It’s All About Him
If Mayor de Blasio wins a second term this November, it’s a safe bet that he’ll spend even less of it doing his job than he has these last four years — and more of it chasing his out-of-town ambitions. On Monday, he’s upping his worldwide profile by keynoting the “migrant crisis” confab at the Concordia Global Mayors Summit. The George Soros-funded event is a play to influence this week’s opening session of the UN General Assembly.
The mayor’s sure to use the opportunity to burnish his progressive and pro-immigration bona fides by mercilessly bashing President Trump — just as he slammed the prez in his speech in Germany this summer.
New Yorkers weren’t too pleased that he jetted off to Hamburg for that event just hours after the murder of a beloved cop. Nor with all his US “love me” tours, let alone all the time he spends in the gym and napping.
And it’s all only going to get worse. All the crazy “socialist impulse” talk in his recent New York magazine interview — the blather about how he wishes city government could dictate exactly what gets built, and where — is widely seen as preparation for a possible run against Gov. Cuomo next year, a chance to build relations with the donors and zealots who supported Zephyr Teachout’s challenge to the gov in 2014.
Which would serve de Blasio well in a 2020 presidential run.
But the time he doesn’t spend supervising city agencies from NYCHA to the Administration for Children’s Services isn’t the only problem. Also bad is the harm he can to the city in order to win national headlines.
It’s pretty obvious, for example, that City Hall leaked word of de Blasio’s “green buildings” initiative to The Washington Post last week — handing it a scoop in the backyard of its rival, The New York Times, in order to boost his national profile.
Yet the plan itself is a sick joke. It aims for heavy fines on buildings that waste electricity — but its standard for “energy efficiency” simply measures a building’s power usage against its floor space. That guarantees that a warehouse will score well and an office tower badly.
This, when the city real-estate industry is already rushing to “build green,” because that’s what high-end clients like Wall Street firms and tech companies demand. Builders advertise for meeting LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards.
Worse, the mayor’s plan has tenant activists freaking out because it threatens to send residential rents soaring: Landlords by law get to boost what they charge to cover the costs of the sort of major building improvements that de Blasio demands.
Oh, and if you had any doubts about whether this is all about serving Bill de Blasio’s ambitions rather than New Yorkers’ needs: He wants the scheme to take effect in . . . 2020.