Late last week, a Brooklyn city councilman heard something alarming. An organization had discovered lead levels in a heavily used park in his district that exceeded, by “multiple times,” the levels recommended by the state Department of Environmental Conservation.
The councilman, Lincoln Restler, immediately drafted an email to senior officials at New York City’s parks and health departments.
The response, he said, was dispiriting.
“We were told they would not meet with us, speak with us, engage with us in any substantive ways if we didn’t complete a seven-page Google doc,” Mr. Restler, the chair of the committee on governmental operations, said on Thursday.
Mayor Eric Adams has issued a new directive that is causing consternation among the ranks of elected officials and agency workers who share the obligation of running the nation’s largest city.
Mr. Adams declared that any elected official — including powerful members of Congress — seeking to engage with city agency staff members must now fill out a lengthy online request, which would be directed to his City Hall intergovernmental team.
The mayor’s office would then review the form and grant the request, or deny it. The new procedure, which was earlier reported by Politico and The City, a nonprofit news organization, was outlined by Mr. Adams in a video call with agency leaders last Friday.
Mr. Adams has cast the new process as a way to make elected officials’ interactions more efficient.
“With 300,000 employees serving more than 8.3 million New Yorkers, we must ensure that we have the right processes in place to streamline our services and maximize our resources, just like any other large organization would,” Liz Garcia, a mayoral spokeswoman, said in a statement.
But city agencies maintain their own intergovernmental staff, cultivate working relationships with elected officials and in many cases pride themselves on their responsiveness.
Elected officials, in turn, pride themselves on their ability to get things done for their constituents by interacting with city agencies.
“I can’t understand how the mayor thinks adding unnecessary layers of bureaucracy to slow down government responsiveness on a concerning public health issue is appropriate,” Mr. Restler said.
The administration’s move came less than three months after the Council ignored the mayor’s objections and passed a bill that required police officers to document more information about their interactions with the public.
On Wednesday, one of the mayor’s top aides, Menashe Shapiro, suggested in a post on X that council members were hypocrites for complaining about filling out a form given their role in passing the police accountability bill.
“Wasn’t it just a short time ago when some wise folks told us that filling a simple form was no big deal?” he wrote. “#irony.”
Robert Holden, a conservative Democrat from Queens, responded to Mr. Shapiro’s post with a message of his own: “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”
Mr. Shapiro deleted his tweet.
A spokesman for the City Council on Wednesday announced it would not be abiding by “this excessively bureaucratic and inefficient process that will only undermine the work of city government on behalf of New Yorkers.”
“Elected officials often communicate with city agencies multiple times a day to pursue solutions to issues faced by their constituents,” said the spokesman, Rendy Desamours. “Requiring a form for various types of communication is the height of government inefficiency.”
After the videoconference with the mayor, a City Hall staff member circulated a link to the new Google form to agency leaders, a copy of which was shared with The New York Times.
“Please be sure to share with Elected Officials (EO’s) and their offices when EO’s reach out seeking engagement requests or when you want to originate a meeting or outreach with an elected official,” she wrote. She then defined “engagement” as encompassing, among other things, any meetings with commissioners or senior level agency staff, and any requests to discuss enforcement issues.
The webpage opens with a quote from the mayor: “We’re much more than we were told we are. And New York should allow us all to be who we were meant to be.” It then asks elected officials to answer a series of questions, including with whom they want to meet and why.
Earl Ash, the city’s official liaison to the federal government, informed members of Congress on Wednesday that they, too, would be subject to the same new procedures. In an email, he described the intake form as a “new and exciting tool” and wrote that it was designed to “improve operational efficiency and streamline requests at a much faster rate.”
Members of Congress, to put it mildly, did not share that view.
“It seems misguided and impractical,” said Robert Gottheim, who serves as co-chief of staff to Representative Jerrold Nadler, a Manhattan Democrat. “We’re on the same team.”
Mr. Gottheim has worked in New York government for decades, and, like other senior congressional aides, has developed close working relationships with city commissioners and other high-level officials. He said his team was working directly with City Hall on the migrant crisis gripping the city and did not intend to simply forget the cellphone numbers of their counterparts.
“I’m not going to submit a form when we are working on vital stuff,” he said.
Mr. Gottheim said that Mr. Nadler, the dean of New York’s House delegation, would advise other members to follow the same tack and said that the office would raise its concerns directly with City Hall.
According to City Hall, the new procedure does not apply to chance encounters in hallways or to deputy mayors or in emergency situations, though Mr. Restler argued his situation was in fact an emergency.
“This is a concerning public health risk for families in my community that are playing in this park every single day,” he said.
He did not fill out the form.
“We are waiting for the health department and parks department to respond to our request for a meeting,” he said.
Ms. Garcia said that it is responding appropriately to the situation at McCarren Park, where the lead had been found.
“We take lead contamination concerns very seriously, and city agencies, as well as City Hall, responded immediately to Council Member Restler’s request for a meeting and asked him to follow our standardized process if not an emergency,” Ms. Garcia said.
She added: “Despite the fact that the council member refused to fill out the form, out of an abundance of caution, the Parks Department is actively adding soil and mulch to the park as an additional protective layer. We are evaluating next steps, and will continue to do everything in our power to keep New Yorkers safe.”
