Bob McManus

Bob McManus

Bill pays his bills: To satisfy political debts, that is

Bill de Blasio says he’ll be a transformative mayor — and he’s well on his way.

Alarmingly.

Just five months into the Age of de Blasio, New York has been transformed from a city with a modest budget surplus and great expectations into a municipality of some suspicion to the credit snoops.

A neat feat, and all it took was a multibillion-dollar sweetheart deal with one of de Blasio’s principal creditors, the United Federation of Teachers; it potentially triples the city’s projected budget deficits — causing Moody’s Investors Services to place the city on “negative” credit watch.

That it abandons any pretense of requiring teachers actually to teach is also telling. Taken in its totality, the UFT accord is a cynical abandonment of sound principles — both fiscal and pedagogical — but it makes one thing clear about Bill de Blasio.

Here is a man who pays his bills.

He pays the big ones, as per the UFT pact.

He pays those in the mid-range, as per his obsession with the Central Park carriage horses following the big-bucks help he got from animal-rights lunatics during last year’s primary campaign — an arrangement that has reportedly drawn the attention of the FBI.

And he pays the little ones, as New York learned in January, when he turned the NYPD on its head to help out a supporter — a storefront Brooklyn bishop who had gotten sideways with the law.

The mayor’s first five top-level staff appointments — including his first deputy mayor and his commissar, er, “inter-governmental affairs” director – came with strong ties to SEIU 1199, the union that more or less placed him in City Hall. (No surprise there, of course, given de Blasio’s own past employment with 1199.)

And so on. And on. And on.

Just this week, he named political fund-raising “consultant” Izabella Vais – a former aide whose specialty last year was tapping the taxi industry on the then-aspiring mayor’s behalf – as an assistant commissioner at the Taxi and Limousine Commission.

The city’s taxi moguls kicked some $350,000 de Blasio’s way last fall, so they had some expectation of recompense. But the consideration is so breathtakingly over the top that one can only admire its audacity – and wonder whether the 30-cent fare surcharge recently approved by the TLC to pay for wheelchair-accessible taxis will actually go for, you know, wheelchair accessible taxis.

Best to test the lock on the box, folks.

The Vais appointment might not seem like much by itself. Politicking is at least as much a part of government as thick policy papers, and on balance that’s good.

But when patterns develop, the first casualty must be the benefit of the doubt.

The UFT wasn’t the only union strongly to back de Blasio — hell, de Blasio wasn’t even the UFT’s first choice — but when it counted they were all in line for the then-public advocate.

Now the new administration is all in line for the unions. And that’s what makes the new UFT contract so toxic.

Never mind that it largely unravels some hard-won Bloomberg administration work-rules and teacher-evaluation gains. That’s bad enough — but it’s the money that really matters.

The pact raises base teacher-pay rates by at least 10 percent through 2018, and de Blasio says that’s the basis for a negotiating strategy for all the municipal unions that will cost more than $17 billion — a sum that immediately caught the credit-raters’ attention.

“The plan is credit negative because it shows how personnel costs drive the city’s budget and challenge its finances, even in a strong economy,” responded Moody’s. “If all unions negotiating do not agree to the pattern settlement, the budget gaps and the city’s challenges to close them would intensify.”

Pattern bargaining is a city tradition, of course. But now that de Blasio has identified the specific sum that he has set aside for raises — $17.4 billion — that becomes the floor against which the other unions will bargain.

And because Bill’s just a guy who can’t say no, don’t bet on the pattern holding.

As it is, Moody’s says the plan balloons the city’s projected deficit by some $5 billion — from $2 billion to $7 billion — over just the next three years.

And that’s the ostensible reason why the agency this week moved the city’s portfolio into its “credit negative” file.

More likely, the real reason for the warning is this: Moody’s takes Bill de Blasio’s pledge to transform New York strictly at face value.

That is, to transform it from 2014 all the way back to 1974, when New York sat in a tar pit of its own making – having been driven to the edge of bankruptcy by its own profligate budgeting.

The mayors who preceded Ed Koch all had bills to pay, too. Which they did — transformatively, and to calamitous effect.