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By Root 1010 0

$5 million for accumulated overtime, sick days and vacation days not taken. The City Council waited until after the November 1977 elections and then passed legislation raising their part-time salaries from $20,000 to $30,000. After a loud public outcry, the legislation was shelved. No matter. In June 1978, the Council voted themselves an $11,000 increase in each member’s expense account. Mayor Koch, who joined the original outcry, approved this later increase, saying in a prepared statement, “I chose not to veto the increase for the Council because I was assured by the Council leadership that the additional funds for the Council members represented vouchered expenses and not ‘lulus.’ ” In truth, the Mayor’s support was the price he paid for Council approval of his 1979 budget. Koch also paid a price for the budget approval of the Board of Estimate. The borough presidents of Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Manhattan walked off with $210,000 extra in staff for each of their offices; Staten Island, being smaller, received $190,000. “So the upshot is that everybody got more,” observed Senator Proxmire, the Wisconsin Democrat who often seemed to be speaking for city taxpayers, “except, perhaps, the more than seven million private citizens of the City of New York.”

New York’s economically uncompetitive position didn’t sink in with Ray Corbett, President of the state AFL-CIO. In May 1978, he called on the state to unilaterally raise the minimum wage from $2.30 to $3.35 by 1981 (mission accomplished). It didn’t seem to sink in with Victor Gotbaum, who, like other principals, looked at a temporary cash “surplus” for fiscal 1978 and declared, “There is no deficit.” Gotbaum was trying to win a wage hike for his members, and as long as New York could induce the federal government to help finance a $1 billion deficit over four years, he would worry about next year, next year.

It didn’t seem to sink in with Governor Carey. When he was not running for reelection, the Governor was gutsy. But 1978 was an election year. Though he had no legal or legislative authority to do so, nor might he be around by then, Carey coaxed Mayor Koch’s support of the controversial Westway project—a $1.1 billion highway and economic development project along the West Side of Manhattan—by pledging to retain the 50¢ subway fare through 1982. Carey, like Governors Rockefeller and Wilson before him, also reduced state taxes in an election year, paying for these, according to Steve Weisman of the Times, “by the shuffling of cash between fiscal years, a practice that politicians tend to deplore except when it serves their purposes.” The Governor, whose first speech to the legislature in 1975 cautioned that “the days of wine and roses are over,” now urged citizens to imbibe some election-year champagne. In addition to a $755 million tax cut and a subsidized transit fare, Carey promised $398 million of new state aid to localities, including more than $200 million to help New York City balance its budget, a $177 million increase in spending for state operations, additional middle-income housing subsidies, elimination of the one-year probation for public employees who break the state law and strike, as well as a cornucopia of other goodies. Each community Carey visited during the campaign seemed to win a government grant. It was like an early Christmas. Buffalo’s Sheehan Memorial Emergency Hospital got $22,000 for a burn center; Oswego got $480,000 for its railroad; neighborhood groups, $5 million for preservation work. Intent on proving he was fiscally responsible, Carey’s Republican opponent, Perry Duryea, at first called Carey “irresponsible” for pledging to retain the 50¢ city subway fare through 1982. Then, when he was roundly condemned for being “anti-city,” Duryea matched Carey’s pledge. The state, as it had done in years past, was setting an example for the city, proving that budgets were political documents—not a set of limits imposed by how much revenue you had, but rather by what those in power wished to spend to remain in power.

The state legislature was