While New Yorkers wait to see whether Gov. Kathy Hochul will use her extraordinary power to remove Mayor Eric Adams from office, attention is turning to a little-known part of the city’s charter that allows a sitting mayor to be removed through what’s known as the Inability Committee.

However, its power has never been tested.

City Comptroller Brad Lander wants to test it — now that four deputy mayors say they are resigning from Adams’ administration.

“If he fails or refuses to provide a clear contingency plan for how New Yorkers can rely on the services that make this city run then, as I said, I will be reaching out to other members of the Committee on Mayoral Inability,” Lander said.

The Committee on Mayoral Inability is an obscure provision in the city charter designed to determine if a mayor is incapacitated — physically or mentally.

But Brad Lander, a member of this committee, thinks there is a broader definition of “inability” that covers Adams’ political troubles.

“They did not envision this particular set of circumstances, but they said, what if the mayor is not able to do the job? And there are five people whose responsibility it is to figure out that question,” he said.

Lander is also running for mayor. He and other critics of Adams question the mayor’s independence now that the Justice Department moved to drop the corruption case against him.

Nonetheless, Adams is at least compos mentis.

“I think it was a stretch to apply that to Mayor Adams’ circumstances today,” Sal Albanese, a former city councilman representing Brooklyn, said.

Albese was a lawmaker when voters in 1988 approved changes to the City Charter that created the Inability Committee.

“It was mostly about addressing circumstances around physical or psychological disability, where you really can’t govern anymore,” he said.

A Charter Revision Commission report from the time recognized the mayor has the second hardest job in the country after the president, so New York needed something like the 25th Amendment in case of disability.

That was especially apparent after Mayor Ed Koch suffered a stroke in 1987. Koch’s doctors at the time called it a “trivial” stroke.

Here’s how the Inability Committee works:

The committee is made up of:

• City’s top lawyer, known as the Corporation Counsel (Muriel Goode-Trufant)
• City Comptroller (Lander)
• Council Speaker (Adrienne Adams)
• Longest-serving Borough President (Donovan Richards of Queens)
• A deputy mayor appointed by Mayor Eric Adams

Four of the five members of this committee must declare the mayor unfit for the job, so that an agreement on disability includes at least one person appointed by the mayor as part of the administration.

If the mayor objects to this, the City Council would decide the issue by two-thirds vote.

Then, power would transfer to an acting mayor — under the City Charter that would be the public advocate, currently Jumaane Williams.

There is, of course, a less convoluted way to remove a mayor: have the governor do it.

That’s what mayoral candidate Scott Stringer wants. He thinks little of the inability committee’s ability to remove Adams.

“That’s going to be a bureaucratic mess that will result in nothing,” he said.