Chief Leader – June 16, 2015
One sign of the anger some key local legislators felt over Mayor de Blasio’s maneuver to ensure that it was his home-rule message amending disability-pension provisions for cops and firefighters hired after 2009 that moved through the City Council rather than the one favored by the unions came when Brooklyn Assemblyman Peter Abbate said he believed Hizzoner might be better off running Sherrill, N.Y., which with a population of a bit less than 3,200 is the smallest city in the state.
“It was just a waste of time,” the Bay Ridge legislator, who heads the Assembly Committee on Government Employees, said of the Mayor’s cloak-and-dagger maneuvering to abruptly move his bill through the Council June 10. “It’s a dog-and-pony show—they’re not ready for prime-time.”
In this case, though, the animals lifted their legs to ensure that maybe the de Blasio-backed bill wouldn’t go anywhere in Albany, but neither might the one which was being pressed that same day in the state capital by not only the unions but Governor Cuomo. The Mayor, in a kind of Cuomovellian power play, got his political soulmate, City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, to twist enough arms—reportedly with the threat that those Council Members who didn’t go along would see their district funding cut in the final city budget—to pass a home-rule message based on his disability-reform measure that Steve Cassidy of the Uniformed Firefighters Association and Pat Lynch of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association previously denounced as woefully inadequate.
Mr. Abbate was clearly frustrated, noting that the Mayor’s bill made it out of committee and moved speedily to a vote only because of the acquiescence of Queens Councilwoman Karen Koslowitz, who had been among the 40 sponsors of the union-backed version, which would give newer cops and firefighters disabled in the line of duty the same pension equal to 75 percent of final average salary, tax- free that is received by those who came on the job prior to 2010.
State Sen. Diane Savino, who represents Staten Island and a slice of western Brooklyn, shared her Assembly colleague’s anger. “To say that some of us are outraged is an understatement,” she said in a June 11 phone interview. “The Mayor twisted arms and the Council Speaker twisted arms and they got what they wanted: a bill that is unacceptable.”
Both legislators said that while the State Senate was ready to grant Tier 2 disability benefits to newer cops and firefighters without a home-rule message, Assembly Democrats were not, and that if such legislation was approved and signed by Governor Cuomo, a city court challenge was certain and was likely to succeed.
Ms. Savino and Mr. Abbate both questioned how Mr. de Blasio could be pressing a national campaign to significantly raise the minimum wage while simultaneously seeking to consign disabled cops and firefighters to an inferior pension benefit that falls below what is provided to those in the rest of the state.
“As long as he’s not paying you, he’s the most-progressive employer in the world,” Ms. Savino said. “But if he’s paying you, he doesn’t wanna give you [fertilizer].”
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