Editorial comment:

A shareholder’s report on NYC, Inc.

As he campaigns for a third term as mayor, Michael Bloomberg portrays himself as a man above politics and as a savvy businessman who can get us through tough times by his careful management of our dollars.

Residents of the Northwest Bronx know better – or should. They have had years of bad news about the huge project that Mr. Bloomberg personally arranged to have dumped in their backyard – the water filtration plant under construction in Van Cortlandt Park.

When he made the deal in the back room of Bronx Democratic Party headquarters that brought the plant to the park, Mr. Bloomberg notoriously enticed legislators to vote for the project with a promise of $220 million in city funds to be spent on parks in their districts. But that was just a down payment.

Mr. Bloomberg may be able to finance his own campaigns, but for the others who sat around the table that day the real windfall was campaign cash from the contractors and construction unions that would build the plant. Our mayor waded waist-deep in the pay-to-play culture of city politics.

Let’s turn to the other side of the ledger, to Mike Bloomberg, the CEO of NYC, Inc. Let’s observe his Department of Environmental Protection in action. Seldom has there been more comprehensively- documented proof that a city agency is managed by a gang that can’t add straight or that its projections and promises are as evanescent as a spring shower that no sooner sprinkles the ground than it evaporates into thin air.

The DEP’s most recent broken promise is its pledge to excavate in the vicinity of the Jerome Park Reservoir without resorting to blasting. Its decision to dynamite after all needs to be viewed in the context of its sorry record of miscalculation and misstatement. Here’s some of that record:

• The DEP’s inability to comply with the schedule it set itself has cost taxpayers thousands of dollars in fines.
• When the agency’s own draft environmental impact statement showed that our water bills would be lower if the plant were built in an industrial park in Westchester, the price tag underwent an unexplained $200 million increase. The new estimate in the final environmental impact statement was just enough to wipe out the potential savings and blunt an argument against building in Van Cortlandt.
• With years of construction still to go, the project has already exceeded its budget by more than $2 billion.

The only question that remains to be answered about the filtration plant is whether the decision-makers were knaves or fools: did they deliberately lie about the cost and consequences of building the plant in the park, or were they too dumb to figure out where to put the decimal points when they estimated the price?

The evidence is mixed.

The DEP did lie to cover its tracks when it upped the estimate for building in Westchester. A spokesman said town officials had negotiated a monetary trade-off for the inconvenience of hosting the plant. Not true, the town supervisors told The Press.

What about what the DEP characterizes as the “minor modification” of using dynamite? It’s tempting to conclude that it kept plans to blast in its back pocket, but there’s no way to know.

As to the DEP’s inability to contain costs, its track record argues for incompetence rather than dishonesty. It has been almost as wrong about the ultraviolet water treatment plant it is building in the Westchester industrial park as about the filtration plant. The cost of building the UV plant has ballooned from $597,000 to $1.6 billion.

Duplicity or ineptitude: either way, this sorry history has had real consequences. It has cost the residents of Norwood their tranquility, and now threatens the tranquility of Van Cortlandt Village and the schools along Education Mile.

And it has contributed to a rise in water rates that threatens the ability of non-profit organizations to maintain thousands of affordable apartments in the Bronx and elsewhere.

Is the mayor who boasts of his businesslike approach accountable for the performance of his agencies? Or is the CEO of NYC, Inc. like those other CEOs, of banks and insurance companies and automobile manufacturers, we have come to know recently, reaping the bonus of re-election for presiding over a failed enterprise?

http://riverdalepress.com/full.php?sid=8617&current_edition=2009-05-14