These days, Michael Bloomberg probably wishes he skipped his
successful push to serve a third term as New York City mayor.
His standing as one of the most-successful players in the
nation’s school reform movement took a hit earlier this month when
he forced the
resignation of former Hearst Corp. magazine boss Cathleen Black
as chancellor of the Big Apple’s public school system just four
months after putting her in the job. The fact that Bloomberg
vigorously gave her votes of confidence — even as teachers union
bosses, defenders of traditional public education, and even some
reformers argued that her inexperience and aloof manner made her a
poor fit for the job — made the reverse of course even more
embarrassing.
Environmentalists once were enthralled by Bloomberg’s
efforts to banish cars from some of the city’s most-congested
corridors are now bickering with him over his move to
delay construction of four garbage treatment plants in the tony
areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn. They complain that the mayor is
backing away from his promise to make sure that all areas of the
city would be equally burdened by the smell of refuse. Motorists
are also steamed with Bloomy after the mayor announced a plan to
charge motorists involved in car accidents for emergency rescue
service. (The plan has since been tossed in the
dumpster.)
Meanwhile Bloomberg is fighting with the once-servile city
council over his efforts to cover a $3.2 billion shortfall in the
upcoming 2011-2012 fiscal year budget. The mayor’s newfound
fondness for fiscal discipline — after nine years of fiscal
profligacy that has doubled the budget to $43 billion — doesn’t
sit well with the council. In particular, they oppose Bloomberg’s
plan to lay off 5,312 public-sector union workers (or 2.1 percent
of the city’s 250,000-person workforce) and cut out $1.5 million
for something called the Center for New York City Neighborhoods,
which has done little to fulfill its mission of stemming the rash
of foreclosures that have hit the city since the economic downturn
three years ago.
None of this has helped his standing with New Yorkers,
many of whom also retain long memories of how his mishandling of a
blizzard last December paralyzed the city for days. Just 40 percent
of residents
surveyed last month by news network NY1 and Marist College
rated his performance as good or excellent, a 30-point decline from
the same period three years ago. Another 53 percent said the city
was heading in the wrong direction, a stunning reversal from three
years ago, when 52 percent of residents thought the city was on the
right path.
Thanks to term limits — and a city council unwilling to
amend the city charter one more time to allow him another four
years — Bloomberg won’t suffer the kind of humiliating electoral
defeat that marked the final days of predecessors such as the
notoriously incompetent Abraham Beame or his legendary successor,
Ed Koch. Among school reformers, Bloomberg will be celebrated for
steady reform of what was once one of the Superfund sites of
American public education. At the same time, he will likely not be
as celebrated as the famed Fiorello LaGuardia or as grudgingly
admired as the man Bloomberg succeeded, Rudolph Giuliani. He has
never fully learned the lessons about improving quality of life
taught by LaGuardia’s and Giuliani’s successful tenures. And now,
fiscal reality (along with the city’s perpetual exhaustion with its
politicians) is making it even harder for Bloomberg to achieve
anything close to their legacy.
The former Wall Street stock trader-turned-media baron at
least deserves credit for two stunning successes. The first lies in
his continuing the longstanding decline in crime that began under
predecessor Giuliani two decades ago. Just 471 homicides were
reported in 2009, 20 percent lower than when he took over in 2002,
while reported robberies declined by 34 percent during the same
period. As a result, New York City no longer resembles the land of
bedlam, arson, and rampant gunplay that fueled such films as
Fort Apache in the Bronx and King of New
York.
The other is the reform of New York City’s public schools,
which he seized control of just after taking office nine years ago.
With former Clinton Administration appointee Joel Klein serving as
his schools czar, Bloomberg proceeded to revamp the
district (and increase graduation rates from an abysmal 37 percent
to a slightly less horrifying 50 percent) with such moves as
shutting down the district’s persistent dropout factories,
embracing charter schools, and successfully breaking the
oft-servile relationship between the district and the teachers
union. This success, along with the reductions in
crime, helped convince the city council in 2008 to revise the
two-term limit on mayoral service, allowing Bloomberg’s tenure
(along with their own) to be extended by another four
years.
But Bloomberg has always struggled with the
quality-of-life elements of running city government that residents
consider as important as safe streets and good schools. The kind of
graffiti and vagrancy that Giuliani ruthlessly combatted has now
returned with a vengeance. Bloomberg would rather attend to such
nonsensical nanny state efforts as banning restaurants from serving
foods laced with trans-fat (even though the diners are only
clogging their own hearts) and faux-environmental crusades such as
banishing automobile traffic on Times Square for the creation of
pedestrian plazas (without considering that it won’t do anything to
trim traffic or pollution).
Meanwhile he has never reined in the kind of fiscal
recklessness that nearly bankrupted New York City four decades ago,
to the benefit of the city’s public sector unions (and their allies
in the city council). The biggest beneficiaries of all: The
American Federation of Teachers, whose New York City local is the
nation’s largest. In exchange for agreeing to reforms such as
allowing principals to actually hire and fire teachers, the
union won a series of double-digit pay raises, and
even such protections for low-performing rank-and-file members such
as a so-called “rubber room” in which they collect salaries in
exchange for staying out of classrooms. By 2008, a New York City
teacher with more than 20 years of experience could earn as much as
$100,049, double the national average for teachers and the average
American household.
Bloomberg could pony up the dollars thanks to taxes
collected from the Wall Street firms and media outfits that have
long made the Big Apple their base of operations. Those dollars
also flowed up to coffers in the state capital at Albany, and in
turn flowed back down the Hudson to subsidize city government. But
thanks to the global meltdown in the finance sector, the current
economic malaise, and the Empire State’s own (relative)
belt-tightening, New York City can no longer count on easy money;
it faces $12 billion in budget shortfalls over the next four years,
according to the city council’s
own analysis.
An even bigger tab is coming thanks to the array of
defined-benefit pensions, which provide annuities to 274,754
retirees (and counting). Taxpayers face as much as $78 billion in
pension deficits, according to a
report released last year by the Manhattan Institute’s Empire
Center for New York State Policy. Thanks largely to deals Bloomberg
struck with public-sector unions — including one with the AFT in
2007 that reduced the number of years a teacher could earn a full
pension from 30 to 25 — the city’s paid $6.6 billion to cover the
annuity payments last year, a ten-fold increase over the amount
paid in 2000.
As a result, Bloomberg must cut deep. But the price of
fiscal profligacy is that everything in a city budget becomes a
sacred cow — even agencies deserving the name such as the city’s
heralded (and 9/11 massacre-scared) fire department. His plan to
shut down overnight service at 20 of the department’s 343 engine
and ladder companies has been rejected out of hand by the city
council. Bloomberg is also getting no help in securing his school
reform legacy. His effort to put the kibosh to a state law
requiring teacher layoffs to be based on seniority was rejected by
New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is mindful of the AFT’s vast
influence (and his own plans to reach the lofty national stage
squandered by his father and predecessor as governor long ago). As
a result, Bloomberg may have to lay off many of the 30,000 young,
talented teachers hired in the last decade who have been
instrumental in turning the schools system around.
Meanwhile Bloomberg’s problems complicate his own effort
to groom a successor. The person he most likely wants to follow him
into office, city council Speaker Christine Quinn, is as well-known
for petty scandals involving favored community groups and
lashing out at reporters such as the Daily News’ Erin
Einhorn, as for being the mayor’s lapdog. The other favorite,
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, has a reputation for moodiness that
doesn’t fit the image of someone holding the proverbial (and often,
actual) second-toughest job in America. And former schools boss
Klein, the Bloomberg official with the best temperament for mayoral
job, is more focused on building up the school reform movement and
helping Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. get into the education
business.
As a result, the lineup it has opened the door to a
possible run for office by a motley crew that includes Eliot
Spitzer, the scandal-plagued former Empire State governor who has
parlayed his fall from grace into a gig on CNN, and former New York
Stock Exchange boss Dick Grasso, Spitzer’s foil during his days as
a crusading prosecutor. New Yorkers would have a better chance
picking a worthy successor to Bloomberg from the Bronx
Zoo.
