Spend enough time browsing New York City campaign websites, and you’ll land on two candidates for citywide office who, at first glance, might appear to be running for mayor. City Council Member Justin Brannan promises to create a universal child care system for the city. Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine’s listed priorities include “solving our housing crisis” and “improving public safety.”
As a little deep reading will tell you, Brannan and Levine aren’t running for mayor. They’re the leading candidates for New York City comptroller – a powerful but not widely understood citywide office that acts as a check on city government through reviews of the city’s budget, and audits of city agencies and contracts. The comptroller also serves as custodian of the city’s public pension funds and sets prevailing wage rates.
In a race where many voters do not tend to know specifics about the duties of the comptroller’s office, the campaign trail rhetoric can get broad, the campaign pledges convoluted. “Some of the policies are a little more indirect,” Levine acknowledged in an iner making such proposals further confuses voters about what the comptroller actually does, it’s a political reality. “It’s hard to run on contracts,” said Democratic political consultant Ryan Adams.
Brannan and Levine – who have so far dominated fundraising and endorsements in a field that also includes state Sen. Kevin Parker and Ismael Malave, a civil servant and former staffer in state and city comptroller offices – are aligned on some major aspects about how they’d approach the office. But they’re starting to develop distinct policy priorities. In the borough president’s office, Levine has championed policies that support the creation of new housing. While the comptroller can’t approve new construction, they could direct city pension assets to help finance affordable housing, as Levine has proposed. As chair of the City Council Finance Committee, Brannan has taken Mayor Eric Adams’ administration to task for budget cuts and a lack of transparency in forecasting. The comptroller can’t unilaterally institute universal child care, but they can identify wasteful spending through audits and use their bully pulpit in the budget process to advocate for that funding to go to that kind of program, as Brannan has proposed.
Both Levine and Brannan have also driven hard against President Donald Trump in their stump speeches, though they differ slightly on how best to prepare the city’s coffers for threatened federal funding cuts. (Levine is ready to bolster budget reserves now, while Brannan doesn’t want to signal to the Trump administration that the city has the funds to absorb cuts.)
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