Kathryn garcia biography

Kathryn Garcia (nee McIver; born March 3, 1970) is an American public official and politician. She was the commissioner for the New York City Sanitation Department between 2014 and 2020.

Garcia was born in Brooklyn, New York. She was the interim chair and chief executive officer of the New York City Housing Authority. She was appointed the "food czar" for New York City's emergency food program in the COVID-19 emergency response.

Garcia became a candidate for Mayor of New York City in the 2021 New York City Mayors' election. On July 6, 2021, Associated Press announced that Eric Adams won the Democratic Partyprimary. Garcia came in second place.

On September 1, 2021, Governor Kathy Hochul appointed Garcia to become director of state operations.

References

Why do you think people keep putting you in positions of power and responsibility?
 

I really don’t think of it as power and responsibility. It’s like, can you actually achieve something and are you consistently just going out there, getting the job done, over and over again? And it’s creating teams. What I actually think that I’m strongest at is creating and empowering the team to do it, because in many of those cases, when I moved to a different role, it did not fall apart. If you make the organization stronger, it should continue without you.

How do you define power?

It really is about how you serve people. It is responsibility. I never think about having power, and I get to do all of these exciting things. I think about, “Oh, I have the responsibility every day to deliver for New York state residents and they will hold me accountable, and they will say, ‘You did a good job,’ or ‘You didn’t do a good job.’” So that is really how I think about my day-to-day world.

What do you think the benefits are to holding power in your line of work?

It’s about being able to get things done. I get to make the phone call and say, “No, you actually have to do this. You are holding it up. You’ve been holding it up. You’ve to get out of the way. This is the direction we’re going in. We’ve articulated it. Tell me what you need to get it done.”

Why do you think capable people in government lose power?

They forget that the only reason that you’re there is because you are there to serve people.

What is the most unsung agency of state government?

The Office of People with Developmental Disabilities. They are often doing unseen, incredible work that gets very little recognition. Do you ever know they exist? They’re doing incredible things for people in the state, and they are enormously large, equivalent to the size of the New York Po

In the increasingly bitter race for the New York City Democratic mayoral nomination, one disturbing fact looms larger by the day:

While Andrew Yang has absolutely no qualifications for the job, Kathryn Garcia, who’s risen in the polls in what’s become a three-way race with Yang and Eric Adams, has all the wrong qualifications.

A career bureaucrat who boasts of her accomplishments in various city positions — most notably, or ignominiously, seven years at the helm of the Department of Sanitation — Garcia compiled a track record of incompetence bordering on dereliction.

In fact, “Garbage in, garbage out” might best reflect her DOS tenure, during which the city’s streets and sidewalks turned filthier than ever. Yang alluded to it without using Garcia’s name at Wednesday night’s debate, but her finger- and footprints are all over it.

Garcia’s career history is full of embarrassments, from her fuzzy, blame-the-cops approach to crime (she’d take us “from a warrior culture to a guardian mindset”) to paying mostly minority women at DOS half as much as mostly white men for similar work, as The Post reported.

Her loopy proposed solution to reducing traffic congestion is to add 250 miles of bike lanes to the existing 1,375 miles — which are, of course, in themselves a large reason for traffic congestion.

But it’s her performance as sanitation chief — the centerpiece of her campaign — that calls for the most scrutiny. As Mark Twain hilariously wrote of novelist James Fenimore Cooper’s over-acclaimed literary output, “It has some defects.”

Garcia was more absorbed in global environmental issues than in the less “woke” business of keeping streets clean. No surprise that she was endorsed by the statewide League of New York Conservation Voters, who praised her for making “Zero Waste her top priority” — which included “the largest composting ban in the US.”

Of course, what most New Yorkers want is side

American government official (born 1970)

Kathryn A. Garcia (née McIver; born March 3, 1970) is an American public official serving as Director of State Operations for the state of New York. She served as commissioner for the New York City Sanitation Department from 2014 to 2020 and was a candidate in the 2021 New York City Democratic mayoral primary, losing by 0.8 percentage points to Eric Adams.

Garcia also previously served as interim chair and CEO of the New York City Housing Authority and was appointed "food czar" for New York's emergency food program during the COVID-19 emergency response.

Early life and education

Kathryn Garcia was born in Brooklyn and adopted as an infant by Bruce C. and Ann McIver. She was raised in Park Slope, along with five multiracial adopted siblings. Her father was the chief labor negotiator for former New York City Mayor Ed Koch, and her mother was a Medgar Evers College English professor and executive director of a nonprofit. Actor Clark Gregg is her cousin.

Garcia completed her primary education at P.S. 321 in Park Slope and graduated from Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics and history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Career

Garcia started her career as an intern at the New York City Department of Sanitation, and then worked as a policy analyst at the New York City Department of Finance and as vice president at Appleseed, focusing on strategic planning and economic impact studies. She later served in several roles at the New York City Department of Environmental Protection during the Bloomberg administration, including as COO. There, she was responsible for the operation of the city's water supply, water and sewer system, and wastewater treatment pl