The Comptroller Pounces

By Henry J. Stern
May 28, 2003

    Way back in Aquarius (on January 31, when the moon was in the seventh house and Jupiter aligned with Mars), I discussed the city's fiscal crisis, and asked whether it would be resolved by the sunset of Gemini (the twins, Castor and Pollux).  Well, Gemini arrived last Thursday, and will be with us until the summer solstice, June 21.  Unfortunately, as the mayor struggles to balance the city budget, other shortfalls have arisen.

    On Monday, Comptroller William Thompson, hitherto quiescent, leaked his professional staff report that the city could be short an additional $618 million.  This was a day in advance of his appearance before the City Council.  However, he, or his press person, saved his principal nugget, an accusation that Mayor Bloomberg was practicing "borough warfare", for his Tuesday testimony, thus assuring a story on Wednesday as well.

    Most of  the report, prepared by a competent professional staff, is in the tradition of comptrollers being more fiscally conservative than mayors.  Comptrollers are supposed to be the people with their eyes on the buck, their office the last refuge of the green eyeshade.  This vision was jarred somewhat in 1975, when the last comptroller to be elected mayor, Abe Beame, was found to have signed off on an escalating program of short-term borrowing (revenue anticipation notes [Rans] and tax anticipation notes [Tans], among other fiscal devices) which brought New York City into insolvency and close to bankruptcy.

     But the money shot in the comptroller's testimony, the incendiary allegation of "borough warfare" by the Mayor, is disappointing to those who had regarded the comptroller as responsible because he is well-spoken.  It is a fact of politics that people who speak (and write) with restraint are held in higher regard than those who rant and rave.  The problem with the mantle of dignity is that when on occasion the mask drops, the actor either steps out of character or into his or her true character, which is often less appealing than the coiffed pose.

    If  Mayor Bloomberg were in fact carrying on 'borough warfare', would not a reasonably alert comptroller have discovered that before the end of the seventeenth month of their terms.  And, if he believed that, should he not have confronted the mayor with evidence of such bias, and only if rebuffed, bring the matter to Page One with City Council testimony ?  And what is the motive for the mayor, a city-wide candidate in 2005, to discriminate against four of the boroughs he serves in favor of one ?

    To deconstruct the accusation, currently the semiotic vogue: the mayor is a rich man, because he is rich he must favor rich people, many of the rich live in Manhattan, so he must favor Manhattan.  The fact is that 75% of the high-bracket income tax increase comes from Manhattan.  The fact is that, in 2001, Mark Green carried Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn, with Bloomberg winning in Queens and Staten Island.  So why should Mayor Bloomberg engage in borough warfare against his strongholds?  After all, even if only 40% of the public want to have dinner with the mayor, 89%  think he is intelligent.

    I think the picturesque concept of interborough strife derives from slogans about "class warfare", a traditional staple of left-wing oratory.   Manhattan in this view is the surrogate for the ruling or imperialist class (Comptroller  Mario Procaccino in 1969 denounced 'limousine liberals'), while the other four boroughs evoke Depression-era subway riders, reading Marxist tracts and proletarian novels on their way to the sweatshops.  (To really digress, 'limousine liberals' reminds me of the phrase 'cafeteria Catholics', a pejorative used by some Roman Catholics to describe those of their co-religionists who accept some, but not all, of the church' s strictures.)

     Provincial condescension does show its ugly head when a club kid doorman excludes a B&T (a derisive term for the bridge and tunnel crowd who live in the other four boroughs or worse yet, New Jersey) who seeks to pass the velvet rope into a downtown drug den, or some other overcrowded pleasure-dome.  But  geographic favoritism is not public policy, and such preferences are what the politically correct would call classism or lookism. Local prejudices exist, but the mayor does not hold them.

    On the other hand, it does not make much sense from a political standpoint to cut garbage collections in half in some boroughs and leave them intact in Manhattan.  Whether this was the intended outcome or a budget ploy is unknown.  But it did leave the mayor vulnerable to harsh attack.  Whoever thought of  that pattern of cutbacks -- Sanitation, OMB or Mayoral staff -- should be assigned to shovel snow in Queens, supervised by the ghost of  Mayor Lindsay.

    The moral that we gain from this tale of woe and pain is that if other people are salivating for your job, you should not give them anything to lick their chops on.

Henry J. Stern is the director of NYCivic.