The mayor has not been a fan. While unveiling the city’s $107 billion budget last week, Adams went out of his way to needle the Brooklyn progressive. And during a media briefing weeks before that, he lit up New York City political Twitter by mocking Lander with an unflattering impersonation.

The episodes have cast the progressive ombudsman of city government as the moderate mayor’s archrival — even as Lander has been cautious in his approach. And the increasing tension is setting up a broader collision course between the left and center factions of the local Democratic Party.

“If Brad Lander decides to really go to war with the mayor, he can be so much more aggravating to him,” Chris Coffey, a Democratic political strategist who worked for former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, said. “On the flip side, Brad makes a pretty good punching bag for a mayor who is at times at odds with the organized left.”

What comes next could impact Adams’ reelection bid, arm the left wing of the party with institutional firepower and provide a platform for the comptroller to potentially mount a mayoral campaign of his own down the road.

“Having the numbers and the proof in the pudding puts Brad in a position of power,” said Camille Rivera, a progressive strategist who did a stint in the de Blasio administration. “And that makes him a de facto leader in the progressive party.”

Both Adams’ and Lander’s offices declined to comment on the growing rift between the two citywide politicians, who took very different paths as they came up through the cutthroat world of Brooklyn politics.

The loudest person in New York City

In 2009, Lander — who is as reserved as Adams is outspoken — won a Park Slope Council seat backed by the left-leaning Working Families Party and subsequently co-founded the body’s Progressive Caucus.

Four years later, Adams easily won the Brooklyn borough president race while aligned with the moderate leadership of the Brooklyn Democratic Party — including the organization’s counsel, attorney Frank Carone, who would go on to become Adams’ first chief of staff in City Hall.

Unsurprisingly, clashes ensued.

In 2018, Lander lambasted Adams’ move to funnel $1 million in participatory budgeting money to Jesse Hamilton, a close ally to the mayor who was running against a Brooklyn progressive. (Hamilton lost, and now has a job at City Hall.)

A year later, Lander and Adams found themselves on opposite sides of a heated neighborhood spat over a popular Brooklyn brunch spot. The restaurant was run by close friends of Adams’ and catered to a largely Black clientele.

Several Brooklyn electeds signed a letter calling for the restaurant’s liquor license to be suspended, citing numerous complaints from neighbors about the antics of drunken patrons. Adams defended his friends — who’d hired Carone as their attorney — and called the opposition to Woodland racist. Lander, who was one of the signatories, said the restaurant owner (who is white and is also involved in the mayor’s favorite Midtown haunt) was manufacturing a race issue to distract from his failure to comply with the law.

After winning the comptroller’s race in 2021, Lander and Adams appeared to start off amicably, even though the two have vastly different styles and political leanings. The duo announced a joint task force before taking office focused on improved payments to nonprofits.

But things soon began to sour.

In his role as the city’s chief watchdog, Lander’s office scrutinizes every contract the city signs with outside vendors, employs a small army of auditors and issues reports that are then trumpeted from a prominent bully pulpit. These findings can gain significant traction in the press and therefore make the comptroller an institutional foil to City Hall — a main reason the office is used as a springboard to run for mayor.

With those tools in hand, Lander has weighed in on major issues facing the city: He released a report tracking the high vacancy rate in city government jobs along with a subsequent study that linked low staffing numbers to poor service delivery. In response, the Adams administration blamed a national labor shortage, but modified hiring parameters to attract more talent.

After Adams visited the southern border to see El Paso’s response to the influx of migrants last year, Lander criticized the trip, saying it reinforced a “harmful narrative that new immigrants themselves are a problem.” Adams accused Lander of playing politics.

Then in early June, the comptroller questioned Adams’ delayed response to a plume of Canadian forest fire smoke that briefly shrouded the city in a post-apocalyptic haze. He also traveled to Rikers Island to renew his call for a federal takeover of the local jail complex that’s seen three inmate deaths this year — a change in authority the mayor vehemently opposes.

Those actions appeared to send the mayor over the edge, cementing Lander as his chief irritant.

At a June 8 press conference on the asylum-seeker crisis, Adams — unprompted — questioned whether the comptroller had adequately advocated for reimbursements from the federal government.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you. What?” the mayor said. “Brad Lander, the loudest person in the city, has yet to go to Washington to deal with the number one issue that this city’s facing. Think about that for a moment.”

Adams then switched to a nasally voice — somewhere near Robin Williams in Mork and Mindy — that was meant to resemble Lander.

“‘I think Eric should…’” he said, before ending the impression and repeating, “The loudest person in the city has yet to go to Washington, D.C.”

In a radio appearance weeks later, Lander defended his positions while insisting his critiques were part of the job description — all while retaining his buttoned-up tenor.

“The Charter assigns the comptroller the job of oversight of the mayor and his agencies, and when you think we’re not getting the competent government that we need, it’s my job to be loud — that’s what the job is,” Lander told WNYC’s Brian Lehrer, later adding, “I try to keep it respectful. I would not mock or do an impression of someone else.”

A careful approach

Adams’ imitation is further proof of the mayor’s tendency to forcefully push back on all manner of criticism directed at his administration: Within the last two months he has scolded City Council members en masse on a call and compared an 84-year-old Holocaust survivor to a plantation owner.

“Most mayors are thin-skinned because they … believe they are never wrong,” former Public Advocate and mayoral candidate Mark Green said in an interview. “But Eric is blistered by moonbeams.”

And yet, the incoming from Lander could be worse. Much worse.

By this time in his tenure in 1995, former Comptroller Alan Hevesi was already engaging in an epic fight with former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani over a potential sale of the city’s water system. Hevesi then launched his bid for Gracie Mansion in 2001.

Weeks after former Comptroller John Liu took office in 2010, a contract for an automated payroll system landed on his desk. Liu, who had mayoral ambitions, rejected the troubled contract, which would balloon into a full-blown scandal for the Bloomberg administration.

And after winning office in 2013, former Comptroller Scott Stringer came out swinging. Stringer released a harsh analysis of former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s free pre-kindergarten program, setting up nearly eight years of acrimony. In 2021, Stringer became one of Adams’ competitors in the Democratic mayoral primary.

Now, Lander himself is signaling what a more sustained pressure campaign against Adams might look like.

In the immediate aftermath of the mayor’s mockery, he declined to approve a contract pertaining to health benefits for unionized municipal retirees — a largely symbolic move that endeared the comptroller to the former city workers and reinforced the idea that the mayor is diminishing the quality of their health insurance. The mayor’s office registered the contract anyway, calling it an improvement for retirees.

Two days later, Lander released a sharp statement criticizing the administration’s implementation of a 2021 law setting a minimum wage for delivery workers for businesses like GrubHub and Seamless.

“City Hall acquiesced to the lobbying of multi-billion dollar app companies, delaying the raises owed to deliveristas six months ago and setting a subminimum wage standard that pads corporate profits off the backs of some of the hardest workers in our city,” he said.

Lander’s office said the contract denial was a coincidence of timing and that, because he was the lead sponsor of a delivery worker pay bill while in the Council, he has consistently released strong statements about it.

Last week, however, he took a much bigger swing at the mayor.

A risky prospect

On June 28, Lander released his first major audit of the Adams administration, which focused on the mayor’s controversial initiative to clear homeless encampments in 2022.

Adams said that the idea was to connect New Yorkers living on the streets to care instead of turning a blind eye. Lander’s audit found just 47 people out of 2,308 who were forcibly removed from encampments in 2022 remained in homeless shelters as of January. Only three had been placed in permanent housing.

In response to the probe, the city said the program has been successful in convincing more homeless individuals to accept help compared to prior efforts, and many encampments have not returned. At a press briefing revealing his findings, Lander said the policy did more harm than good.

“The sweeps not only failed utterly to meet their stated goals, they also damaged the trust that outreach workers rely on to build the relationships that will actually enable them to connect people to services,” he said.

Audits of city agencies can take a year or more to complete, meaning Lander, whose name is frequently mentioned as a future mayoral candidate, is only getting started. But increasing the intensity of his critiques could come with serious political risk.

Running for mayor is about building coalitions. And while Lander might have a natural base with the left wing of the Democratic Party — that is not necessarily enough to win.

“Brad seems to understand politics is about addition, not subtraction,” a former comptroller official said. “And if you have a strong foothold with the progressives, then you need to go get some moderates.”

Adams, for example, was elected by a strong coalition of Black and Latino voters. Lander risks alienating that crucial bloc if he puts too much pressure on the mayor, according to Basil Smikle Jr., the director of a Hunter College public policy program and former executive director of the state Democratic Party.

The risk is especially high because Adams, who is Black, can connect with his base in a way that Lander, who is white, cannot.

“[Lander has] got to make sure to pick and choose battles carefully so he doesn’t alienate these groups he might need down the road,” Smikle said. “And because of the added layer of race, he has got to be even more careful.”

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