The spat between Eliot Spitzer and Scott Stringer over who would do a better job of attending meetings of the New York City pension system is something to behold.
First there’s the scandal over Stringer’s failure to attend but a tiny portion of the meetings of the board on which he sits. Then there’s the foreboding of what trouble might erupt if Spitzer ever gets a chance to sit in on any of the meetings.
The contretemps surfaced in last week’s debate, when Marcia Kramer of CBS asked Stringer about a report that he attended only three of the 21 meetings in 2006. He is a member of the board by virtue of being Manhattan borough president.
Stringer responded by suggesting that the report about which Kramer asked was inaccurate.
That report turns out to be an editorial issued in 2007 by The New York Sun, which I edit. Stringer suggests that he attended not three but four of the 21 meetings that year.
The fact is that to a shocking degree, the city’s pension-fund meetings are rarely attended by the officials formally responsible for them. Even though Stringer attended only a few meetings in 2006 (or since), it was more than most trustees attended.
Eight of the 11 trustees, the Sun reported at the time, attended not a single meeting in 2006. They included the then-comptroller, William Thompson, and labor leaders Lillian Roberts of DC 37, Carroll Haynes of the Teamsters and Roger Toussaint of the transit workers.
On Tuesday, Spitzer’s aides convened a conference call to press the point. Capitalnewyork.com quoted a Spitzer spokesman as saying of Stringer: “Some might say that his seat at NYCERS has been as empty as his campaign’s rhetoric about how he has the right experience to serve as the city’s comptroller.”
That, however, didn’t stop Spitzer from once backing Martha Stark as a possible state comptroller. Yet she sat on the pension-fund board as Mayor Bloomberg’s finance commissioner, and she attended only six of the board’s 2006 meetings.
The public officials who skip these meetings usually cite a provision in city law that lets them designate someone else to represent them on the board. This is because they are supposedly too important or too busy.
No private company — no bank, no publicly held corporation — would allow its directors to routinely skip meetings and send some underling to represent them. It would be grounds for removal and, conceivably, expose the routinely absent directors to liability.
So why is there such a cavalier attitude on the part of our public officials toward their pension responsibilities? One answer is that it doesn’t matter to them whether the pension investments go well. Under the law in New York, a failure to perform just means the taxpayers are on the hook.
No Democrat — and all too few Republicans — worry about the taxpayers. Elect a Republican mayor who promises not to raise taxes, and spending soars. Elect a Democratic mayor, and end up like Detroit or Chicago. City employees have a pension deal that private-sector employees can only envy.
Ira Stoll, who wrote the Sun editorials on the pension-fund meetings and now edits FutureOfCapitalism.com, reckons the right strategic move is for the city to get out of the business of running the pensions. “They ought to wind the whole thing down and let the employees invest their own pension money without the assistance of the politicians,” he says. I agree, but neither of us is holding our breath.
The fact is that the existence of a $140 billion pool of money is manna for a politician. It’s what makes the comptroller’s pulpit so attractive to Spitzer: a chance to wield serious power.
The only thing worse than Scott Stringer not going to meetings may be the prospect of Eliot Spitzer attending.