Mayor Eric Adams long imagined turning his haters into waiters. Apparently, the New York City Commission of Racial Equity (CORE) is certainly waiting. A lawsuit brought by the independent city board alleges the Adams administration missed deadlines to release the city’s Racial Equity Plan mandated by the city charter dating back to January 2024.
On Wednesday, Aug. 20, CORE commissioners, along with advocates and elected officials, announced the lawsuit outside city hall. They say the litigation will legally compel the Adams administration to release the plan, which would help gauge how the city’s second Black mayor is addressing inequities in city government.
“We know that 45 city agencies have completed a plan and submitted it to the Mayor’s Office,” said CORE executive director Linda Tigani to the AmNews. “We know that it has been under review month after month after month. The administration has repeatedly given us release dates up until two months ago, where they have then decided that they’re not going to share release dates or there is no release date, so we were left with no other option than to take him to court to ensure that he follows the law.
“And the law in New York City is that we must have a racial equity plan and that every city agency must address racial inequities in our day-to-day work as government.”
Such a law stems from the 2022 election, when a ballot measure passed amending the City Charter, a.k.a. NYC’s constitution, to mandate the Mayor’s Office to produce a preliminary and final racial equity plan aligned with the budget cycle. The similarly named New York City Racial Justice Commission (RJC), a charter revision commission formed by Adams’s predecessor Bill de Blasio in 2021, proposed such ballot initiatives, which ultimately created CORE to work with the mayor to produce the city’s Racial Equity Plan.
“They required, as part of their vote, for New York City to biannually release a racial equity plan for every city agency,” said RJC chair Jennifer Jones Austin. “That would demonstrate how they were going to go in and address all of the policies, procedures, [and] practices that had enabled racism to endure in government functioning. The plan was to have been released in January 2024. Here we are in August 2025 and this mayor has yet to release the plan.”
CORE is made up of 15 people, split between seven mayoral appointees and five City Council appointees, along with executive director Tigani and an appointee each from Offices of the Public Advocate and City Comptroller. Assembling the board apparently takes time. The lawsuit blames the Adams administration, which did not appoint a single commissioner in 2023 and only rounded out all seven mayoral picks last October. Contrarily, NYC Comptroller Brad Lander made his lone selection by July 2023.
Adams’s delayed appointments led to an agreement with CORE to initially postpone the Racial Equity Plan. The revised timeline scheduled community engagement efforts in April 2024 with a preliminary plan from the mayor slated by the end of October 2024. A final plan was to come out by December 20, 2024 … but more delays occurred.
This past January, Deputy Mayor for Strategic Initiatives Ana Almanzar predicted the preliminary plan would come out in February and the final plan would follow in May after a review period, according to the lawsuit complaint. The Adams administration then pushed back the publication date back another time before announcing an indefinite postponement with no interim date.
During the rally, Lander, whose office appoints one CORE commissioner, underscored the plan’s importance in the face of President Donald Trump’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts at the federal level.
“When communities have the courage to develop racial equity plans and to step up and implement them, everyone does better, because we wind up with safer neighborhoods in a safer city that everyone can thrive in, when some people aren’t kept in crappy schools with limited job opportunities,” said Lander. “When everyone has access to capital and can create new businesses, more jobs are created and people thrive more broadly.”
The firm of Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel LLP will take up the lawsuit for CORE. The civil rights law firm is no stranger to suing the city, handling multiple key cases, including the Nunez settlement over city jail conditions.
“The mayor’s job, set forth right there in the rule book, is to do one thing [at] a very specific time, and that is to create and publicly release a written plan for how city government will address and mediate the racial inequities that plague our city,” said partner Andrew Celli. “There’s nothing vague or ambiguous or subject to interpretation about what the mayor must do and when he must do it.”
Celli will be seeking a mandamus, or court order, mandating Adams to release the plan. The parties will tentatively meet on September 10, although the actual arguments may be pushed back to a later date. Even with a ruling, the Adams administration frequently appeals unfavorable decisions and can potentially drag the case out further.
A spokesperson for Adams blamed the delays on several lawsuits threatening federal funding and said the administration’s legal team is reviewing the report to ensure “it is iron-clad, legally sound, and protects New Yorkers’ best interests.” She also called the lawsuit “incredibly misguided, short-sighted, and jeopardizes the wellbeing of the vulnerable communities it claims to protect.”
Diversity initiatives remain under attack on the federal level after Trump issued targeted executive orders when he returned to office this past January. However, CORE argues the Adams administration cannot flout the city charter enforcing the Racial Equity Plan’s release for any reason.
The CORE commissioners and their proponents believe there’s also a moral obligation to release the Racial Equity Plan. Rev. Kirsten John Foy, the Public Advocate’s appointee, provided particularly pointed words for Adams as New York City’s second Black mayor.
“You got a historic mandate from the ancestors by invoking them to get there,” said Foy, “and now, brother, you have a mandate to step before the people and tell the truth about your record.”