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Addresses NYC Partnership on First 100 Days of Bloomberg Administration

April 10, 2002


Today, I believe, marks the hundredth day of my administration, and in all fairness, I guess I could not expect or even dream for as favorable stories as we've gotten so far. Somebody suggested that what I should do is spend the next three months up in Purchase, learning how to hit a 3-iron, the City might be better off if I left it alone, no such luck, I will be here and probably won't learn how to hit a 3-iron.

What did I do in the first hundred days? I think the answer is I got ready for the next thousand. People always want to rush to the end game, but the most important thing is to lay the basis, the framework, build the infrastructure, get the tools in place, and then, I guess, sit back and let the people that you pick actually do the job. That is very hard for some people to do and hard for others to understand, but I think everybody in this room that's been successful knows that people and tone are everything, and all of the other things will come and be dealt with over time, if we have the right people in place.

I think we have put together a partnership: business, labor, every level in government. I'm going from here, across the street, flying up to Albany, to see the senate, to see the assembly, to see the Governor. You can't do that enough, we are very dependent on Albany. Yesterday I spent some time with John Ashcroft; we are very dependent on the federal government. I spent some time yesterday with some of the staff of the City Council. Nobody does things by themselves, and we need all levels of government, just as we need to have an active involvement in the private sector, and without that we would have nothing.

I think you are seeing the fruits of putting together that partnership. There have been a number of things that we can point to. One is just the continued great cleanup of the tragedy that took place on 9-11. I was over there giving a tour to Ashcroft and his wife, and reminded them that we have gone through perhaps the most complex construction project in the history of the world, outdoors, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, never stopping regardless of weather, lots of heavy equipment, lots of new techniques. Nobody has ever tried to clean up something like this before, it literally is the first time, and we have done it without a fatality so far. We're going to finish that in May.

That is, if you think about it, really the government and the private sector working together. There were three or four big construction companies there that did the work, the Fire Department, Police Department, Port Authority Police Department were there every day looking for the remains of people-a tragic thing and a hard job for them to do-and the Department of Design and Construction, some of the best engineers you'll ever meet, that work for New York City, supervised the whole thing. The courts didn't stop us, the legislature didn't stop us, partisan politics didn't stop us, everybody put all that stuff on hold and they said we've got to do something together. Maybe the great challenge in life is to keep that going on into the future.

We do have some problems, but let me just point out that if you want an outside verification of whether or not we are together, working in the right direction, whether government, labor and business are going together, perhaps the biggest vote of confidence we've had is that all three rating agencies reaffirmed our A or better rating, last time we sold bonds a few weeks ago. That was a rating that we got in the days we had a surplus. Today, we have close to a five billion dollar deficit for this year, for next year, for the year after, and the rating agencies in the days of Enron, and Arthur Andersen and everybody looking carefully were still willing to go along and say, "there is a partnership here, everybody in New York City wants to make it work," and we will make it work and their vote of confidence is not misplaced.

A lot of questions as to whether or not President George W. Bush is really committed to New York City, not a New Yorker, focuses on Texas, that's where he's comfortable, last president was here all the time, this president, it's hard to get him here, and yet, when push came to shove, and in spite of everybody saying you have to get a commitment, he's not living up to his word, George Bush did come through with twenty-one odd billion dollars. Now, people are saying, "oh well, you can't use the money for this, you can't use the money for that," but the fact of the matter is, I don't know what the president would have to do to demonstrate his commitment to New York City, and I think the reason he has it is not that he's a New Yorker, but he understands the needs this City has, and we've had everybody, from both parties, from all levels of government, from the private sector, down in Washington explaining our City's needs, and it goes to show that if we all work together, we really can move government and get some cooperation.

The President also came through with what may in fact turn out to be one of the big seminal changes in our education system, the commitment to give Governor's Island back to New York City. The plan basically is to move parts of the City University to Governor's Island, which would give them a residential campus for the first time, and let them take a university system that used to be maybe the best, certainly in the New York area, back to the days of greatness.

It's a university that everyone in this City really can go to. Making that better really does an enormous amount. We think of public education as just helping kids from K through twelve, there are kids after that that would like the opportunity to get a great college education, and if we help City University, we'll be able to do that. At the same time, we will free up space in all five boroughs, for high schools and this City, if we are ever going to reduce class size, which clearly does help the educational process, we need more teachers-the City University provides sixty percent of our teachers-and we need more classrooms, and we don't have the money to go out and build classrooms, and the siting issues and the legal challenges-just the way the world works today-it would take a very long time to build a lot of classrooms. This will let us get buildings that have been used for education, designed as classroom space, and we'll be able to get it right away. But I think it is also partly because of this partnership with you, with labor, with the government in all sectors.

I hope to have a Joint Session of Congress here, we've made presentation tapes and working on big presentations for both the Democratic and Republican national committees, it would be a big boost for New York City, if we can get one, we have a decent chance of getting both, but anything that any of you can do to help us do that, that will go a long way toward bringing dollars into the City and convincing people that New York is the safest big City in the world.

I always wonder what people are thinking when they say 'I'm afraid to go to New York.' I don't know where they live but they'd be hard pressed to live some place safer. If you're worried about your safety, you come to New York, you shouldn't be going in the other direction. It still is the place you want to raise your family, get an education, get medical care, and look to the future, and the future, with a lot of luck, will include the Olympics in 2012, we're certainly going to go and keep working on that, that will give us an impetus to build some facilities and just to give the whole City a shot in the arm. People always say there's oh well, this problem with it, that problem with it, but as you all know, there are problems with everything. If you look as the glass as half-empty, you'll never get anything done. Fortunately, New York is basically a City where people look at it as half-full, where people look at problems as challenges rather than impediments, and we have to keep doing that.

In the first hundred days, I think, in looking back, I have put together a great team, it's the one thing I can take credit for, and I think after this, they're going to do all the work and they're the ones that deserve the credit. It's a diverse group of people, with lots of ideas, a mixture of government experience and private-sector experience. I think everybody thought when I walked in that I would just pick people from the private-sector, I don't think that's terribly practical, on the other hand, I did want people that had better payroll or people that understood who we're trying to serve. And so, I tried to have a balance, a lot of people who had been in government before, some of whom had gone off to the private sector and were coming back, and some absolute new faces who never had to deal with the problems and restrictions the government places on you, and I think that kind of a dynamic and that kind of interaction-some people are saying "why can't we do it," and others saying "here's why you can't"-having them fight it out in the road is a very good thing.

The only disappointment was when I picked Andy Alper who was at Goldman Sachs to run EDC, Hank did not fight very hard to keep him, I thought I must be making a mistake here, far down the road, besides which, he'd work for cheap, so we can afford it.

We have been doing some things in the last ninety, hundred days. Each department-think about it, crime continues to come down, compared to January, February, March a year ago. January, February, March a year ago, we had unlimited overtime, we had a bigger police force, we did not have to worry about terrorism. None of those things are true today, and yet, the Police Commissioner through, I think, looking at new ways of doing things continues to make progress, and I think the Police Department Community Relations, which I feel is a very important thing if you want people to feel that the Police Department works for them as opposed to against them, the whole Police Department, all 40,000 men and women deserve credit. The big headline in the paper today is that the Police Department is disbanding a unit which did get a lot of credit before for bringing crime down, it also got some criticism because it was involved in a few of the very high-profile tragedies or disgraceful acts that took place and which unfortunately, do take place in life. But, the Police Department is being run by professionals who think they know what they're doing, I have enormous confidence in them, and they're not sitting there letting the editorial pages of the newspaper run them, you can't run government that way. You have to have professionals, you have to give authority, you have to set some moral tone and some oversight, but just because we've done things one way is no reason to continue to do it forever.

The fire department lost 343 brave men who gave their lives to save others, but we are rebuilding, and if you question whether or not we think if New York City has a future, we will probably, by the time the doors close, have close to 40,000 men and women apply to join the New York City Police Department this year, we will have more potential firefighters wanting to take the test than we can possibly accommodate, people do want to come to work for New York City and they do want to work for all parts of it, uniformed services as well.

We're trying to do some other things, I think the great challenge we have is to make City government accessible and understandable to people, a project that will take nine or twelve months before you really implement it, and even then it will be a work in progress, and it's not going to be perfect ever, but it'll constantly get better, is to find a way where you can just walk up to your phone, hit 311, and get somebody that can help you. I think one of the differences between government and the private sector is, and it varies, because some parts of the City really are client-sensitive, but there really isn't the service that the private sector is forced to have, because the marketplace makes them. In government, you don't quite have that direct response of sales going down, but what we're trying to do is combine forty help desks and fifty different phone systems around the City, so you can hit 311 and say "hey, there's a fire hydrant outside and it's leaking," or "there's no heat in the building, who do I call?" or whatever. And you have to be able to do that in lots of different languages, you have to be able to do it twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, it's pulling together all those needs. If you go to the phone book there's-last time I looked-eleven pages under New York City Government. How anybody would find out who can help them, I don't know, but the answer is, you're the citizen of New York City, it shouldn't be your responsibility to find out who can help you. We are here, you're paying us to help you, it should be our responsibility, and I think that through training, and pride, and some technology, we can take what is basically a group of a quarter of million people that work for New York City who really do care, and really want to do a good job, and you can help them do an even better job.

The next hundred days-what do you try to do? Well there's four things that I tried to list here that I think at the end of the next hundred days you'll be able to say you did or you didn't… whatever: balance a budget. We have that problem. Enact school governance, certainly there's been a lot of articles in the paper and one of the reasons I'm going to Albany is to keep working on that. A new policy for waste management in this City. We're going to be bankrupted by our waste; we have to do something about that. And, jump-starting the whole West Side development of Manhattan, Penn Station is a good bell-weather for starting that process.

Let me talk for two seconds about the fiscal problems. We will put in, a week from today, our executive budget. It will forecast a deficit roughly the same as what we forecast back in February. The economy is picking up, but there's no way the economy can possibly pick up fast enough to make a material impact on the difference between our revenues and our expenses, not just for this year, that's true for the next few years. We are going to have to find ways to do more with less, we are just going to have to spend less. Whether it means we have to do less, that's a function of how smart we are.

Nobody ever looks at a program and says, "well, it either didn't work or the utility has gone away with time." Once you start a program, it goes on forever, and we just can't do that anymore. I have proposed for fiscal '03, which starts July 1, $1.8 billion in cuts in our expenses. Now, $500 million of that are what you would call one-shots. They are canceling or postponing increases in programs that were budgeted but we're not going to be able to do. But you only get the benefit of that once. Having said that, $1.3 billion of the $1.8 billion are recurring things. If you do make those cuts, they will also reduce your deficit in fiscal '04, '05, '06, by that $1.3 billion. We will get through '03, we will borrow $1.5 billion dollars, a one-time shot, I'm not happy about it, but the State legislature authorized it after 9-11, recognizing that the tax revenues were declining precipitously because of 9-11. We can't do that next year, and the year after, it's a one-time thing, and we have to pay it back. I mean, when you borrow money, people don't ever think about that, you are mortgaging the future. But I don't think you can go and cut another one and a half billion dollars in the expense side of the budget, in one year.

There's a limit to how quickly or how much you can adjust the system, not just people's expectations, you just have to find other ways to do things, because we still need the services, even if we don't have the money to do that, and it just takes some time to figure out how to do that and to get everybody onboard. But we will borrow $1.5 billion, we will cut $1.8 billion in expenses, we hope that the unions will do some adjustments in pension funds and fringe benefits to save about half a billion dollars, and my commitment to them is if they do that, there will not be any layoffs, and I think we could live with that.

And we need the State and the Federal government, I talked about partnership, well we need both of those legislative bodies to help us in terms of changing some laws so that we can reduce some of our costs. For example, the Federal government has already come through with a $150 million savings. They changed the law that now let's us go and refinance some bonds. That will save us one and a half billion dollars every year going forward. We budgeted to get $800 million in savings, that's $150 million of it already, so there's still $650 million, but we have to get the state legislature and the federal government to help us, and I think they will, because I think they'll recognize that in the end, the future of this country and the future of this state is the future of New York City.

Make no mistake about it, however. We cannot raise taxes. People always want to talk about tax raises in an ideological framework of whether taxes or higher taxes are good or bad, or who gets taxed and that sort of thing; let's just get serious. For this year, Albany, in an election year, is never going to raise our taxes, period, end of story. So let's not spend a lot of time talking about it, I joked the other day in a speech that we are standing at a financial precipice and those that want us to raise taxes want us to really take a great step forward. You just can't do it, it isn't going to happen, I don't know what's going to happen down the road any more than anybody else does. Predicting the future, as Henry Kaufman used to tell me, it's difficult, but we've just got to-he always used to say if you went off the scale, you're a lousy forecaster, the first basis was knowing how to set the vertical scale on your graph-we are going to have to get through fiscal '03, borrowing a billion and a half, cutting what we spend, getting some help, some technical help from others, and if we do that, we will be fine.

Long-term, the way you get out of the deficit, because remember they are forecast to go on and on and on, you have to grow the economy, and you are not going to grow the economy unless you make the City a more and more attractive place. So, low taxes, clean streets, safe streets, good schools, those are the things that are our future. Now, it'll take a while, because things don't happen overnight, either fixing the problems or seeing the results of that, but anybody that thinks we can tax and spend our way out of this problem just didn't learn anything from the 1970's and the last thing we want to do is turn over the management of this City to the Financial Control Board, and let some upstate people run our City. That's not democracy and we do not want to do that.

School governance, second big thing, I have said all along I do believe, and still do believe, that we will convince Albany to let the Mayor be in charge of the schools. The current Board of Ed is accountable to nobody, micromanages all the way down, and destroys the Chancellor's authority. Negotiates, and mayor's are always responsible as well, contracts with the unions that basically let the unions manage the school system, as opposed to those that the public wants to have manage the school system. We're not going to change that overnight, we have a former Chancellor here who can tell you a chapter and verse in difficulty. You should go read some of the union contracts and you'd be shocked at some of the things the City does not have the right to do. I'll just give you one thought so you know how bad some of these things are. The union contract with the custodians restricts the City in terms of what things it can audit. Think about that. In a day and age the City cannot audit certain expenditures that the custodians make. It's in the contract, I didn't make it up.

Anyway, if we get the governance, I do believe that we can make the school system better, anybody that thinks it's going to happen overnight is sadly mistaken, but let me remind you that eight years ago, my predecessor would have stood here and said he was going to bring down crime and you would have found that laughable, with twenty two hundred murders a year then, today there's four, five, six hundred murders a year, you can make a difference in these things if everybody gets together in that partnership, and one of the reasons I'm so optimistic about getting governance changed is I think a partnership has been formed on this issue. Labor- in favor of change. A lot of people who work in this City send their kids to schools in this City, they want things changed. Business- you're hiring the graduates of the schools system. Business wants things changed. Government, you cannot find any level of government that doesn't at this point say yes we have to make a change.

Now, we don't all agree on what the change should be, but you'd be hard pressed to find anybody. I can't think of a newspaper that hasn't come out one hundred percent and said give the Mayor control. In the last ten years our school system has done the following: enrollment up about 13%, budget up, adjusted for inflation, 35%, number of employees in the Board of Ed 65% but only 35% increase in the number of teachers. It is a bureaucracy that is out of control that's not accountable to anybody, and while I think-in all fairness-that most people on the Board of Ed are well meaning, the fact of the matter is that the results are an abomination. Some schools, twenty percent of the kids read at grade level. When you have schools where 40% of the students read at grade level, people think it's a success. Think about that. We have dumbed down our expectations so much that even the successes, with the exception of, I know, Stuyvesant, and Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech, yes there are some, and there are some good districts over in Staten Island and other places, and some parts of it work very well, and fundamentally the people that work for the Board of Ed are good, well-meaning people, but the results are not what we want.

Solid waste policy, we closed the Staten Island landfill, I get awfully tired of people asking me whether we are going to reopen the landfill. Even if we wanted to, you could not. It was a non-conforming landfill, once it's closed, the legal process… you fundamentally have to dig it all up to reopen it. It's just not going to be open, so let's stop talking about it. But we do have half a billion dollars more expense every year because we no longer have that landfill and we've got to pay Pennsylvania and Virginia to take our waste and get it there. We have to solve that problem. We're going to spend this coming year over a billion dollars to get rid of solid waste. I mean, the extra $500 million, divided by 80,000, that's eight, seven thousand dollars per teacher. Teachers want a raise; just take a look, that's what the extra expense is. Let's not complain about it, lets not say we should have and we would have, the bottom line is we did, and lets find a way to solve our solid waste problems going forward. And I think that there are ways to do that and what I'd like to do in the next hundred days to come up with a plan, it will not get all the approvals you'll ever need to do it whatever it is, and I don't know what that plan is going to be, but I will put together, I'm in the process of putting together, I've got a very good Sanitation Commissioner, we're going to come up with a plan that we think is environmentally solid, economically feasible and politically palatable, and it'll then take years to implement. Rudy came up with a plan and it probably is a plan that would have worked, unfortunately it has become very problematic because of some criminal investigation in Linden, New Jersey, where part of the transfer was going to take place, and the economics have changed since he came up with that plan. Things change all the time, we have to continue to go on.

And lastly, Penn station, I appointed Daniel Patrick Moynihan to the Penn Station Redevelopment Committee. The renovation, or changing the Post Office into the new Penn Station is one of these things that have gone on forever. I don't know how many people that are involved in Penn Station ever met Moynihan before, but I wouldn't want to be on the other side. He is going to get that done, and I think that Penn Station is one of the major entrées to New York City, and it's on the West Side, and it will help open up that whole area. We have got to get the Post Office, which at the moment is what's dragging its feet, to transfer the building, then we've got to get everybody who says they're on board to actually go and do something, and I think we will do that.

In the mean time, the next thousand days in front of us, great opportunities, challenges that we cannot foresee today, but I do think we have the people in place, I think we have the management style and tone that's appropriate for the next four years. I'm a big believer in picking good people, and giving them the tools, and removing barriers to cooperation and promoting them and protecting them, and letting the professionals go and do what they do well. I should not try to micromanage, that's never been my style and I won't, I think I put exactly the right people in place, hopefully I haven't made any mistakes, if I have, you work with people, and if it's still not working, you change it. But the best days of this City are yet to come. It's the right spirit, it's the right time.

My predecessors, Giuliani, and Dinkins, and Koch, all did make a big difference in this City. They left us with some opportunities and yes some problems too, nobody fixes everything, and nothing you do is always right but they've given us a chance to fix the school system, to continue to reduce crime, to get our financial house in order, to develop the housing which this City needs desperately, and in the end, there's no reason why any company or any individual in their right mind would move out of New York City. I would just urge anybody who looks across the river and says, "Oh, it's a better deal there," or looks the Island or up in Westchester, it's not a better deal there. The place that the employees you want to have in your companies, the place they want to live and work, is the Big Apple; the place where your competitors are, your customers, your suppliers, and the important state that covers you, in New York City. There are real rational reasons to live in New York City that are compelling and when you think you'll get a better financial deal elsewhere there's no free lunch. All of these other municipalities that have tried to give you tax breaks and wave checks in front of you, the bill is coming due for them. In the end, nobody gets services without paying for them. There isn't a free lunch but there is something very special about New York that you can't get elsewhere, and that's what I'm going to work on, helping it.

I appreciate all of your help, this is a partnership, we need you, you need us, we're all in this together. And I'll see you in a hundred days, a thousand days, whatever. Thank you.