ANALYSIS
SCHOOLS Chancellor Rudy Crew lost what may have been the most significant vote of his career yesterday because he doesn’t know how to play this game.
He lost because neither he nor any of his imported braintrusters understand how profoundly the Fiscal Crisis of 1975-76 still resonates here – and because he tried to play power politics in a town that invented the game.
He came, he fought – and he got peeled like a grape.
The fullness of Crew’s defeat was underscored by the public deference paid to one of its principal architects – Queens Borough President Claire Shulman – by Ed Board President William Thompson of Brooklyn.
When Thompson saw Shulman sitting among the spectators shortly before yesterday’s momentous capital-budget vote, he marched right over to her and all but knelt in supplication.
As well he should have.
Unlike Crew, he has to live in this town.
Crew and deputy chancellor Harry Spence made several miscalculations in the weeks and days leading up to yesterday’s vote.
Foremost among them was the structure of their $11-billion capital budget. It came in three sections:
*Part One, worth $7 billion, was to be funded from guaranteed city, state and federal revenue sources.
*Part Two, $1 billion, was to come from economies in existing budgets – including from the Board of Ed’s day-to-day spending plan.
*Part Three presupposed that the city would float some $3 billion in bonds that, at present, it can’t repay.
This is where the legacy of New York City’s brush with bankruptcy kicks in. Issuing unsecured bonds, once a staple of municipal finance here, is no longer possible.
Certainly, city and state comptrollers Alan Hevesi and Carl McCall – whose support for responsible school repair is beyond question – would never approve a Monopoly-money capital budget.
And they said so.
Clearly, if the $11 billion plan was to work, a revenue stream would have to be developed – and for that, Crew & Co. would need to attract broad-based (i.e. Republican) support.
Here’s where things got really silly. Spence supposedly surveyed the political landscape and discovered Queens – where GOP warhorses like state Sens. Frank Padavan and Serph Maltese live.
Why not force them to supply more state aid – by making Queens’ share of the capital budget largely contingent on cash from Albany?
Brooklyn would get real money; Queens, more or less, would get promises that only Padavan & Co. could redeem.
This was precisely the tactical opening that Mayor Giuliani needed: He went to Shulman and said – in words or substance – this: “You cede your board vote to me, and I’ll make Queens whole in my budget. Maybe even better than whole.”
And so it was done.
Queens (and Staten Island) made out like bandits – and the mayor now enjoys unshakable control of the board.
Bill Thompson understands this – hence his homage to Shulman.
Crew and Spence probably do as well.
Now.