever be an avatar for government transparency and accountability in Gotham City.

Whomever Adams follows in New York City, however, can learn from why President Biden's opaque approach to good governance after the most corrupt administration in American history has been flailing and failing to restore public trust in the federal government after a historic pandemic, unpresidented maladministration, and official lies.

Back in April 2024, New York City joined the Open Government Partnership, alongside 54 other local governments. If you haven't heard about it, you might be forgiven: as far as I can tell, the City and its mayor has never held a press conference about joining.

While New York City's page on the Partnership website claims that the "co-creation process between government and civil society is currently ongoing," there is no public evidence that that's true: no releases, draft commitments, workshops and readouts, ideation forums, or media coverage of them.

The only public statements about New York City's intent to participate in the Open Government Partnership I've been able to find came during a public forum convened on May 29, 2024 by the Open Government Secretariat at the General Services Administration, when Betsy MacLean, chief policy & innovation officer in the New York City Mayor’s Office of Policy & Planning joined a panel discussion.

This was the first U.S. government event held during "OpenGovWeek" for many years. (Sadly, it excluded civil society voices who might have offered more context and perspective about the United States experience with democracy and government transparency over the last decade. Sidelining critics is not the OGP way, but it’s all too often been this White House’s.)

I've embedded the recording of that video below. Presentations, overview, and agenda are also publicly accessible, thanks to the Secretariat's excellent work maintaining a public record of public meetings over the first year of its existence.

Given the opportunity to ask questions in this public forum, I did exactly that, enjoying a welcome feedback loop between queries posed in chat and the participants. Open government in action!

MacLean answered this one on screen: "Are you not worried that the people who feel most isolated and despondent will not provide the qualitative data that tells you How New Yorkers are doing?"

We do a lot of partnering with community based organizations. Using the trusted messenger model, we partner with groups that have worked in communities for a long time and where folks trust them know that they can go to them for good advice and for good services and then we listen to those organizations. I think some of the best work that we've done over the last few years is with these organizations. It’s a trust-based philanthropy. We partner with giving based organizations funds without a million restrictions and reporting requirements and trust that they know best what to do with the money. We took this approach for benefits access. We partnered with 39 community based organizations in different communities in different parts of the city. We let these organizations tell us how they are going to use the money and report on how it went. I think if we do more partnering with community organizations, we will reach the folks that we really both want and need to reach the most. We also meet folks where they are by scheduling meetings within communities. We make it easy to get there, provide childcare, food, and money whenever possible.We make sure we're valuing people's time. That is super critical. We also make sure we're providing translation and interpretation. We often are in communities that speak multiple languages. We are super intentional about including folks who have the greatest barriers to participation.

What I didn't realize until some time later, however, is that officials would circle back offline, write answers in response to some the questions we asked in the chat, and then upload a PDF with a spreadsheet.

Sadly, none of the government participants have since committed to re-engaging ongoing feedback loops over on the U.S. Open Government list-serv, where such conversations go back over a decade. (White House commitments to improve public engagement for other agencies look good on paper or in pixels during global summits, but aren't always followed up in action after.)

On the one hand, MacLean ignored almost all of my written questions about New York City's plans and the void in public information about the city's involvement.

On the other, she did circle back to answer this one: "Did New York City talk with New Yorkers about applying to OGP before you did it? Did any civil society organizations endorse the application, as they did in Austin? Who are New York City’s partners? Will you create an advisory committee and multi-stakeholder network to support the co-creation process?"

We were inspired by our colleagues at People Powered, including Josh Lerner, who encouraged us to apply. It felt like a good first step in our journey. We are super brand new to OGP. NYC was accepted just a few months ago, so there is a lot of work to be done to socialize the idea across the Administration. We will be partnering with organizations as we put our plan together and determine next steps. We will engage with the community on our plan, goals, and big picture vision for what we want open government in New York to look like. There has been a lot of great work done already so we will build on that work.

The expanding corruption scandal in the Adams administration has made pursuing commitments to government transparency and accountability challenging, but New York City's journey is far from over.

The city now faces a impending deadline from the Open Government Partnership to actually produce a first action plan and then implement it – all within a two year cycle.

Despite OGP's helpful laundering of New York City's claims to be working on a plan, there's still no public evidence of meaningful co-creation with millions of New Yorkers who now have even more good reason to be skeptical of the city's commitments to transparency, accountability, participation, and collaboration.

But that could change, and with it the public perception of the relevance of former President Barack Obama's "signature good governance" initiative in the United States.

It's possible that we might see both New York City and the federal government pursue co-creation of new open government plans in the winter of 2024, which would then be implemented by new administrations. It's plausible that the elevated profile of those efforts could finally lead to the positive impact in the United States that has so far been missing.

As a skeptical optimist, that's a forecast I'd like to see come pass. Winter is coming, either way, as our nation and one of its biggest cities stands at a crosswords. Here's hoping that we see governments that prove more worthy of our public trust in the year ahead.