{"id":500152,"date":"2026-01-08T00:48:18","date_gmt":"2026-01-08T00:48:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/500152\/"},"modified":"2026-01-08T00:48:18","modified_gmt":"2026-01-08T00:48:18","slug":"mamdani-says-he-will-review-chief-diversity-officers-performance-at-the-mta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/500152\/","title":{"rendered":"Mamdani Says He Will Review Chief Diversity Officer\u2019s Performance at the MTA\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Wednesday promised to look into a revelation<\/a> by THE CITY that the Adams administration holdover Mamdani reappointed as chief business diversity officer oversaw a unit caught cherry-picking data to inflate its success helping minority- and women-owned businesses win MTA contracts.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe expect excellence and accountability throughout our administration that extends across our portfolio, and this is a matter you\u2019re raising right now that I\u2019ll be looking into more fully,\u201d he said during an unrelated press conference in Queens.<\/p>\n

Mamdani\u2019s vow came in response to a question about whether his team was aware of the 2023 report<\/a> by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA)\u2019s inspector general about Michael Garner, who served as the MTA\u2019s chief business diversity officer for years before Adams named him to the same job at City Hall in February 2023.<\/p>\n

Mamdani announced he was keeping Garner on in the same $274,000-a-year post last month. His response Wednesday indicated the administration was unaware of the IG\u2019s report prior to Garner\u2019s reappointment.<\/p>\n

Shortly after Garner jumped to City Hall, Acting MTA Inspector General Elizabeth Keating released the report, which found that a unit Garner supervised used selective and unverified data about participants in Garner\u2019s program, effectively inflating the success of the program in helping MWBEs win MTA contracts.<\/p>\n

\"MTAThen the MTA\u2019s Chief Diversity Officer Michael Garner announces a milestone in contracting with minority and women-owned companies through the MTA Small Business Mentoring Program, Sept. 27, 2021.
Credit: Marc A. Hermann\/MTA<\/p>\n

The IG found that the unit, the Department of Diversity and Civil Rights, counted just 50 of 268 program participants in its 2022 analysis of the program, only including businesses that had won MTA contracts worth $1 million to $3 million with specific revenue levels.<\/p>\n

The IG also found the unit relied on information about revenue that was self-reported by those contractors that it did not validate. Among other recommendations to improve reporting on the MWBE program, the IG suggested that the MTA look at all the participants, not just a select few, and double check the info provided by the contractors. The MTA agreed to the IG\u2019s findings and vowed to adopt that recommendation.<\/p>\n

Garner is the third Mamdani appointee about whom problematic new information has surfaced after he picked them for his team.<\/p>\n

Catherine Almonte Da Costa resigned after anti-semitic tweets she\u2019d posted years ago surfaced. Screen grabs of social media posts in an account deleted by Cea Weaver, appointed<\/a> by Mamdani to run his new Mayor\u2019s Office to Protect Tenants, emerged early this week. In one posting, she declared home ownership was \u201ca weapon of white supremacy\u201d and called for private property to be banned.<\/p>\n

While Mamdani accepted Da Costa\u2019s resignation, he has continued to back Weaver\u2019s appointment. On Wednesday when he was asked if he supported the idea that homeownership is a \u201cweapon of white supremacy,\u201d he dodged the question and, instead, touted his support for homeownership in general without once mentioning Weaver\u2019s name.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy focus as the mayor of New York is to deliver stability in a city and we know that one critical pathway to that stability is home ownership,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\n\tRelated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Wednesday promised to look into a revelation by THE CITY that the Adams administration…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":500153,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-500152","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-city","11":"tag-newyork","12":"tag-newyorkcity","13":"tag-ny","14":"tag-nyc","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-united-states-of-america","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","19":"tag-us","20":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115856730084698121","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=500152"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500152\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/500153"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=500152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=500152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=500152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}