Mayor Mamdani announced Tuesday he was picking two veteran city officials to represent Gotham on the board of the MTA: former Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and former city budget chief Melanie Hartzog.
The pair will join two current mayoral appointees on the MTA board, Dan Garodnick and David Jones, whom Mamdani has asked to stay on.
“Melanie and Janette have dedicated their careers to delivering results for New Yorkers, and alongside Dan and David, they will help ensure that this city gets fast and free buses, and that riders have strong advocates at the table,” the mayor said in a statement. “I’m grateful for their willingness to serve.”
The pair will replace outgoing board member Midori Valdivia, who Mamdani appointed earlier this year to run the Taxi and Limousine Commission, as well as former Mayor Adams’ appointee Meera Joshi, who left the post last year.
Barry Williams for New York Daily News
Melanie Hartzog, then-director of the city’s Office of Management and Budget, with Mayor Bill de Blasio at City Hall in 2019. (Barry Williams for New York Daily News)
The picks are Mamdani’s first exercise of mayoral prerogative regarding the state-run transit agency, and come six months after an inauguration into office buoyed by promises to make the agency’s bus network “fast and free.”
Sadik-Khan is best known by New Yorkers for her stint as Department of Transportation commissioner under former mayor Mike Bloomberg from 2007 to 2013. In that role, she pioneered the ongoing expansion of the city’s bike-lane infrastructure, as well as efforts to shut down car traffic in major pedestrian zones, such as Times Square.
She is currently a transit consultant with Bloomberg Associates.
Bryan Smith for New York Daily News
Janette Sadik-Khan, then-DOT commissioner, poses with her bicycle at her lower Manhattan office in 2007. (Bryan Smith for New York Daily News)
Hartzog served as the city’s budget director under former mayor Bill de Blasio from 2018 to 2020. She also served as de Blasio’s deputy mayor for health and human services for the last year of his mayoralty.
Hartzog currently heads up The New York Foundling, one of the city’s oldest child welfare organizations.
The MTA’s 23-person board has 13 votes.
Five votes are given to the board’s five gubernatorial appointees, four votes are given to the mayor’s four appointees, and one vote each is given to appointees from Westchester, Suffolk and Nassau counties.
Representatives from Dutchess, Orange, Rockland and Putnam counties each receive a quarter of a vote.
Representatives from labor, as well as from the MTA’s Permanent Citizen’s Advisory Councils, have nonvoting seats on the board.