There is plenty of bad news in the budget Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed today, but--hard as this may be to believe--it could have been worse. The strategy from City Hall seems to have been to soften the blow, at least on the surface, of having to close a $4 billion budget gap by reducing city spending by $1 billion through ...

When Michael Bloomberg called City Council members “gutless” for not supporting a 7 percent property tax hike, it marked a sharp departure from the spirit of cooperation he tried forging after the contentious vote on term limits.
According to one City Councilman, Lew Fidler, it also contradicted the sentiment the mayor expressed in a private conversation, in which he said ...

City Councilman Lew Fidler said the Ravich plan to tax businesses one third of one percent in order to help fund the M.T.A. sounds familiar. Fidler said it was part of the traffic plan he proposed months ago as an alternative to congestion pricing. "If they had done that when I proposed it, we'd have half a ...

The National Committee for the Furtherance for Jewish Education held their annual “empowerment breakfast” in a small hotel room on Ninth Avenue yesterday morning, where the talk of politics was unavoidable. Breakfast chair Suri Kasirer called City Comptroller Bill Thompson to the front of the room to present an award. (She used to be a fund-raiser for him). Kasirer introduced ...