No New Tammany Hall

The new political machine, begat by term limits, relies on nepotism:

For New Yorkers who voted to impose term limits on the City Council, the promise was to sweep clean a moldering institution and fill it with “citizen legislators” who would bring energy and fresh ideas from the private sector, where they would return after their eight-year allotments.

But as the first class of councilors elected under the term limits law in 2001 prepares to leave office next year, the very opposite is becoming reality: With lawmakers seeking new elective offices and career politicians looking to join, or rejoin, the body, the Council may well become a political revolving door.

Already, 20 of the 35 Council members who are being forced from office have filed with the city’s Campaign Finance Board to run for another position. And at least a dozen of those planning to compete for open Council seats have budding or established political careers, including state officials, relatives of Council members and even a few former councilors who collectively have decades of service under their belts.

. . .

Paul Vallone, whose father, Peter F. Vallone, represented a district in Astoria, Queens, for 27 years until his brother Peter F. Vallone Jr. took it over in 2002, is running to represent the Bayside area. Paul Washington, a former chief of staff for Councilman Charles Barron, is running for the councilor’s East New York, Brooklyn, slot, while Evan Thies, a former spokesman for Councilman David Yassky, is competing to represent Mr. Yassky’s Brooklyn district, which stretches from Park Slope to Williamsburg.

And then there is Thomas V. Ognibene, who represented Middle Village, Queens, for 10 years before leaving office in 2001 because of term limits. He recently lost a bid to replace Dennis P. Gallagher, his former chief of staff, who resigned from the Council this year after admitting to a sexual assault.

“The person who runs for the office is a relative, a chief of staff, a protégé of the person that was in there in the first place,” Mr. Ognibene said. “Insurgency is virtually impossible. You cannot generate the money or the support,” he said, adding, “So you don’t get the people in there that had been contemplated, the people with the fresh start, the new view.”

Then Again, He Always Said He Wasn’t A Poll-Taking Kind Of Leader

So I guess now we know the results of that poll — people are quite comfortable with term limits:

Mayor Bloomberg hinted yesterday that he might be open to changing term limits — but only for other city officials, and not himself.

“If the public wanted to vote for it to change, I don’t know that I would want to run again. I’m going to be 68 years old when I finish this. I really haven’t had a vacation in six years,” the mayor said.

“We have term limits, which I have said are probably a good idea. I’ve always said a new guy can do it better. The public has voted for it twice.”

R, FK T, We’ll Call It What We Want

In the end, it may have been a gracious but hollow measure to rename the Triborough Bridge to honor Robert F. Kennedy:

What’s in a name, anyway? Would that which we call the Triborough Bridge by any other name — oh, let’s skip the Shakespeare and get to the point. Would anybody call the Triborough anything but the Triborough?

The short answer seems to be, no.

“It connects three boroughs,” said Susan Breslaoukhov, the manager of a French Connection clothing store in Rockefeller Center. “That’s self-explanatory, I expect people will keep calling it Triborough for a long time.”

The what-will-they-call-it question came up after the State Assembly voted to rename the Triborough the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge, for the former attorney general who was elected to the United States Senate from New York in 1964. He died 40 years ago Friday, after being shot in Los Angeles, just after he won the California Democratic primary.

Gov. David A. Paterson is expected to sign the bill making the name change official. His predecessor, Eliot Spitzer, suggested the bridge renaming in January. At that time, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland and the eldest of Robert Kennedy’s 11 children, said, “This has been a dream for quite a while.”

But some said the renaming could be confusing for commuters. “It’s been that way for a million years,” said Morton Mozzar, an automobile-service consultant in Queens. “If they had renamed it right afterwards, O.K., like they did with J.F.K. Airport.” (The airport was called Idlewild but was renamed after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. It only seems as if the Triborough has been around for a million years. Next month it will have been open for 72 years.)

Some New Yorkers pointed to name changes that did not take. Consider the Marine Parkway-Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge, as it has been known for 30 years in honor of the former Brooklyn Dodgers first baseman and Mets manager.

Or what about renaming the Miller Highway the Joe DiMaggio? Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Gov. George E. Pataki agreed to that in 1999, soon after DiMaggio’s death.

The Miller Highway? Nobody called it that in the first place (except, perhaps, relatives of Julius Miller, the Manhattan borough president when the first section was opened in 1930). It ran from West 72nd Street to Battery Place and was not to be confused with the Henry Hudson Parkway, which runs north from 72nd.

“And what about the Thruway?” asked Mimi Marenberg of Airmont, N.Y. “Its name is the Thomas E. Dewey Thruway, but who calls it that? No one. How about Newark International Airport? No one calls it Liberty. We spend money on big signs, renaming these things, but all it does is generate money for the sign people.”

What about RFKTB? Like NKOTB, only more reverent . . .

Earlier: Few Will Have The Greatness To Bend The Span Between Queens And The Bronx.

Location Scout: Triborough Bridge.

Which Authority? A Higher One . . .

The feral cats at JFK will be “turned over to the proper authorities” alright:

The cat and mouse game between Kennedy Airport felines and the Port Authority has come to an end — and the cats lost.

So say animal lovers who accuse the authority of backing out of negotiations to humanely deal with the hundreds of cats who roam the 5,000-acre airport.

The next stop for the furry creatures, advocates say, could be death.

“They are telling folks that they are trying to adopt these animals out, but that is patently not true,” said Patrick Kwan, New York state director of the Humane Society of the United States.

“These animals cannot be adopted out. This is an extermination program that sentences them to death.”

Cross Promotion . . .

Ed Skyler has internalized it:

The free ride is finally over for thousands of privileged parkers, with the city yanking more than 25,000 permits in a sweeping overhaul yesterday of a gilded system that for years has infuriated regular motorists.

Deputy Mayor Ed Skyler said 32 percent of the 80,770 official parking placards used by 68 different agencies had been withdrawn.

. . .

Skyler insisted that vehicles with expired permits and those bearing placards issued without authority by uniformed unions — the bane of many irate motorists trying to find a parking spot — would now be ticketed. “You might as well have Time magazine on your windshield [as an expired permit],” he said. “It’ll be just as effective.”

Because speaking of Time Magazine:

Mayor Bloomberg went out on a limb — and it got him named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world.

The magazine posed him on a tree outside City Hall on April 18 to illustrate his commitment to environmental issues.

Happily, the mayor — who rode to his perch on a cherry picker — was safe from any dive-bombing birds. His security guard was planted firmly in a flower bed below him.

And that’s a commitment to environmental issues, not constitutional issues:

In a blow to Mayor Bloomberg’s campaign to get guns off the streets, a federal appeals court shot down a suit by the city that sought to make firearm makers responsible for the illegal sale of weapons.

The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan tossed out the lawsuit in light of a 2005 law that Congress crafted in direct response to the city’s claims. The 2-to-1 split opinion overturned an earlier ruling by Brooklyn federal Judge Jack Weinstein, who was poised to start a trial in the case when Congress approved the law.

Bloomberg said he is “disappointed,” but vowed to continue his fight against illegal guns through another lawsuit targeting crooked dealers and pawnshops.