#The Post’s ranked picks for NYC comptroller

It’s a green-eyeshades job: The city comptroller helps manage public-employee pension funds and Gotham’s debt portfolio, vets city contracts and audits agencies, overseeing a staff of nearly 800. But many of the Democratic candidates see it mainly as a way to attack the NYPD and/or just want some job: to escape the state Senate or because term limits are forcing them off the City Council.

Oh, and half of them lack any experience in finance or in managing a large enterprise. (In last Thursday’s debate, Corey Johnson and Brad Lander came off as particularly lost.)

Only four candidates strike us as credible, but at least two carry real promise of doing the job far better than anyone who’s held it in years. All understand that public safety and a resurgence in office work are absolutely vital to the city’s recovery from the pandemic and lockdowns; none is chasing some outdated pre-COVID ideological agenda.

Here’s our ranking:

#1: Zach Iscol is an entrepreneur who’s started successful for-profit companies and the Headstrong Project, an innovative nonprofit to serve veterans’ mental-health needs that now operates in 25 cities. A Marine veteran of some of the toughest fighting in Iraq, he has ample financial and managerial experience, including with government agencies: He’s particularly proud of meeting the challenges as deputy director of the Javits Center field hospital last year, keeping dozens of local, state and federal agencies working in concert despite the at-odds agendas of their political bosses (Trump vs. Cuomo vs. de Blasio — what a nightmare).

And he wants to use the job to help reinvent New York City government, vowing to audit not just each agency in its silo, but the actual processes of city government across all its arms: What goes wrong, for example, in the effort to get mentally ill homeless off the streets and into treatment?

He’s ambitious — aiming to do more with the job than anyone ever has. But it’s ambition that can serve the city well.

#2: David Weprin is a decades-long veteran of state and city government with extensive Wall Street experience, especially in municipal finance. He’s run large agencies, notably as a top financial regulator under Gov. Mario Cuomo.

And he’s an independent thinker, leading the opposition to Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s congestion-pricing plan while on the City Council but supporting the Amazon deal while in the Assembly even as other Queens politicians were killing a project that would’ve meant tens of thousands of good jobs. He also helped push for the partial reopening of city restaurants.

If he wins, he vows to do far deeper and more frequent audits of city agencies, also looking harder at the outside contracts that now make up about 20 percent of the city’s budget — and a full quarter of Department of Education spending.

#3: Michelle Caruso-Cabrera has significant financial experience as a journalist for Univision and CNBC. She, too, supported the Amazon deal, even running a primary campaign against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after AOC helped kill it.

Regularly citing the need to be “a good fiduciary,” she rightly faults recent comptrollers for neglecting financial audits of city agencies to focus on performance (which is more likely to win headlines). She vows to look hard at a city government that “spends very badly” (and $20 billion more a year than it did just eight years ago, with “very bad outcomes”) and to use her media experience to ensure regular New Yorkers understand how outrageous it is.

#4: Reshma Patel has major experience from her work in the offices of the mayor and the comptroller, and vows to be independent and to hold the mayor accountable.

You can vote for any of these four as a candidate who can do the job of overseeing nearly $100 billion a year in city spending and $250 billion in pension funds. None of the others deserves any ranking at all.