After Eric Adams on Thursday morning became the first sitting New York City mayor in over 150 years to face criminal charges, he was quick to brush off any suggestion that he might resign. If he stands firm, there are two players who can force him from office. The first is a committee of city officials. The second is a friend: Governor Kathy Hochul.
No governor has used that power before. Hochul called the indictment “shocking in its scale,” but declined to comment further until her office had a chance to fully review it. (Her office did not immediately reply to a request for further comment.) If she were to remove Adams, it would be a sudden fall from grace for a mayor whom Hochul, just months ago, called a “strong friend.”
Though Hochul has not indicated her next move, she vouched for the mayor just last week, as federal raids and resignations continued to plague his administration: “No matter what anyone says about our current mayor, he has done some good things,” she told the New York Post. She has also repeatedly bragged about their working alliance. “We’re just working together in a way that was unprecedented but comes very natural to the two of us,” she said in May. In March, Hochul thanked Adams for reinforcing “the depth and the strength of our relationship.”
When Hochul entered office in fall 2021 after her predecessor resigned in disgrace, she and Adams immediately hitched their wagons. New York City mayors and governors had traditionally been rivals, jostling for power. But that was going to change.
“In the past, there has been this tension,” she said in December of that year. “The era of fighting between those two bodies, those two people, is over.”
The pairing was ideal, observers said at the time. Hochul and Adams were ideologically aligned: both antagonists to their party’s progressive flank, especially when it came to public safety.
And they could use each other. Adams had policies he needed passed in Albany. Hochul had an upcoming election to win.
Hochul was enthusiastic in her support for Adams’s initial 2022 bid to retain mayoral control of the New York City school system. When Adams asked for a three-year extension, she pushed for four. “I said I was more collaborative,” she said at the time. “I’m showing you how I’m more collaborative.” (During that year’s legislative session, state lawmakers settled on two years, though Adams received another two-year extension as part of the most recent budget deal.)
In the election later that year, Hochul faced a Republican challenger who was polling too close for comfort and attacking the new governor for being soft on crime. As she campaigned, she partnered with Adams to pass aggressive criminal justice policies, leaning on his established police-friendly bona fides.
They tag-teamed efforts to alter New York’s bail reform statute. Adams wanted to give judges ultimate discretion to keep anyone charged with a crime jailed pending their trial so long as they saw them as “dangerous,” especially if they were found with a gun. Hochul did what she could, facing down staunch opposition from the left to force through bail law adjustments during tense spring budget negotiations in 2022 and 2023.
The two also worked in lock step to repeatedly flood the city subway system with cops, starting by targeting homeless riders in 2022. Adams mobilized round after round of NYPD deployments, and Hochul pitched in MTA cops — then, earlier this year, raised the ante with State Police officers and National Guard troops. While they’ve both asserted that New York City transit is safe, New York needs an expanded police presence to “win on feeling safe,” in Adams’s words, and “change the psychology around crime,” in Hochul’s.
Their focus on policing has kept the mayor and governor close: a “partnership,” as they both have described it, cracking down on pro-Palestine protests, unlicensed weed shops, and fare and toll evasion.
“Governor, I don’t know if you are a basketball player, but the points you put on the board is only part of the game. The game is also the assist,” Adams said in June after a slew of marijuana shop busts.
Another area of partnership has been housing development. During her 2024 State of the State address, Hochul supported Adams’s plan to build 500,000 units of affordable housing over the next decade — a goal he called “our moonshot,” referencing John F. Kennedy’s efforts to land an astronaut on the moon. “Let them build,” Hochul said.
That effort has advanced somewhat over the last year, but hasn’t taken off in the way either hoped. Hochul’s plan to build more was supposed to be the cornerstone of her state budget last year, but it crashed and burned. This year, Hochul finally won a replacement for the widely used 421-a tax credit — after two years of trying. Adams said the deal reflected “a real desire of: how do we get Eric what he needs.”
Housing aside, Adams has not always been able to count on the governor to get his priorities passed.
In 2022, after some delay, Hochul signed a controversial bill requiring New York City to reduce class sizes in schools over five years, a move the city’s Independent Budget Office estimates would cost nearly $2 billion a year. Adams had opposed the legislation, arguing the city can’t afford it.
Hochul has also delivered considerably less funding to support migrants and asylum seekers than Adams said the city needed. This year’s final budget included about $2.5 billion to that end — half of what Adams asked for.
The ever-ebullient mayor still touted the budget deal as a win. Holding up a cup of water, he told a civic and business group in April, “Do we get this full glass? No. But this glass is half-full — three-quarters full.”
Whether Adams’s cup remains three-quarters full is now, in part, up to his friend in Albany’s executive mansion.
Hochul isn’t the only player who can decide Adams’s fate. The mayor could resign, perhaps under the pressure of national Democrats eager to contain the damage to the party’s image. Or city officials could form a five-member “inability committee” to oust him. Per the New York City Charter, removal would require votes from four of the five committee members, who would include City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, Comptroller Brad Lander, Queens Borough President Donovan Richards, a deputy mayor picked by the mayor, and the city’s top attorney (a position that currently sits vacant).
If neither of those scenarios pans out, it will be up to Hochul to decide whether to take action. That’d be a first, as a governor has never removed a New York City mayor from office. The only time they’ve come close was nearly a century ago, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt dangled the threat over the head of then-Mayor Jimmy Walker, who was under investigation for trading cash for city contracts.
There are at least two mechanisms by which Hochul could move to replace Adams. The city charter empowers the governor to serve him with her own charges and remove him after a hearing.
State law also allows the governor to remove a mayor after launching an investigation into alleged misconduct. While never used against a New York City mayor, that step is hardly unprecedented: As New York Focus reported this month, Hochul flexed that power this past May to remove a member of the state Board of Parole.
Will Hochul do that to her friend?
“Making the magic happen every single day, right, Mayor?” Hochul said at an October 2022 press conference. “That’s how we roll. That’s how we roll.”
“I would be in a foxhole any day with you, governor,” Adams said, “as we deal with all these crises we are facing.”