The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [89]
*The same pattern does not hold for federal mass transit capital construction funds. Over the last ten years, the New York region has received more federal construction dollars—$2 billion—than any other and ranks 6th in per capita aid.
Chapter Five
Mismanaged New York
THE DOMED LOBBY of the Municipal Building, across from City Hall, is still as a snapshot. The sixteen elevators stand at attention; except for the solitary guard leaning against a wall and two newsstand employees frozen in thought, the lobby’s marbled surface is as smooth and clear as a lake of ice. It stays this way from the end of the lunch hour until about 4 P.M., when the snapshot explodes into a motion picture. The elevators, like giant LCV’s, spring open, spilling wave after wave of city employees—clerks and computer programmers, secretaries and accountants, office boys in shirt sleeves and office managers lugging briefcases. Some pause to buy the afternoon paper. Most don’t have time, darting directly for one of the four gold spinning doors leading to the street. At 4:40 P.M. the doors stop spinning, the newsstand begins to close. Within five minutes, they are done. “Most people who work here have left by four-thirty,” explains the woman who works at the stand.
City employees, except those few who work staggered hours, are supposed to work until 5 P.M. Even in the Municipal Building, where they do stagger hours, many don’t work a full day. That they don’t can be blamed on employees for disobeying orders, or on their bosses for not enforcing them. Or both. No matter who’s blamed, New York City’s government—with an almost $14 billion budget matched by only one of the fifty states (California) and few nations, and a work force of 300,000, which is considerably larger than the combined populations of the state capitals of New York and New Jersey—is a model of mismanagement. People may argue over what government should do. But those functions it does perform should be done as cheaply and efficiently as possible. That is the management challenge the city is flunking. New York is spending more and getting less, as the following suggests:
City taxpayers spend three times more than they did ten years ago to receive the same level of police, fire, sanitation and education services, according to the Mayor’s Temporary Commission on City Finances.
It costs about as much to educate a child in public as in private schools. The sum has risen from $500 per student in 1960 to $2,600—a jump four times greater than the consumer price index. Yet today there are only 10 percent more students, class sizes have expanded, reading scores have declined—and the number of school employees has doubled.
Between 1968 and 1977, the city’s transit system lost 22 percent if its riders but gained 384 employees, according to the business-oriented Economic Development Council.
The city has 2,000 more policemen than it had in 1961—yet in 1977 policemen worked 1 million fewer hours than they did in 1961, according to a study by Mary McCormick, former research director of the Temporary Commission.
In 1970, there was one sergeant for every eleven cops. In 1977, there were 25 percent fewer patrolmen and one sergeant for every seven cops.
Hospital services declined at the same time expenditures and the number of hospital employees multiplied. Between 1961 and 1971, the municipal-hospital system’s patient services dropped 20 percent while 4,000 new employees were hired, a study by Charles Brecher of Columbia University’s Conservation of Human Resources Project found. In the decade through 1976, the city’s health expenditures tripled, averaging $226 a day in a city hospital in 1976—70 percent above the national average.
The growth of the city’s budget has not meant a corresponding growth in taxpayers’ services. Between