The Lobbying Effort Is In The Mail

Even with all that presidential hype he’s still just a lame duck:

Lawmakers on Monday shelved Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s plan to charge a fee to drivers entering the busiest parts of Manhattan, dealing a setback to the mayor as he tries to raise his national profile and promote his environmental initiatives.

The State Senate, which had convened in a special session, adjourned without taking up the plan after it became apparent that the votes for passage were not there.

Meanwhile, the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, proposed sending the issue to a study commission that would also consider other ways to reduce traffic, and giving the Legislature until next March to act.

The developments suggested that passage of the mayor’s plan, or one resembling the original, was unlikely. Asked if congestion pricing was dead, Senator Martin J. Golden, a Brooklyn Republican who supports the plan, said, “It doesn’t sound like it’s alive, that’s for sure.”

Mr. Bloomberg had lobbied hard and backed an extensive publicity campaign to pressure lawmakers to approve his plan by Monday, the deadline for the city to seek as much as $500 million in federal aid. But legislators complained that he had failed to answer basic questions about the proposal, which has never been tried on a broad scale in any American city. Still, last-ditch talks continued late Monday night.

. . .

In a tense meeting on Monday, testy exchanges erupted between the mayor and the Democratic state senators he was trying to win over. At one point, according to several people present, Mr. Bloomberg told the senators that his administration had sent plenty of information about his plan in the mail, and that it was not his fault if they had not read it.

“If the mayor came in with one vote, he left with none,” said Senator Kevin S. Parker, a Brooklyn Democrat.

“His posture was not ingratiating,” he said. “He says he doesn’t know politics, and he certainly bore that out by the way he behaved.”

So angered were Democrats that they decided to vote as a bloc to defeat the measure, and there were not nearly enough votes among the Republican senators for it to pass.

The mayor moved from meeting to meeting in the Capitol, his expression grim, and he declined to take questions from reporters. He did take a shot at his critics on WROW-AM radio in Albany on Monday morning, saying, “Anybody that says we didn’t have enough time to look at this is ridiculous.

“They don’t read the mail or they don’t read the newspapers,” he said, adding that it would be difficult “to not know about congestion pricing if you can read.”

Or maybe they actually did read the newspapers (nice lobbying effort, by the way — sending over a stack of op-eds!) and felt that there were certain outstanding and/or unanswered issues including but not limited to the potential increased traffic just outside the congestion pricing zone, the incomprehensible notion that Manhattanites below 86th Street would be charged to leave the zone (and reduce congestion in the process!), or the astounding observation that the 6 train is actually not that crowded if you go to work at quarter to seven . . .