What’s overpaid, underworked and goes “Beep! Beep!”?
New York City’s borough presidents – five jokes who might actually be funny, if they weren’t so ridiculously expensive.
The borough presidencies, once positions of real power, were dramatically degraded 20 years ago by charter “reform.”
Today, they are impotent anachronisms.
They cost a lot.
They do very little.
Brooklyn’s Marty Markowitz has $5 million to spend on a staff of 84 – including a $50,000-a-year speechwriter and a $45,000-a-year “proclamations writer.”
Bronx beep Alfonso Carrion also has $5 million to spend on his 79 employees – including a $99,000 secretary and an $85,000 “secretary to the assistant to the president.”
He and Staten Island’s James Molinaro each have 11 official cars.
Carrion, however, uses three drivers to shuttle him around – while the slightly more frugal Molinaro drives himself around Staten Island.
Meanwhile, Markowitz has seven cars and three drivers, Queens beep Helen Marshall has four cars and one driver – and Manhattan’s Scott Stringer has three cars and two drivers.
All five also have hundreds of thousands of dollars in “discretionary spending” – pork fat, in other words, to slather on organizations and undertakings deemed in useful alignment with any given beep’s ambitions.
Once upon a time, when the city was run by the tested and true Board of Estimate, borough presidents played meaningful roles in municipal governance.
But that ended in 1989.
Today, they serve only advisory and ceremonial roles (e.g., Markowitz’s recent formal recognition of Ms. Full-Figured USA as an asset to Brooklyn).
The next Charter Revision Commission shouldn’t hesitate to get rid of them.
Alas, given the realities of New York politics, that’s not going to happen.
So here’s a compromise:
Amend the charter to give them each a desk in the back room of a police precinct or firehouse somewhere, a cellphone (with very limited minutes), a pair of safety scissors for ribbon-cuttings – and a MetroCard to get around with.
See if anybody misses ’em.
Highly unlikely.