Some of Mayor Adams’ top advisers received pay increases this year that pushed their salaries above his, including David Banks, the since-resigned schools chancellor whose wage bump made him the highest-paid city government employee over at least the last decade, new payroll data shows.
Banks, who stepped down earlier this month in the wake of getting his home raided by federal authorities in connection with one of several corruption probes into Adams’ administration, saw his annual salary boosted to $414,799 as part of the wave of wage hikes, the data disclosed Wednesday reveals.
That pay, up 12.5% from the $363,346 Banks previously collected, made him the highest-paid city employee listed in the municipal government’s payroll database, which dates back to fiscal year 2014.
Additionally, the new data shows six of Adams’ deputy mayors — including Banks’ younger brother, ex-Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Philip Banks, who also resigned this month after being ensnared in a corruption probe — saw their annual salaries jacked up to $287,663 from $251,982. Adams’ chief adviser Ingrid Lewis-Martin and chief of staff Camille Joseph Varlack saw their pay grades lifted in the same manner.
Former First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright, who resigned this month after being raided by the feds as well, had her wage go up to $313,941 from her previous $275,000.
The deputy mayors, Lewis-Martin and Varlack all received one-time $3,000 bonuses earlier this year, too, issued as part of an agreement announced for non-unionized managerial city employees, the data shows.
But one city employee who didn’t get a raise this year was the mayor himself.
His annual salary has stayed flat at $258,750 since he became mayor on Jan. 1, 2022, and he didn’t collect the $3,000 bonus this year, either, the data shows. That means many members of the mayor’s senior staff at City Hall now make more than he does, as do most of his commissioners, who also got 12.5% salary bumps this year, including since-resigned NYPD head Edward Caban, the data confirms.
Fabien Levy, the deputy mayor for communications whose salary is now $287,663, didn’t immediately return a request for comment Wednesday.
It first emerged this past February that Adams was awarding raises to top city government officials, though it wasn’t clear at the time exactly who would and wouldn’t get them.
The increases came after Adams instituted a since-lifted hiring freeze across nearly all city agencies in fall 2023 due to concerns about the municipal government’s finances driven by spending on services for newly-arrived migrants.
At the time, Adams said the migrant crisis was putting such a strain on the municipal government’s finances that he feared it would “destroy New York City,” and he also instituted deeply unpopular public service cuts to balance the city budget. Many of those cuts have since been rolled back amid stronger-than-anticipated revenues and lower-than-anticipated spending on services associated with caring for migrants.