Bill comes due on promises

As cheers fade from Mayor de Blasio’s victory party, all of us — especially supporters of the administration — should remember that elections, while important, are not the sole or even the primary way we hold public servants accountable.

De Blasio promised many policies and programs before and during the reelection campaign. Now it’s up to us to hold him to those pledges — especially the ones made halfheartedly or under political duress.

Here are three important pieces of public business about which the mayor has shown a decided reluctance. New Yorkers have about 1,500 days to make sure City Hall gets the job done.

Let’s start with the city’s public hospitals, which serve the poorest and sickest New Yorkers and are facing a $1.6 billion deficit that is projected to grow to a staggering $1.8 billion in 2020, nearly 24% of the operating budget of city Health and Hospitals.

City Hall has announced, with depressing regularity, that hundreds of millions more public dollars are being used to shore up Health and Hospitals. At the same time, the city’s sprawling, nominally nonprofit private hospital networks are racking up impressive surpluses and paying big bucks to top managers, according to a study published by New York State Nurses Association shortly before Election Day.

The five private hospital networks, according to the study, have 108 executives making more than $1 million a year, with the average compensation a staggering $2.2 million. These institutions, adept at finding revenue, have left Heath and Hospitals to shoulder the cost of services that get little or no insurance reimbursement — including care for undocumented residents, jail inmates and those suffering from psychiatric and substance abuse disorders.

Ideally, City Hall would push through a broad restructuring of the health care system — including playing hardball with private hospitals that scarf up tons of public subsidy but dump the burden of indigent care on the city.

But the mayor seems to be in no hurry to pick that fight, perhaps because it would inevitably impact his allies in Local 1199 SEIU, which serves the private institutions. New York faces an ugly day of reckoning — at one point this year, Health and Hospitals was 14 days from running out of cash to pay its 45,000 employees — unless the public demands action.

A nonfinancial crisis has been brewing in the yeshivas that serve the city’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities. Very credible reports suggest that tens of thousands of students in 39 yeshivas are getting a little as 90 minutes of nonreligious education a day, a clear violation of state education laws requiring minimum standards in core fields like English, science, math and social studies.

City Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña promised to look into the situation and estimated it would take a month to figure out what’s going on. That was two years ago.

Shortly before Election Day, I asked Fariña why what had begun as a 30-day study seems about to enter its third year.

“Until we get to all the schools that were on the list of schools to review, we will not be putting out a report,” she said. “We’re actively doing the investigations, we’re following the criteria that the state has given us, and we expect to have a report when all the visits are complete.”

New Yorkers concerned about this issue will need to keep the pressure on Fariña and de Blasio, lest politically powerful leaders in the Orthodox community persuade City Hall to push back that 30-day report for another two, three or 10,000 years.

Another stalled educational initiative is a strategy to reduce the level of racial segregation in our city’s public schools. Earlier this year, de Blasio drew criticism for issuing a vague, skimpy, 12-page plan offering only minor tweaks to the city’s current system of geographic assignment (mostly in lower schools) and standardized admissions tests (in some high schools).

“I’m trying to level with the people of this city,” the mayor said when pushed on the timid nature of his plan. “Do you know how many decades it will take to fix all this?”

This mind you, is coming from the mayor who regularly boasts about doing the seemingly impossible, and is fond of hyping his record with adjectives like “transformative,” “deep” and “profound.”

“There’s a lot more we intend to do,” said the mayor about the lingering shame of segregation.

It’s up to us to insist that those intentions become reality.