City Council Speaker Christine Quinn needs a quick catch-up course on the City Charter.
Quinn called a Sunday press conference in the wake of a weekend rape in Hudson River Park to request that Mayor Bloomberg let the NYPD and the Parks Department off the hook when it comes to pending budget cuts.
Bloomberg, looking at substantial revenue shortfalls and related issues, last week told all his commissioners to begin planning for smaller budgets next year.
Said Quinn:
“We simply cannot take away resources from our NYPD at this time with these types of incidents occurring. We also cannot cut back on resources for parks enforcement. They have already been cut to [the] bone.”
On the merits, these are arguable points.
As expressed, though, they pretty much miss the point — which is that Speaker Quinn doesn’t have to ask Mayor Bloomberg for budgetary relief of any sort.
She writes the budget.
Or, at least, she has so much control over the budget-making process that if she wants the NYPD and Parks Department to be held harmless from the coming cuts, she can see to it that they are.
It’s all right there in the City Charter: The mayor proposes, and the council disposes.
Back in 1991, when then-Speaker Peter Vallone Sr. determined that there weren’t enough cops on the street, he crafted the so-called Safe Streets, Safe City program — expanding the force by 4,000 officers and stiffening then-Mayor David Dinkins’ spine in the process.
Sure, the expansion came with a fat (albeit temporary) tax hike — something that’s always problematic — but it also was the product of genuine leadership.
Certainly Vallone didn’t ask Dinkins’ permission to proceed; neither should Quinn ask Bloomberg, if she feels so strongly. And maybe she does.
But it doesn’t seem so.
It seems, in fact, that she’s having a tough time divorcing herself from the customs of the council: beseeching rather than initiating; pandering rather than leading.
Quinn, after all, is by most accounts the morning-line favorite to succeed Bloomberg in 15 months.
Is she up to the job?
She needs to start acting like it.