Declaring that the economy “may well be on the verge of a meltdown,” Mayor Bloomberg ended months of fevered speculation yesterday and announced he’ll seek a third term to steer the city through the difficult years ahead.
“I don’t want to walk away from a city I feel I can help lead through these tough times,” the mayor said at a momentous City Hall press conference that drew an overflow crowd and was attended by all his senior aides.
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“My whole life has prepared me for the challenges ahead.”
Although he had previously opposed changes to the 1993 term-limits law, Bloomberg said he would sign a bill extending the terms of all city elected officials, which are now limited to eight years.
“The public is simply having another person on the ballot they can pick from if term limits were to be changed,” he said.
Opponents didn’t see it that way.
They angrily accused the mayor of subverting the will of voters, who twice endorsed term limits at the ballot box.
“It’s a suspension of democracy in New York City,” fumed Comptroller Bill Thompson, a leading Democratic mayoral contender in 2009.
“It’s still my intention to run for mayor,” he added.
Rep. Anthony Weiner, the mayor’s most persistent critic, charged that Bloomberg was about to undercut his long-held reputation as a reformer.
“Nobody that supports doing it [changing term limits] this way can ever again say they’re for open government, that they’re for reform,” said Weiner, who declared that his mayoral campaign, too, would remain intact.
Council Speaker Christine Quinn, a close Bloomberg ally, was the only one of the major Democratic contenders to say she’d drop out of the mayoral race and run for re-election if term limits were repealed.
Bloomberg cast his decision as a response to the severe economic downturn, as well as a feeling that his administration still had much unfinished business.
“The good news is that we planned for a slowdown in New York, but we may well be on the verge of a meltdown,” he said.
“There are times when you know a job is done, and there are times when you feel you’re in the thick of major changes that still require hard work and careful management and tough accountability.”
The term-limits question could have gone before the voters a third time next month had Bloomberg appointed a Charter Revision Commission he promised in January in his State of the City speech.
Councilman Bill DeBlasio (D-Brooklyn) called on the mayor to name that commission now so it could do just that in a special election.
But the mayor rejected that idea as “problematic.”
Bloomberg, who dumped his Republican Party registration last year, wouldn’t say if he’d now run as an independent.
“This is not the time for politics,” he said.
Earlier, Bloomberg was honored as one of 18 “Kings of Queens” in an awards ceremony that featured a trumpeter in full royal velvet regalia at Douglaston Manor.
“Vicky wanted to put a crown on my head,” the mayor told a crowd of 300, referring to the emcee. “But I thought the press would go crazy.”