One emergency every two months

A mayor can declare an emergency. Doing it suspends the rules the city normally follows when it spends money or knocks a building down: no competitive bidding, no hearing for the owner, no review before a historic building comes down. It is meant for a fire, a riot, a storm.

Carmella Mantello took office on January 1, 2024 and signed her first emergency declaration on January 4. She has signed eleven between January 4, 2024 and April 1, 2026 — one every ten weeks. Six fall in her first year.

Two of the eleven involve no emergency anyone would recognise. One hired an accounting firm. One kept paying for licence plate cameras after the council voted to stop.

All eleven invoke § C-40 of the Troy City Charter in near-identical language. Every document is in the source library.

The charter section she uses

All eleven cite § C-40 of the city charter. It is four sentences long, and it is about disasters: “conflagration, riot, storm, earthquake, or other unusual peril to the lives or properties or both of the citizens of Troy.” It tells the mayor to summon “all the forces of the City,” lets her deputise whoever she needs, makes the costs a charge against the city, and tells her to phone the Council President.

Those four sentences are the whole section. The power to skip bidding comes from state law, which allows it in a genuine emergency. The power to run a declaration for five months comes from the fact that nobody wrote an end date into § C-40 in the first place.

What gets skipped

Three protections stop applying the moment a declaration is signed. Her own lawyers put the purpose of that plainly when the council took her to court:

One of the primary purposes of a state of emergency is to afford municipal officials a dispensation from the usual auditing and purchasing procedures of municipal government.

Competitive bidding. Normally the city has to advertise a job, take bids, and award it to the cheapest qualified bidder — the rule that stops a mayor handing work to whoever she likes at whatever price. State law sets the threshold at $20,000 for purchases and $35,000 for public work, and lets a city skip all of it during an emergency. Most of the eleven declarations authorise “immediate procurement of materials, commodities, and services.” The road salt one puts it plainly: “there is not enough time to follow normal procurement.”

The owner’s hearing. Normally, before the city tears down your building, it has to post a notice on it and give you a hearing you can attend and argue at. Four of the eleven declarations authorised demolition, covering six buildings.

Historic review. Normally, knocking down a building in a historic district needs a public hearing before the Landmarks Preservation Board. 624-630 Second Avenue were two adjoining 18th-century buildings. They were inspected and condemned on the same day, August 22, 2025.

Who decided the buildings had to come down

The declarations assert that each building was structurally unsound. The only evidence for that in the file is the city’s own inspection report, written by the official recommending the demolition. No independent engineering assessment of the six structures appears anywhere in the file. The city inspected, the city decided, and the city signed.

The documents record the process that did not happen. At 1124 Fifth Avenue, code inspectors “despite repeated attempts — have been unable to make contact with the current owner.” At 200 Hill Street, officers “have made numerous attempts to contact the owners of record at their address of record to afford them opportunity to be heard and to remediate, all to no avail.” At 310 and 314 2nd Street a hearing was held before the Deputy Mayor and the owner did not appear.

One timeline is worth stating on its own. The 310 and 314 2nd Street declaration is dated April 2, 2025. The inspection it rests on is dated March 19-20, 2024.

As a result of his March 19-20 inspection, the City Engineer condemned the aforesaid buildings and has determined and reported that the risk of imminent collapse is so great that the structures must be demolished.

Twelve months separate that finding from the emergency.

The two with no building

January 28, 2024. Comptroller Andrew Piotrowski left and nobody remaining was qualified to close the city’s year-end financials. The declaration names the vendor it authorizes:

Pursuant to § C-40 of the City Charter, I hereby declare a public emergency to mobilize all available City resources as shall be required to address the complete and proper functioning of the Office of the Comptroller. This shall include but not be limited to the hiring of ProNexus, a financial consulting firm…

April 1, 2026. The council tabled the Flock Safety renewal and directed the City Auditor to withhold all payments. One day after the contract’s stated expiration, the mayor declared an emergency to keep paying it. Full account here.

The mayor cannot unilaterally spend taxpayer dollars using a state of emergency declaration when no such conditions exist.

She had a choice of two powers and took the one that never ends

Every mayor in New York can declare an emergency under state law. That one runs thirty days and then stops. To keep it going the mayor has to renew it in public, which gives the council a chance to say no every time.

Troy’s charter has its own version, § C-40, and it runs until the mayor says it is over.

All eleven of her declarations use the charter. None uses the state law.

The Flock declaration of April 1, 2026 runs “until such time as the emergency conditions described herein have been resolved” — a condition she defines and she decides when to lift. Troy was still under it five months later. One signature, no renewal, no vote.

Under the state law it would have expired in thirty days and needed renewing five times in public. Under the charter it needed her signature once.

Niagara Falls shows the other choice. Mayor Robert Restaino declared an emergency in late July 2026 after his own council refused to fund road and blight work — same tactic, same obstacle. His runs on the state law, so it is “set for 30 days but can be extended 30 days at a time.” Every month it goes back in front of the people who said no.

She vetoed the public hearings

The council wrote a local law to replace § C-40 and put a clock on it. Before it could hold hearings on that law, it had to pass a resolution scheduling them.

She vetoed the resolution scheduling the hearings. The council overrode her 7-0 on July 9, 2026, and held them on July 23 and August 6. The law passed 7-0 on September 3.

Asked about it, she said the council was misdirected.

I inherited the emergency powers that are currently in place, and there is a reason the City Charter gives the duly elected mayor the ability to act when a crisis occurs… While the Council wastes time and taxpayer dollars pursuing this in a courtroom, the people we serve lose.

She also defended the eleven directly.

Throughout my time as mayor, I have used emergency declarations to address a number of serious issues, including dilapidated buildings, failing water infrastructure, an accounting crisis, and natural disasters. These powers exist for a reason.

What the record shows

Eleven times in twenty-seven months, Mayor Mantello signed a document that let Troy spend without bidding, demolish without a hearing, and answer to nobody until she decided it was over. She used it for a water main and an ice storm. She also used it to hire an accounting firm, and to keep paying a camera company the council had voted to stop paying.

She had a version with a thirty-day limit available every time, and used the one with no limit every time. Sued over the last one, she told the court the practice was “not unprecedented” and filed six declarations to prove it — three of her own and three from the mayor before her.

By September 2026 the council had written itself a law to overturn a declaration, because it had no other way to stop one.