City Council power play will make or break Zohran Mamdanis mayoralty

In January, both ends of City Hall will be under new leadership.The voters chose Zohran Mamdani as the city’s next chief executive.He will run the mayor’s side of the oldest functioning City Hall in the country.The members of the City Council, however, will elect a new speaker, who will lead the city’s legislature from the building’s opposite wing.Ahead of that January vote, the neck-and-neck front-runners are Julie Menin, an Upper East Side establishment Democrat considered a relative moderate, and the progressive Crystal Hudson of Brooklyn, the mayor-elect’s ideological fellow traveler. While not nearly as prominent as the mayor, the speaker holds significant power over the direction of the city government.She or he decides which of the hundreds of bills pending in the council come before the body for a vote.The speaker also appoints the chairs of the committees in which those bills originate, who have the power to oversee and investigate city agencies.If Hudson is elected, she will bring up bills that advance the agenda of her progressive base.For example, City Council leftists, including its Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members, are determined to pass the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA).This proposed local law would force any owner selling a building with three or more units to notify the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development and share information about the building’s finances before listing it for sale.Owners would then have to give qualified nonprofits an exclusive 120-day window to make offers on the building — during which they’d be prohibited from selling to an individual or a “for-profit” entity.Worse, the HPD commissioner can extend this period, placing even more pressure on financially strapped owners to sell to a nonprofit.The measure may well be unconstitutional, but DSA-style progressives will deploy it to push favored not-for-profit companies — many of which depend on the council fo...