The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [189]
After six months in office, things didn’t go as Ed Koch had planned. “Mayors of New York have governed by the politics of consensus, making short-sighted, destructive attempts to steer a middle course between strongly differing groups,” candidate Koch declared in an August 22, 1977, Op-Ed page article in the Times. “If New York City is to survive, it must elect a Mayor who will risk his personal popularity to govern this city along the course of necessity—not convenience.… The battle for this city will not be won by steering the middle course that compromises our future. It is by reaching for excellence, not acceptability, that we will survive, and we can prosper.” A nice speech. Assuming Koch meant what he said—and I believe he did, and does—the relevant question is: Why has so little changed?
The answer is complex, and goes to the heart of many of New York’s and the nation’s ills. First, with bigness comes a breakdown in responsibility. We see this on the national level, where officials shape one-half-trillion-dollar budgets and quibble over whether the deficit will be $30 or $50 billion. When dealing with one-half-trillion-dollar budgets, $5, $500,000 or even $50,000,000 seems a pittance. With so much money, so many programs, so many constituent groups to be pacified, what’s another program? The numbers defy human scale. We’re all ants when viewed from 30,000 feet.
Like Ed Koch, Jimmy Carter was an outsider who swept into office promising to be frugal with the public purse. One of his first acts was to boost the salaries of his former campaign aides. James Gammill, who at twenty-two was making $7,500 in the campaign, now earns $45,496 as the White House’s personnel director. The President’s closest aides, Hamilton Jordan and Jody Powell, saw their campaign salaries more than double to $56,000. Richard G. Hutcheson, who at twenty-four earned less than $10,000 in the campaign, now receives $45,496 as the White House’s staff secretary. Midge Costanza, who earned $15,000 as a member of the Rochester City Council, received an almost 400 percent increase to $56,000. Even after she was demoted in 1978, Costanza lost her prestigious office next-door to the President but got to keep her full salary before she ultimately resigned. The taxpayers are abstractions—ants—when viewed from the lofty heights of the powerful.
It’s not as if it’s your money—or, for that matter, anyone else’s. So Mayor Koch conferred huge raises on members of his staff. And so union leaders who struggled to avoid bankruptcy demanded hefty wage and benefit gains. So Assembly Speaker Stanley Stein-gut, who once slipped on a city sidewalk and broke his toe, insisted, though fully recovered, on suing the city. So former Deputy Mayor John Zuccotti filed a delayed claim for sixty-three days of overtime pay after leaving city government in 1977.
So it was for me. When I resigned as executive director of the city’s Off-Track Betting Corporation in 1973—two years before the fiscal storm hit—a check arrived one day in the mail. It was for $5,984. Since I’d taken few vacation days, I assumed it was for back vacation pay. There was nothing to sign, no itemization of what the money was for. Yet here was this big fat check. Terrific. Or so I thought, until a Daily News reporter called in December 1977 to inform me that $2,498 of this sum was for compensatory time (overtime). Ridiculous, said I. Over the years, I’d written several pieces criticizing the practice of paying overtime to city executives.
A call to OTB revealed that the News had its facts right. No matter that at the time I didn’t know the compensatory time was included. No matter that the money was officially due me, or that I immediately sent a check to reimburse the city for all of the compensatory time (as did Zuccotti, who also claimed he didn’t know). The moral of this tale is that I didn’t think to ask what the original check was for. It was as if the money rained