Former First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan, a de Blasio administration alum, will return to Metropolis Corridor beneath Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, who additionally appointed longtime aide Elle Bisgaard-Church as his incoming chief of employees.
Photograph by Lloyd Mitchell
Former First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan, a de Blasio administration alum, will return to Metropolis Corridor beneath Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, who additionally appointed longtime aide Elle Bisgaard-Church as his incoming chief of employees.
A veteran of each metropolis and state authorities relationship again to the Nineteen Seventies, Dean Fuleihan served as Invoice de Blasio’s right-hand man in Metropolis Corridor from 2018 by means of 2021, with duties that included advising the then-mayor on managing the NYPD, the Division of Schooling, and the Division of Investigation.
Mamdani final week unveiled a workforce of girls who will assist lead the transition into his administration, together with 4 with ties to the previous de Blasio Administration: Melanie Hartzog, Maria Torres-Springer, Elana Leopold, and Grace Bonilla.
Requested on Monday whether or not his mayoralty is shaping as much as be de Blasio 2.0, Mamdani dismissed the comparisons.
“I am going to create a new City Hall… We are making our own,” he stated. 5 of his seven appointees introduced to this point are de Blasio administration alums.
“We are lucky that there are many who have come before us who have shown us both the ways in which we can succeed and the pitfalls that await those who look to do so,” he added.
Mamdani brings on a Metropolis Corridor vet
Fuleihan, 74, personally oversaw a number of departments in the course of the de Blasio years at Metropolis Corridor, together with the Workplace of Administration and Funds, the Workplace of Labor Relations, and the Workplace of Local weather Coverage and Packages. He started his political profession as a coverage analyst for the state Meeting in 1978 and was the Meeting’s principal employees negotiator for the state price range.
Photograph by Lloyd Mitchell
Introducing him on the Roosevelt Home on the Higher East Aspect, Mamdani stated he would depend on Fuleihan “for counsel, not only for his wealth of managerial experience, but also because of the similarity between our visions for this city.”
“Dean is a child of Lebanese immigrants, and like me, he has seen our city through the prism of the immigrant experience, and knows well that there are many New Yorkers who our leaders never tend to,” Mamdani stated.
He praised Fuleihan’s “steadiness, his managerial competence and his clarity of vision” as important to “deliver what politics can be in this city that we call home.”
Fuleihan stated he was “proud to be returning to City Hall” and thanked Mamdani “for the privilege of joining the administration and the trust you’re placing in me to serve our city.”
He highlighted his expertise guiding New York by means of “numerous state budgets and serious economic challenges” as causes he’s ready to hold out Mamdani’s affordability agenda.
Fuleihan added that from the early phases of the mayor-elect’s marketing campaign, it was the “aggressiveness, warmth, and hope” of the brand new mayor’s agenda that made him open to “help in any way I could.”
“I firmly believe in this agenda, and I’m proud to join a team that will be devoted to this agenda and will work every day to make it happen,” he stated.
Mamdani’s election architect turns into chief of employees
Elle Bisgaard-Church has been considered one of Mamdani’s closest advisers since his time in Albany and managed his rebel mayoral bid in the course of the Democratic major, remodeling him from an underdog to a victor.
After the first win, Bisgaard-Church served as chief advisor to the final election marketing campaign. She holds twin grasp’s levels in public administration from Columbia College’s Faculty of Worldwide and Public Affairs and the London Faculty of Economics.
Mamdani known as her “unapologetically committed to the cause of improving the lives of working people” and described her as “our moral compass, our brilliant strategic center, and a genuinely kind and selfless person.”
Bisgaard-Church stated the marketing campaign confirmed voters count on Metropolis Corridor to ship actual enhancements.
“A million people said last week that they want more from City Hall, that they expect better from their leaders. They said loudly and clearly, it is not asking too much that New York be a place people can afford to live,” she stated.
Photograph by Lloyd Mitchell
On the SOMOS group’s political convention in Puerto Rico over the weekend, Gov. Kathy Hochul forged doubt on considered one of Mayor-elect Mamdani’s main marketing campaign guarantees, fare-free buses in NYC, saying it might threaten funding for the town’s public transit system.
Mamdani remained undeterred on Monday, expressing continued enthusiasm for making his marketing campaign promise a actuality.
“I am confident that what we will find in Albany is a politics of partnership that we have not seen for quite some time,” he stated. “And so I think much of this will remain hypothetical in that what we have found in the conversations we’ve been having is that affordability is, in fact, a thread that unites many across the party, and the necessity of delivering on it.”
Fuleihan, the incoming first deputy mayor, drawing on his decades-long expertise in Albany, advised reporters that he had been advised many instances prior to now that issues couldn’t occur, and immediately, “and that’s not what we’re being told.”
“We’re being told, let’s have a conversation, and that’s what we’re going to do,” he added.
