At Upper West Side Town Hall, Focus Was on Local Progress at a Time of National Uncertainty

By Daniel Katzive

For a little while Monday night, Upper West Siders paused from focusing on New York City’s leadership crisis, or global issues of war and peace, to grapple with some familiar local topics: trash containerization, rats, e-bikes, mental health, MTA escalators, and homelessness.

The occasion was City Councilmember Gale Brewer’s town hall meeting, and the mood in the near-capacity crowd at the Ethical Culture Society’s Adler Hall was mostly upbeat – though there were distinct undercurrents of political anxiety.

A panel of city commissioners, superintendents, and chiefs joined Brewer, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, City Comptroller Brad Lander, and special guest Wynton Marsalis. Audience members submitted questions on index cards which Brewer fired off to the various officials in attendance, keeping this a low-drama affair without direct audience participation. The evening included a presentation by a group of Girl Scouts and a dog named Benny; they drew smiles as they called for more attention to the dangers to pets from discarded cannabis products.

Comptroller Lander did wade into the national environment. “I can’t believe that the biggest risk to New York City’s finances, which is of course the main thing we’re working on in the comptroller’s office right now, is the federal government itself,” he told the audience. “There’s some things to like about the city’s economy. And yet now we face the grave risks of a federal government that doesn’t have our best interests at heart.”

In one example that he labeled “essentially highway robbery,” Lander said the federal government had clawed back, from a city bank account, $80 million of emergency funding to reimburse the city for migrant housing costs.

Lander expressed confidence that the city would eventually get those funds back in a court decision. But he noted that the money for migrant housing was a drop in the bucket compared to the $9.5 billion in federal money the city receives annually – about 8% of the city’s total budget (the total of federal money coming in to New York is even larger if federal infrastructure spending and entitlement programs are included). Lander said this means the city remains vulnerable to further interference – by what he referred to as the “Trump regime” – with the flow of federal money; the comptroller said he would be recommending an increase in reserves to deal with these risks.

Community School District 3 Superintendent Kamar Samuels also touched on the impact the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants is having on families. He pointed out that the district’s overall average school attendance rate is 91% – already a cause for some concern – but that for students in temporary housing, that rate drops to 79%. According to Samuels, even if schools are relatively safe from immigration enforcement actions, parents sometimes hold their children out of school for fear they might be detained while the children are in class.

Jazz musician Wynton Marsalis, a long-time ally of Brewer, tried to play a note of guarded, if somber, optimism in his remarks, calling for citizens to remain engaged. “We’ve lost our way,” he said. “It has nothing to do with the president, it has all to do with us. And what we are doing here is how we find our way.”

“Back to reality,” said Brewer after Marsalis spoke, shifting gears back to street design and the city’s Smart Curbs program. The assembled officials stressed forward progress on all fronts and highlighted improving metrics—lower crime rates, fewer rats, more shelter capacity. 

For the most part, the uncertainties created by the Trump administration, and by the city’s leadership crisis, remained largely unspoken. The name Mayor Eric Adams, or even the phrase “the mayor,” did not come up once Monday evening, which perhaps spoke volumes in itself.

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