Bloomberg Highlights Strategy of Savings for City Does anyone else feel enfuriated

New York City

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Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg focused on the incremental rather than the innovative in his annual State of the City address on Wednesday, pledging to avoid any new spending, to consolidate government operations and to take modest steps in helping small businesses and minority youths.

It was a decidedly more low-key, less ambitious presentation than those Mr. Bloomberg has made in the past.

He promised to expand job training services and to organize financing fairs for immigrant small-business owners. He said five banks and five credit unions had volunteered to set up a program featuring bank accounts with no minimum balances or hidden fees. And in the city’s latest effort to help stanch the foreclosure crisis, he vowed to establish a $10 million fund that would help up to 1,000 families refinance their mortgages.

Mr. Bloomberg, who won re-election to a third term by a narrower-than-expected margin in November, said that a new interagency task force would “consolidate,” “centralize” and “reduce” government operations. Among the goals, he said, would be cutting the number of city vehicles, and shrinking the city’s office space by 10 percent — or 1.2 million square feet — over four years. The trim in office space would save $36 million in rent, and $4 million in energy, each year.

He delivered his address — his ninth since taking office in 2002 — at Frank Sinatra School of the Arts in Astoria, Queens. And in a nod to “New York, New York,” which was played over a loudspeaker before and after his 45-minute speech, Mr. Bloomberg borrowed liberally from the lyrics: “As someone once said, ‘We’re going to make a brand new start of it. We’re going to do more than ever — more than any city has ever done — to find innovative ways to improve people’s everyday lives.”

In some ways, the speech was a bit of a departure for the mayor. He largely steered clear of anything controversial, unlike earlier addresses, which dealt with subjects like education, property taxes, ground zero, homelessness and term limits.

There was no slick video narrated by Ric Burns or a marching band, as was the case last time. He made no part of his speech in Spanish, as had been his habit when he was running for a third term last year.

Instead, Mr. Bloomberg offered a menu of grind-it-out ideas designed to help New Yorkers, against a backdrop of a $4 billion budget deficit and a national recession. “It was a different kind of speech,” said Bill de Blasio, the city’s new public advocate. “It was definitely incrementalist. A lot of the big-picture issues were kept to a minimum.”

Perhaps the most notable proposal was Mr. Bloomberg’s plan to combine the Department of Juvenile Justice with the Administration for Children’s Services.

“Make no mistake: there will be no coddling,” Mr. Bloomberg said, referring to youngsters in the juvenile justice system. “This is an anti-crime strategy based on real data, and we’ll measure results carefully.”

Two small agencies — the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting, and NYC TV — will also be merged. And at the Human Resources Administrations, two back offices will be combined, Mr. Bloomberg announced, resulting in an expected annual savings of $3.9 million.

And, in the kind of language that was typical of his tenure building his financial services firm, Bloomberg L.P., the mayor — who is the wealthiest person in the city — said that technology could improve government efficiency and customer service. He plans to start a pilot program to install GPS devices on city school buses. He also said the city would hand out bracelets that would enable families to locate the elderly or children.

Mr. Bloomberg, who toyed with the notion of a presidential run in 2008, and was later reported to be on Senator John McCain’s short list of vice presidential contenders, did not completely confine himself to local issues.

Citing President Obama’s announcement that undocumented Haitians who were in the United States before the Jan. 12 earthquake would get temporary protective status and be allowed to remain legally for 18 months, Mr. Bloomberg said that the city would lead an effort to help Haitian New Yorkers get legal and administrative support to apply for such status.

“That will allow them to find legal employment here, and allow more money to find its way back home to their loved ones,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

Afterward, city officials offered mixed assessments. Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker, praised Mr. Bloomberg’s commitment to small businesses, and his attempts to deal with foreclosure problems.

John C. Liu, the new city comptroller, commended Mr. Bloomberg for focusing on small businesses and immigrants, but said that the foreclosure plan sounded like “rhetoric we’ve heard before.” Mr. Bloomberg should have been more critical of Wall Street, Mr. Liu added.

Meanwhile, Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president, and Rubén Díaz Jr., the Bronx borough president, expressed surprise and disappointment that Mr. Bloomberg did not say anything about establishing a commission to overhaul the City Charter — a commission that is expected to change the term-limits law.

Of course, Mr. Bloomberg being Mr. Bloomberg, a few verbal miscues were on display, as well. Beyond botching a couple of names, Mr. Bloomberg may have committed a bit of a Freudian slip when he summed up his speech as the “State of Our Union,” and not the State of the City.

I was completely stunned by: Criticized as Too Sedate, Public Advocate's Office Intends to Get Louder

New York City

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In a challenge to the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, the city’s new public advocate, Bill de Blasio, will unveil a plan on Monday to train aggrieved residents to organize petition drives, demonstrations and civic actions against City Hall.

Moving swiftly to redefine a sedate office at the periphery of New York City government, Mr. de Blasio is creating a department of community organizing, which will seek to turn those who grouse about city policies and practices into advocates who band together to reshape them.

In an interview Sunday night, he said the new department could be especially effective in mobilizing parents of children in the city’s schools, a group he says has been consistently ignored by the Bloomberg administration.

The move represents a significant rethinking of the office, which has traditionally served as a quiet problem solver, responding to scattered complaints about everything from unfilled potholes to unresponsive city officials. But Mr. Bloomberg has largely filled that task with 311, the popular information hot line, and Mr. de Blasio’s predecessor, Betsy Gotbaum, kept a low profile over the past eight years. For much of that time, the office had been criticized as ineffectual, so much so that the City Council slashed its financing and Mr. Bloomberg called the job “a waste of everyone’s money.”

In the interview, Mr. de Blasio vowed to take the office “to a new activist level.”

“This is what government is supposed to do — channel energy and activism and achieve results for our constituents,” he said.

Mr. de Blasio has repeatedly complained that the Bloomberg administration does not promote — or permit — enough citizen debate and engagement.

“This is a city that not long ago seemed ungovernable, so a very top-down style of government has taken shape, epitomized by the current administration,” Mr. de Blasio said. “But you have to engage the grass roots, and my office will be the leading edge of that.”

To promote activism, the office will hold workshops across the city to link residents with grass-roots organizations, offer toolkits for how to advocate for policy changes, create a page on the public advocate’s Web site to connect New Yorkers with similar problems and give out awards to those who “successfully fight on behalf of their neighborhoods,” according to a copy of a news release to be distributed on Monday.

Of course, whether citizens who have complaints want to become more active is an open question. Some may simply want their problems addressed.

But the strategy is intended to broaden the public advocate’s influence when its financing is at an all-time low, with an annual budget of $1.7 million, down from $3.5 million a decade ago.

It also reflects the considerable ambitions of Mr. de Blasio, who is viewed as a possible mayoral contender in four years. The idea is not entirely new: Norman Siegel, a lawyer who also ran for public advocate last year, has called for similar outreach efforts.

In a gesture rich in symbolism, Mr. de Blasio will announce the plan with eight new City Council members, many of them community organizers elected in a wave of anti-incumbency.

Neither Mr. Bloomberg nor the Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, was invited to the news conference. Margaret Chin, a newly elected councilwoman from Manhattan, said it was time for elected officials to adopt the tactics of the groups that lobby for change.

Mr. de Blasio said the focus of community organizing would be city agencies “where there is evidence of systemic failures.”

He criticized the Department of Education, citing its announcement, with scant warning, that half of a neighborhood public school would shut down and its space be given to a new charter school. “I am going to fight to make sure there is community involvement,” he said. And if the administration’s plans hurt residents, he said, “I will fight to reverse it.”

Mr. de Blasio also suggested pressuring the mayor to require that publicly subsidized development projects employ nearby residents and contain greater benefits for their neighborhoods.

Mr. de Blasio said that the public advocate would still resolve many complaints quietly, by reaching out to City Hall commissioners. But if those officials fail to respond, he pledged, he will rally residents to put public pressure on the agencies to act.

“The traditional vision was to call a press conference, issue a report, file a lawsuit,” he said. “I don’t think any of those tools, which are typically used in a drive-by manner, have the same impact as organizing communities.”

New York Times (blog) Plenty of Snow, and Hard to Get Anywhere

New York City

Updated | 1:50 p.m. The city was covered in snow, but events and services were not interrupted. Long Island reported severe transportation delays; New Jersey shoppers willing to drive found all-but-empty malls.

On its way out the door, autumn gave the New York region a mighty foretaste of winter, dropping more than two feet of snow on parts of Long Island, jamming highways and causing the cancellation of hundreds of flights but offering youngsters a chance to try out their sleds even before Christmas.

By midmorning Sunday, a 100-mile band of falling snow that had buried the stately boulevards of the nation’s capital in 16 inches of powder had already passed through New York City and was centered off Cape Cod. Matt Scalora, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Brookhaven, said the 25 inches of snow recorded there was the deepest since the 1940s, and snow was still falling in the Hamptons.

With gusts reaching 35 miles an hour, sections of the Long Island Expressway had to be closed to permit plowing or because drivers were hampered by wind driving snow into their windshields. Accidents caused by skids dappled highways and side roads.

In New York City, where 10.9 inches of snow fell, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg reported that there were no deaths or serious injuries as a result of the storm — a contrast to the five deaths along the East Coast that have so far been blamed on the storm. He also gave drivers a pre-Christmas present: alternate side of the street parking will be canceled Monday. Public schools, however, will remain open, he said.

By Sunday morning, 800 flights — a majority — had been canceled at the three major airports in and around New York City, according to Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The runways and taxiways were clear and the relatively few flights took off with minimal delays, he said, but the rough weather along the East Coast had nevertheless played havoc with airline schedules. Most travelers, he said, had checked with their airlines and not gone out to the terminals, so there was little of the exasperated encounters at the gates and few of the sleeping passengers stretched out on floors sometimes seen with flights disruptions.

Many of the long-haul buses leaving the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Midtown were also canceled, he said.

A Con Edison spokesman said that 40 customers lost power in the New York City and Westchester region. Metro-North canceled shoppers’ specials on its New Haven line, but most other trains into the city were operating on normal Sunday timetables — about once an hour.

The storm hit the Long Island Rail Road hardest. Stanley Davis, a railroad spokesman, said at 12:30 p.m. on Sunday that service was “extremely limited” with delays of 15 minutes to two hours across the system. Service between Ronkonkoma and Greenport to the east was canceled entirely because of high snow drifts, he said. Service on the Montauk branch east of Speonk was very sparse, he said.

“It’s been a challenging storm,” he said.

Once the snow had stopped falling in New Jersey, resourceful shoppers dug their cars out of thick blankets of snow and took advantage of malls that were less teeming than usual.

Susan Bongiorno, a homemaker who lives in Bloomfield, came out early to the Willowbrook Mall in Wayne N.J., to buy her 17-year-old daughter the “Rock Band 2″ video game because, she figured, “Everybody else will still be digging their cars out of the snow.”

“You have so many service people wanting to help you,” she said. “Normally you can’t find one because the stores are so mobbed. At Best Buy this morning I had three guys helping me at once, I just stood there and they did all the running.”

Declan Butler, 33, a college student, and his wife, Anne, 33, a teacher, took their 18-month-old daughter shopping — navigating slippery roads in spots, but noticing how little traffic there was on the way.

“This road is usually a parking lot this time of year,” Mrs. Butler said.

Fred Beierle, 39, who works in financing and lives in Hoboken, also came to the Willowbrook Mall with his companion, Marina Rosa, 24. They had planned to shop Saturday, but stayed home because of the blizzard and were pleasantly surprised on Sunday.

“We’re lucky we came out in the blizzard,” he said. “Because everyone thinks the roads are bad, so they stay off them, but the roads are fine.”

At the mall in Short Hills, N.J., Roger and Lynn Manshell said they had not planned to go shopping, but after seeing their neighborhood sparkling with snow, they decided to have a day of outdoor activities.

“All the snow did was add a beautiful, winter wonderland to an average Sunday,” said Mr. Manshell, 72, who works as a marketer for advertising products.

Nate Schweber contributed reporting from New Jersey.

MTA Proposed Cuts

New York City

MTA Proposed Cuts

The W line may be eliminated entirely under service cuts proposed by the MTA Finance Committee to be voted on by the agency’s board of directors December 16.

The MTA Finance Committee announced its 2010 budget cuts on December 14, including plans to eliminate subway lines, bus routes and jobs. Among the changes announced are the elimination of the W and Z lines, 21 local bus routes and the shortening of the G and M lines. More than 6,000 non-union workers will receive a ten percent pay cut effective in April 2010. The cuts arose from a $400 million budget loss resulting from a $143 million cut in state funding this year with an additional $49 million in cuts expected next year and a $100 million loss in tax revenue. Another cause for the budget problems is the pay raises which the agency will have to award workers over the next three years.

“These are all direct cuts to scheduled service to the public,” MTA Chief Financial Officer Gary Dellaverson said. “There’s no reason to call them anything other than that.” The agency also announced that it will lay off about 700 workers and will eliminate free MetroCards for students in New York City public schools. Currently about 500,000 school children use the passes to get to school. As a result of the cost cutting plan students will have to pay half price fares starting next year and full fares by 2011. Students are currently eligible based on age and distance from school. The program was once fully funded by the city and state.

“This is very unfair. It will be very, very expensive,” one concerned parent said.

Board members were to vote on the budget Wednesday, December 16. All of these changes could take effect by the middle of next year.

Councilmember James Vacca (D-The Bronx) and Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn (D-Manhattan) on Tuesday joined with leading transportation advocates on the steps of City Hall to urge the MTA board to reject the latest round of service cuts. Vacca and Quinn proposed that the MTA reallocate $140 million of capital funds to close the unexpected gap in its operating budget. Additional funds would come from two sources: more than $90 million in unspent federal money that may be used for operating expenses through a congressionally sanctioned process known as “flex” and roughly $50 million in MTA operating funds that are currently being used to supplement the capital budget for a total of roughly $140 million, approximately $11 million more than the $129 million that staff and service cuts are expected to save.

“If busses and subway services are cut the way the MTA is proposing, we will be creating mass transit deserts throughout New York City, stranding hundreds of thousands of people,” Vacca said. “Once again New Yorkers are paying more and getting less.”

“We normally would not favor using capital funding towards operating expenses,” Quinn said. “Under the circumstances, however, this is the only appropriate action to take.”

The MTA’s decision to hold not a single public hearing for straphangers to voice their opinion on the proposed service cuts is meeting with much criticism and anger.

“Riders have every right to be mad as hell,” Gene Russianoff, staff attorney for the NYPIRG Straphangers Campaign said. “This is a real slap in the face. I don’t think they understand how much this shreds the MTA’s credibility.”

Public meetings on the proposed service cuts will be held early next year.

I was completely stunned by: MTA Passes Wide Range of Service Cuts

New York City

Nearly every bus, subway and commuter rail rider in New York stands to be affected by a punishing slate of service cuts that was approved on Wednesday by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is struggling to fill a sudden financial shortfall of more than $400 million.

The plan, which does not include a fare increase in 2010, strips back some of the advances to New York City’s transit system in the past decade — eliciting outrage from the city’s top elected officials and community leaders, some of whom spoke against the plan at the board meeting on Wednesday before the vote was taken.

The cuts would create more crowding on subways and buses, reduce frequency during weekends, late nights and weekday afternoons, and wholly eliminate two minor subway lines, the W and the Z. Service on dozens of bus lines would be reduced or ended, and disabled riders would find it more difficult to get around.

But the most controversial proposal is a plan to phase out free fares for more than half a million students who currently receive free or discounted rides on the transit system. Half the discount would be erased in September 2010, with the rest swept away by September 2011 — an idea that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has labeled “unconscionable.”

The vote was 12-0; one board member, Norman I. Seabrook, was not present, but indicated in a letter to the board that he would have voted against the plan.

Jay H. Walder, the authority’s recently appointed chairman, laid out a frank assessment of the authority’s shortcomings: “In the two months that I’ve been here, it’s apparent to me that we don’t operate in a way that ensures that every taxpayer dollar that we receive is being used as effectively as possible.”

He pledged to undertake a top-to-bottom review of the agency’s finances. “In short, we need to take the place apart,” he said, adding that he regretted that he could not avoid the cuts. “I wish there was a way to do it fast enough to take the things off the table that we’re talking about today; I don’t think we can.”

The elimination of the student discounts attracted a series of furious speeches on Wednesday morning in the fifth-floor boardroom at the authority’s headquarters on Madison Avenue. “You sit here and bring anxieties to young children,” City Councilman Charles Barron said. “What do you want them to do? Jump the turnstiles and turn them into criminals?”

His remarks were greeted by cheers from dozens of protesters attending the meeting.

The authority is attempting to plug a financial shortfall of nearly $400 million that appeared in startlingly quick fashion. Late last month, state legislators cut $143 million out of the authority’s budget; state accountants then determined that a payroll tax dedicated to mass transit financing would produce $100 million less revenue than initially thought. Finally, late last week, a court ruled that the authority must pay significant raises to transit workers, adding tens of millions of dollars in expenses.

Jeffrey A. Kay, a mayoral appointee to the board, denounced state legislators for “pulling out the rug” from the transportation authority.

“They were the ones who put together a deal and said you are fine for the next two years; it was their deal that fell apart,” Mr. Kay said in an angry speech. “The politics has to stop. The public and the riders have to go through this, and they’re caught in the middle of it.”

None of the cuts would take effect until June at the earliest. A fare increase of 7.5 percent is already scheduled for 2011.