New York Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani and his constituent services director Mariela Ortiz do community outreach at a recent event in New York City.Mother Jones illustration; Courtesy of Mariela Ortiz
Have you ever reached out to a customer-service helpline and fallen into a vortex of bad phone-tree options, all AI-generated, none of which have anything to do with your problem? There’s no capable human to help—even after you beg for a “representative!” across the automated line.
That’s how Jennifer M., a lifelong resident of Astoria, Queens, felt when her 66-year-old mother-in-law was widowed and fell behind on paying her rent in 2023. Debilitated by severe arthritis and addled by grief, an eviction loomed in less than two weeks. Surely, Jennifer thought, her mother-in-law qualified for some government assistance. But figuring out what kind and from which agencies took her through the frustrating and often-futile process of trying to navigate New York’s byzantine bureaucracy.
“Everyone we would call, they would give us the runaround and send us right back where we started,” she says, asking not to share her last name to protect her mother-in-law’s privacy.
That is, until she requested help from the office of then-New York State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, who is now mayor-elect of New York City, and reached his constituent services director, Mariela Ortiz.
Ortiz has served in this role for the last three of Mamdani’s five years in the state legislature and has become well-versed in helping the people of New York’s District 36 battle slumlords and unresponsive government agencies. To prove a housing complex was illegally turning off the heat in the middle of the night, for instance, Ortiz once secured a building inspector to do a surprise inspection at midnight. (She hasn’t received complaints about heating there since). After a year of chronic outages, she pushed the city to restore gas to 20 residential customers and a beloved Mexican restaurant. She has even personally accompanied worried constituents to their traffic court and social security hearings.
“Our agencies are here to provide services,” Ortiz says of her job, which entails helping dozens of people per week. “This is what they’re supposed to be doing.”
But in treating constituent problems as urgent and solvable, Ortiz actually provided an answer to a strangely radical hypothetical question: What if every day government services actually worked?
Right now, most New Yorkers don’t think that they do. In fact, only 27 percent of residents rate government services as excellent or good, according to a 2025 report from the Citizens Budget Commission (CBC); in 2017, 44 percent gave satisfactory scores. During outgoing Mayor Eric Adams’s tenure, for example, most city buses received “failing grades” on metrics such as arrival and wait times. Bad landlords cost city taxpayers an estimated $300 million per year in incurred expenses, such as emergency shelter and legal services. Roughly 35 percent of applications for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Food Stamps) took longer than 30 days to process.
“This is a wake-up call that things are not where they need to be in New York,” CBC President Andrew Rein told local news site amNY. “New Yorkers are telling their leadership to focus on these priorities.”
Members of Mamdani’s incoming team—which Ortiz expects to join in some capacity—promise that they will. While the administration’s goals include free city buses, rent freezes, and city-run grocery stores, they also want clean and safe public transit that runs on schedule, and the imposition of immediate consequences for landlords, businesses, and agencies that fail to abide by code.
“There is often low trust in government because our processes are just too hard to navigate.”
“There is often low trust in government because our processes are just too hard to navigate,” Elle Bisgaard-Church, Mamdani’s chief of staff in the assembly, and soon in his mayoral office, tells Mother Jones. “It’s really important to us that there are fewer barriers for New Yorkers to get what they need from the government, which is supposed to serve them.”
A prerequisite for addressing constituent problems, however, is knowing what they are. On a recent Sunday, leading up to his January inauguration, Mamdani wanted to find out, so he brought a pen and notepad to a series of 3-minute sit-downs with over 100 New Yorkers.
During his 12-hour “The Mayor is Listening” event at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens on December 14, New Yorkers vented about the kinds of grievances that come across Ortiz’s desk every day: difficulty communicating with New York agencies; road construction work during rush hour traffic; apartments without sufficient heat or hot water in the winter; illegal price gouging in rent-controlled buildings.
I reached out to Mamdani’s incoming deputy mayor, Dean Fuleihan, who has served in many high-ranking roles across New York City and state government—including as deputy mayor once before under Bill de Blasio—to learn about what the team took away from these brief meetings. There was genuine excitement about the campaign platform, he said, but also earnest demands concerning basic needs.
New York City is “the most expansive major local government in the country,” Fuleihan says. “So the school districts, the water and sewer, streets, traditional city services that we’re going to deliver—excellence has to be achieved [because] New Yorkers will feel that on a day-to-day basis.”
Even with his long experience, Fuleihan, who is 74, says he’s learning a new approach to governance from Mamdani. “He has made clear to us that we’re all going to be part of the effort of listening to New Yorkers,” he says. “That’s not something that somebody in my role would traditionally do, right? They would be in City Hall.”
As an assemblyman, Mamdani took cues from the community when working on advocacy and legislation. When roughly a quarter of constituent complaints pertained to the high Con Edison electric and gas rates, he joined as a party in the New York State Public Service Commission case against the utility company, which helped secure lower rate hikes and more transparency.
According to Ortiz, Mamdani also inserted himself into email chains and joined virtual meetings to push along individual constituent issues. A perk of her boss’s recent mayoral win, Ortiz says, is that agencies seem to be even more responsive to her requests.
Jennifer M’s family crisis was quickly resolved. Given the pressing eviction deadline, Mamdani’s office escalated her mother-in-law’s case with a government housing agency and helped her to apply for a grant that covered her rent so that she was able to remain in her home. As a result of a thorough case assessment, Ortiz also discovered the woman was eligible for a rent-increase exemption for senior citizens and approximately $350 more in monthly Social Security benefits—money the widow has been able to use to stay current on her rent.
After he is sworn in on January 1, the struggle for Mamdani and his team will be expanding this approach for a constituency that will have increased seventyfold, from 122,000 to 8.5 million. He’s made his loftier ambitions clear. But, even before those big plans can be realized, he is determined to expand his previous strategies to improve the efficiency of existing government services.
In that work, Mamdani’s team may discover what so many major corporations seem to forget: Even without bells and whistles, customer service that simply does what it is supposed to do can go a long way to ensure brand loyalty. The same is likely true for voters.
When I asked Jennifer M. which mayoral candidate received her vote in November, she didn’t miss a beat: “Who do you think?”
