READ his lips: No new stadiums.
Michael Bloomberg yesterday said there would be no city money this year for the construction of new facilities for the Yankees and Mets.
“At the moment, everybody understands – given the lack of housing, given the lack of school space, given the deficit in the operating budget – it is just not practical this year to go and to build new stadiums,” the mayor said.
It was an easy call: It’s not clear that anybody is excited about these stadiums besides Yanks owner George Steinbrenner and Mets owner Fred Wilpon.
When new stadiums were first being talked about, in 1998, Yankee Stadium attendance was still parlously low (compared to other teams) because New Yorkers and out-of-towners were afraid to go to The Bronx. Add in a piece of falling steel and concrete early in the ’98 season and a lease up for renewal, and Steinbrenner seemed to have all the cards.
But the continuing crime drop and brilliant play of the team changed all that. From ’99 onward, the Yanks have drawn more than 3 million a year, and the franchise is the most profitable in the majors.
The original notion of a stadium on Manhattan’s far West Side made a lot of sense as a public project. That area (West of Ninth Avenue from 30th to 42nd Streets) is the most inexplicably undeveloped parcel of land in the city.
Development means an expansion of the city’s tax base, and so hundreds of millions of new dollars in city revenue, which could help in building some low-cost housing (to name one favorite of those who hated the stadium idea). The bond money spent on the West Side stadium would have been an investment with a huge dividend.
But a new stadium next door to Yankee Stadium will do little or nothing – except for construction workers and Steinbrenner. The same is true for a new Shea next to the old Shea.
So Bloomberg deserves praise for throwing cold water on Rudy Giuliani’s final act in office, the “deal” on stadiums. He deserves less praise for his announced intention to slash his own City Hall staff by 20 percent.
The phrase “penny wise and pound foolish” could have been invented for that notion. About 250,000 people work for the city – a number that suggests massive and scandalous redundancy. The 100 staffers Bloomberg stands to lose are among the least redundant and most important.
We want a mayor with enough people around him to keep track of the gigantic city agencies and the weird things they do – especially when the mayor is a governmental novice. Without sufficient political oversight and attentiveness, the city government can run roughshod over City Hall.
Cuts in other citywide officials’ staff make more sense. For example, a 20 percent cut at the public advocate’s office is a good idea, but doesn’t go far enough. The right number to lay off at the public advocate’s office is 42, which is the total number of employees at the advocate’s office. That includes the public advocate herself.
This is no knock on the office’s new holder, Betsy Gotbaum. New Yorkers should know that during last year’s debate between candidates for the office, neither she nor anybody else could actually say what it is that the public advocate does or ought to do in the future.
She couldn’t say because there is no reason for the public advocate office to exist. It was created when the city government was being recreated in the late 1980s to give then-City Council President Andrew Stein a job. Stein didn’t even win his race for it; Mark Green did.
And look what happened to Mark Green.