It’s a hanging shift in New York, the place mayors like Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg loved outsize energy over metropolis enterprise and h
It’s a hanging shift in New York, the place mayors like Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg loved outsize energy over metropolis enterprise and have lengthy had reputations to match. Within the short-term, this energy dynamic has stalled two key de Blasio priorities: assured paid depart and retirement accounts for personal sector employees. However it’s already had different impacts throughout the town, from added laws opposed by enterprise, elevated sway by the Legislature over native authorities and, some argue, an extra of obstacles for metropolis businesses.
Metropolis Council Speaker Corey Johnson makes no bones about the truth that he sees the Council — and never the mayor’s workplace — as New York Metropolis’s legislative lodestar.
“Within the final two years that I’ve been right here, the laws we’ve completed has been pushed by the Council,” he mentioned throughout a current press convention. “There have been some legislative packages which have been necessary to the mayor, that had been priorities of the mayor. However they had been additionally on the similar time priorities of the Council, so there was an overlap.”
Since de Blasio took workplace in 2014, the Council has handed almost 1,100 payments — greater than double the quantity underneath earlier administrations. Some current high-profile packages embrace laws requiring the town to launch a streets grasp plan each 5 years, new legal guidelines to curb emissions in giant buildings and an elevated give attention to lead paint hazards. However a lot of the legislative movement has come and gone with much less fanfare.
Largely, the reams of latest statutes are the results of ideological unity between the mayor and Council. However a extra transactional dynamic is at drive as properly: Council members going through time period limits on the finish of 2021 want to depart workplace with some form of legacy.
“They do that,” mentioned one Council member who requested anonymity, “as a result of all of them need a piece of the pie.”
Many payments have added necessities for companies and actual property companies, with an eye fixed to…