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Polls open for early voting in New York City primary 

Elsie Encarnacion looks to win District 8's open City Council seat

Vote 2025: Meet the candidates for New York City Council District 12

Vote 2025: Meet the candidates for New York City Council District 11

Wilfredo Lopez vying for District 8's open City Council seat 

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News 12 Staff

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Welcome back to this episode of Power and Politics, everyone. As we continue our vote 2025 coverage and our conversations with mayoral candidates, we turn to the city's former comptroller who's trying to return to politics after running for mayor four years ago. News Twelve's Heather Fordham met with Scott Stringer to discuss the key issues of his comeback campaign. You have been in office for nearly 30 years or held public office for nearly 30 years in New York. Uh, what kind of motivates you to run for mayor? Well, look, I'm a lifelong New Yorker. I grew up in Washington Heights, you know, hung out on Fordham Road, went to public school, raising my own kids in the city, so I have a real skin in the game. And public service to me is really about serving the people of New York City and I have the experience, I think the competence and the vision for what this city can be, you know, we don't have to be second best or play second fiddle. We can actually have a government that doesn't deal in corruption, a government that actually aspires to be the best that it can possibly be, and I think I offer that especially at this moment in time. Now this is your 2nd run. You ran back in 2021. You had some challenges there. What did you learn from that run that helped you come into this campaign and set it apart? Well, like life, sometimes the lessons that you learn are Not from your success but from the challenges you face so I think this time I'm a stronger and better candidate. I also think that people are buying what I'm selling. I think people now recognize that you can't promise the world to everybody. You can't make promises you can't keep. I think people want someone who understands the finances of the city. They want someone who knows what can be done on their behalf and also what can't be done. And by the way, fighting the Trump administration that's coming for our city, you need your best fighter out there, somebody who is strategic, who plays chess. Checkers and when you look at the last 4 years of the Adams administration, it has just been a colossal failure and quite frankly, the next one on deck, Andrew Cuomo, he also represents chaos and corruption, and I think people are tired of that. They just want somebody who's going to get this job done. And speaking of the Trump administration, just within the last week we had a Bronx public school student who was detained by ICE in a courthouse. How do you plan to work with the administration when it comes to immigration and enforcement crackdowns? Well, this the whole tragedy about Dylan, uh, and what's going on is just frightening for a parent. I couldn't imagine risking losing my two kids. Uh, to an ICE agent in the dead of night or the middle of a school day, this is a very dangerous situation for so many Americans and New Yorkers. So as mayor, we're gonna do everything legally to prevent snatching kids off the streets, college students off the streets. We're better than that. I'm gonna use my financial expertise to make sure that. When Trump tries to take money out of our budget, which he did $80 million that we are working with the banks, working with our city agencies, understanding our budget codes, knowing that we have to do everything we can to thwart Trump, especially in the short term, because we're going to have to take back Congress. We're going to have to elect Hakeem Jeffrey Speaker. To start to dismantle this serious attack on New York City and also on other urban cities around the country, and that again is why experience is going to matter this time. You got to know what you're doing in order to fight a very tuned in Trump administration. You know this administration is more strategic than the first one, and we have to be equally strategic. And kind of switching gears towards big issues for voters in this uh mayor election season, affordability, it's kind of top of mind for everyone across the city. What is your plan to address the affordability crisis that we're facing here? Well, look, when you think about how we build affordable housing. I've identified 1000 vacant lots that the city owns that can be turned into affordable housing. Many Bronx residents live in Mitchell Lama housing. They know how successful it's been. I want to build Mitchell Lama 2.0. I want to do it throughout the Bronx the same way, uh, the Bronx, once abandoned, was able to come back through a serious affordable housing plan. I want to bring this back again. Uh, this is work I've. Been part of for a very long time and look, the way you do this is you think big you think massive you know Mayor LaGuardia back in the day built 2200 nature buildings for public housing. The M Mits Lama housing program was 100,000 units for 400,000. People, many families where I grew up, whether it was Washington Heights, whether it's Kingsbridge Road, wherever housing was, it was created for the working people in the city. So as a lifelong New Yorker, I would love to do yet again another generation of affordable housing. I know you have experience with auditing NASA during your time as comptroller. How do you revitalize public housing and also build more housing that you speak of without pushing out the people who are in these communities? It's a great question. And look, the reason my housing plan works is because we have vacant lots that the city owns. We own it and those lots should be turned into affordable housing when you have free land and you go to not for profit groups who are used to building housing. You could see the synergy in the relationship and then you overlay that with the subsidies that we already have we start to build affordable housing, you know, building housing for housing's sake is important. We need to increase our density, but we should also build housing that is about neighborhoods and the people who lived in NIA, the people who lived in. Salama housing, they didn't just exist in these apartments. They built the schools, the daycare centers. They created a way of life, a politics of inclusion and diversity. Why can't we do that all over again? That's how New York gets reborn generation after generations because mayors focus on the next housing and affordability challenges. We want to see. Not just for the very rich and enclaves for the very poor, but we want people, young families, people to come to our city and stay here and raise families here. And the job of the mayor is to have safe streets, clean parks, uh, a quality of life that says you're gonna go nowhere else ever because we love New York City. I wanna go back to that.

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Welcome back as we get back to our interview with mayoral candidate Scott Stringer talking with News Twelve's Heather Fordham. Another big issue public safety. I know you've said in the past that you support adding more cops, putting cops on every subway train, with also a mental health initiative to go along with it. Could you elaborate on what that plan would look like? Sure, uh, look, I grew up, uh, uptown in the 1970s when there were 2000 murders a year. Uh, I don't want to go back to that. So we have the lowest police headcount in a generation, so we need to hire more police officers. The reason we're paying overtime, paying 3 $1.3 billion in overtime as opposed to $650 million just a few years ago, is because too many police officers are leaving the police force and not enough people want to be cops. So we need to hire 3000 cops, but we need a retention plan and we also need to go out. And make sure that we attract the next generation of police officers, many people who grew up in the city who would love the opportunity, but the scheduling is not right, it's not predictive. We don't have daycare, uh, especially for women who want to be police officers. 20% are now female, but yet we don't have childcare in in within the department. That's why my childcare plan is so important. So we wanna create a safe environment on the trains. We want community policing, but that's not enough. We have got to align policing with a serious mental health initiative, and that's what I wanna do. I wanna take that overtime we're spending, and I want to drive it to the biggest and best mental health initiative the city's ever seen more mental health workers, uh, more housing that meets the wrap around services, the people who are homeless and those who are struggling on the subway, they need help. They're not criminals, they're not hurting anybody, but they are slowly dying in front of us, so we have. To do two things at the same time, walk and chew gum at the same time. Got to keep the city safe, but we also have to help the most vulnerable, the people who are homeless, the people who can't find affordable housing. All of this is intertwined, and that's why we need a mayor who knows the city agencies, as you said, I've audited NIA. I've audited every agency over and over again. I know where the bodies are buried and where the money is being wasted. We need to create an ability to break down the silos to do the work we need to do.

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