During both his terms, Reynoso served as chair of the City Council's Committee on Sanitation & Solid Waste Management.[3] He also co-chaired the Council's Progressive Caucus.
Political positions
Ideologically, Reynoso is a progressive.[3][6] At age 22, before his election to the City Council, he co-founded New Kings Democrats, a progressive reform-oriented grouping of the Brooklyn Democratic Party; the faction has struggled for control of the borough's party organization, clashing with bossesVito Lopez and Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn.[6][7][8]
Housing and land use
In 2019, as a city councilmember, Reynoso proposed a plan to create new historic districts to limit development in Bushwick, preserve manufacturing zoning, and allow no more than 2,000 new housing units, all at below-market rates (in contrast to a plan by Mayor Bill de Blasio to allow 5,613 new units of housing, including 1,873 units permanently earmarked for below-market-rate).[9]
In November 2021, upon winning election as borough president, Reynoso criticized past mayors for what he called overdevelopment, and that he wanted to "empower community boards to dictate what their communities look like in 10 years."[3] However, in 2023 and 2024, Reynoso supported more housing construction,[10][11] and proposed plans to upzone Brooklyn to permit more housing.[12][13] He also criticized NIMBYism and efforts to block housing construction based on notions of "neighborhood character."[10][11] In November 2023, he criticized Mayor Eric Adams for slow progress on addressing the New York City housing crisis, and suggested that New York City should eliminate single-family-exclusive zoning.[14]
As a city councilmember and as Brooklyn BP, Reynoso has supported initiatives to protect the safety of pedestrians and bicyclists,[8] including Vision Zero.[15] He supports the end of parking minimums and has criticized illegal parking, such as double parking and parking on sidewalks, parks, and bike lanes.[8] In January 2022, six days into his tenure as borough president, Reynoso put an end to illicit parking on the Brooklyn Borough Hall plaza, ending the widely criticized practice of his predecessor Adams, who allowed his employees to illegally park their private vehicles across the plaza during his tenure.[8][16] In 2024, after a series of pedestrian deaths caused by turning cars at intersections, Reynoso and other Brooklyn elected officials called for universal daylighting.[15]
Crime and policing
On the Council, Reynoso was the lead sponsor of the Right to Know Act; the act require New York Police Department officers to hand out business cards with their name and rank to persons they stop, and to inform persons stopped by police of their right to decline a consent search.[3][17] The bill, passed in response to NYPD's use of stop-and-frisk, was enacted in 2017 and took effect in 2018.[17]
In 2019, Reynoso voted to support New York Mayor Bill de Blasio's plan to eventually close Rikers Island, the city's long-troubled jail complex, and replace it with newly constructed borough-based jails.[6][18]
Reynoso then easily won the November 2021 general election, defeating against Republican candidate Menachem M. Raitport and Voices for Change candidate Shanduke McPhatter.[3]
In October 2022, Reynoso fired his deputy borough president, Diana Richardson, a former Crown Heights assemblywoman, following a string of staff and constituent complaints about her behavior.[20]
