Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani will appoint two more Bill de Blasio alums to jobs in his administration, he announced Wednesday – after nearly a month of silence from his transition team.
Jahmila Edwards will enter the proud socialist’s administration as the director of intergovernmental affairs, while Catherine Almonte Da Costa will serve as the next director of appointments, Mamdani said at a press conference in Brooklyn.
The move gave some political insiders a case of deja vu.
“This is really just a re-run of the de Blasio administration,” one insider quipped to The Post.
Edwards, who worked for de Blasio as public advocate and mayor, comes from influential union, DC37, where she’s been for a decade, and Da Costa, who was contracted to work on communications for the census under the former mayor, is leaving as the head of culture at Orchestra.
“We know our efforts are ambitious — and we also know they are necessary. With Jahmila as director of intergovernmental affairs, we are leaving the politics of settling for less in the past and showcasing a government that fights for working people first,” Mamdani said.
“And with Catherine Almonte Da Costa as director of appointments, we have a true expert in talent acquisition in City Hall, making sure excellence is at the core of city government operations.”
The appointments were the first made public in weeks — with the last big move coming in late November when NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch accepted Mamdani’s offer to stay on as the Big Apple’s top cop. Mamdani had made his intentions to keep Tisch on clear, in a move largely viewed as a political strategy to ease concerns about his radical criminal justice agenda.
The only other outside appointment came in mid-November, when the incoming mayor tapped longtime de Blasio top aide Dean Fuleihan as first deputy mayor.
Mamdani also formally named Elle Bisgaard-Church, one of the top people in his campaign, to his administration when announcing his top deputy mayor.
The mayor-elect told reporters more appointments were in the works ahead of his inauguration on Jan. 1.
The incoming administration still has a number of high-profile posts to fill, including who will run the largest school system in the country, a fire commissioner, and a head of the Office of Emergency Management — a key spot with the upcoming 250th Anniversary of the US and the World Cup happening at the same time next year.
“We have like five business days left in the year,” an insider pointed out.
Fuleihan — who sources said landed the gig with Mamdani with an assist from de Blasio — had pushed back earlier this week on the notion that the Mamdani administration wasn’t prepared to take over in two weeks.
“We are not behind,” he said at a breakfast forum with the Citizen for Budget Commission.
Fuleihan’s former boss, though, had one of the slowest transitions in recent history — with fewer than a dozen top positions filled on the day before he took office.
