Razzle Dazzle: Master of All But the Unions

Razzle Dazzle
Master of All But the Unions


Amid the impressive list of accomplishments Mayor Bloomberg ticked off during his Jan. 17 State of the City address, and the ambitious goals he set for the coming year, there was a not-so-curious paradox.

His new agenda, and one item that isn't on it that ordinarily would be in a time of municipal prosperity, pivot on his dealings with two unions with which he's had chilly relations: the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association and the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators.

Mayors traditionally have used budget surpluses to add cops, even when crime was already declining, as continues to be the case in Mr. Bloomberg's administration. But though he lavished praise on the NYPD's crime-fighting efforts - ''No one does it better," he told his audience at the New York City College of Technology in downtown Brooklyn - and couched his crusade against illegal guns in terms of the number of officers nationwide killed by them, he passed on the natural applause that accompanies announcements of more police hirings.

Can't Fund What You Can't Hire

The reason is that he doesn't need support for budgeting additional money to hire cops because he hasn't been able to spend what's already allocated for that purpose. The NYPD is about 1,000 cops short of its hiring target, the most likely explanation is the $25,100 starting salary, and no solution is expected before the summer, by which time an arbitration panel may be ready to decide the PBA contract.

The Chief-Leader/Pat Arnow BOUND ONLY BY BARGAINING LAWS: With a panoramic backdrop to match his list of accomplishments, Mayor Bloomberg didn't fear being upstaged by a hero police dog (Ranger, accompanied by Police Officer Neal Campbell) as he delivered his State of the City address. One of the few areas where he has been unable to impose his will to further an ambitious agenda is in his dealings with the unions, as stalled contract talks have made it more difficult to meet police hiring goals and to ensure that Principals will embrace the greater freedom mixed with accountability that is a key to his plans for the public schools. In the meantime, Mr. Bloomberg crosses his fingers and hopes that the rise in murders last year - even as other felony crime continued to decrease - was an aberration and that the city won't have any particularly scary killings in prime tourist areas before it can start replenishing the police force.

His plans for the other municipal service topping his priority list - education - rest heavily on Principals taking on added responsibilities and being skilled enough to improve parts of the school system which have been resistant to achievement for years, if not decades.

But if morale among Police Officers, who are working under a contract that is 2-1/2 years out of date, is not great, how chipper are Principals now that they are 3-1/2 years without a pact? Even those for whom the pay is not the thing have reason to wonder whether the promise of greater freedom tied to greater responsibility amounts to more than setting them up for a fall, given their treatment at the bargaining table.

CSA President-elect Ernie Logan, who noted the lack of specificity in Mr. Bloomberg's plans for Principals, said, "I think my members are losing confidence in their Chancellor. They keep on hearing, 'I support you, I support you, I support you.' But what they're hearing is not what I'm hearing at the bargaining table."

One former city official, speaking conditioned on anonymity, summed up the situation this way: "If they're serious about asking more of Principals because they're finally recognizing their importance, what are they going to do to show it other than imposing demands on them? He hasn't shown us a path to get [to lasting systemwide improvements] and he's left off a key part of the train: namely, the engine."

Other than those not-so-incidental labor dilemmas, the Mayor's vision of the city sounded almost as good as the Brooklyn Steppers Marching Band, which kicked off the State of the City festivities with a rousing rendition of the un-Bloomberg-like "Boogie Oogie Oogie."

He pointed to record low unemployment and a soaring bond rating, a growing population and a falling crime rate, the "biggest affordable housing initiative ever undertaken by an American city" and success in moving residents from welfare to work - a contrast with the Rudy Giuliani trick of merely getting them off the public-assistance rolls.

Tax Cuts a Nation Could Love?

Mr. Bloomberg called for a 5-percent cut in the property tax, elimination of city sales tax on all clothing and reduced taxes for small businesses, a combination that led political consultant Hank Sheinkopf to proclaim it an agenda for making him a viable candidate for President in 2008.

Other consultants weren't ready to make that leap, but said the Mayor's program clearly was crafted with an eye on his legacy and dispelled any notion that he was drifting or bore any resemblance to a gimpy waterfowl.

"This is not a traditional lame duck; it's not George Pataki pounding at the windmills in Iowa," said George Arzt, a consultant who served as Mayor Ed Koch's Press Secretary.

Maureen Connelly, an ex-Koch spokeswoman who advised Mr. Bloomberg during his 2001 campaign for Mayor, remarked, "I think he's very engaged, and he's set forth a very ambitious agenda," citing his initiatives on housing, employment, criminal justice and education as examples.

She also pointed to some of the smaller items in Mr. Bloomberg's speech that make clear to residents the city's interest in improving their lives and responding to their concerns.

He announced that the Department of Finance was beginning to send forms to 120,000 households that were eligible for Earned Income Tax Credits from the city, state and Federal governments for 2003 and 2004 but hadn't claimed them. "The average household is due well over $1,000 - and some are owed considerably more," Mr. Bloomberg noted.

Making It Easy

The fact that the city has already done the calculations and filled out everything on the forms except residents' signatures, Ms. Connelly said, should prove just as popular among lower-income New Yorkers as the property and small-business tax cuts and elimination of city sales tax on high-end clothing (it was already waived on items costing $110 or less) will be with more-affluent residents.

Mr. Bloomberg also announced that the city's 911 call centers are now equipped to receive digital images and videos sent by cell phone or computer of crimes in progress or dangerous building conditions. Ms. Connelly viewed it as a way to use his interest in technology to involve citizens more in the operation of a city that can be much more responsive to them.

The backdrop for his speech displayed images of his administration's accomplishments over the past year: a record school construction program, the completion of the city's third water tunnel, and a record number of construction permits, more than half of them for sites outside of Manhattan.

The band, complete with dancers, was a new touch, but there were familiar pieces of pageantry for the speech, among them representatives of the city's uniformed agencies on the stage. In this instance, recent heroics by several civil servants - as well as Wesley Autrey, who got a standing ovation from much of the crowd for saving a man who had fallen onto the subway tracks earlier in the month - allowed the Mayor to acknowledge them and bask in reflected glory.

Sanit, Police Heroes

They included Sanitation Workers Ralph Cimino and John Talmadge, who lifted a van to free a young girl it had struck and rolled onto; Police Officer John Lopez, who chased down two bank-robbers after they tried to carjack him and his family, and Ranger, a German shepherd assigned to the NYPD K-9 unit who drew the requisite "awwws" when he limped across the stage in a cast, the product of a severed tendon suffered while pursuing a perp.

The Mayor delivered the speech with a jauntiness and confidence that weren't always apparent when he first took office. "He's come a long way," Ms. Connelly said. "The city's come a long way."

Of course, the switch from centralizing control of the school system - to the point where both Teachers and Principals frequently complained about micromanaging - to doing away with the 10 regional offices created to oversee teaching and learning and giving Principals "the full authority they need in order to lead" sounded like Mr. Bloomberg was ready to go a long way in the opposite direction from the past five years.

Ms. Connelly said this was one respect in which Mr. Bloomberg differed from certain unnamed political leaders who stuck with failed policies as an alternative to admitting mistakes.

'Not Afraid to Change'

"He's someone who's not afraid to change," she said. "If something works, he goes with it. He likes to put things out and test them; he's an innovator."

Mr. Arzt echoed that sentiment, and said that given that a Quinnipiac poll showed the Mayor's approval rating at 75 percent before he announced the tax cuts, this was the ideal time for him to risk political capital on the issues that mattered most to him.

"If he's going to break Teacher tenure or modify Teacher tenure, the time to do it is now," he said. "This is not a guy who is afraid to speak out and take on critical issues."

One of the more interesting findings of the poll was that Mr. Bloomberg's popularity continued to rise even as Police Commissioner Ray Kelly's plummeted in response to the Thanksgiving weekend shooting of Sean Bell by police.

"Bloomberg is not as identified with the Police Department as Giuliani was," Mr. Arzt explained. "Everybody knows that Kelly is running the Police Department."

One City, One Standard

The Mayor has also escaped political responsibility for the shooting - which is now being considered by a Queens grand jury - because, unlike his predecessor, he is not viewed as either indifferent or hostile to the interests of black and Latino residents.

Part of that perception is shaped by those communities' dealings with the police, but that interaction is more complex than merely whether residents believe they or their children are being mistreated by cops because of their skin color. It also stems from how vigorously cops are dealing with the kind of criminal activity which can place residents under siege.

Rudy Giuliani's strength in that area lay in putting an end to open-air drug bazaars and making sure that recreational facilities weren't taken over by gangs in broad daylight; his weakness was in demanding enforcement activity that led too many cops to treat minority teenagers like suspects regardless of whether probable cause to do so existed.

Under Mr. Kelly, the NYPD has dialed back the overzealousness while not skimping on enforcement. And Mr. Bloomberg has made gun control a signature issue; while Mr. Giuliani's position does not differ much, he never made himself a target of the National Rifle Association by being such a vociferous advocate on the subject. If Mr. Bloomberg follows him onto the campaign trail, nobody is going to wonder, as they do with our former Mayor, how well he will play in other parts of the country once they find out he's not like them on that issue, because there's no escaping where he stands.

Difference on Schools

And arguably, a larger part of minority voters' impression of a Mayor's administration is based on their experiences with the school system; Mr. Giuliani in this area was, to put it politely, negligent.

During his speech, Mr. Bloomberg pointed to gains in on-time high school graduation rates and reading and math scores, then said, "Our black and Latino students are closing the racial and ethnic performance gap that has long been the shame of our school system."

'A Long Way to Go'

But he also noted, "We've still got a long way to go. Because even today, more than half of black and Hispanic students still do not perform at grade-level standards and only one in four black or Hispanic students now graduates with a Regents degree. If that's not reversed, too many of our children will face dead-end futures in a highly competitive global economy. We can't let that happen."

Mr. Bloomberg's line about being stricter about granting tenure - "We must also make sure that ineffective Teachers are not awarded the privilege of tenure and the near-lifetime job security that comes with it" - received just scattered applause. This tepid response probably owes less to a concern among those in the crowd that Randi Weingarten was taking notes on who was clapping than to uncertainty about just where the Mayor plans to go on the issue.

The United Federation of Teachers president issued a statement afterward noting that it was their tenure rights that protected Teachers from the demands of Principals that they change test scores to artificially inflate school achievement. The "near-lifetime job security" Mr. Bloomberg referred to, she said, was less germane to the system's problems than the fact that nearly 45 percent of the Teachers hired in 2000-2001, the last school year before he became Mayor, left within five years.

Tying Tenure to Scores

Another UFT official indicated that it would oppose any effort by Mr. Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein to tie tenure approval to student test scores.

This is part of the ongoing tension between educators and those who succeeded in the corporate world as the Mayor and the Chancellor did: an overemphasis on the standardized tests is detrimental to real learning, but how do you measure achievement - particularly in schools where both sides agree that students for years have been receiving less than a quality of education - without relying on the scores? And is the deciding factor getting a certain number of students to perform at or above grade level, or making enough progress to believe that they will reach that level in another year or two? If it's the stricter standard, how many young Teachers are going to be idealistic enough to seek jobs in low-performing schools rather than opting for safer assignments if they are available?

Puts Onus on Congress

Mr. Bloomberg by nature might be one of those who would take on the bigger challenge despite the risk because of the potential for greater satisfaction. Later in the speech he called on Congress - where even Democrats are wary of angering the NRA - to overturn a Federal law that bars local law-enforcement agencies from access to Federal data that could help make criminal cases against gun dealers who sell firearms to traffickers.

"It's time to take ideology out of crime-fighting and it's time to give Mayors - the people who are responsible for policing our streets - the tools we need to protect our citizens," he declared.

He called for tougher penalties against juveniles for violent felonies committed with a firearm - an issue which, like the sort of tough quality-of-life enforcement behind the undercover operation that led to the Sean Bell shooting - can become controversial depending on how it's applied.

The Mayor also indicated he would hold Governor Spitzer to his pledge to bring real reform to Albany, calling state government "a national symbol of government dysfunction." The areas where he sought remedies - from unfunded mandates produced by the state's approval of union pension bills to banning political contributions from those who do business with government - invite battles that he will have difficulty winning.

Still Focused on City

But the issues he is picking appear to have more to do with what Mr. Bloomberg genuinely believes will benefit the city than with positioning himself for higher office. The same can't be said about some past Mayors and Governors who had or have national aspirations. As Ms. Connelly noted, when then-Gov. Mario Cuomo gave a speech on religion at Notre Dame, he was burnishing his image rather than looking to help the state; in Mr. Bloomberg's case, "He's reaching out and building coalitions in Congress on issues to benefit the citizens of New York."

That is what keeps this Mayor from slouching toward irrelevancy with nearly three years to go in his final term. As he noted at the conclusion of his speech, "We've achieved more in turning around our schools, improving our quality of life, and bringing our city back [after 9/11] than most people ever thought possible."

One of the unanswered questions as he tries to build on those achievements is whether he can succeed without meeting some of the city's key unions halfway.