The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [177]
But the city’s CETA trick does suggest how little has changed. Once again, City Hall was making short-term decisions with long-term consequences. Having braved the trauma of laying off 25,000 workers one year, the city turned around and hired an equal number back the next. CETA employees now comprise about 10 percent of the work force. Instead of planning for a long-term scaling down of its service delivery system, City Hall merely found a new device to pay for it. Thus the city set itself another trap. Since the Carter administration has already announced plans to cut back CETA employment, and Congress in October 1978 restricted employment to no more than eighteen months, City Hall and workers will likely be forced to undergo the trauma of layoffs once again. No matter. “My real future worry,” Barry Feinstein told me in March 1978, “is that the CETA program will lapse. The city has to make plans to pick up the slack by expanding the tax levy budget.”
The use of CETA lines helps demonstrate why city labor costs have not gone down, and how the poor once again took it on the chin. Under federal law, these jobs are supposed to be earmarked for the poor. But New York, like other cities, pilfered these funds to rehire laid-off workers. To discourage this, the federal government placed a cap of $10,000 on what it would pay a CETA worker. That didn’t stop City Hall. To make up the difference between this $10,000 and a worker’s former salary, New York decided to subsidize the difference—$35.5 million worth in fiscal 1978.
Perhaps the real lack of change was in perceptions. The principal actors in the fiscal drama seemed to suffer a collective reality gap. They often spoke the right lines, sometimes risked the boos of an audience, but more often than not they were oblivious to the cold reality of the massive budget deficit. For Abe Beame, it was business-as-usual. He treated his final budget numbers as if they were Vietcong body counts, except that he deflated the totals. Instead of a long night, he proclaimed “light at the end of the tunnel.” So he eased up. The mayor who had asked city workers to sacrifice used the occasion of his final days in office to make two commissioner appointments to the seldom-show Board of Water Supply. This is the same board Comptroller Goldin claimed could have been abolished, saving taxpayers $2.6 million. These lifetime posts, requiring attendance at one weekly meeting and offering a chauffeured limousine, secretary and $25,000 salary for the chairman and $20,000 for the two other commissioners, permit full-time outside employment. Beame awarded the chairmanship to his deputy mayor, Stanley Friedman. To deflect anticipated criticism, he gave a commissionership to Simeon Golar, a black former judge. (In mid-1978, spurred by Mayor Koch, the legislature voted to terminate the Board.) Also in his final hours in office, Beame appointed fifteen judges, many being political cronies who failed to win Bar Association approval. When I asked him about these appointments at a Channel 13 lunch one day, Beame reacted as if he didn’t understand the question. With doleful eyes he looked at me. Hadn’t Lindsay appointed his friends? he asked. Hadn’t Wagner? Didn’t Carey? Why should he be singled out and picked on?
Nor did the fiscal emergency sink in with others at City Hall. Ignoring the so-called fiscal crisis, top executives of the outgoing Beame administration submitted claims of over