In a stunning development, the senior mayoral aide overseeing some of the city’s largest and most ambitious projects announced yesterday that he was resigning to become president of Bloomberg LP, the mayor’s information-services company.
“The city’s loss will be the private sector’s gain,” declared Mayor Bloomberg as he disclosed both the resignation and hiring of Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff.
The situation was certainly unusual.
On one hand, the mayor said he had “done everything he could” to keep his trusted longtime aide from leaving.
On the other hand, Doctoroff couldn’t have been hired at Bloomberg LP without the mayor’s blessing.
“It’s sort of a bittersweet moment for us,” the mayor conceded.
Doctoroff, a wealthy investment banker working for just $1 a year, was long rumored to be job hunting after serving nearly six years as the deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding.
The mayor said a fateful business trip in October led Bloomberg LP Chairman Peter Grauer to suggest hiring Doctoroff for the No. 2 position at his expanding worldwide company.
“Unfortunately, I made the mistake of letting Dan go to Korea with Peter to give a speech,” the mayor recalled. “Peter said this is the kind of guy we really need, and I checked with the Conflicts of Interest Board as to whether I could have a general conversation with him. They said yes.”
Mindful of the city’s strict ethics rules, Bloomberg added that it was “Grauer who put together this deal.”
The mayor praised Doctoroff as the “chief architect of the most sweeping transformation of New York’s urban environment since the days of Robert Moses.”
Doctoroff is credited with overseeing 289 separate projects, from the expansion of the No. 7 subway line to the rezoning of vast parts of the five boroughs.
He was also at the helm of the administration’s most visible failure, the loss of the 2012 Olympics after Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver refused to allow construction of a stadium on the far West Side.
Through a spokesman, Silver declined comment on Doctoroff’s departure.
Doctoroff made no apologies for thinking big, and even a fierce critic acknowledged that he brought a visionary eye to the city’s landscape.
“While we’ve had disagreements on the specifics, Mr. Doctoroff deserves credit for his role in the ethos of innovation we’ve seen at City Hall,” said Rep. Anthony Weiner, a vocal opponent of the administration’s congestion-pricing proposal.
With numerous projects still in development, from Willets Point to the West Side rail yards, some officials questioned the timing of Doctoroff’s resignation, which takes effect at year’s end.
“Why is he leaving now?” asked City Councilman Leroy Comrie (D-Queens). “It’s going to be a big loss to me. There’s a lot of heavy stuff in the pipeline, and he’s very knowledgeable.”
Councilman Mike McMahon (D-SI) raised another issue: Since Bloomberg isn’t supposed to be running his company from City Hall, how could he have helped engineer the deal that landed Doctoroff?
“It certainly seems like a close call,” McMahon said. “If this was football, they’d order an instant replay.”