City Slacker
The unions, not de Blasio, run New York
MAYOR de Blasio, persistently beset by legal problems and entering his reelection year, just did what any New Yorker in trouble might do. He called the cops.
That is, he laid a bundle of cash on the NYPD’s principal labor union, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, settling the city’s last major outstanding labor contract.
This doubtless was in the expectation that the pact will grease the skids for a second de Blasio term — that’s also the New York way.
So now the labor ducks are all in a row. Pretty smart, huh? Well, the mayor ’s legendarily high self-regard has gotten him into more than one pickle over the past four years, and it seems the fellow just doesn’t learn.
Why else would he have agreed to sit down with US Attorney Preet Bharara, if not in an effort to talk his way out of the federal criminal investigations that dogged his administration early on?
Look at it this way: If de Blasio is bright enough to outsmart Preet’s piranhas, which appears to be his strategy, how did he get into so much trouble in the first place?
And how much trouble is that? Consider that New York City taxpayers are already on the hook for some $11.7 million (and counting) in legal fees run up by the mayor and his minions as they attempt to fend off federal and state prosecutors. So, clearly, de Blasio ain’t all smart.
Perhaps that’s dawning on him, which might explain his testy refusal to discuss the upcoming meeting during a press gaggle earlier this week.
But there’s further evidence that de Blasio isn’t the master strategist he imagines he is. His legal troubles stem from efforts to strengthen himself politically, and they raise an obvious question:
Why did he even bother?
Flashback to the new PBA contract, plus all the pacts that came before it, which speak to this fact: Unions, particularly publicemployee unions, pretty much run state and local politics in New York.
Keep them happy, and you prosper. If they’re sad, you don’t.
So de Blasio slathered big bucks on the unions — the United Federation of Teachers’ eye-popping nine-year agreement will extend to 2023 — and the unions are lining up to endorse his re-election. Easypeazy.
Thus this deeply unpopular mayor — he has scarcely ever cracked 50 percent in the usual popularity polls — enters his reelection year ensnared in scandal, with the city up to its scuppers in vagrants, its child-protection agency fatally adrift and its schools mired in failure. But there isn’t a single credible political opponent in sight.
Astonishing? No. The big unions — DC37, the sanitation workers, 32BJ SEIU — have already endorsed de Blasio. Others, including the PBA, can be expected to. Perhaps more to the point, they’re all making it clear that no opposition to de Blasio will be welcome.
Thus there is no real campaign cash — to say nothing of political oxygen — for anybody else. Business as usual, in other words.
New York City is hardly unique in this respect, of course. Albany marches to the drummers at Local 1199 SEIU and has for decades. And the city’s principal subsidized-housing scheme, the 421-a program, is hostage to Gov. Cuomo’s obeisance to construction unions.
So why de Blasio felt compelled to gild the lily — to form nonprofits and collect specialinterest cash to enhance his political prospects — is an enduring mystery.
Now, there’s no doubt that he did this. His Campaign for One New York slush fund collected a whopping $350,000 from the UFT scarcely a month before City Hall lavished that nine-year contract on the union. The deal reeked, but the issue is whether it was legal.
So no doubt it’ll be a topic for discussion when de Blasio sits down with Bharara’s people in the not-too-distant future.
If Preet indicts de Blasio, expect candidates to be falling all over each other to file for the September mayoral primary.
But that nobody has challenged the mayor based on what’s already on the public record speaks to the fundamental cowardice of the potential field and to the city’s corrupt political culture — but most of all to the power of the unions. Which, when you think about it, are all part of the same pathetic package.