The Big Apple is facing its “worst crisis in 50 years,” says a group of New Yorkers who are launching a reform effort called “Save Our City” to try to turn it around.

The bipartisan committee will kick off its official launch during a noon press conference Wednesday at City Hall and plans to hold events all over the city in the coming months. 

The group’s organizers include a former commissioner of the New York City Police Department commissioner, Raymond Kelly; along with a former lieutenant governor of New York, Betsy McCaughey; the chief executive of Junior’s Cheesecake, Alan Rosen; and the former United States attorney general, Michael Mukasey.

The committee, launching ahead of the 2025 mayoral and City Council elections, says the next mayor must have “a pro-growth agenda to ensure jobs, prosperity and tax revenue for the city.” 

The group’s launch comes as cities across the country are seeing efforts to restore order and push back against liberal open drug use, homelessness, and crime. In New York’s case, the City Council cannot be relied on to save the city, Ms. McCaughey tells the Sun in a phone interview.

“Of late, here’s what they’ve done: they’ve established a reparations committee, they’ve made living rough on the street a right, and they’ve imposed new burdensome paperwork requirements on any cop who stops a suspect on the street,” she says.

“And now that they’ve accomplished those three things, they’re looking at providing sexual devices to transgender inmates at Rikers Island, like silicone breasts and prosthetic penises,” she adds.

These are not the issues New Yorkers are concerned about, she says — rather, they want “a safe subway ride, good schools and order instead of chaos on the streets.” A pressing focus of the “Save Our City” effort will be to address the “enormous cost and impact of migrant shelters,” she says. 

Another major objective of the group is to encourage more local voter turnout, given that in last year’s November local election, participation was a mere “12.8 percent of registered voters, compared with 60 percent in the 2020 national election,” the group notes.

Other key issues of the committee are to “stop the exodus” of businesses and residents leaving the city, deter crime and improve public safety, restore bail requirements, permit local authorities to cooperate with federal immigration authorities, and protect the city’s Jewish community. The committee, which will be an educational nonprofit, aims to inform people that “it doesn’t have to be this way.”

“I’m so confident that the great silent majority in New York want to be heard and want to participate in a plan to turn New York around, I think at some point I’m going to fill Madison Square Garden,” Ms. McCaughey says. 

The group’s website, saveourcityny.org, has a portal for residents to express their concerns and share how the city’s decline has affected them. Ms. McCaughey says that she is already hearing from residents — and the website only went live this week. 

“A large part of this problem isn’t the mayor. New York City faces the worst crisis in decades, and all of this preceded the corruption issues that are now coming out with the mayor,” she says, in reference to the federal government’s charges against the city’s mayor, Eric Adams, for bribery and campaign finance offenses, for which he has pleaded not guilty.  

All of the “career politicians are jockeying for a position to replace the mayor,” Ms. McCaughey says, adding that “they don’t have a plan to turn the city around.” 

The “Save Our City” effort would be a “vehicle” for New Yorkers from all parts of the city to get involved in planning a better path for it, she says. 

“And the reason we need this vehicle is that New York, sadly, right now, is a one-party city. Where is the Republican Party?,” she says. “The City Council has been taken over by the lunatic left.”

Mr. Kelly, the longest-serving New York Police Department commissioner and another leader of the committee, said in a statement that “New York City is in trouble!”

“Save Our City can help get it back on track with some of the best minds I know,” he said.