Kathryn Garcia for Mayor (NYT endorsement)

[elleng]

Her ideas and experience
stand out in a crowded field of
Democratic hopefuls.

'The mix of optimism and anxiety that New Yorkers feel as the coronavirus is beaten back in the five boroughs highlights the extraordinary challenges facing the city and its next mayor in the coming months and years.

New York isn’t dead. But to make it flourish again, those who stuck with the city through the Covid-19 pandemic face significant headwinds to resuscitate businesses and revive economic life, bring teachers and students back to the classroom, restore stricken lives and shuttered communities and quell an alarming spike in violent crime.

Even as the immediate crisis needs to be vanquished, this great city also needs a mayor who will make progress on persistent problems like transportation, housing, education and poverty. The city requires someone who can take charge right away, with fervor and confidence.

All of the candidates in the June 22 Democratic primary are concerned with the welfare of their city and have thoughtful ideas about how to better it. It is Kathryn Garcia who best understands how to get New York back on its feet and has the temperament and the experience to do so. Ms. Garcia has our endorsement in perhaps the most consequential mayoral contest in a generation.

Voters could be forgiven for knowing little about Ms. Garcia. The pandemic has, to an alarming degree, hustled the hustings out of the neighborhoods and onto Zoom. The early polls in the race show that simple name recognition can have a big impact — on the early polls. Many primary voters say they haven’t made up their minds. So we’d like to help them.

A go-to problem solver for the past decade, Ms. Garcia was hard to miss at City Hall — a confident, gravelly-voiced woman who ran an overwhelmingly male Sanitation Department. She has a zeal for making government work better and was often known to show up ahead of a 6 a.m. shift for roll call not to micromanage but to find out how her people were doing.'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/10/opinion/kathryn-garcia-nyt-endorsement-nyc-mayor.html

[markpkessinger]

1. I was considering Garci seriously until . . .

. . . I heard her speaking of lifting the cap on the number of charter schools in the city, and also on her desire to eliminate surprise restaurant inspections. New York needs to focus on improving its public schools. And the restaurants have given New Yorkers confidence that restaurants are maintaining good health and hygiene standards. Those two things disqualified her as far as I'm concerned.