Council Member Julie Menin represents New York City Council District 5, covering the East Side of Manhattan and Roosevelt Island. An attorney, civic leader, three time City Commissioner, and former small business owner, Julie has over two decades of experience in the public and private sectors. She currently serves as the Chair of the City Council Committee on Consumer and Worker Protection. Julie previously served as Commissioner of the Department of Consumer Affairs and Commissioner of Media and Entertainment. She also served as an adjunct professor at Columbia University. Julie most recently served as the City’s Census Director, successfully advocating against the Trump Administration’s efforts to add a citizenship question and achieving a historic result by finishing first among all major cities. Because of this effort, New York City will be receiving its fair share over the next decade of over $1.5 trillion in federal funding for public schools, affordable housing, healthcare, infrastructure, and other vital programs.
As Council Member, Julie has passed over 17 bills of which she was the primary sponsor, including the groundbreaking Healthcare Accountability Act to lower and bring transparency to excessive hospital prices. Her tenure has included several critical policy wins such as advancing universal childcare in New York City, easing burdens on small businesses by establishing a one-shop-stop web portal for all city licenses, codifying the right to reproductive health services, and creating an Office of Healthcare Accountability to rein in skyrocketing healthcare prices. At the same time, Julie has effectively addressed a full range of constituent issues: sanitation and rat-mitigation concerns, street safety, unlicensed smoke shops, robust capital funding for district parks and schools, access to low-cost internet for NYCHA residents, and more. Julie also led a groundbreaking initiative in partnership with the Gray Foundation and the Museum of Jewish Heritage to address antisemitism across New York City. This initiative will bring 85,000 public and charter school students to the museum to engage in immersive exhibition tours and comprehensive Holocaust education programs.
As Commissioner of the Department of Consumer Affairs (“DCA”), Julie reinvigorated the agency by increasing consumer restitution by 70 percent while instituting 25 reforms to lower onerous fines on small businesses where there was no consumer harm. Also under Julie’s leadership the agency implemented the City’s historic Paid Sick Leave Law, launched a new Earned Income Tax Credit initiative that resulted in over $260 million being returned to low-income New Yorkers, and conducted trailblazing investigations into industries preying on New Yorkers such as for-profit colleges. She also launched an investigation into a major online firearms marketer to determine if NYC-based sellers were using this website to advertise and illegally sell second hand guns without DCA licenses – thereby skirting City, State and federal laws. In addition, as DCA Commissioner, Julie spearheaded a new initiative that has now seeded over 200,000 NYC public school kindergarteners with a college savings account and chaired the board of New York City Kids Rise, the not-for-profit organization she helped create to implement the project.
Julie also previously served as Commissioner of Media and Entertainment where she brought TV and film production to an all-time record for the city creating thousands of jobs and significant revenue for New York. Julie launched new programs to increase women’s representation and opportunities in film, TV, theater and the music industry, such as the first-ever women’s film fund, job training programs to increase gender equity in the film, theater, TV and music industries, and a slate of new women’s programming on the city’s TV channels. Julie also negotiated the historic deal to bring the Grammy Awards back to New York in 2017, resulting in a $200 million economic benefit for New York City.
Before becoming a Commissioner, Julie served as the seven-year Chair of Manhattan Community Board 1 where she helped lead Lower Manhattan’s resurgence after 9/11. Several weeks after her small business was badly damaged on 9/11, she founded the not-for-profit organization Wall Street Rising which focused on the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan for residents and small businesses, ultimately developing it into an organization with over 30,000 members. She served as a board member of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the 9/11 Memorial Jury, and the 9/11 Memorial Board and was one of the founding board members of the World Trade Center Performing Arts Center (The Perelman Center.) She was credited for her solution-based leadership after 9/11 including building three new schools downtown, advocating for the creation of the WTC Health Registry to provide for healthcare for first responders and residents, pushing for the successful creation of the Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center to centralize and manage 60 active construction projects on and near Ground Zero, and successfully leading the charge to move the trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed from Lower Manhattan.
Prior to her career in public service, Julie practiced law as a regulatory attorney at Wiley, Rein & Fielding, a large law firm in Washington D.C., and as the Senior Regulatory Counsel at Colgate-Palmolive where she played a lead role in numerous agency cases involving the Department of Justice, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Trade Commission, and also litigated disputes in state and federal courts. She has served on the board of the Women’s Campaign Fund, where she helped launch She Should Run, a nationwide initiative that has encouraged thousands of women to run for elected office and served on the board of Eleanor’s Legacy, an organization in New York focused on electing more Democratic women statewide. In addition, she has served on the boards of the Downtown Hospital, Citizens Union, the Municipal Arts Society, the September 11th Memorial Foundation, the WTC Performing Arts Center, the National Advisory Board for Public Service at Harvard University and the board of trustees of Columbia University.
Julie has been recognized as a Women’s Campaign Fund Rising Star, Citizen Union’s Civic Leader, City and State’s “Power 100 Women” and “Top 25 Women in Public Service.” She has also been the recipient of numerous awards including Columbia University’s John Jay Award and the League of Conservation Voters Public Service Award. She has served as a national commentator on law and politics and has appeared on CNN, The Today Show, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and other outlets and previously hosted and co-produced a local NBC cable news show focused on politics and law.
Julie also served as an adjunct professor at Columbia teaching on city and state government, focusing on how cities can take the lead in the face of deregulation. She graduated magna cum laude from Columbia University and received her law degree from Northwestern University School of Law.
Julie is a proud mom and honored to represent the district that her mother and grandmother settled in (known as Little Hungary) after surviving the Holocaust and escaping from Hungary. Julie resides in Yorkville with her husband and children.