Tag Archives: Michael R. Bloomberg

NYC’s Economy: Charter Revision Can Help

“Wall Street Must Recover Before City Can Overcome Recession, Economists Say.”

That’s the headline over Patrick McGeehan’s NY Times article Wednesday about an interview with economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He repeated this message in a follow-up story on unemployment rates on Thursday.

What are the prospects for a Wall Street recovery? Not good, according to McGeehan’s sources at the Fed.

Quoting one of them, Fed regional economist Rae D. Rosen, McGeehan reports that “Wall Street still appears to be shrinking. The latest figures from the State Labor Department showed that the number of jobs in the city’s securities industry declined by about 2,000, or 1 percent, in February, while most other sectors were adding jobs.” Continue reading

Charter Revision: What the Mayor Really Wants

Michael Bloomberg

How does Mayor Michael Bloomberg view the goals of his 2010 charter revision commission? Celeste Katz, the new editor of the DN’s Daily Politics blog, answers this in her April 13th piece on the mayor’s changing stance on the future of the Public Advocate and the borough presidents. Katz quotes Bloomberg about the BPs:

“I for one have come to believe that the Borough Presidents really do provide value added. I don’t agree with everything everyone does but on balance the Borough Presidents provide, at a local level, working with community boards and working with the City Council people, a valuable service and whether you could do it more effectively or not, whether they should be allowed to do A, B or C, those are the details.” Continue reading

The Times Has Spoken

Anthony Crowell, John Banks, Matthew Goldstein

You can be pretty sure that Saturday’s NY Times editorial condemning this year’s abbreviated charter revision timetable got the mayor’s attention.

The editorial directly criticized Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plan to rush charter revision in order to advance a couple of initiatives he’s especially interested in: term limits and non-partisan elections.

At first glance, these seemingly simple changes to NYC’s political process look like things voters could handle without long analysis and discussion. But political changes, even the simplest ones, can have unintended consequences. Continue reading

Press Coverage of Charter Revision Hearing

NYC Charter Revision Commission

Next-day coverage of the first public hearing of the 2010 NYC Charter Revision Commission was less than global. The most analytic piece may have appeared on silive, the news blog of the Staten Island Advance.

“Surprise sprung by Charter chair; L.I. attorney named to direct panel and Staten Island secession vet tabbed as research director,” was the silive lede. The story, by Peter N. Spencer, discussed the implications of charter chairman Matthew Goldstein’s choice of executive director Lorna B. Goodman and research director Joseph P. Viteritti for key commission staff roles. Continue reading

Charter Panel Hears Pitch for Non-partisan Elections

Carl Paladino at NYC Charter Revision Commission Hearing 4/6/10

A surprise visit by Carl Paladino, millionaire Buffalo developer and newly-announced candidate for Governor, provided some media candy at Tuesday evening’s NYC Charter Revision Commission public hearing at the CUNY Graduate Center in Manhattan. Paladino’s open disdain for New York’s partisan electoral politics brought passion to the dominant message voiced in Tuesday’s public testimony: Make NYC elections non-partisan. Continue reading

Charter Revision: How to Reduce Conflicts of Interest

Patricia E. Harris

Writing in The NY Times City Room Blog, Michael Barbaro calls attention to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s announcement naming “Patricia E. Harris, the second-most powerful official at City Hall, to be the chief executive and chairwoman of the multibillion-dollar Bloomberg Family Foundation.”

Barbaro notes that “in 2008, Ms. Harris and a City Hall aide, Allison Jaffin, obtained a waiver from the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board to work at the foundation while keeping her job at City Hall, arguing that her work was voluntary and involved minimal use of public resources. At the time, however, she held the title of president.”

Barbaro’s story has drawn dozens of comments from readers, most of them critical of Mayor Bloomberg’s use of his vast personal wealth to influence city policy. Continue reading

Charter Revision Commission Executive Director to be Named (Updated 4/7/10)

Francis Barry, Charter Commission Executive Director Candidate. Photo courtesy Staten Island Advance

Once again, the Staten Island Advance provides early coverage of events at the NYC Charter Revision Commission. This time, it’s who is likely to be appointed to direct the commission’s staff: Francis S. Barry, a close mayoral aide.

As we’ve commented before, the commission’s executive director is the key person in shaping the commission’s agenda, triaging what information gets in to the 15 part-time commission members, and, perhaps most crucially, determining what information gets out from the commission to the press and the public. Continue reading

When Schools Battle for Parents’ Hearts and Minds

P.S. 217 Odyssey photo courtesy Matthew Septimus

Rick Hess, education guru at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, says that the whole point of giving parents a choice between charters and traditional public schools is to create competition, which forces both to improve. One form this competition takes is in how they recruit new students. Charters don’t seem to have to jump through the same hoops as TPSs do. We witnessed this recently in Flatbush. Continue reading

Community Boards Threatened

Image: Madison Area Technical College

Less than a year ago, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced that “civic service may be the most important thing we ever do” as he launched his “NYC Service” initiative to promote volunteerism and “channel New Yorkers’ good intentions to tackle our greatest challenges, particularly those caused by the economic downturn.”

Today, he violated that commitment by authorizing a devastating budget cut to NYC’s community boards, whose almost 3,000 members constitute the city’s largest cadre of civic volunteers.

In an email to the city’s 59 boards, mayoral budget official Randolph R. Panetta announced that budget director Mark Page had ordered each community board’s budget cut by $15,542 — a droplet in the huge bucket that is the city’s $4.9 billion Fiscal Year 2011 budget shortfall, but a cut so severe at the local level that many boards will have to reduce staffs that already number only two or three employees. Continue reading

Charter Commission Kick-off: Cheesecake and Undercurrents

First came the cheesecake: Brooklyn BP Marty Markowitz greeted the 2010 NYC Charter Revision Commission members at their first public meeting, at the NYC College of Technology in downtown Brooklyn, and gifted each one with Junior’s cheesecake.

Then commission chair Matthew Goldstein explained the purpose of the meeting to an audience of about 75, and invited his colleagues to introduce themselves. When the intros progressed across the crowded stage to commission member Carlo Scissura, Scissura leaned back and deferred to colleague Hope Cohen, who had been forced to sit behind him when the dais got too crowded for all 15 commission members. Goldstein, a mathematician by training, joked about this as being an example of “a packing problem.” It was not his last mathematical allusion. Our take: The commission’s March 3rd appointment date didn’t leave enough time to hire the staff members who could prepare for a public meeting scheduled only two weeks later. Continue reading