Zo-and-tell!
City Hall must turn over emails and text messages exchanged with the influential Rent Guidelines Board, a judge ruled Wednesday, as part of an inquiry into whether Mayor Zohran Mamdani pressured the panel to deliver on his promised rent freeze.
Judge Brendan Lantry, a former chair of the Staten Island GOP, issued a narrowly tailored order seeking behind-the-scenes communications to determine whether members of the supposedly independent board improperly coordinated with Mamdani’s administration.
“The question naturally arises: how would the Mayor comply with his ‘guarantee’ to the voters to ‘freeze’ the rent unless he, or his staff, communicated with the Board to ensure that the Board refrained from imposing any rental increase?” Lantry wrote.
In June, board members approved a rent freeze for both one-year and two-year leases covering roughly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments across New York City.
The vote gave Mamdani a high-profile win for his socialist agenda, while also fueling claims that the outcome had been engineered.
A coalition of city landlords soon filed a legal challenge, alleging that Mamdani had filled the independent board with tenant activists loyal to his cause.
The landlords had sought access to a far broader range of municipal messages, but the limited disclosure order still represents a significant step for critics seeking to scrutinize the Rent Guidelines Board’s vote.
“The court acknowledges that discovery in a special proceeding is rare,” Lantry wrote. “It is also rare (in fact, it is unprecedented) for a candidate for Mayor of New York City to guarantee that the Board, an entity that the parties concede is independent from the Mayor’s Office, will freeze the rent upon his election to office.”
Lantry pointed to additional unusual circumstances, including the resignation of board member Christina Smyth, who described the proceeding as a predetermined “sham.”
The records covered by the order include communications involving City Hall, the Mayor’s Office of Mass Engagement, the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants and the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget.
However, the order does not require the release of communications between Mamdani and his staff or messages exchanged internally among Rent Guidelines Board members.
The parties are scheduled to attend a discovery conference on Sept. 21.
