The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [167]
The city’s management also improved. Acceding to the commands of the new City Charter and the Control Board, City Hall installed a management reporting system requiring monthly and annual productivity goals from each city agency. These goals were then monitored by a director of operations, a new office manned by a complement of full-time business executives whose salaries are paid by their companies. Beame had begun to surround himself with a better team of executives. Koch enlarged the pool of talent and began addressing management questions his predecessor chose to ignore. He asked Albany, for instance, to exempt an additional 3,000 city managers from union membership, to reform the civil service laws. He directed his Investigations Department to hire an additional 161 inspectors and search out not just corruption, but sloth and incompetence. In the first four months of the Koch administration, disciplinary actions against nonproductive employees increased—the Human Resources Administration instituted 450 disciplinary actions, the Parks Commissioner reassigned twenty-nine foremen who were not doing their jobs and promoted twenty-nine workers who were.
New York taxes began to inch down. In 1977, Mayor Beame announced the phasing out of the stock transfer tax, a 10 percent reduction in the commercial rent tax, a slight reduction in the real-estate tax. In 1978, Governor Carey proposed and the legislature approved a $750 million reduction in state taxes. New York was struggling to make itself economically more competitive. But this change must be placed in some perspective. The tax bite, conceded Assistant Budget Director John Fava, is deeper in New York City today than it was when the market collapsed in 1975. Responding to pressure from the “conservative” Ford administration, in 1975 the corporate tax rate jumped 50 percent, the financial tax doubled, the retail sales tax was extended to personal and business services, the personal income tax climbed by as much as 25 percent, the real-estate tax soared by $1.40 for each $100 of assessed value. Still, the trend is toward reduced taxes, with the major parties—Democrats, Republicans, Liberals and Conservatives—now vying to convey their greater commitment to tax reduction.
City Hall’s attitude toward labor negotiations also seemed to change. “I believe the most dramatic change since I took over City Hall,” Koch told me in June 1978, seated in his office between Fiorello LaGuardia’s former desk and massive portrait, “is that the municipal labor leaders no longer own the mayor’s office. They did.” To demonstrate his independence, Koch took the unusual step of releasing a list of sixty-one “give-back” demands he was making of the municipal unions in their 1978 contract negotiations. The new mayor was proclaiming that he, representing the taxpayers in those negotiations, had to win something positive from the negotiations besides the negative of avoiding a strike. Elected with a mandate to shake the cages, Koch applied his favorite expression—“I am outraged”—to actions Beame and others regarded as commonplace. Koch had higher expectations, which filtered through to his commissioners and radiated to the public, accounting for the new mayor’s 70 percent approval rating in the fall of 1978. One state auditor recalls a meeting he held with Beame when the latter was comptroller. They met to discuss a state audit which found that Beame’s employees were working an abbreviated day. “ ‘You mean your people put in a full day?’ ” he recalls Beame asking. “His attitude was, ‘Why get excited?’ ” If anything, Koch got too excited, arousing fears that he was impetuous, unreliable. But that is a fear engendered by all reformers.
What Hasn’t Changed
Compared to past practices and rhetoric, much changed in New York during the first three years of the