To hear him tell it, as he did Wednesday, Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio will confront in January a profound and unprecedented challenge in managing the city’s budget. For good measure, he added: “This is not business as usual.”
Well, it should be business as usual.
Well, it was business as usual under the stewardship of Michael Bloomberg.
De Blasio faces a crisis only to the extent that he is willing to retreat from Bloomberg’s stand against paying as much as $7.8 billion in retroactive wage hikes to the city workforce.
Hit by declining revenue during the national economic meltdown, the present mayor entered negotiations by telling the municipal unions that he would agree to raises only if they agreed to savings on pensions and/or health-care costs.
The unions refused, hoping they would find a more accommodating partner in the next mayor. In the same situation, Gov. Cuomo secured zero-raise contracts from state unions.
Those deals helped him build a $2 billion surplus he plans to return to New Yorkers in tax cuts. Similarly, denying unaffordable raises enabled Bloomberg to avoid mass layoffs or tax hikes.
For which de Blasio is hardly grateful.
“We are going to be facing literally an unprecedented situation in the history of this city,” he declared as he announced the fourth member of his slowly gelling administration.
Dean Fuleihan, a numbers whiz and former close aide to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, will be budget director. “This is an assignment for someone who can handle the toughest situations there are,” de Blasio said.
Unfortunately, de Blasio seemed to suggest that he plans to surrender on back pay, putting a potentially multi-billion dollar hole in a budget otherwise balanced for the next 18 months.
Under that scenario, something big will have to give, and Fuleihan will have to help find it. More preferably, de Blasio would have ruled out retroactive pay as simply undoable.
He still can when presenting a financial plan a few weeks into office. In fact, de Blasio’s depiction of the situation as dire demands nothing less.
He would be well advised to take the advice offered by Bloomberg at virtually the moment that de Blasio was introducing Fuleihan.
Delivering a valedictory speech (excerpted here), Bloomberg said his successor in City Hall will be ideally positioned to reach historic labor agreements. De Blasio has the political capital and progressive credibility to stop runaway public employee benefit expenses from siphoning ever more money from public safety, education and all other manner of city services.
Bloomberg was right. To use de Blasio’s words, the incoming mayor has the opportunity to bring home a profound and unprecedented victory. He must seize it.