Last night, as the ball dropped, I concluded my tenure as New York City Comptroller – with immense gratitude.

Earlier in the day, my son Marek joined me up in the cupola of the Municipal Building, where I took the oath of office four years ago. As I reflected on the past four years – and especially on this last one, which has surely been a wild ride – I welled up with gratitude.

It’s hard for me to describe how profound an honor it has been to serve. We tried to summarize that work in our final report, Accounting for Our Term.

It’s an accounting of the work we’ve done to keep the City honest, secure our future, build stability for New York’s families, govern with New Yorkers, and to walk our talk. 

We ran all the way through the tape, issuing four audits in my final week (including one that The City called “explosive”). Our audits over the term helped the City save billions of dollars, catch cheaters (scoundrels from DocGo, to ghost plate drivers, to employers who don’t pay what they owe), restructure NYC Ferry, involve NYCHA residents in oversight and much, much more. 

By the numbers: those 120 audits contained 785 recommendations. City agencies agreed to implement 478 (61%) of them – not bad, that’s definitely a higher percent of the time than Eric Adams and I agreed! Of these, 361 have been implemented, 29 are partially implemented, and 316 are still pending. 

We created a tracker, so you can follow along! It’s one of a dozen new dashboards we launched, which will continue under Comptroller Levine, that track NYC government performance indicators, agency staffing, claims against the City, pension fund assets under management, homelessness, Rikers/DOC, climate commitments, and the creative economy.

So many things that matter can be measured – and must be. The work of doing it as a powerful act of stewardship. So I’m honored to pass the reins over to Comptroller Mark Levine. I know he’s going to do a great job. We’ve known each other for decades, and he brings a passionate love for the city, and a clear-eyed commitment to making it better. He’s put a great leadership team together, with some of the fantastic folks who came in with me four years ago, and some dynamite new talent as well.

But honestly, it wasn’t the things that can be counted that made me tear up with gratitude in the cupola yesterday. Instead, I found myself humming a song by Billy Bragg (with words often misattributed to Albert Einstein, actually said by sociologist William Bruce Cameron): 

Not everything that counts can be counted; not everything that can be counted, counts. Like the solidarity that New Yorkers show in the hardest times. After 9/11. After Hurricane Sandy. In showing up now to protect our immigrant neighbors. 

In her book, A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit describes that “feeling that crops up during so many disasters,” “an emotion graver than happiness but deeply positive,” that gives us “a glimpse of who else we ourselves may be and what else our society could become.” If you’ve been there in those moments of crisis, and felt the solidarity of working together with neighbors to build something better, you know what she’s talking about.

That’s what made me so grateful yesterday. Over the past 16 years serving the city, the past 4 as Comptroller, and across this last wild ride of a year, I have had more chances than I can count to work together with so many of you, through hard times and tough fights, to make this extraordinary, messy, wounded, wonderful city of ours a little better. In every single corner, New York City is full of people hungry to do it.

Another word for that is hope. And that’s what today is all about. 

I’m headed to the inauguration shortly, to watch Zohran Mamdani become the 112th Mayor of New York City, Jumaane Williams be re-sworn in as Public Advocate, and Mark take the reins as Comptroller.

In his campaign, Zohran captured that feeling that Solnit describes. He identified the crisis of affordability facing New Yorkers, and offered community in organizing to do something about it.  That didn’t help with my mayoral campaign, of course. And yet, somehow, I’m grateful for it. Amidst the anger, fear, corruption, and chaos of Donald Trump, amidst the sense our democracy is not up to its tasks, he has inaugurated a profound sense of hopefulness.

There will be time, of course, for measuring how he delivers. Those dashboards will keep counting. Future audits will come. But we need a shared sense of possibility to believe it all matters. That’s what I’ll be grateful for, out in the cold today.

And finally, a very big part of the gratitude I’m feeling is for the extraordinary outpouring of support you’ve shown for my campaign for Congress, since we launched it three weeks ago. Thousands of you have contributed, signed up to volunteer, offered to host house parties, offered ideas and pushback. Told me how excited you are about it – and how hopeful it makes you feel. 

Thank you. Seriously, thank you. Every single one matters.

We’ll report our numbers soon, of course (last night at midnight was also the deadline for our first quarterly campaign filing). But for today, it’s the things you can’t count that I’m feeling profoundly grateful for. 

And looking so hopefully forward to.

With deep gratitude, abiding hope, and the warmest wishes for a bright and healthy start to 2026 for you and your loved ones,

Brad

P.S. If you’re a history nerd like me, you may have followed the controversy over whether Zohran is the 111th or 112th Mayor of New York City. If you’re looking for the official list of New York City Comptrollers, we created a new Comptroller’s office history page as part of my transition into that history. My favorite remains Andrew Haswell Green, who served from 1871 to 1876, and then went on to lead the effort to consolidate the five boroughs into Greater New York – unleashing something far beyond anyone’s ability to measure.