It took Albany a little more than 24 hours this week to strip Mayor Bloomberg of his two “legacy” issues – congestion pricing and mayoral control of the public schools. Now the question is: How will Mike keep busy over the 630 days remaining in his term of office?
Disneyworld?
Oh, wait. Winners go to Orlando – and Mike right now is anything but.
To be sure, the mayor’s a man with big ideas. He’s very smart, and he surrounds himself with very smart people.
Odd, then, that the very best brains money can buy don’t understand that Albany calls the shots for New York City, not the other way around.
The city is a constitutional construct of the state. This reality has roiled relations between generations of mayors and governors – and it is of particular significance in the power vacuum that has informed Albany since Eliot Spitzer‘s self-destruction.
Bloomberg moved heaven and earth on behalf of congestion pricing – but he couldn’t move Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (nor, though it never came to that, the state Senate), and so congestion pricing died quietly on Monday.
Then, on Tuesday, the United Federation of Teachers made it perfectly clear who really controls the New York City public schools.
That would be UFT President Randi Weingarten – who long ago bought the state Legislature – and who has apparently made a downpayment on Spitzer’s fledgling successor, David Paterson.
Nobody talks a stronger public-school reform game than Paterson, but there he was with Silver and Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno on Tuesday – conspiring to strip teacher-tenure decisions from the city Department of Education.
The details aren’t important, but the point of the exercise is critical: When it comes to teacher accountability, the UFT – not Bloomberg, not Schools Chancellor Joel Klein – now runs the city schools.
And, as a practical matter, this brings to an end New York City’s experiment with mayoral control of the schools.
Hurrah for the teachers.
To hell with the kids.
Bloomberg spent most of yesterday flailing about on the tenure issue, much as he railed against the loss of congestion pricing on Monday.
No surprise there.
As things now stand, history will note that he was a competent care-taker mayor – that in 2002 he took custody of Rudy Giuliani’s epochal municipal reforms and passed them off, intact and unimproved upon, to a successor to be elected in 2009.
Think of it as Mike’s no-fingerprints mayoralty.
But it needn’t end that way.
If Bloomberg didn’t fully understand in the beginning how powerless the city is relative to the state, he sure does now. So he needs to gravitate to the power.
He needs to quit flirting with the notion of a gubernatorial candidacy and to get on with it – full bore.
Just the establishment of a fully funded “exploratory” committee would grab the rapt attention of the bunglers and boodlers who populate Albany – doing wonders for Mike’s current lame-duck status.
Bloomberg would bring intellect, imagination, ambition and resources to bear in a way that could achieve the reforms promised by Eliot Spitzer – the reforms overwhelming endorsed by New Yorker in 2006.
One thing’s for sure: He’s got nothing better to do these days.
mcmanus@nypost.com