NYC mayor, though battered, weathers his first major storm

NEW YORK — After winning plaudits for his response to last month’s winter storm, Zohran Mamdani is learning in its aftermath one of the maxims of being New York City mayor: You get blamed for everything.

As frigid temperatures and increasingly filthy piles of snow lingered for two weeks after the Jan. 25 storm, Mamdani has taken flak for blocked crosswalks, ice-bound cars, poorly marked mobile warming centers, snow-clogged bus shelters and treacherous subway staircases. Residents have expressed outrage at piles of garbage on city streets and called for help regarding power outages in the middle of the tempest.

The City Council is demanding answers about the 19 New Yorkers who died from exposure — and another seven who are believed to have succumbed to hypothermia indoors. And the New York Post, which has been chronicling everything from blocked Citi Bike docks to shade at the mayor’s winterwear, has featured critical takes about Mamdani’s handling of the conditions on several recent front pages.

How much culpability the city bears for all these ills is complicated.

“People are going to get cranky. We have not had a cold stretch like this in a while. And the snow, which was lovely to look at three weeks ago, made it hard to remove trash and is now dirty,” said Howard Wolfson, a former deputy mayor under Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “On the one hand, it’s hard to blame the mayor for the weather. On the other, the buck stops with City Hall.”

So far, the whiteout of ‘26 does not seem destined to become an asterisk on Mamdani’s tenure in the same way botched storm responses have clung like barnacles to the legacies of Bloomberg and former Mayor Bill de Blasio.

But operational shortfalls abound and have been highlighted for weeks by a variety of media outlets and officials of every political stripe — even Mamdani’s allies in the City Council.

That has in turn provided fodder for some of the mayor’s critics to begin building a case against him based on a lack of prior management experience, a weakness in Mamdani’s political pedigree that dates back to the campaign, and one that will continue to pose an electoral risk going forward — especially with a new, soggier phase of the historic storm just beginning.

As snow continues to melt, clogged catch basins will require New Yorkers to ford fetid ponds of slush. Overnight freezes will glaze the city in fresh ice each morning. And a salty gruel will begin to seep underground, corroding critical infrastructure while also acting as a conductor of electricity — a potent combo that increases the risk for power outages, subway delays and that uniquely urban hazard, exploding manhole covers.

The city’s medical examiner expects there to be more cold-related deaths. And the Council is set to hold another oversight hearing on the city’s garbage and snow clearance that is sure to expose more deficiencies and — for a young mayor who vowed to transform service delivery upon taking office — serve as an early lesson in the difficulties of wrangling such a large workforce.

Once the snow began to fall in the early hours of Sunday, Jan. 25, the city’s Department of Sanitation sprang into action. More than 5,000 staffers employing 2,500 pieces of equipment worked 12-hour shifts to plow and salt city streets, per City Hall.

In some ways, Mamdani was lucky, according to Wolfson. Accurate weather predictions gave him days of advance notice. The storm hit on the weekend, avoiding the chaos of a snarled rush-hour commute. And the mayor canceled school the following Monday to give workers additional time to clear thoroughfares.

Those advantages along with advances in how the Sanitation Department handles storms allowed the mayor to avoid extreme scenarios — like snow-bound neighborhoods paralyzed for days or icy pileups of pirouetting cars — that have stuck in the collective craw of New Yorkers who vividly recall massive snowstorms in 2010 and 2018.

“We’ve seen storms do real political damage in New York City,” said Democratic consultant Jon Paul Lupo. “This isn’t anything like those.”

The mayor is not responsible for running the subways, the electricity grid, digging out cars or shoveling sidewalks in front of private property.

He is responsible for snow removal, homeless outreach and coordinating responses between agencies — and with that in mind, he has some explaining to do.

The Sanitation Department does double duty as both snow-clearers and garbage collectors. By prioritizing plowing, salting and melting, the mayor opened himself up to criticism of a different kind of accumulation.

“All my kids live in New York City. I’ve been there since the snowstorm. The garbage is piled up everywhere,” former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said during an appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher last week.

The inverse, of course, is also true: Prioritizing garbage would have impacted snow removal, a catch-22 that will be examined closely in an upcoming Council oversight hearing.

Other qualms with the city’s response? Snow initially sat untouched in areas of jurisdictional dispute like subway entrances and bus stops, suggesting more coordination was needed from City Hall. The city’s mobile warming buses were poorly advertised at first, leading to underutilization. And the Mamdani administration was unable to match past metrics of hiring temporary workers who could have shoveled more sidewalk cuts leading to crosswalks.

Even Mamdani’s allies have problems with how he handled elements of the storm.

While shoveling sidewalks is a property owner’s responsibility, Council Member Shahana Hanif — a strong supporter of the mayor who represents a decidedly Mamdani-friendly district — said the city should take a more active role in future storms to ensure every New Yorker is able to move about the city.

“As a person with disabilities, and having had both of my hips replaced, snow plowing is only prioritizing cars while the sidewalks have been atrocious for days,” she said.

The 19 outdoor deaths during the storm — and the seven indoor deaths — have been closely covered by the media and have become a particular concern to the Council, especially given the haphazard way City Hall disseminated information on the fatalities.

Mamdani presides over a team of several hundred outreach workers who, when the city’s so-called Code Blue protocol kicks in during subzero weather, begin routinely checking in on homeless New Yorkers known to be living on the streets. As of Feb. 10, the city had completed 1,400 shelter placements. Clinical social workers and the NYPD also have the ability to invoke state law and forcibly transport someone to the warmth of a hospital if that person is exhibiting signs of mental illness and presents a danger to themselves or others — an issue that is separate and distinct from Mamdani’s policy of ending homeless encampment sweeps. The city performed more than 80 involuntary removals as of Feb. 10.

The city can always pour additional resources into reaching more homeless people. At the same time, whether that would have prevented a majority of the fatalities was unclear even after a five-hour Council hearing. And it is becoming less apparent as more information about the cold-weather victims surfaces.

None of the New Yorkers who died had interactions with outreach workers during the storm or ensuing cold. At least five of those who died outside were known to have some type of permanent housing. A spike in exposure deaths around the country coincided with the atypical cold snap. And while administration officials expect 2026 to be an aberration, the city routinely sees dozens of hypothermia-induced fatalities that never garner front-page headlines, largely because of the strained social safety net meant to prevent street homelessness in the first place. In 2022, for example, 54 people died from exposure to excessive natural cold, according to data from the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. A year later, the same metric fell to 29.

Given the complexity of the city’s 300,000-plus workforce, every mayor is bound to suffer operational failures many times over throughout their years in office. For Mamdani, however, those shortfalls hit differently.

Before becoming mayor, the democratic socialist had few managerial job qualifications, and some of his most vocal critics have been invoking that history when launching attacks against his job performance in the wake of the storm.

“Though his top goal might be converting New York into a socialist paradise (and slamming Israel), his troops still need to pick up the garbage and clear the snow,” the New York Post wrote in a Feb. 2 editorial. “Nor will his glib, on-camera smiles and social-media savvy substitute for managerial competence and the execution of core city services.”

The mayor has hired many seasoned government experts such as First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan who are more than capable of managing day-to-day operations. And Mamdani’s allies have pushed back against some of the assaults on his operational chops as excessive.

“I presume and assume the loud voices like the New York Post that were using these bad faith political attacks will join us in, not just weaponizing these deaths, but speaking out for expanded support,” Public Advocate Jumaane Williams said during the Council’s hearing.

But the conservative-leaning Post, which remains an influential voice in New York City, is unlikely to ease their coverage, and it had a ready rejoinder for Williams and his left-leaning brethren.

"Reporting on preventable deaths isn’t weaponizing tragedy, it’s doing the job," a spokesperson said. "We presume and assume that those quick to dismiss these concerns as 'bad faith' will be just as quick to support real oversight, real accountability and the resources necessary to ensure this never happens again."

De Blasio, the former New York City mayor who tangled often with the city’s biggest tabloid, said Mamdani will always be fighting against this perceived disadvantage as he seeks to deliver on his main campaign promises.

“Right-leaning leaders are given more benefit of the doubt on operational stuff. For progressives the stereotype is: All they care about is social justice and they must be inexperienced,” he said, invoking as a counterpoint the technocratic Bloomberg. “But the worst handled snowstorm, by far, was in 2010.”

Gelila Negesse contributed reporting.