City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams has her eye on Gracie Mansion — but she’s already living like a “queen” in fully remodeled office spaces in several boroughs, insiders told The Post.
Since being elected speaker in January 2022, the Democratic mayoral hopeful has green-lit hundreds of thousands of dollars in top-to-bottom renovations for her main digs in City Hall, a suite of offices across the street, and to move her district office to a swankier spot in Queens, sources said.
From her first gavel slam, Adams made the historic and spacious speaker’s office at City Hall her own — repainting it from the understated white and pale blue it’s been for decades to a gaudy “toucan” orange.
She also ditched the existing furniture, carpet and decorative items for new desks, chairs, paintings and other fixtures, sources familiar with the renovations said.
Her interior designer ambitions continued late last year, when she quietly signed off on gut renovations and new furnishings for the Council speaker’s suite at 250 Broadway — without the knowledge of many of her fellow council members or the city agency that brokered a $4.7 million-a-year lease agreement in 2020 for the full Council to occupy four floors in the office tower, sources said.
The speaker’s 18th-floor suite includes four offices with breathtaking views, a conference room and a private bathroom.
“She lives like a queen with a need for you to worship her. I describe her as the emperor with no clothes,” said a NYC Democratic pol.
The 250 Broadway renovations could have “easily cost six figures,” while tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of work was done bringing the City Hall office to the speaker’s liking, according to a source briefed on details of the work.
She also relocated to higher-end district office space at the Rochdale Village Shopping Center in Jamaica, Queens, which likely came with significant additional costs.
It is unclear what pile of taxpayer cash paid for the decorating.
The City Council by law sets its own expense budget, which historically operates like a shell game. Pots of money are moved from one line item to another on a whim after the yearly spending plan is adopted — and many of these revisions are rarely accounted for or updated in public records, according to council members and other City Hall sources.
“The Council budget is all fungible and can be commingled,” said a source with intimate knowledge of the legislators’ spending process. “They’ll use placeholders for procurements while also creating flexibility in case the speaker wants to do special projects.”
The Council’s overall budget grew from $80.5 million in fiscal 2022 to $100 million in the following 12 months during Adams’ first full fiscal year as speaker.
The total has since remained flat — line by line — but will grow to $115 million during the new fiscal year beginning in July, in large part to account for staff raises. The new budget also estimates projected procurements unrelated to “personal services” rising from $1.6 million to $2.2 million and office rent costs rising from $12 million to $13.5 million.
Thirteen of 15 City Council members and staffers informally polled by The Post insisted this week they had no clue Adams renovated her Broadway suite – in large part because Adams hardly uses the space or invites other members there. This included at least a half dozen pols and operatives politically aligned with her left-leaning ideology.
The city’s Department of Citywide Administrative Services, which manages city-owned buildings, confirmed it had in-house staff paint the speaker’s City Hall office at her request but couldn’t immediately provide the cost.
The agency said it didn’t pick up any of the cost for Adams’ other office upgrades.
DCAS also brokered the City Council’s $4.7 million-a-year lease to rent space at 250 Broadway through 2040 from owner AmTrust Realty Corp.
The lease – a copy of which was reviewed by The Post — guarantees the landlord to pay for up to $11.5 million in “base building work” renovations — but not furnishings — over the length of the deal.
That perk was negotiated into the taxpayer-funded rental price, and it includes work on additional floors being renovated that the city agreed to rent at the tower for a price starting at nearly $10 million yearly and scaling slightly higher over the length of the 20-year pact.
Councilman Robert Holden, a moderate Queens Democrat, said he was unaware of the speaker’s renovations until shown photos of the work by The Post.
He called Adams’ choice of wall color at City Hall “garish” and said he would’ve never voted to adopt the Council’s expense budgets drafted under her watch if he “had the true breakdown of how the money” was being spent.
“There needs to be transparency because this is insane,” he said. “This money could be put to better use for taxpayers than upgrading her offices to suit her needs.”
He also claims he’s gotten a raw deal with his assigned office space at 250 Broadway, saying that after he complained about being stuck in space with “no windows” he was moved to a worse office with faulty plumbing, “no heat” and “thin walls.”
AmTrust Realty did not return messages.
Kalman Yeger (D-Brooklyn), who served on the City Council six years before being elected to the state Assembly in November, said Adams “wasted money” refurbishing the speaker offices because former Speaker Corey Johnson left them in “good shape” and she is “hardly ever” in her offices.
Upon replacing term-limited Democrat Melissa Mark-Mark Viverito as speaker in 2018, Johnson kept the speaker offices as she left them — with the exception of painting a wall at the Broadway suite to cover a mural Mark-Viverito put up near the welcoming area featuring a large bird, sources said.
A Democratic pol aligned politically with Adams said the speaker would rather spend the Council’s budget money as she sees fit, rather than have unused dollars go back to the city’s general fund and be used at the discretion of Mayor Eric Adams – who is not related to the speaker and is her political adversary.
The speaker did not return questions, including a request for a breakdown of her spending on office renovations.
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