This Week's Stories
GG's quick takes on recent NYC news


Week of 13 August 2001:

Hevesi and $
In a compromise with the Campaign Finance Board, New York City Comptroller and mayoral candidate Alan Hevesi agreed to pay $240,000 extra in fees and commissions to his political consultant Hank Morris, who had been working for free. The board then released $2.6 million in public funds for Hevesi's campaign.

All was not good news for Hevesi yesterday, however. According to both Newsday and the New York Post, prosecutors are looking into a claim by a former employee of the Lowinger family, which owns U.S. Electronics and other companies, that Hevesi took a $6,000 cash payoff in early 1997 to help the family's business.

Ethics in Government
Six of the mayoral candidates answered 15 questions about ethics in government, posed to them by six leading civic groups. All wanted to re-open the steps of City Hall, improve city elections, continue funding the city's Independent Budget Office and strengthen laws protecting whistleblowers in city government. They disagreed over whether to make the investigations commissioner more independent of City Hall, and on whether to strengthen other ethics rules. Their complete replies are available on Gotham Gazette's Searchlight on Campaign 2001.

Also available on Searchlight is a voter registration form. Today is the last day to register to vote in the September primary.

The Numbers
Part I
As expected, Board of Education Chancellor Harold Levy announced his plans yesterday to cut up to 1,500 administrative jobs in the central and district offices. A full text of Levy's speech, as recorded by the New York Times.

Part II
The Campaign Finance Board is expected to decide today if mayoral candidate Alan Hevesi will receive $3 million in matching funds from the city.

Part III
Yesterday Mayor Giuliani, who is known for his press conferences full of dizzying graphs and statistics, launched a new city web site that will post performance information from 18 city agencies. The site provides information such as the number of stop-and-frisk arrests, how many pest-control inspections were completed, ambulance response times, and the percentage of on-time arrivals of the Staten Island Ferry. The program intends to duplicate the CompStat accountability program in the Police Department. To visit the web site, go to http://www.nyc.gov and click on Citywide Accountability Program.

And a reminder: Tomorrow, Friday, August 17 is the last day to register to vote in the September primary.

Levy Watch: Day Two
Schools Chancellor Harold Levy is expected to announce today that he will cut $20 million from the school1s central administration budget. But the plan seems unlikely to silence Levy's growing chorus of critics who condemned the proposal even before it was released.

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said yesterday that he told Levy the reduction was "infinitesimal."

District Council 37 administrator Lee Saunders, whose union represents 30,000 board employees, attacked Levy for not consulting the union. "Chancellor Levy has hired nearly a dozen top aides, each earning six-figure salaries," Saunders said in a statement. "As he looks to save money, he should first consider changes in his own office before slashing his way to educational oblivion."

However the Times reports that the mayor and other may not yet be aware of the proposal's full scope. The Times says Levy's plan would eliminate up to 1,200 administrative jobs over the next three years and cut the board's budget by roughly $300 million.

The central administration has a budget of $285 million out of a total school budget of $12 billion.

School's Out?
A series of mishaps in the schools have eroded the political support for Schools Chancellor Harold Levy, as Abby Goodnough writes in the Times: "First came a string of highly publicized sexual abuse incidents in city schools. Then City Hall and the State Legislature passed budgets that did not provide nearly the increase in education spending that Mr. Levy had requested. News of a shortfall in the school construction budget drew jeers from Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and other officials, and the criticism intensified last week, when Mr. Levy revealed that estimates of the shortfall had ballooned by almost 50 percent to $2.8 billion.

"Mr. Levy's troubles have been compounded by election-year politics: all six major candidates for mayor have seized on the recent problems and loudly proclaimed the school system a disaster zone.

"A long-awaited plan for reducing the school system's central administration, which Mr. Levy is to release tomorrow, could play a major role in determining his fate. Mr. Levy, the city's first chancellor to come from a corporate background, promised early on to use his private-business expertise to sharply reduce the board bureaucracy, and much of the recent criticism has focused on his failure to do so."

That plan, according to the Daily News, will eliminate 300 of the 3,300 jobs at the central Board of Education. According to the Post, the plan will slice $20 million from the budget.

School's Down
Governor George Pataki yesterday officially appealed the decision in January by Supreme Court Justice Leland DeGrasse that found the state's formula for funding the public schools was unfair to New York City. One argument: the ruling deprived the state of its authority to set education policy. The original deadline of September 15th to fix the inequity has been delayed.

Hot Enough?
Four New Yorkers, all with a history of heart disease, died on Friday of hypothermia, the first heat-related deaths reported in the city this year.

Last week's stories...


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