Laura Anglin, an economist who during nearly two decades in New York government served as the state’s budget director and, as the city’s chief operating officer, helped manage the response to the coronavirus pandemic, died on Thursday in a Manhattan hospital. She was 57.
The cause was lung cancer, her brother John Svitek said.
Ms. Anglin’s sweeping portfolio as a public official included administering, as deputy comptroller for retirement services, $6 billion in yearly pension benefits for a million current and former state employees.
As the state’s budget director, she drafted and enforced spending and revenue-producing tools like taxes for a $100 billion-plus annual financial plan.
And as the city’s deputy mayor for operations, she confronted major urban challenges, like the swift creation of prekindergarten programs and the shaping of pandemic strategies.
“She was one of the unsung heroes of the fight against Covid in New York City,” former Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a phone interview on Monday. “She played a profound role in testing, vaccine and recovery efforts. Anti-bureaucratic, she always had an attitude that we could address any problem, and in a long career really believed in the power of government to do good.”
Ms. Anglin was budget director under Gov. Eliot Spitzer and his successor, David A. Paterson. She was named deputy mayor for operations by Mayor de Blasio when he restored the position at the start of his second term in January 2018. Before that, she was chief administrative officer for First Deputy Mayor Anthony E. Shorris.
Andrew Rein, president of the Citizens Budget Commission, a business-supported watchdog group, said of Ms. Anglin in an email, “She well understood that effective public leadership came from both the big picture and the often-unnoticed brass tacks of on-the-ground operations.”
Laura Lee Svitek was born on May 25, 1965, in Queens to John and Charlotte (Ninke) Svitek. Her father was an accountant, her mother a homemaker.
After graduating from John Glenn High School in Huntington, N.Y., on Long Island, she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics from the State University of New York at Albany in 1987 and 1989.
Her marriage to Michael Anglin ended in divorce. Her brothers, John and Scott, are her closest survivors. She lived in Manhattan.
Making her way up from intern, Ms. Anglin played a leading policymaking role in state government on the environment, education, taxation, transportation and public safety.
After working as an economist with the State Department of Environmental Conservation and as an econometrician with the Department of Taxation and Finance, she joined the staff of the State Assembly Ways and Means Committee, rising to director of budget studies and to budget director under the Democratic majority.
Ms. Anglin was deputy comptroller from 2003 to 2006 and became first deputy budget director before she was named budget director by Governor Spitzer.
When Mr. Spitzer resigned amid a prostitution scandal, Ms. Anglin continued to serve in the Paterson administration, where she was viewed as a force for spending restraint.
Among the proposals the administration championed during her term, unsuccessfully, was an 18 percent tax on sugary sodas and soft drinks.
“We are seeing an obesity epidemic,” Ms. Anglin said at the time. “One out of every four New Yorkers is obese, up from about 14 percent in 1995.” She cited research linking soft drinks to obesity in children and diabetes in women and predicted that the tax could curb consumption of sugary drinks by 5 percent.
When she left his administration in 2009, Mr. Paterson said that Ms. Anglin had “played a major role in stabilizing New York’s finances and enacting critical reforms that will eliminate waste and inefficiency in government.”
From 2009 to 2016, she was president of the Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities, which represents more than 100 private institutions in New York State. She was the first woman to lead it.
Dr. David J. Skorton, who was president of Cornell University in Ithaca from 2006 to 2015, recalled Ms. Anglin as combining “the soul of higher education and the savvy of New York State budgeting.”
She was chief administrative officer for the first deputy mayor in 2017 and a deputy mayor from 2018 to 2021.
When she was named deputy mayor, the New York City-born Ms. Anglin told an interviewer: “I feel like I came home. At the state level, the things you do are at the 64,000-feet level. You make a law or rule change and you’re done. In the city, if you make a change, you see the immediate result, and it’s up to you to implement that change. That’s very rewarding.”
Given her experience working with men, she was asked what advice she would impart to women. “For women managers specifically, I would say be assertive, but not aggressive,” she replied. “Show them that you are here and mean business.”
