Too Many Deputies

To the Editor:

Disparate news events are not necessarily so different, when politics plays with public service. A story in the Nov. 17 Daily News reported Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's speech in New Orleans before a gathering of municipal officials from across the country: "... Bloomberg laid out his principles of governing. The Mayor said his principles are 'a challenge to [presidential] candidates to move beyond photo-ops, to reject stage-managed town hall meetings, and to talk about how we're going to use real accountability to solve real problems and take real questions from our constituents and give them real answers. They're a challenge to a rotten political culture that rewards sellouts and sycophants, and I've just always thought that we can do better.'''

Just a day earlier, the Daily News had reported: "Mayor Bloomberg Thursday asked two of his top aides to investigate whether the city could have done more for a mentally ill Brooklyn teen [Khiel Coppin] fatally shot by police. 'What I did is I asked Deputy Mayors (Ed) Skyler and (Linda) Gibbs to pull together the different city agencies and see what we are doing and whether or not there is something else we can (do) ... .'''

The tragic circumstances of Khiel Coppin's death may have fully engaged the Mayor's attention, but the strength of the Mayor's principles of governing - the principles about to be extolled in a speech before his colleagues - was no match for the autosycophantism that must have switched on in the Mayor's head in the intoxicating atmosphere of "a rotten political culture" here at home.

Conscripting two Deputy Mayors to "see what we are doing" sounds generous and grand, but its only guarantee is the waste of time and resources to reinvent a wheel that has long been patent in The New York City Charter.

The Charter enumerates 40 paragraphs of functions, powers, and duties for the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH), under § 556. Many of these mandates vest in DOHMH the weighty responsibilities of looking after the interests of the city's mentally disabled.

But, I suppose, if there is more political mileage to be gained bypassing the Commissioner of DOHMH for a couple of Deputy Mayors picked from the full snoot at City Hall, then taking measures more likely to add zip to one's political engine will be understandable - why turn with equanimity to a duly empowered agency head, and why invoke respect for "... real accountability to solve real problems," when you can make a more dramatic and newsworthy gesture?

Our Mayors have featherbedded City Hall with Deputy Mayors and their bureaucracies-in-waiting for some 30 years. Currently, there are seven Deputy Mayors, but while the Charter, under § 7, does not explicitly limit their numbers, neither does the Charter require the Mayor to impose upon our wallets and patience the burden of subsidizing more than one Deputy Mayor.

MARK S. TRAVITSKY, Administrative Staff Analyst (Retired)