That did not mean that Mayor Bloomberg would avoid actions that could affect his company’s bottom line. As he was trying desperately to keep corporations from leaving town after the attacks on the World Trade Center, he canceled a $14 million tax benefit for his own company’s lavish new building on Lexington Avenue. There was no way the mayor’s headquarters would be leaving town, he told colleagues. Bloomberg waived rental fees for terminals being used by the city comptroller and others, and he promised he would not use the city as part of his company’s advertising. His promotions could list the Vatican and much of Wall Street, the London financial district, or virtually everybody concerned with finance in Washington, but not the City of New York.
One item caught the eye of Wayne Barrett, the fearsome investigative reporter at the Village Voice. Because the mayor of New York had some control over the city’s cable matters, Bloomberg had promised not to get involved in any negotiations for Bloomberg Television, which was then in the upper reaches of the dial at channel 104. However, shortly after he hired his former deputy mayor Dan Doctoroff to run his company in 2008, the Yankees channel moved elsewhere and Bloomberg News magically shifted to the far more advantageous channel 30. It was like switching from the top shelf at the grocery store to the average customer’s eye level.
Barrett was outraged. He wrote about how in other cities, Bloomberg TV languished in the “hinterlands,” as he put it: channel 224 in Los Angeles, 252 in San Diego, 246 in Boston. The Bloomberg people insisted it was not about favoritism for the mayor or trickery of any kind; it was simply a question of paying more for a lower slot in the listings.15
There were other more trivial adjustments. The conflicts board also noted that Bloomberg’s 1997 book, Bloomberg by Bloomberg, enjoyed a sudden spurt in sales in 2001. (More than forty thousand were sold by the time he left office.)16 Some copies were undoubtedly bought by the mayor himself, who routinely gave the book to visiting dignitaries, sometimes in their own language after it was translated into Chinese, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, French, and Spanish.17 The city’s Conflicts of Interest Board decided that it was okay for the book’s biographical data to note that he was mayor, but the publisher should not use his city position “to market or promote the book.”18
Bloomberg, who had rigid anti-nepotism rules for his company, nevertheless got the conflicts board to okay the hiring of his daughter, Emma Bloomberg, another employee earning $1 a year. (He added his sister at the same rate to help the city’s relations with the United Nations.) The ethics board decided it was okay because “Although [Emma] will receive an advantage [by working in city hall for the mayor], it will not come at the expense of the City. Rather, she will be conferring on the City the benefit of uncompensated services that you have judged her qualified to render based on her work in your election campaign.”19
The board made plenty of other exceptions for Bloomberg while he was mayor. He could give extra pay to members of his staff like his executive assistants. He argued that he wanted to reward them for their extra time helping him out with his “private logistical and family matters.” The conflicts board chair at the time, Steven B. Rosenfeld, cautioned that the extra pay could not be for any work done as part of the city job, only the extras. The letters from the conflicts board did not list dollar figures, but Bloomberg said he would pay for an additional twenty to thirty hours a week “over and above” the regular city workweek. That meant a sixty to seventy hour workweek or ten-hour days and goodbye weekends.20
In the end, the conflicts board saw so few conflicts for Bloomberg that Barrett wrote in the Village Voice, “If the board was viewed as toothless before Bloomberg’s terms, its advisory opinions [for this mayor] have raised questions about the health of its gums as well.”21
If Bloomberg got off lightly in his dealings with the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board, he held firm to his own ethos about how his money should be spent and how rich people contributed to the city. He had tapped into his own fortune, spending more than $650 million during his time as mayor, and he defended the wealthy during a time when city reformers and, later, protestors would demand more taxes on the city’s rich. “We want rich from around this country to move here. We love the rich people,” he said at one point, thus earning the title Mayor Moneybags. But he was firm about his views on sharing the wealth. “People say, ‘Oh, well, you know if the income were redistributed throughout the system more fairly.’ I don’t know what fair means. You can argue that if you make more money, you deserve more money.”22 Plus, he argued, these rich people “buy things and create jobs for waiters, limo drivers and the like.”
By 2003, Bloomberg, the businessman, had begun to explain more openly how he saw the future of his city. In a speech for business and civic leaders, Bloomberg made it clear he was counting on New York City to lure the best and the most energetic people, no matter how expensive it was to live and do business there. “If New York City is a business, it isn’t Wal-Mart,” he said. “It isn’t trying to be the lowest-priced product in the market. It’s the high-end product, maybe even a luxury product. New York offers tremendous value, but only for those companies able to capitalize on it.”23
So Bloomberg’s New York really was a fur coat and Rolls-Royce kind of town, and Bloomberg wanted the world to crave it the way he once did. He wanted his city to provide something that would be called “magnetic infrastructure,”24 an alluring collection of place and people that would bring in some of the smartest and most sought after talents in the world, a buzzing hyperkinetic society that shared various amounts of space on 302 square miles of highly congested land.
This was the view of Bloomberg, the businessman, the old-style Republican side of a man who believed that the path to a better society came when individuals got a good education, found a job, and worked like a demon to get ahead. There was also a Democratic Bloomberg in there, of course, who believed in civil rights and gay rights and women’s rights, and public health, which he soon argued would include gun control and climate control. But he was a rich man who believed in the power of capitalism to improve people’s lives and who intended to use his own wealth to do his part.
In the twelve years he was mayor, Bloomberg could certainly afford any luxuries denied most public officials because, as the economy recovered, so did his business as run by his appointed managers. They would expand the business and add considerably to its bottom line. In 2000, the company was worth $2.3 billion. By 2014, when Bloomberg returned, his company was worth $9 billion.25 As the company expanded, so did Bloomberg’s own bottom line. Worth about $4 billion when he took office, he had amassed a comfortable $33 billion by the time he was leaving city hall. Put another way, Forbes magazine, which assessed big money, ranked Mike Bloomberg as the eighty-second richest man in the world when he became mayor.26 In the spring of 2013, a few months before he left office, he had become the thirteenth richest man on earth.27
11
A Laboratory for Urban Reform
“When you need to talk to me, come by my desk and when I’m off the phone, we’ll talk. When I need to talk to you, I’ll come by your desk and when you’re off the phone, we’ll talk.”
—Bloomberg to Deputy Mayor Robert Steel
There are a lot of moving people and parts in New York, all running at the unnatural speed of the nation’s largest city. As Pete Hamill, one of the great chroniclers of New York, liked to say, New Yorkers always act like they’re double-parked.
In 2002, when Mike Bloomberg arrived at city hall, there were nearly 300,000 employees at 50 major departments serving just over eight million people. New Yorkers spoke an estimated 800 languages,1 mostly English, often in dialects not yet flattened by cable television. There were about 3.6 million workers of all varieties2 and 420,000 welfare recipients and 1.1 million public school students—all living on a little more than 300 square miles in five separate counties. Residents produced more than 11,000 tons of trash every day3 that the city had to pick up and send elsewher
e, and they enjoyed nearly 30,000 acres of parkland that almost always needed tending.
There is more, always. New York City is the center of world finance, American media and publishing, a cluster of exceptional museums, prime theaters, sports stadiums, major hospitals, famous universities. Movies are being made on many a photogenic corner and hot new fashion trends migrate from the streets in SoHo or Brooklyn to the runways in the city or even Paris. There is food of any variety in 27,000 restaurants,4 plus cafés, bodegas, and food carts. There are technology start-ups and big-time developers and small-time landlords; there are bus drivers, subway drivers, limo drivers, truck drivers, taxi drivers, and ordinary citizen drivers. There are gyms and undertakers, plumbers and realtors, lawyers and construction workers, to scratch only the surface. And all of them need some kind of license or approval or assistance or comfort or service from their city government.
For a man who hated downtime, this was the perfect job.
* * *
On the very first day that Mayor Bloomberg’s newly formed, fix-it squad of administrators arrived at city hall, they were ushered into what had been the old Board of Estimate chamber. Instead of the rows of benches once used for meetings, the big room had been overtaken by a sea of fifty desks and converted into the Bloomberg Bull Pen. For anyone who had been in the building earlier, it was a shock. For those who once enjoyed the sanctity and prestige that came with an office, it was an insult. This was Wall Street’s roisterous workplace imposed on city government. There were fish tanks, a Bloomberg signature addition since the beginning of his company, but if they were supposed to relieve tension, they were a waste of the city’s water supply.
Nobody was a big deal except the guy in the middle. And that guy, Mike Bloomberg, clearly loved it. He sat in the center like a king surrounded by his courtiers. Bloomberg believed such openness encouraged creativity and productivity and a lot less intrigue. He once said of the system at his company, “It may seem like chaos, but every single thing that goes on here is carefully planned. Like an explosion.”5
“The room was a player. You needed to understand the room—that was part of his management style,” said Ester Fuchs, a professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University and a key adviser for Bloomberg in his early years as mayor. You could watch who talked to him, she said. You could see his reaction, frown, smile, or what Fuchs liked to call his “twinkle”—that look that said, yes, this is something that nobody else would dare to try but him.6
Robert Steel, a former banking business executive who joined as deputy mayor in Bloomberg’s last term, asked the mayor how often he liked to meet. Once a week—the weekly staff meetings? Every morning? Bloomberg answered, “When you need to talk to me, come by my desk and when I’m off the phone, we’ll talk. When I need to talk to you, I’ll come by your desk and when you’re off the phone, we’ll talk.”7 Bloomberg had long ago declared a personal war on process—meetings were supposed to be rare and short. He disliked paperwork, extra forms were a scandal. And friends spread the word that he could once be seen at his company dramatically ripping a proposed form into shreds. Just get it done. Go for the results, not the impediments along the way.8
At city hall, it wasn’t quite that simple, of course. There were city rules about process, and meetings that were required. Peter Madonia, Bloomberg’s chief of staff, remembered a time when he needed to discuss a very sensitive union matter and asked to go into one of the few remaining offices. Bloomberg said he preferred to go to a table on a platform above the bull pen where everyone could see them chatting. Bloomberg told him, “You hide in plain sight. You go into an office, everybody wants to know what you’re doing.”9
Bloomberg thrived in the clatter of his open workroom. Not everyone else did. Marc Shaw, the mayor’s chief budget strategist, hated being deprived of a closed private space. An office. He would slide into the nearest conference room or move out into the park in front of city hall to smoke a cheap cigar and talk on his cell phone. Patti Harris, Bloomberg’s most important deputy mayor, would repeatedly try to coax him back inside, but Bloomberg didn’t want to tamper with the budget wizard. Shaw got a pass.10
Some of those in the room learned other ways to manipulate the system. Near the platform where Bloomberg met with important people like Madonia in the open, there was also a bull pen coffee machine. And Bloomberg had decreed that everybody—even the mayor himself—had to fetch their own drinks. When Bloomberg would take some official to the platform, a crafty aide with good hearing might use that opportunity to spend a little extra time getting a cup of coffee.
Timing was a major part of Bloomberg’s equation, and nearly every major project had a real deadline. How real was it? Bloomberg always wanted results sooner, and he shortened virtually every time frame. Perhaps more important, when he announced a plan to the media, he wanted to add the date it would open or start or become real. He often pushed those inside city hall by handing the estimated deadline outside to the Daily News.11 (By his second term, Bloomberg had installed a highly visible countdown clock, which had to be adjusted when he engineered a third term beginning in 2010.)
Unlike most politicians, Bloomberg relished open disagreements—even if they rose to full-throated shouts. Bill Cunningham, who joined the Bloomberg campaign as a political adviser and became the mayor’s first communications director, often said that he was hired because he was not afraid to argue with the man. Once, after the mayor “tore my hide off,” as Cunningham put it, the underling fought back, and as the two sparred openly, the bull pen grew quiet. The room waited. Would Cunningham be fired? Demoted? Hardly. Only a few minutes later, Bloomberg and Cunningham were getting cups of coffee at the end of the room and sharing a few laughs. A dirty joke, Cunningham remembered.12 The swing from angry to okay in a few short minutes was a reminder that Bloomberg didn’t encourage prissy debates. He wanted the few disagreements to ignite, explode, and then dissipate quickly—inside the bull pen, of course.
Bloomberg pushed his hires to be inventive, to think about new ways of solving the same old problems. If X didn’t work, make a case to try Y. Or Z, even. For the big projects, he wanted to see the data about what was needed before he would approve the proposal to fix it. And in many cases, he wanted data to show whether it worked. Or didn’t. His enthusiasm for new ideas meant city workers came up with plenty of suggestions big and small, serious and even provocative. In one case, officials trying to come up with new ways to remind pedestrians to look both ways before crossing the street suggested a sign at busy street corners that read “Wearing Clean Underwear?” Alas, that one never went public.
“Nobody tried more different things, brought more new policy, created more opportunities,” said Joel Klein, who was Bloomberg’s first schools chancellor. In his view, Mike Bloomberg wanted to make New York City “the laboratory for urban reform.”13
* * *
While Bloomberg’s new army wrestled with the giant centipede of city government that touched and sometimes meddled in virtually every aspect of urban life, Bloomberg would soon become a major cheerleader for his city and the power of cities in general. At his inaugural address in 2001, he had beseeched corporate leaders to stay in the city, especially after the 9/11 attacks. To stress that point, he would soon declare that “the golden age of the suburb is over.”14 He would even mock those living in the pricey suburbs as workers who did not have the guts and energy to thrive in the big, fast city.
“Even before he was sworn in as mayor, Mike called the CEOs of major companies pledging he would do everything in his power to keep the city safe,” recalled Kathryn Wylde,15 the president of the Partnership for New York City, New York’s premier business group. She expressed the relief of many business leaders in the city when Bloomberg was elected. It was an important message from the businessman mayor, and they made major corporate decisions based on those phone calls. They might never have believed that from a mere politician, but they trusted Bloomberg to have their intere
sts in mind whenever he made city decisions.
Besides all the promises and the showy meetings with any public official or superstar who came through city hall, Bloomberg had a more urgent duty—a necessity before any reforms could even take place. His first city budget was due forty-five days after he took office, and it would draw complaints from all quarters.
The attack on 9/11 had already eroded New York’s economic fortunes,16 and a global recession soon added to the city’s woes. Mayor Giuliani had left Bloomberg with one of the worst deficits in years; the new mayor would scramble to fill a $4.76 billion hole in what would be a $41.4 billion budget.17
His first budget was what he called a “spread-your-pain, no-sacred-cow kind of a solution to our problem.”18 Nearly every department had to cope with a yearly PEG—the dreaded acronym that meant cutting each budget by finding a “program to eliminate the gap.” That first year, the cuts ran to 7.5 percent citywide with some departments facing setbacks as steep as 26 percent. Bloomberg cut social services, even police and education budgets. But it turned out there would be one sacred cow, as a clever Times headline writer noted, and that was the mouse—computers would get extra, even in a downtime. Bloomberg carved out $25 million a year for two years to create his planned 311 information and complaint system. To some, it looked like the mayor who loved numbers had deserted millions of human subjects in favor of a fancy new tech experiment.19
Bloomberg stunned sports fans and especially Giuliani, who saw new sports stadiums as a key to his legacy, when he canceled plans for the city to help build new stadiums for the Yankees and the Mets. He labeled the massive packages of tax write-offs and city support as “corporate welfare.” (In later, fatter years, he would relent and give city support to help build these two stadiums, plus another one in Brooklyn.) More pointedly for some of his old friends on Wall Street, he canceled Giuliani’s elaborate package of enticements offered to help build an expansion of the historic stock exchange in Lower Manhattan.20
The Many Lives of Michael Bloomberg Page 14
