With music blaring and championship-style banners hailing his record hanging from the rafters, Mayor Bloomberg took to the Barclays Center yesterday for a spectacle-filled final State of the City speech.
His message was simple: New York has been lucky to have Mike Bloomberg.
The truth is that the mayor can count some solid achievements over his tenure. For example, he took a successful crime-fighting strategy and improved it — making Gotham the envy of other big cities.
Though he should have used it to better effect, he also achieved something that had eluded all his predecessors — mayoral control of the schools. And though he’s allowed budgets to increase faster than they should have, his wise rezoning has opened huge swaths of the city to development.
So there’s a legacy out there. But he won’t get it simply by bragging.
Ultimately, the test of Mayor Mike’s legacy will be the bar he sets for his successors. That means making it more difficult for them to undo the progress — and easier for them to build on.
How he spends his last year will be crucial here. For example, with a budget bloated by unsustainable costs for public employees, the mayor would do well to keep reiterating what he noted last month: Any money the city saves in operating expenses gets eaten up by retiree costs.
As for the unions, it was good to hear Bloomberg promise that “we will not burden the next mayor with contracts the city can’t afford.” That comes in the wake of his successful handling of the school-bus drivers’ strike. We’d like to see him take this further by using his bully pulpit to put pressure on his successors not to give away the store. Noting that his tough stand on the bus strike did not get him “a lot of political support” was a good start.
Above all, Bloomberg must emphasize that while backsliding would be disastrous, having candidates limit their promises to upholding achievements that have already been made is no better.
If the mayor uses this next year to pound that message home, he may get the legacy he believes he deserves.