NYC Mayor Eric Adams defends sister-in-law following major promotion to $150K job at DOE
Mayor Eric Adams played defense Thursday after it was revealed that his sister-in-law scored a major promotion to become a top advisor making $150,000 a year at the Department of Education, city records show.
Sharon Adams was promoted in March to the role of ‘strategic initiative specialist’ in New York City’s DOE administration shortly after her husband, Bernard, stepped down from his controversial post as the head of the mayor’s security detail.
Adams is one of a string of Hizzoner’s family members or longtime associations who have scored high paying gigs in city government following the 2021 election, hiring decisions that have resulted in frequent criticism and controversy for City Hall.
For instance, Hizzoner’s longtime partner, Tracy Collins, also scored a major promotion at the DOE last year when she became the $222,000-a-year senior advisor to Deputy Chancellor Desmond Blackburn.
“I have a firewall [between] what happens in the DOE and what happens here at City Hall,” Adams told reporters at a press conference that followed an unrelated event at City Hall. “I do know this, Sharon’s an educator, well qualified.”
“There are some very clear rules that the city has in place on if someone is going to be employed if the mayor of the City of New York is related to that person,” he added. “We comply with those rules.
Investigative news non-profit The City first reported the sister-in-law’s new gig.
Critics have hounded the Adams administration since its earliest days over the mayor’s repeated decisions to hire his close allies, friends and family members into high-ranking government positions — or award those already on the city payroll with raises and prestigious new titles.
Adams first attempted to hire his brother, Bernard, to serve as a deputy commissioner at the New York Police Department and then as the chief of his security detail, but was forced by the city’s Conflict of Interest Board to limit his role to providing security adviser and his salary to just $1 per year.
The mayor selected a longtime friend scarred by one of the NYPD’s biggest corruption scandals in recent memory, Philip Banks, to serve as his deputy mayor for Public Safety, igniting even more controversy. Banks has denied wrongdoing.
