Mayor-Elect Eric Adams Shows Off Colorful Personality During Appearance On 'The Late Show With Stephen Colbert'
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- In the few short weeks since Eric Adams was elected mayor, he has signaled that his reign at City Hall will be a 180-degree change from the current administration.
He intends to be the innovation mayor with a larger-than-life personality to drive what he hopes will be a larger-than-life comeback from the dark days of the COVID-19 pandemic, CBS2's Marcia Kramer reported Wednesday.
The quote from the old "Star Trek" television show, "To boldly go where no man has gone before," seems to sum up the the persona of the next mayor. He's got a whole bunch of new ideas for using technology, and a wicked sense of humor.
The whole country got a taste of that when he appeared on "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert" on Tuesday night.
"Do you have a message to tell the rest of the country from New York?" Colbert asked.
The question was straight forward, but the response was unexpected. Adams pulled out a gift bag filled with things to attract tourists to post-pandemic New York City. Yes, there was a blanket for the cold of a Times Square New Year's Eve celebration, but the former cop also offered this:
"One of my best gifts, marijuana is legal you know, so I brought raw bamboo, and I can't give you this gift. I will give it to you later," Adams said.
"I want to check the contents of that bag," Mayor Bill de Blasio said Wednesday.
The gag was so successful, even the present occupant of Gracie Mansion, de Blasio, a man who many think is badly in need of a personality transplant, tried to get in on it. And was there there just a tinge of "I wish I had thought of that" in de Blasio's assessment?
"I think it was fun. I just think it was fun. He was playing around. Eric's got a great sense of humor and I really just appreciate that he had a good time on that show," de Blasio said.
After boosting New York City on Colbert's show, the mayor-elect spoke at a tech conference, where he talked about all the new ways he wants the city's tech gurus to come up with ideas to modernize the city.
"You know what we can do and how we can transform our city. Historically, it has been an uninviting place on a global proportion. We are too bureaucratic, too expensive, too difficult to do business. So much bureaucratic madness," Adams said.
Adams said he was looking for 21st century solutions to long-term municipal problems.
"I want you to look at how we provide goods and services. How can we do it better? How can we drop children off to school? How do we pick up trash? How do we pay people? It is my belief that we should be paying people with cyber wallet," Adams said.
As a man who used healthy eating to beat back diabetes, he said he was especially interested in paying people getting food stamps with a cyber wallet, so the city can offer incentives for good behavior.
"If a person is receiving food stamps through a cyber wallet and instead of buying unhealthy food they buy healthy food, we match it dollar for dollar," Adams said.
And about that mysterious white envelope Adams brought with him to Colbert's show, Kramer said she hopes Colbert didn't try to smoke it. A source in the Adams camp told her they just gathered a collection of lawn grass and things that would look like marijuana.