• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1140 0

is holding a two o’clock press briefing, the Board of Estimate a press conference at three. Instead of just printing excerpts from relatively worthless press releases, journalists often allowed their sources to determine what was news. They too often covered fires, not the workings of government. Little time was left to tell the reader what was really going on. Editors, who had the time, often didn’t give the direction. They were generalists, and the subject demanded specialists. Besides, city finances and budget intrigue and management were also, well, boring. “The big mistake I made,” reflects one former City Hall bureau chief, “was in willingly letting certain reporters cover finances. The reason I didn’t was because I was bored.” Those who weren’t bored—at The Wall Street Journal or other specialized publications—were easily ignored. Those who covered City Hall for TV or radio couldn’t do the subject justice in two minutes or less—even if they understood it. The academic community, which could have understood it, produced little evidence that they tried.

And, finally, in managing the city, the mayor lost the ability to check the burgeoning power of the municipal unions. The adversary relationship that is supposed to exist between boss and employee collapsed. The mayor became a supplicant, seeking political support, with no weapon in his arsenal to equal the atom bomb of a paralyzing strike. Unions exercised a veto over the appointment of certain commissioners. The civil service system insulated workers from political control, but, also, from mayoral control. Unionization reached up into managerial ranks, claiming all but 2,000 managers. Workers and managers were often brothers and sisters in the same union. Mayors come and go; their unions remained and expanded. A mayor, elected by the people to manage the city, could not easily do so.

When the city’s revenue base rapidly deteriorated, starting in 1969, first Lindsay and then Beame wouldn’t wrestle with the municipal labor tiger. “So resistant to contraints posed by the deteriorating fiscal environment was the labor relations process,” Ray Horton wrote in the City Almanac, “that real compensation for most City employees increased more rapidly in the 1970–1975 period than in the 1965–1970 period. The political power of organized workers … effectively insulated the labor relations process from the effects of resource scarcity.” In the 1971–75 period alone, the Temporary Commission found, while police services and hours worked declined, the compensation of cops rose by an average of 51 percent—more than in the prosperous sixties. The city’s tax levy budget, according to the Budget Bureau, expanded more rapidly between 1970 and 1975 than during any other five-year period since 1960, soaring 15 percent annually.

The power of organized constituents was on display when the city government, in the spring of 1977, tried to withdraw its contribution to the Medicaid program, which pays the doctor’s fees of its retirees. Retirees already receive free medicine under Medicare. Normally, the medical fee is paid by the individual. But for years the city sent an annual check—about $80 in 1977—to each of its 40,000 retirees. The yearly cost was a relatively modest $4.4 million, but with increased retirements city officials worried it would quickly escalate. Acting like the statesman he can be, labor leader Victor Gotbaum agreed to terminate this fringe benefit to help pare the budget. The Beame administration introduced the necessary legislation before the City Council in February. By early March, Brooklyn Councilman Robert Steingut warned Labor Commissioner Anthony Russo that the bill was dead because of pressure from constituents. By March 31, the bill was an orphan. The Mayor, running hard for reelection, pretended defeat was victory and issued a press release, claiming: “We were able to avoid imposing this hardship on retirees.” Russo put it differently: “Abe collapsed. There was too much political pressure on him. City Council President Paul O’Dwyer has even introduced a bill