“One of the more stupid things I ever heard,” offered a sputtering Mike Bloomberg when he learned that Chris Quinn was about to offer the City Council a bill that would cut street vendor fines from a maximum of $1,000 to $500. Mike still snorting added, “He would veto it if it ever crossed his desk.”
Oh wow! Whatever happened to the deal? You, Quinn, get me a third term and I will support you, Quinn, for mayor?
The visible disaffection started when Bloomberg offered the mayoral position to Hillary Clinton and The Times reports that the mayor’s inner circle is secretly pulling the sleeve of assorted luminaries to replace him.
What Bloomberg is concerned with is not so much his record, but the stature of the office he leaves behind. It is one thing to have the candidate for president replacing you and another for a shrill politician that won her start decrying landlords at rent strikes occupying the “second most important office in America.” I suspect Bloomberg never liked Quinn anyway.
Bloomberg continued that the Quinn bill “is not to protect the public, it is to protect the vendors and it doesn’t make sense.” However, it does make “political” sense because just hours later, runner-up for mayor, Bill De Blasio, complained that the Departments of Health and Consumer Affairs had doubled fines over the last three years. Furthermore, it had come down disproportionally heavy on Queens and “wasn’t it a stunning coincidence” that Quinn suddenly became the vendors’ pal.
As a journalist, I sympathized with our Public Advocate who “fought for months to get the city to open its books.” The bureaucracy is the real government that outlives and ignores politicians and certainly investigative reporters.
