Bloomberg, the Morning After
By the time you read this, you'll know how close Fernando Ferrer came to winning The Bronx, and exactly how much money Mike Bloomberg spent per vote to win his second, and supposedly last, term in elected office.
Buyer's remorse has a way of settling in the morning after a $70 million campaign binge.
So it's only fair after the avalanche of spending by Bloomberg subsides-it is over now, right?-to examine the true cost of his re-election. Leaving aside his army of consultants, ad men and paid "volunteers," most New Yorkers will feel the cost of Bloomberg's second term once a slew of new deals for the city's municipal unions are ratified. Those contracts include sizable raises for thousands of union members, which Bloomberg has repeatedly claimed will be offset by "innovative, creative productivity enhancements."
"Productivity, in all likelihood, does not pay for the salary increases," said Doug Turetsky of the Independent Budget Office. "So there is going to be some cost to the city, the level of which I can't be precise about yet," which is convenient for the mayor. Make deals during the election, gain good press, and deal with the costs once safely back in office.
The IBO will have more precise numbers in December, when the unions ratify their contracts, which then in effect become law. In politics as in show business, timing is everything.
Those deals for firefighters, correction officers, detectives and other unions will go a ways to determining whether the Fiscal Year '07 deficit, presently projected at $3.5 billion, eclipses the $4 billion deficit of 2001. Remember that one? It ushered in the 18.5% property tax increase and shuttered six firehouses.
About half of this debt resulted from the events of 9/11, but the other half was mostly because of Giuliani's generous second-term spending.
Whatever the causes, the looming hole forced the mayor to cut his own staff and challenge the City Council, public advocate and comptroller to do the same. It also spawned the fabulously titled Doomsday Budget, which never got implemented, though we like to think it would have required Bloomberg to pay off the entire deficit himself.
It also put Bloomberg, who'd self-financed his campaign and won few union endorsements in his first run for mayor, in a position where he had no political debts to repay, and in which he could have tapped into the post-9/11 desire for shared sacrifice to have forced the city's workers to make contract concessions in the name of the greater good.
The mayor-who dedicated prime space in his first state of the city address to the unaffordability of the city's workforce, which is 1/7th the size of the federal workforce, but which receives far more generous benefits-had the city's unions over a barrel.
Labor leaders for the first time saw across the table from them not a political machine in which they were the cogs but a billionaire mayor who had a fortune, not a political career, to worry about (at least after 2005). With no need to placate the unions in exchange for their powerful get-out-the-vote teams, Bloomberg was under no evident political pressure.
Yet he quickly spoke the magic words: No layoffs. He didn't entirely give in, though-he held off on negotiating new contracts (thus forcing the unions to continue working under their old ones) and somehow Doomsday was avoided. And contracts were put off until-what are the odds?-the next election year.
This year, with election politics in the air, things changed. One at a time, each week since September, those union heads marched into the Blue Room with the mayor to announce deals had been reached on the contracts that they hadn't been able to agree on when their original contracts expired two years ago.
On Sept. 26, the Correction Officers announced an agreement; on Oct. 12, the Uniformed Sanitation Workers had their day in the blue room; on Oct. 20, the Sergeants Benevolent Association reached a deal; On Oct. 27, the Uniformed Firefighter Association. The Detectives Endowment Association announced their tentative agreement on November 3, the same day members of the United Teacher's Federation (barely) approved their contract.
As Fernando Ferrer said so often, "Thank God for elections."
All these contract deals were struck after it was clear that the Mayor's re-election was all but a sure thing. As each day passed, Bloomberg's bargaining position improved. Supporting Ferrer was increasingly perceived as a futile position.
Yet at each Blue Room announcement, the mayor explained how the city would pay for roughly 17% pay increases for the thousands of workers through-you guessed it-"innovative, creative productivity enhancements." It is a phrase truly deserving of its own month in a calendar of management catch phrases, but for accountants, like the ones in the IBO, those four words will determine how the upcoming budget deficits compare to the one resulting from 9/11, as well as the fiscal lack of discipline of Giuliani's second term.
Historic opportunities to reshape the city's finances come not too often in a mayor's time in office, right Mr. Dinkins? But did Bloomberg set New York on a new course with its unions?
How much those union contracts really cost will only be known once they're handed over to the IBO numbers crunchers. That happens after the unions ratify them and they, in essence, become binding.
Don't worry. The city was so late in signing some contracts that the new deal with the sergeants and corrections unions were entirely retroactive and had in fact expired even before they were announced.
The Real Race
The real race in this town is taking place next week and no, you don't have a vote. It's for the other good seat in City Hall, Speaker of the City Council. Since only other council members vote for speaker, the sole issue in that campaign is term limits.
The prize here goes to whichever of the seven Speaker wannabes can woo their colleagues with promises of immortality. Or at least one more term.
Thirty-seven City Council members are entering their second and final four-year term. Not many other jobs offer $75,000 base pay, five-digit lulus and free parking passes. Kicking these guys out of the Council is like kicking a teenager out of their parent's house and leaving the junk food and PlayStation inside.
On Nov. 17, so-called good government group Citizens Union is hosting a candidate's forum at Baruch College with the magnificent seven?Leroy Comrie, Bill De Blasio, Lew Fidler, Melinda Katz, Christine Quinn, Joel Rivera and David Weprin. Each has given money or tried building alliances with their colleagues, but term limits trumps all other issues.
The candidates all recently filled out a questionnaire from CU in which they laid out, among other things, their positions on term limits.
Quinn said the current system shifts power from "representatives to lobbyists, unelected staff." De Blasio said practically the same thing, but settled on three four-year terms. Weprin overdosed on qualifiers, explaining that he was "open to exploring changes to the law, provided there is sufficient public input to any significant changes to the law."
Comrie, Katz and Rivera didn't return the questionnaire at all. But how they feel about term limits is less important than how their constituency in this race-fellow council members-feel.
Brooklyn Working Family Party member Letitia James and Staten Island Republican James Oddo both think term limits suck. Oddo wrote the group, saying, "We, as a body and as a city, cannot afford to have another individual sworn into the position of speaker and immediately becoming a lame duck."
Oliver Koppell of the Bronx, who served the public as Assembyman and State Attorney General, told the group, "I support change to at least 16 years, if not outright repeal of term limits." Now that is job security.
Manhattan's Gale Brewer, who reportedly has the anti-term limits legislation already drafted, said she opposed the limit for the sake of the little people. "[T]he quick change of council members means that smaller nonprofits who take a couple of years to become acquainted with their local legislator will have to invest more scarce staff time into more lobbying with a new elected official on a regular basis."
And since this is New York, some are seeing race as a factor also. Since Bloomberg is white, and the last two Speakers have both been white, our sources say that the odds favor some one of color, or at least a woman. That gives Katz, Quinn, Comrie and Rivera reason to be optimistic. But if Weprin, Fidler or De Blasio prevail, don't worry. Once the 2001 class is kicked out in 2009, that'll leave James, Darlene Mealy, Jessica Lappin (if she wins) and a few others in good position. n
What kind of race would this be without the anonymous web site and $50 bet. For the former, we recommend Runsforspeaker.blogspot.com. For the latter, there is New York Press' politics blog, Fifth Estate, online at http://nypress.com/blog