Mamdani transition: Mayor-elect adds de Blasio veteran, elevates close aide to top City Hall posts

Former First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan, a de Blasio administration alum, will return to City Hall under Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, who also appointed longtime aide Elle Bisgaard-Church as his incoming chief of staff.

A veteran of both city and state government dating back to the 1970s, Dean Fuleihan served as Bill de Blasio’s right-hand man in City Hall from 2018 through 2021, with duties that included advising the then-mayor on managing the NYPD, the Department of Education, and the Department of Investigation.

Mamdani last week unveiled a team of women who will help lead the transition into his administration, including four with ties to the former de Blasio Administration: Melanie Hartzog, Maria Torres-Springer, Elana Leopold, and Grace Bonilla.

Asked on Monday whether his mayoralty is shaping up to be de Blasio 2.0, Mamdani dismissed the comparisons.

“I am going to create a new City Hall… We are making our own,” he said. Five of his seven appointees announced thus far are de Blasio administration alums.

“We are lucky that there are many who have come before us who have shown us both the ways in which we can succeed and the pitfalls that await those who look to do so,” he added.

Mamdani brings on a City Hall vet

Fuleihan, 74, personally oversaw several departments during the de Blasio years at City Hall, including the Office of Management and Budget, the Office of Labor Relations, and the Office of Climate Policy and Programs. He began his political career as a policy analyst for the state Assembly in 1978 and was the Assembly’s principal staff negotiator for the state budget.

Photo by Lloyd Mitchell

Introducing him at the Roosevelt House on the Upper East Side, Mamdani said he would rely on Fuleihan “for counsel, not only for his wealth of managerial experience, but also because of the similarity between our visions for this city.”

“Dean is a child of Lebanese immigrants, and like me, he has seen our city through the prism of the immigrant experience, and knows well that there are many New Yorkers who our leaders never tend to,” Mamdani said.

He praised Fuleihan’s “steadiness, his managerial competence and his clarity of vision” as essential to “deliver what politics can be in this city that we call home.”

Fuleihan said he was “proud to be returning to City Hall” and thanked Mamdani “for the privilege of joining the administration and the trust you’re placing in me to serve our city.”

He highlighted his experience guiding New York through “numerous state budgets and serious economic challenges” as reasons he’s prepared to carry out Mamdani’s affordability agenda.

Fuleihan added that from the early stages of the mayor-elect’s campaign, it was the “aggressiveness, warmth, and hope” of the new mayor’s agenda that made him open to “help in any way I could.”

“I firmly believe in this agenda, and I’m proud to join a team that will be devoted to this agenda and will work every day to make it happen,” he said.

Mamdani’s election architect becomes chief of staff

Elle Bisgaard-Church has been one of Mamdani’s closest advisers since his time in Albany and managed his insurgent mayoral bid during the Democratic primary, transforming him from an underdog to a victor.

After the primary win, Bisgaard-Church served as chief advisor to the general election campaign. She holds dual master’s degrees in public administration from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and the London School of Economics.

Mamdani called her “unapologetically committed to the cause of improving the lives of working people” and described her as “our moral compass, our brilliant strategic center, and a genuinely kind and selfless person.”

Bisgaard-Church said the campaign showed voters expect City Hall to deliver real improvements.

“A million people said last week that they want more from City Hall, that they expect better from their leaders. They said loudly and clearly, it is not asking too much that New York be a place people can afford to live,” she said.

She said the administration will measure its performance in daily quality-of-life gains: “It won’t make the news every day when a family enrolls in a child care program or a 311 housing inspection is resolved quickly, or whenever our parks are clean, safe and full of people… They will be ordinary, part of the texture of daily life.”

Photo by Lloyd Mitchell

At the SOMOS organization’s political conference in Puerto Rico over the weekend, Gov. Kathy Hochul cast doubt on one of Mayor-elect Mamdani’s major campaign promises, fare-free buses in NYC, saying it could threaten funding for the city’s public transit system.

Mamdani remained undeterred on Monday, expressing continued enthusiasm for making his campaign promise a reality.

“I am confident that what we will find in Albany is a politics of partnership that we have not seen for quite some time,” he said. “And so I think much of this will remain hypothetical in that what we have found in the conversations we’ve been having is that affordability is, in fact, a thread that unites many across the party, and the necessity of delivering on it.”

Fuleihan, the incoming first deputy mayor, drawing on his decades-long experience in Albany, told reporters that he had been told many times in the past that things could not happen, “and that’s not what we’re being told.”

“We’re being told, let’s have a conversation, and that’s what we’re going to do,” he added.

In a positive sign for those impending discussions, Gov. Hochul praised Mamdani’s choice of Fuleihan as first deputy mayor, calling him a “steady, principled public servant who has dedicated his career to making government work for New Yorkers.”

“His experience and integrity will be invaluable in this role,” Hochul posted on X. “A great choice and a win for New Yorkers.”