New York Daily News
By Chris Sommerfeldt | September 7, 2025
Mayor Adams has yet to make good on an election year promise to boost wages for FDNY emergency medical services workers, with new information emerging about his embattled confidante Ingrid Lewis-Martin pushing hard against that vow while still at City Hall, the Daily News has learned.
On the 2021 campaign trail, Adams pledged he would as mayor see to it the FDNY’s emergency medical technicians and paramedics get paid as much as firefighters, who start with salaries around $54,000.
“For years our EMTs, paramedics & fire inspectors have been shamefully denied pay parity — that comes to an end when I become Mayor,” Adams, an ex-NYPD captain, tweeted on June 4, 2021, echoing calls from union leaders who say their members’ starting salaries of just about $36,000 have driven them into poverty and caused a staffing crisis that’s impacting emergency services response times.
But with only a few months to go in his first term and slim chances at reelection, Adams’ administration has not put EMS workers’ wages on par with firefighters amid a bitter labor negotiation with their unions, whose members are going on more than three years without a contract. A new recording obtained by The News sheds light on one potential reason for the logjam.
Oren Barzilay, a FDNY EMS worker who serves as the president of one of the department’s emergency response unions, said he had a similar conversation with Lewis-Martin during negotiations with the administration in July 2024, just weeks before the corruption investigation into the chief adviser landed in the public spotlight.
“She said that we don’t deserve it and that our jobs are not as dangerous as the [firefighters],” said Barzilay, who shared a copy of an invite to the July 15, 2024 Zoom meeting in which Lewis-Martin allegedly shot down his push for better pay.
“I was taken aback by it because we had never heard the mayor say anything like that and our jobs are just as dangerous – we walk on the same calls as police officers, the same calls as firefighters,” Barzilay added, noting his members have been in shootouts and fires and also face the risk of contracting diseases when they respond to certain calls.