Council Finance Committee Chairman Justin Brannan has filed paperwork to run for city comptroller next year and tells the Daily News he is looking at overhauling the city’s byzantine budget process as a key priority should he be elected to the fiscal watchdog post.
In a Wednesday morning interview after registering his 2025 comptroller account with the Campaign Finance Board, Brannan said he hasn’t definitively decided yet whether he’s going to run for the citywide position.
Opening the account, though, will allow him to raise money for a run, and Brannan said he plans to start doing so immediately. Brannan, who represents a section of southern Brooklyn that includes Bay Ridge, said he’ll then make a final call on whether to officially pull the trigger on a 2025 comptroller bid based on how much cash he pulls in over coming months.
The Brooklyn lawmaker’s 2025 moves come after Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine and Queens Assemblywoman Jenifer Rajkumar also filed to run for comptroller in the wake of incumbent Brad Lander announcing last month he’s going to challenge Mayor Adams instead of running for reelection next year.
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Brannan, who as Finance Committee chair played a prominent role this year in pressing for the reversal of city service cuts proposed and enacted by Adams, said reforming the city’s budget and contracting processes would be top of mind for him as comptroller.
“New Yorkers work their asses off and pay a lot of taxes so it’s impossible to tell them that there’s not enough money to keep the libraries open and pick the garbage up,” Brannan told The News, referring to some of the mayor’s most unpopular budget cuts that were eventually undone. “In my previous life as chair of the Contracts Committee, I also learned about the absolute hell that [city government] vendors go through in getting paid … We need to do better.”
Brannan, who’s term-limited from running for another four years in the Council when his term is up at the end of 2025, didn’t immediately spell out specific ways he envisions pushing through reforms to the city’s budget and procurement protocols.
The job of comptroller, though, comes with authority to audit city agencies, and Brannan suggested that power should be used more aggressively to allocate tax revenues that could be used to avert cuts to public services.
“I don’t see headlines about how much we’re spending on corporate tax breaks that we’re not investigating,” he said. “There are plenty of spaces where the city could be tightening up. If we’re actually spending wisely, there is money to fund all of the city’s most important programs. I know that because I’ve seen the books.”
On the fundraising front, Brannan has a long way to go.
Levine already has nearly $263,000 in his comptroller account, all of it rolled over from his Manhattan borough president campaign coffers, city filings show. By contrast, Brannan only has about $8,000 in his Council account, and he said he doesn’t plan to roll it over.
Rajkumar, a key ally of the mayor, is even further behind, reporting a negative balance of $19,435 as of the last fundraising filing from early July.
An issue likely to emerge as a key point of contention in a primary campaign should all three candidates end up facing off next June is Rajkumar’s close ties to Adams, seen by some government veterans as potentially problematic given that the comptroller is supposed to serve as a check on the mayor.
“My job is not to gratuitously attack anybody, but you have a job to do [as comptroller] and that job is oversight and you need someone who’s independent,” Brannan said when asked about Rajkumar.
In response to Brannan’s comments, Rajkumar told The News: “I am more independent than anyone in the field.”
A spokesman for Levine’s campaign declined to comment on Brannan’s 2025 filing.
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