Searching for PlaNYC, 2035 Edition
Possibilities for the third term encore appear on the horizon
November 13th, 2008
Dan Doctoroff spoke to students in a concrete bunker of a lecture hall at Columbia University earlier this month about how hard it is to get anything done in government, and to relay lessons he learned along the way. He took them through the battles of trying to get new newspaper kiosks in city streets, of the sticky wicket that is Ground Zero rebuilding. He took them through a PowerPoint presentation of the failed plan to build a football stadium on the Far West Side and compared it to the Bloomberg administration’s PlaNYC initiative to show how they had learned the error of their ways—how they had learned to be more inclusive, how they catered to the players’ pet interests.
At the end though, the centerpiece of PlaNYC, congestion pricing, failed as spectacularly.
“So what’s the moral?” Doctoroff asked, looking up at a slide that had both plans side-by-side. He paused a moment. “Well, I don’t know.”
Doctoroff has not served in the administration for nearly a year, but there are still some lessons that can be gleaned from his slide projector. Looking back over the battles of the first two terms of the administration, and how the mayor fought them, it’s possible to construct how they might go about a third.
When PlaNYC was launched in 2006, it caught many political observers by surprise. Sure, Bloomberg was as green the next guy, but nobody thought he would transform himself into some kind of municipal Al Gore overnight. People who have worked with the administration, though, say that the plan grew out of the failures of the first term, in particular the doomed plan to build a stadium on the West Side. And, many add, that failed stadium plan lead in a direct line to plans to deck over Hudson Yards, pave over Willets Point. and build new baseball stadiums in Flushing and the Bronx.
In his first term, within a year of being elected by the slimmest of margins, this is a mayor who set about outlawing smoking in bars and disbanding the Board of Education, and then proceeded to try to build a mega-sports complex on the west side, rezone 1/6 of the city’s land, outlaw transfats and try to get motorists to pay a fine to drive into Manhattan, all the while presiding over an unprecedented surge in building construction and becoming a national advocate for stricter gun laws and climate change and government reform.
It is this penchant for big thinking (if not, according to the mayor’s critics, necessarily big doing) that leads political observers and current and former administration officials to say there is almost certainly to be some kind of “PlaNYC 2035”—a big, over the top initiative that cuts across city agencies and consumes most of the oxygen of the next few years.
“This is a guy who thinks big,” said Ed Koch, the city’s last three-term mayor. “He would not be satisfied without having some real home run in the last four years, I’m sure.”
No one is willing to dare guess what such a plan could focus on yet, but the smart money is that the mayor will likely reach back into the letdowns over his previous two terms to craft a plan for a third one.
The most glaring failure of the Bloomberg era, the one that still stumps Doctoroff, was congestion pricing. In his lecture, Doctoroff told the students, “It will be back, I promise you that,” but in what form is anybody’s guess. It’s unlikely the mayor will try to drive down the same road he did last time, especially since the city council put their necks out for the plan last time only to watch it fail, and the plan’s biggest supporters, the Senate Republicans, are now in the minority in Albany.
But with the MTA expected to post record deficits, something that can both raise funds and mitigate traffic is likely to be in the works. Tolls on the East River bridges are widely rumored recommendations to come out of the Ravitch Commission when they release their findings next month.
And the mayor may try to ram through a big project that can be done relatively easily.
“I think it’s not impossible that you see a big capital project by the city that can be used to rally people’s spirits,” said Jordan Barowitz, a former administration spokes person and now Director of External Affairs at the Durst Organization. He cited the Empire State building, which topped out in the nadir of the Depression, as precedent.
“The downturn makes things more challenging, but the mayor is not going to stop swinging for the fences,” Barowitz said.
For the foreseeable future, the economy will consume most of the mayor’s attention—think of it as the Global Warming of 2006, if you will—and the mayor may decide that time has come for a fiscal PlaNYC. The city will almost certainly expand its push for even more television and film production to happen here. Economists say that deepening ties to the city’s institutions of higher learning will help the city pull out of a recession and will pay off even more down the road. Paying close attention to what is happening in Washington and around the world in order to best exploit vulnerabilities in global finance may also provide opportunities.
“New York never really got ahead of the biotech thing when that got going, so it will be important to get out ahead of whatever the next thing is,” said one former administration insider. “It’s probably going to be something with energy and there will be major investment in that part of the economy happening globally. New York is going to have to capture some of that.”
Likewise, if Barack Obama decides to do the kind of massive, New Deal-style national infrastructure that many have urged him to, the mayor could attempt a similar program here. Doing so would align the mayor’s transportation and environmental interests with the city’s desperate need in a few years to provide jobs and diversify the work force after the collapse of the financial sector and all the jobs it will take with it.
Another way to reprime the city’s economy would be to turn up the heat even louder on immigration reform and to make the city more of a hub for foreigners.
“Bloomberg has been a tremendous advocate from a government perspective and from a business perspective about the need to completely overhaul the nation’s immigration laws and what they mean for a municipality,” said Andrew White, the director for New York City affairs at the New School. “I could see him trying to map out a model on a local level for what a truly reformed immigration system would look like and then pursue it and speak out vigorously about it.”
Likewise, the teetering economic situation could spur the mayor to further action on another oft-stated principle: government reform.
“The fiscal crisis can in some ways be helpful,” said Barowitz. “There is no way during a flush time you could reorganize an agency. Now there is the opportunity to do some innovative things and go after some sacred cows.”
Every few years the mayor has proposed some kind of massive public health initiative. With cigarettes all but banned or taxed out of the five boroughs, and transfats booted too, and with it now being impossible to order a Whopper in blissful ignorance of its calorie content, there may be little left to prohibit or post. Some have suggested that the mayor would pursue an insurance initiative similar to ones undertaken in San Francisco and Massachusetts. Such a plan would be on the scale that the mayor likes to operate on, but with money tight it would be difficult to pull off.
And speaking of San Francisco, some crystal-ball readers say they could see the mayor trying to do some big social initiative like legalizing gay marriage in the city. This kind of move, though, depends largely on what happens now that Democrats are in control of Albany, but it has a certain Bloomberg stamp on it: big, sensible, and most of all, a near-certain revenue-raiser.
There is also the chance, though, that after a successful eight-year-run, the mayor will hit a prolonged rough patch. Doctoroff was the energy behind the biggest plans of the last seven years, and he’s gone now, as is Bill Cunningham, the mayor’s former communications director and the man responsible for keeping the mayor on message and selling many of his ideas to the public.
Close observers say that without both men, the mayor already seems less engaged and disciplined than he once was, though neither have been around the bullpen much for a while.
One unstated reason the mayor seems to have pushed for a third term is a feeling amongst administration officials that they need a few more years, not even necessarily a full term, to see substantial progress on a host of issues—progress that no successor will be unable to undo.
A few more years would net the administration a solidified grip on mayoral control of schools and give them a chance to see if some of their reforms have lead to sustained improvement.
Reformers have praised Bloomberg for daring to shake up a bloated system, but the results have been mixed, and spending has ballooned to a level that will be unsustainable in tight financial times. If substantial progress can be made, however, Bloomberg will have achieved something many said was impossible, and will have vindicated his bid for mayoral control of schools and for a third term.
“Any organization in which you have more than a million children is going to require sustained commitment and leadership,” said Mitchell Moss, professor of urban policy at New York University and a Bloomberg adviser. “It’s not a matter of completing it or not. It takes time to deal with a system so large. God may have taken six days to build the earth, but it’s going to take a lot longer than that to turn the New York City school system around.”
Most mayors, and New York City mayors especially, like to have their legacy solidified in concrete and granite before they exit the stage. The pockmarked cityscape today symbolizes for many the holes in the mayor’s legacy. For him to cement it, he will try to realize some of the city’s more grandiose projects. One place to start is Ground Zero, a project whose rebuilding has spanned the entire length of Bloomberg’s time in office, and, though not his fault alone, has made only the slightest progress and come to represent bureaucratic inertia and infighting. City officials expect to have at least the Sept. 11 memorial and the Freedom Tower completed by the time a third Bloomberg term would end, but a shaky economy could slow down progress even further.
Likewise, across the river, the Mayor spent a lot of political capital trying to lure a basketball team to Atlantic Yards to anchor a downtown retail and office hub. Those plans have been scaled back considerably, and if no one is willing to take a risk on a major new project with credit markets frozen, then five years of haggling could end with little more than a series of parking lots to show for it.
Other major developmental initiatives—like Willets Point and Hudson Yards—are not likely to see a lot of tangible progress in the next four years regardless of who is mayor or which direction the economy heads, but getting them off the ground will take up much of the energy of a third Bloomberg term, people with knowledge of the real estate industry say.
The rest of the city is littered with half-built projects like Queens West in Long Island City and unrealized plans like those in Coney Island. And city officials fear that another administration could permit much of the Bloombergian vision of the city to fall into abeyance, especially with the excuse of the crisis.
And if they really only do need a few more years, his ambitions for what he can do at City Hall could be all but wrapped up by 2012.
So don’t throw away those “Bloomberg for President” bumper stickers quite yet.
dfreedlander@cityhallnews.com
At the end though, the centerpiece of PlaNYC, congestion pricing, failed as spectacularly.
“So what’s the moral?” Doctoroff asked, looking up at a slide that had both plans side-by-side. He paused a moment. “Well, I don’t know.”
Doctoroff has not served in the administration for nearly a year, but there are still some lessons that can be gleaned from his slide projector. Looking back over the battles of the first two terms of the administration, and how the mayor fought them, it’s possible to construct how they might go about a third.
When PlaNYC was launched in 2006, it caught many political observers by surprise. Sure, Bloomberg was as green the next guy, but nobody thought he would transform himself into some kind of municipal Al Gore overnight. People who have worked with the administration, though, say that the plan grew out of the failures of the first term, in particular the doomed plan to build a stadium on the West Side. And, many add, that failed stadium plan lead in a direct line to plans to deck over Hudson Yards, pave over Willets Point. and build new baseball stadiums in Flushing and the Bronx.
In his first term, within a year of being elected by the slimmest of margins, this is a mayor who set about outlawing smoking in bars and disbanding the Board of Education, and then proceeded to try to build a mega-sports complex on the west side, rezone 1/6 of the city’s land, outlaw transfats and try to get motorists to pay a fine to drive into Manhattan, all the while presiding over an unprecedented surge in building construction and becoming a national advocate for stricter gun laws and climate change and government reform.
It is this penchant for big thinking (if not, according to the mayor’s critics, necessarily big doing) that leads political observers and current and former administration officials to say there is almost certainly to be some kind of “PlaNYC 2035”—a big, over the top initiative that cuts across city agencies and consumes most of the oxygen of the next few years.
“This is a guy who thinks big,” said Ed Koch, the city’s last three-term mayor. “He would not be satisfied without having some real home run in the last four years, I’m sure.”
No one is willing to dare guess what such a plan could focus on yet, but the smart money is that the mayor will likely reach back into the letdowns over his previous two terms to craft a plan for a third one.
The most glaring failure of the Bloomberg era, the one that still stumps Doctoroff, was congestion pricing. In his lecture, Doctoroff told the students, “It will be back, I promise you that,” but in what form is anybody’s guess. It’s unlikely the mayor will try to drive down the same road he did last time, especially since the city council put their necks out for the plan last time only to watch it fail, and the plan’s biggest supporters, the Senate Republicans, are now in the minority in Albany.
But with the MTA expected to post record deficits, something that can both raise funds and mitigate traffic is likely to be in the works. Tolls on the East River bridges are widely rumored recommendations to come out of the Ravitch Commission when they release their findings next month.
And the mayor may try to ram through a big project that can be done relatively easily.
“I think it’s not impossible that you see a big capital project by the city that can be used to rally people’s spirits,” said Jordan Barowitz, a former administration spokes person and now Director of External Affairs at the Durst Organization. He cited the Empire State building, which topped out in the nadir of the Depression, as precedent.
“The downturn makes things more challenging, but the mayor is not going to stop swinging for the fences,” Barowitz said.
For the foreseeable future, the economy will consume most of the mayor’s attention—think of it as the Global Warming of 2006, if you will—and the mayor may decide that time has come for a fiscal PlaNYC. The city will almost certainly expand its push for even more television and film production to happen here. Economists say that deepening ties to the city’s institutions of higher learning will help the city pull out of a recession and will pay off even more down the road. Paying close attention to what is happening in Washington and around the world in order to best exploit vulnerabilities in global finance may also provide opportunities.
“New York never really got ahead of the biotech thing when that got going, so it will be important to get out ahead of whatever the next thing is,” said one former administration insider. “It’s probably going to be something with energy and there will be major investment in that part of the economy happening globally. New York is going to have to capture some of that.”
Likewise, if Barack Obama decides to do the kind of massive, New Deal-style national infrastructure that many have urged him to, the mayor could attempt a similar program here. Doing so would align the mayor’s transportation and environmental interests with the city’s desperate need in a few years to provide jobs and diversify the work force after the collapse of the financial sector and all the jobs it will take with it.
Another way to reprime the city’s economy would be to turn up the heat even louder on immigration reform and to make the city more of a hub for foreigners.
“Bloomberg has been a tremendous advocate from a government perspective and from a business perspective about the need to completely overhaul the nation’s immigration laws and what they mean for a municipality,” said Andrew White, the director for New York City affairs at the New School. “I could see him trying to map out a model on a local level for what a truly reformed immigration system would look like and then pursue it and speak out vigorously about it.”
Likewise, the teetering economic situation could spur the mayor to further action on another oft-stated principle: government reform.
“The fiscal crisis can in some ways be helpful,” said Barowitz. “There is no way during a flush time you could reorganize an agency. Now there is the opportunity to do some innovative things and go after some sacred cows.”
Every few years the mayor has proposed some kind of massive public health initiative. With cigarettes all but banned or taxed out of the five boroughs, and transfats booted too, and with it now being impossible to order a Whopper in blissful ignorance of its calorie content, there may be little left to prohibit or post. Some have suggested that the mayor would pursue an insurance initiative similar to ones undertaken in San Francisco and Massachusetts. Such a plan would be on the scale that the mayor likes to operate on, but with money tight it would be difficult to pull off.
And speaking of San Francisco, some crystal-ball readers say they could see the mayor trying to do some big social initiative like legalizing gay marriage in the city. This kind of move, though, depends largely on what happens now that Democrats are in control of Albany, but it has a certain Bloomberg stamp on it: big, sensible, and most of all, a near-certain revenue-raiser.
There is also the chance, though, that after a successful eight-year-run, the mayor will hit a prolonged rough patch. Doctoroff was the energy behind the biggest plans of the last seven years, and he’s gone now, as is Bill Cunningham, the mayor’s former communications director and the man responsible for keeping the mayor on message and selling many of his ideas to the public.
Close observers say that without both men, the mayor already seems less engaged and disciplined than he once was, though neither have been around the bullpen much for a while.
One unstated reason the mayor seems to have pushed for a third term is a feeling amongst administration officials that they need a few more years, not even necessarily a full term, to see substantial progress on a host of issues—progress that no successor will be unable to undo.
A few more years would net the administration a solidified grip on mayoral control of schools and give them a chance to see if some of their reforms have lead to sustained improvement.
Reformers have praised Bloomberg for daring to shake up a bloated system, but the results have been mixed, and spending has ballooned to a level that will be unsustainable in tight financial times. If substantial progress can be made, however, Bloomberg will have achieved something many said was impossible, and will have vindicated his bid for mayoral control of schools and for a third term.
“Any organization in which you have more than a million children is going to require sustained commitment and leadership,” said Mitchell Moss, professor of urban policy at New York University and a Bloomberg adviser. “It’s not a matter of completing it or not. It takes time to deal with a system so large. God may have taken six days to build the earth, but it’s going to take a lot longer than that to turn the New York City school system around.”
Most mayors, and New York City mayors especially, like to have their legacy solidified in concrete and granite before they exit the stage. The pockmarked cityscape today symbolizes for many the holes in the mayor’s legacy. For him to cement it, he will try to realize some of the city’s more grandiose projects. One place to start is Ground Zero, a project whose rebuilding has spanned the entire length of Bloomberg’s time in office, and, though not his fault alone, has made only the slightest progress and come to represent bureaucratic inertia and infighting. City officials expect to have at least the Sept. 11 memorial and the Freedom Tower completed by the time a third Bloomberg term would end, but a shaky economy could slow down progress even further.
Likewise, across the river, the Mayor spent a lot of political capital trying to lure a basketball team to Atlantic Yards to anchor a downtown retail and office hub. Those plans have been scaled back considerably, and if no one is willing to take a risk on a major new project with credit markets frozen, then five years of haggling could end with little more than a series of parking lots to show for it.
Other major developmental initiatives—like Willets Point and Hudson Yards—are not likely to see a lot of tangible progress in the next four years regardless of who is mayor or which direction the economy heads, but getting them off the ground will take up much of the energy of a third Bloomberg term, people with knowledge of the real estate industry say.
The rest of the city is littered with half-built projects like Queens West in Long Island City and unrealized plans like those in Coney Island. And city officials fear that another administration could permit much of the Bloombergian vision of the city to fall into abeyance, especially with the excuse of the crisis.
And if they really only do need a few more years, his ambitions for what he can do at City Hall could be all but wrapped up by 2012.
So don’t throw away those “Bloomberg for President” bumper stickers quite yet.
dfreedlander@cityhallnews.com
