News editor Rudy Giuliani has let it be known that newspaper readers
aren’t much interested in the stories being produced in City
Hall’s Room 9 sweatshop. “People don’t care about a lot of
stuff that you write about,” the Mayor told reporters by way of
celebrating the new year. “They care about, ‘Do I have a job, do
I have better opportunities, do my kids have a good education?
As a news break, this pretty much falls into the category of dog bites
man, but let us not begrudge the Mayor his interest in helping newspapers
overcome falling readership. Every lecture delivered to the press corps is,
presumably, one less lecture directed at those annoying people who persist
in being poor. If the Mayor is busy telling correspondents what sort of
news the public wants to read, even he, the multitasking, 24-7 chief of
chief executives, will have no time left for dispensing advice to the
unemployed, the unskilled and the left behind. Last time he was heard on
the subject of the poor and jobless, he was telling Dan Barry of The New
York Times that they ought to open up lemonade stands. Ah, would that
they could! But Mr. Giuliani’s tireless revenue-collectors no doubt
would move quickly to collect their share of the profits, and thus would
more small businesses be regulated and ticketed out of business.
Mr. Giuliani’s assertion that people care more about their economic
well-being and the education of their children than they do about various
mayoral eccentricities (using homeless people and the mentally ill as pawns
in a political game, etc.) is correct. People are more interested in
their jobs and their kids’ schools than they are in the
Mayor-as-celebrity. The question, however, is this: Would Mr. Giuliani
really rather see the press write about bread and butter instead of cotton
candy? If so, then what to do about Harvey Robins?
Every year at about this time, Mr. Robins sends various opinion-makers
and power brokers a document outlining his version of the state of the
city. This is hardly an act of presumption, for Mr. Robins served as
director of operations under Mayor David Dinkins and in various capacities
under Mayor Ed Koch. He knows and understands city government; he loves and
appreciates the city. And he happens to believe that all those frustrated
newspaper readers on whose behalf the Mayor lectured the press
corps–the ones who want to know about jobs and opportunities and
schools–aren’t faring so well under Mr. Giuliani’s vaunted
leadership.
“If we are going to judge the city on how well the people who live
here are doing in terms of quality of services and how they are faring
economically, we’re failing miserably,” he said. His paper offers
a litany that newspaper readers worried about jobs, opportunities and
schools surely would find newsworthy: New York’s middle class (those
earning less than $40,000 a year) has lost $1,500 in real income over the
last 20 years; the city unemployment rate of 7.8 percent is well above the
country’s 4.6 percent; third-grade reading scores fell in 30 of the
city’s 33 school districts last year; some 17 percent of the
city’s teachers are not certified.
Mr. Robins cites 60 points which, he argues, demonstrate that the other
New York–the New York of the outer boroughs, of subway riders and
public school students and park users and library cardholders–has
suffered while the New York of Manhattan, of commuters and tourists, of Information Age opinionmakers
and Neo-Gilded Age lawyers and traders, has prospered. Those in the latter
categories, of course, have helped portray New York as America’s
comeback city. As Mr. Robins views it, the other New York has been
forgotten, underserved and overburdened. “We’re a city governed
for others–tourists and commuters–and not for people who live
here,” he said.
His solution? For a start: a 1 percent increase in the city’s top
earners; higher property taxes on one-, two- and three-family homes; a
higher minimum wage; an end to corporate welfare; productivity givebacks
from the city’s unions (ah, and you thought he was just another
soak-the-rich lefty!); an end to the not-for-profit status of private
hospitals; an increase (from 0.45 to 2 percent) in the commuter tax;
cutting back on overtime in some city agencies, and an assortment of other
revenue-enhancers.
What to do with the new revenues? Funnel them back to the people who
live in the city and use its facilities.
“What we’ve done recently is showcase Times Square and Wall
Street, but take a look at the unfurbished subways in the outer
boroughs,” Mr. Robins said. “What about the 200 underperforming
schools? What about the parks, other than Central Park?”
Perhaps this is the sort of stuff the Mayor thinks ought to be discussed
in the newspapers. After all, it’s about jobs, it’s about
opportunities, it’s about schools.
The man’s right–who cares about City Hall’s feuds,
anyway?
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