A Tale Of Two Cities

Or perhaps it’s just a secret scheme to fully rehabilitate Bloomberg’s legacy:

On its face, it makes no sense.

A handful of sophisticated New York developers write big campaign checks to rural backwoods political committees miles upstate.

Upon closer inspection, however, it all becomes clear.

The developers were told the money wasn’t meant to help elect some yahoo constable in Moosebreath Corners, N.Y. Instead, it would help Mayor de Blasio in his quixotic quest to flip the GOP-controlled state Senate to the Democrats.

And the developers who chose to give just happened to be seeking — or had in the past received — lucrative benefits from the de Blasio administration such as zoning changes and tax breaks.

All of this is now under investigation by Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.

When It’s Slushy It’s Easy To Slip

“Mayor de Blasio’s Campaign Fund-Raising Scrutinized in U.S. Corruption Inquiry”:

A wide-ranging federal corruption investigation centered on two businessmen with ties to Mayor Bill de Blasio is also examining some aspects of his campaign fund-raising, a person with knowledge of the matter said on Friday.

The investigation, which in recent days has garnered attention because the focus on the two businessmen led federal agents to interview roughly 20 senior New York Police Department officials, has for some time been examining the ways the businessmen wielded influence in New York City government, several people briefed on the matter said.

That examination has included an aggressive review of Mr. de Blasio’s campaign fund-raising, the person with knowledge of the matter said. The investigation’s focus on Mr. de Blasio’s fund-raising was reported on Friday night by WCBS-TV News.

It was unclear what specific aspect of the mayor’s fund-raising was under scrutiny and how it related to the conduct of the two businessmen.

The two businessmen under scrutiny are Jona Rechnitz and Jeremy Reichberg. Both served on a large committee that planned Mr. de Blasio’s inaugural celebration in 2014, and Mr. Rechnitz and his wife each contributed $4,950, the maximum amount allowed, to his 2013 campaign. Mr. Rechnitz also raised about $45,000 for him.

Or, “De Blasio’s lust for power will be his final downfall”:

[. . . A]ll the probers’ tips lead back to City Hall, and now the target is coming into clear view. It looks as if the mayor’s three slush funds, the ones that good-government groups blasted as a “shadow government,” have a bull’s-eye on them.

The multimillion-dollar operation is tied to every sleazy deal you’ve read about since de Blasio took office. It is the dirty doorway to all the other schemes and players.

The funds raised at least $4.36 million from developers, unions, taxi medallion owners, carriage-horse opponents and wealthy liberal activists like George Soros. In short, all those who wanted something big and valuable from de Blasio found their way to the back-room boiler operation and wrote a fat check.

The first of the groups was such a hit that the mayor created two more. All three nonprofits have an innocent-sounding name and, because they are incorporated separately from his official campaign, are not bound by the limits and disclosures required under the city’s campaign finance law. It’s a safe bet that avoiding those rules is why the groups were created.

If that pattern weren’t suspicious enough, an added element is that de Blasio has been moving huge amounts of money among the three entities, creating a virtual shell game that, temporarily at least, conceals the donors, how much they gave and how the money is being spent.

Ultimately, the issue is what, if any, favors the donors got in exchange for their cash. Were there illegal quid pro quos?

Lessons In Leadership

Because you can always blame things on lousy messaging on the part of some junior staffer:

Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Wednesday that he was going to add $305 million to New York City’s capital budget to speed up work on Water Tunnel No. 3 so that it would be able to serve Brooklyn and Queens.

The money will pay for construction of two deep shafts in Maspeth, Queens, that will connect with the tunnel, which is virtually finished. When the work is done, the five million people who live in the two boroughs will have a robust supply of water other than Tunnel No. 2, which was built in 1936.

The mayor’s announcement came just hours after The New York Times reported that his administration last year had removed all money to pay for the tunnel and had also replaced the announced 2021 deadline for completion with a commissioner’s “guess” that it would be ready for service sometime in the mid-2020s.

Those actions and statements, the mayor said, had been misunderstood as postponing the work. “There are times when my team does not do a good job of explaining something,” he said.

The simplest part of the mayor’s day may have been finding money to pay for the tunnel, not an especially difficult task in a budget swollen with revenues from a booming city economy.

Far more awkward was the struggle by him and his aides to argue that they had never flagged in their support for the tunnel project, and to avoid an unflattering comparison to Mr. de Blasio’s predecessor, Michael R. Bloomberg, who drove progress on the construction after work on the tunnel had moved sluggishly for decades.

On Setting New Priorities

“. . . .[W]eak city leaders . . .”:

The entire Brooklyn-Queens leg of the new tunnel was scheduled to be finished by 2021, with $336 million included in the capital budget in 2013 by Mr. de Blasio’s predecessor, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, for whom completion of the third tunnel was the most urgent and expensive undertaking of his tenure.

But last year, Mr. de Blasio’s administration, eager to keep a lid on water and sewer rates that had grown by an average of 8 percent annually under Mr. Bloomberg, moved financing for the third tunnel to other projects, Amy Spitalnick, a de Blasio spokeswoman, said.

The city intends to finish the remaining portions of the tunnel sometime in the 2020s, but it has not set a date for completion nor allocated money in the budget to carry out the work. For the foreseeable future, the $6 billion tunnel will remain dry in the two largest boroughs, where well over half the city’s population lives.

“You look back over the last 50 years, whenever there were fiscal pressures, the unseen world of the municipal water system is where weak city leaders turned to cut spending,” said Kevin Bone, a professor of architecture at Cooper Union and an editor of “Water-Works: The Architecture and Engineering of the New York City Water Supply.” “I’m disappointed to hear that they’ve deferred it. It is symptomatic about planning for the future in America.”

[. . .]

Asked why construction of Tunnel No. 3 had been deferred, the de Blasio administration at first said it had been a decision of Mayor Bloomberg’s, but later said it had been a matter of setting its own new priorities and addressing the cost of state and federal mandates.

Unlike Almost Any Other Food In Its Fundamental Nature

“Mr. de Blasio, a politician who values loyalty deeply, has found ways to give back”:

When New York City banned whole milk from public schools in 2006, seeking to reduce obesity and improve students’ health, a trade group for the American dairy industry hired a well-connected Washington lobbyist to fight back.

Harold M. Ickes, the lobbyist, was a towering figure — a member of a prominent liberal family, a trusted counselor to Bill and Hillary Clinton and a former White House deputy chief of staff. But his firm’s appeals to the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg were rebuffed.

The man who would one day succeed Mr. Bloomberg, however, was more receptive.

That man, Bill de Blasio, then a councilman from Park Slope, Brooklyn, embraced Mr. Ickes’s cause, sponsoring a resolution calling for a review of the policy and accusing city officials of “radically” changing menus without listening to parents’ concerns.

“The bottom line, in my view, is milk is unlike almost any other food in its fundamental nature,” Mr. de Blasio said at the time. The policy stayed in place, but the dairy industry later thanked Mr. de Blasio for his “leading efforts on this issue.”

On his path to becoming mayor, Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, has long leaned on Mr. Ickes, whom he calls his closest mentor. A friend for three decades, Mr. Ickes, 76, has advised Mr. de Blasio’s campaigns, introduced him to wealthy donors and recommended him for a breakthrough job managing Mrs. Clinton’s run for United States Senate in 2000.

Mr. de Blasio, a politician who values loyalty deeply, has found ways to give back.

Shortly after the mayor’s election in 2013, Mr. Ickes opened a New York branch of his lobbying firm. Although he had not lobbied in the city for nearly a decade, Mr. Ickes proved a quick study, collecting about $1 million in fees and securing wins for major clients.

Among his victories, one stands out: At Mr. de Blasio’s urging, the City Council passed an unusual bill in 2014 that gave $42 million in wages to public school bus drivers represented by Mr. Ickes. The wages came on top of an existing city contract, raising objections from some council leaders and government watchdog groups.

In emails to aides to Mr. de Blasio, Mr. Ickes personally suggested changes to the bill’s language, records show.

The mayor has said his friendship with Mr. Ickes does not influence his decision-making, or the city’s treatment of his mentor’s clients. But an examination of emails and other public records obtained by The New York Times shows that the men’s close relationship has given Mr. Ickes extraordinary access, enabling him to push his clients’ interests directly to the city’s top officials.