The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [139]
Ironically, the success of the reform movement—as well as the advent of television—removed the strong party organization as a potential check on the abuse of power. No longer was there a coherent party apparatus through which citizen complaints could be filtered, sorted out, disciplined. In 1959, Sayre and Kaufman observed, “no single ruling elite controls the politics and government system of New York.” But as Professor Raymond Horton of Columbia observed in a recent unpublished paper—Sayre and Kaufman Revisited—they assumed, as did James Madison, that the many competing special interests would balance each other, creating stability. In theory. In fact, city officials grew politically more dependent for their power and reelection on the very forces they were to regulate, on those who shared a public-profit motive and benefited from the growth of government. Instead of being dependent on one political machine that practiced the art of political trading, they were now dependent on many smaller machines that got more than they gave. “The result,” Francis Fox Piven writes in The Fiscal Crisis of American Cities, “was a virtual run upon the city treasury by a host of organized groups in the city, each competing with the other for a larger share of municipal benefits.… The cities are unable to raise revenues commensurate with these expenditures; and they are unable to resist the claims that underlie rising expenditures. And that is what the fiscal crisis is all about.…”
Of course, the city was profligate under the bosses. In the mid-nineteenth century, during the last four years that Boss Tweed ruled New York, the city’s debt tripled. In 1933, after bosscontrolled Jimmy Walker was deposed as mayor, Governor Herbert Lehman was forced to step in and submit to a “Bankers Agreement” obliging the city to accept a stern fiscal regimen. It is at least possible that a strong citywide party, immune from Republican or factional attack, could have policed and curbed the demand for more when there was no more to give. Mayor Richard Daley presided over a corrupt party but not a bankrupt Chicago. “He can and does say no to demands for spending,” wrote Terry Nichols Clark in 1976, “because he is strong enough to say no.” New York’s fractured political system made strong leadership difficult.
The mayor had power to say yes. It was harder to say no; easier to gimmick the budget than to cut it. With the passage of a new city charter by a two-to-one margin in 1961, another check was removed by granting the mayor sole power to estimate revenues. No longer would the comptroller, the City Council and the Board of Estimate share this power. Also, unlike many states which check the fiscal abuses of their local governments, New York State did not play cop. To avoid new state aid, the Governor and state legislature preferred to see the city increase its revenue estimates, taxes or borrowing. The permissive state parent, which created “moral obligation bonds” and its own array of budget gimmicks, had little moral authority or inclination to prescribe medicine they themselves abhorred as if it were poison. “Public discussion of state finances,” a September 26, 1973, audit by state Comptroller Arthur Levitt declared, “now includes such phrases as ‘rollovers,’ ‘reverse rollovers,’ and ‘accelerations.’ What these terms have in common is that they represent manipulations of the financial reporting process and tend to reduce public understanding and public confidence in government operations.” Levitt was one of the few public officials to regularly warn of city and state fiscal practices, but his audits were usually issued a year