NY TIMES
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has long relished his reputation as a fearless urban innovator, treating New York City as his laboratory for groundbreaking experiments in public health and social engineering.
But as he has sought to banish cars from swaths of Times Square, require energy-efficient taxis and restrict the size of sugary drinks, he has tested something else: the limits of his mayoral authority, which he has used repeatedly to bypass legislative oversight and public scrutiny.
As Mr. Bloomberg’s third term draws to a close, his assertion of sweeping mayoral power has suffered a series of high-profile setbacks, miring several of his marquee initiatives in litigation and raising questions about the wisdom of his administration’s peremptory approach.
The state court ruling on Monday that struck down the mayor’s proposed limits on large sugary drinks pointedly rebuked him for overstepping his powers, finding that he had improperly circumvented the City Council, which had played no role in approving the regulations. The soda rule, Justice Milton A. Tingling declared, would “not only violate the separation of powers doctrine; it would eviscerate it.”
Adverse rulings have become a recurring impediment for a mayor accustomed to getting his way. Courts or administrative regulators have blocked the Bloomberg administration from mandating fuel emissions standards in New York City’s taxicabs, expanding street-hail car service beyond Manhattan, and changing eligibility requirements for homeless people seeking shelter.
In each case, the mayor’s ambitious social policies became stymied over questions of procedure and authority.
Aides to the mayor, a former corporate executive who has not answered to a boss in decades, acknowledge that he has taken an expansive view of mayoral power. But they point out that many of his signature accomplishments, like a ban on smoking in restaurants, mandatory sentences for those who carry illegal guns and energy-efficiency rules for building owners, were approved by the City Council.
Mr. Bloomberg“had an aggressive approach, and it’s led to 11 years of enormous accomplishments for the city and enactment of groundbreaking policies that have been replicated across the country.”
Mr. Bloomberg’s heavy use of executive power to turn big ideas into city policy has won him plenty of fans. They applaud him for finding clever ways to cut red tape and to skirt a fractious City Council, which, at any time, may impede or block his will. And some of his unilateral actions have held up and become popular: a ban on the use of all but tiny amounts of artificial trans fats in restaurant cooking, and a sanitary grading system for the city’s restaurants.
Even those who have challenged his exercise of authority concede that the alternative can be political paralysis.
“We all appreciate his attempts at doing good things,” said Richard D. Emery, a prominent civil rights and election lawyer who has been involved in lawsuits against Mr. Bloomberg’s office.
Mr. Emery’s clients successfully sued the Bloomberg administration to block its plan for a virtually all-hybrid fleet of taxis. A judge ruled that only the federal government had the power to regulate fuel and emissions standards. The ruling was upheld by the Supreme Court. “The motif here is Bloomberg trying to take over authority where other governmental entities have authority,” Mr. Emery said.
A case in point was Mr. Bloomberg’s attempt to extend street-hail service by livery cabs, to solve the problem of scarce taxis in northern Manhattan and in other boroughs. After meeting resistance to the proposal in the City Council, the mayor’s office turned instead to the State Legislature, persuading state lawmakers that taxi policy was within their jurisdiction.
The courts disagreed, ruling last summer that the city had overreached. “This court,” wrote Justice Arthur F. Engoron of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, “has trouble seeing how the provision of taxi service in New York City is a matter that can be wrenched from the hands of city government, where it has resided for some 75 years, and handed over to the state.”
Mr. Bloomberg has never entirely warmed to the political logrolling and elbow-greasing that typically accompany city policy-making. Instead, he has unleashed a flurry of administrative orders and “pilot” programs” that require little or no comment from the City Council or residents.
Dozens of administration projects, like transforming the city streetscape with pedestrian plazas and bike lanes, have begun as pilots, which generally require no public hearings or Council committee hearings, even as they expand into de facto citywide policy.
...no less a Bloomberg ally than Christine C. Quinn, the speaker of the City Council, has battled the mayor over his power, suing him to block a policy requiring homeless adults to prove that they had no alternative to city shelters. The mayor’s office, she said in an interview, “overplayed their authority.”
And James S. Oddo, a Republican councilman from Staten Island, who has agreed with the mayor on many high-profile issues, put his dismay in bigger terms.
“I think this administration, from early on, believed that theirs was a moment in time, and they were going to push their agenda, and not be slowed in any way by what they perceived as the traditional obstacles — including, as we look back, elected officials, parents and all the other usual entities that created the pressure points in government,” Mr. Oddo said.
“Listen — an elected official who is beholden to those pressure points is terrible,” he said. “But an elected official who has no sensitivity to those pressure points can be equally as bad.”