Yet even such wonkish favorites as congestion pricing have been dismissed by Bloomberg as a waste of political capital. “He’s totally not interested in congestion pricing now,” Fuchs says. “He’s got so many things he’s gotta spend his political chips on, so many things that are tied up with Albany, why do that now?”
Ah, Albany. That’s where Bloomberg is wielding his mandate. That’s the big idea, to break the stranglehold of the big three—George Pataki, Shelly Silver, and Joe Bruno—on two issues. So far, however, threatening to bankroll friendly state senate candidates and dropping school-construction plans in unfriendly state legislators’ districts hasn’t scared anyone. Albany won’t cough up the billions in school aid it owes the city until Pataki leaves office. And Bloomberg has no influence on that.
The mayor’s prospects at ground zero are marginally better—he has the leverage of withholding some funding from Larry Silverstein, and a large pulpit from which to browbeat the developer. Yet the bigger hammer belongs to Pataki. The governor set a March 14 deadline for Silverstein to surrender portions of the World Trade Center site to the Port Authority or lose billions in state-controlled Liberty Bonds. Carrying out the threat, though, would mean delaying the Freedom Tower and damaging Pataki’s slim presidential hopes.
If Bloomberg wants to do something revolutionary, he should declare an end to the city’s personal-income tax, ban cars from Manhattan, or sell the city-owned hospitals. But the biggest idea of all would be permanently rewiring the relationship between Albany and New York instead of simply tinkering with it. Then Bloomberg wouldn’t be just king of New York. He’d make New York king.
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