NEW YORK — Michael Bloomberg isn’t getting a lot of help these
days in securing his legacy as mayor of New York City.
The state’s otherwise dysfunctional legislature and new Gov.
David Paterson dealt a blow to Bloomberg’s school reform agenda
last month when they essentially banned the use of test scores and
other student data in evaluating the performance of new teachers.
They did this at the behest of the United Federation of Teachers,
which has long dueled with Bloomberg over his control over the
City’s school system.
Another of his school reform efforts — giving principals the
power to hire or remove teachers regardless of seniority — came
under question earlier this month when a report from The New
Teacher Project showed that the changes came at a high cost to
taxpayers. Thanks to the contracts Bloomberg negotiated with the
UFT, some 665 teachers removed from the classroom are still being
paid full salaries for not working, at a cost to taxpayers of $81
million in 2006 and 2007.
Bloomberg is demanding that the union come back to the
negotiating table to change those terms. That’s unlikely to happen
until the contract runs out next year, when the mayor is the lamest
of lame ducks.
His reputation for running clean government has been shattered
thanks to revelations that his chief ally (and possible successor),
City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, and her staff siphoned part
of budget allotted to the council for its own spending purposes —
some $360 million this fiscal year alone. These funds were given to
favored community groups without going through the legal budget
process. The spending was covered up by setting up phony
outfits.
The scandal has grown to include allegations of theft of student
tutoring dollars by city council aides. But Bloomberg has both
downplayed the slush fund shenanigans and stoutly defended his own
pork barrel spending.
Since succeeding Rudolph Giuliani as mayor of the nation’s
largest city in 20002, Bloomberg had been highly-lauded by school
reformers and others for successfully taking over the city’s
once-independent school system and for maintaining his
predecessor’s stellar success in reducing crime.
But the former Wall Street stock trader-turned-media billionaire
didn’t fully learn the lessons about improving quality of life
taught by Giuliani’s successful tenure. As mayor he has placed more
emphasis on public relations than on strong, steady management that
follows up on his successes.
As a result, there has been a slow increase in the kind of urban
ills that once made New York the nation’s most fearsome eyesore.
And his most successful initiatives remain incomplete.
A VISIT TO THE Big Apple by one of its native sons offers examples
of how Bloomberg has succeeded — and failed — in keeping it a
livable city.
On one hand, streets remain as safe as they have during the
Giuliani era, with some 494 homicides were reported in the city in
2007, a 16 percent decline over the number of homicides reported
five years earlier. Bloomberg has also pleased health nuts — and
rankled smokers, fast-food restaurants, conservatives and
libertarians — by enacting smoking and trans fat bans and
requiring calorie and cholesterol information on menus.
On other quality-of-life issues, New York is slipping. Vagrancy,
once treated as a scourge under Giuliani, is seen all over the
city. Homeless men can be seen coughing and spitting on the E train
to Manhattan, crunched over with heads covered on Columbus Circle,
even sleeping underneath the marquee of the famed Radio City Music
Hall.
Stanching vandalism, once a key part of the city’s application
of the “broken window” theory of crime prevention, has fallen by
the wayside. Graffiti is now splattered upon apartment buildings,
covering storefronts and even scratched into the windows of
trains.
Meanwhile Gotham’s notoriety as one of America’s highest-taxing
urban communities — lessened under Giuliani — has come back under
Bloomberg. The average New Yorker pays $9.02 in taxes to the city
and state governments for every $100 earned, according to a 2007
study of America’s nine largest cities by the city’s Independent
Budget Office. The average tax burden for the other cities was just
$6.16.
City government expenditures account for more than 11.2 percent
of the city’s personal income in the 2007-08 fiscal year. That’s up
from less than 9.4 percent at the beginning of Bloomberg’s
tenure.
The high taxes, along with the high cost of housing, makes New
York less attractive to middle-class families. Just 30 percent of
its neighborhoods are middle-income communities, according to the
Brookings Institution. It also means that the city is less
attractive to start-ups and small businesses, which thrive in
low-tax environments.
So New York’s economy is more dependent on the financial
services and media outfits that have long made their headquarters
along the Hudson River. But such firms are now going through both
cyclical and long-term declines.
Wall Street firms such as insurance giant American International
Group — which reported $13 billion in losses over the last
half-year — are likely to reduce their payrolls, draining the
city’s economy. Bloomberg’s budget officials estimate that the city
could lose $660 million in taxes from 18 banks and investment firms
this coming fiscal year alone.
AFTER SUFFERING FROM middle class flight and a fiscal collapse
during the 1970s, mayors such as Ed Koch and Giuliani took a more
quality-of-life-oriented approach. They focused intensely on better
policing and reducing residential and business tax burdens.
Bloomberg has had a penchant for the kind of high-spending big
city policies that nearly drove the Big Apple into bankruptcy in
the first place. The city’s current budget of $60 billion is 36
percent higher than the first one Bloomberg oversaw six years ago.
The 2008-09 fiscal year budget he has proposed merely nibbles at
the edges of the city’s spending, depending on past surpluses to
avoid a deficit.
Citizens and even legislators have tired of the tax-and-spending
and Bloomberg’s constant publicity-hogging — including the
floating of such trial balloons as an improbable run for the
presidency.
One of Bloomberg’s most recent proposals, a congestion-pricing
plan under which drivers would have paid $8 for a trip into
Manhattan, was laughed out of Albany by state legislators last
month. The concept, long-embraced by think tanks such as the Reason
Foundation, could help reduce traffic on the city’s streets. But
the high tolls, the ineffectiveness of the plan’s approach and its
focus on unclogging the streets of just one of New York’s five
boroughs angered city residents and suburban commuters alike.
Even Bloomberg’s greatest success — the reform of the city’s
school system, which he took over in 2003 — isn’t unqualified.
Bloomberg and his schools chancellor, Joel Klein, have ruthlessly
expanded school choice through the creation of charter schools,
swept out the system’s notoriously corrupt, inept bureaucracy and
pushed through new curricula and teacher quality policies that
will, in the long run, improve the quality of education students
receive.
But in the short run, test scores and graduation rates for the
school system remain abysmal. And the rough handling of the
teachers union has cost him important political capital. Given that
mayoral control expires next year, it isn’t certain that Bloomberg
or his successors can keep the schools from spiraling back into
mediocrity.
Bloomberg will probably not go down with such predecessors as
John V. Lindsay or Abraham Beame as a failed mayor. He has been
more successful than contemporaries such as former Indianapolis
Mayor Bart Peterson and Anthony Williams of Washington D.C. But he
leaves a mixed record that doesn’t come close to such
highly-esteemed city leaders such as L.A.’s Richard Riordan or the
legendary Fiorello LaGuardia. And he’s definitely no Rudy.
