Outgoing City Council Member Keith Powers is launching a run for Manhattan Borough President in the 2025 Democratic primary following reports that current beep Mark Levine filed a bid for city comptroller last week, he confirmed Monday.
Both Powers and Levine were able to file for their respective runs after current city Comptroller Brad Lander officially announced a challenge against Mayor Eric Adams late last month.
Powers, who has represented parts of Manhattan’s East Side including Stuyvesant Town and Midtown since 2018, is seeking higher office while term-limited from continuing on in the city’s legislature.
In an interview with amNewYork Metro, Powers said he sees the borough president’s office as a path for continuing his work in the City Council.
“It builds on the work that I’ve been able to do over the last seven years, in the City Council, working on issues like housing and land use and the quality of life issues in different parts of our neighborhoods,” Powers said. “Like what I have been working on around like scaffolding, things like that. So it’s another way to continue to serve where I grew up, and another way to continue the work I’ve been doing.”
The council member said addressing the city’s affordable housing crisis with the land use powers of the borough president’s office will be on the top of his list if he is elected to Borough Hall next year. Furthermore, he said strengthening the borough’s neighborhoods is going to be another one of his core focuses.
“People think about Manhattan as a big populated borough, but they forget it’s really a place of neighborhoods where people care about how their small businesses are doing,” Powers said. “They care about the conditions on their block. They care about the cost of living, of course, and care about making sure that they have a good neighborhood that they get to call their own.”
During his time on the City Council, Powers has served as the Democratic majority leader between 2022 and the beginning of this year and now as chair of the Rules Committee. He helped passed legislation including a bill to institute a buy-back program for faulty e-bike batteries and another that mostly bars landlords from running criminal background checks on tenants.
Powers has been at work assembling a campaign team, he said, bringing on veteran political consultants including Red Horse Strategies, Global Strategy Group, Dynamic SRG and Alex Navarro-McKay.
The council member said that thus far he is the only declared candidate in the race.
“There’s been people throwing their name around, but nobody else has really that we can tell have taken any really serious measures to do anything,” Powers said.
However, a source with knowledge of the matter said some other names including state Sen. Brad Hoylman Sigal (D-Manhattan) and Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal (D-Manhattan), have been floating around as well.
Powers’ campaign launch is just the latest sign of Lander’s mayoral announcement causing a major shakeup in the 2025 election.
Levine is one of many pols who appeared to be waiting until 2029 to seek higher office, but now is seizing on the opening created by Lander’s candidacy — which opens up his current position and potential others who decide to run for higher office as well.
Should Lander drop out of the mayor’s race and seek another term as comptroller instead, Levine could decide to run for another term as Manhattan borough president. If that scenario shakes out, Powers said he would bow out of the BP race.
“I’m obviously not running against Mark Levine,” he said.
