Per The New York Times, the Council and Mayor have agreed on a $59.1B budget for the new fiscal year just ahead of the July 1st deadline. The budget shifts funding away from infrastructure and towards taxpayers and consumers of City services.

During the news conference, Mr. Bloomberg and Ms. Quinn offered a few of the highlights. The New York City Housing Authority would receive $18 million more than Mr. Bloomberg proposed in May. Libraries would continue to be open six days a week and not five as was originally suggested.

The city’s capital budget would be trimmed by 20 percent. All agencies would absorb across-the-board cuts in operating expenses. And financing for City Council-sponsored programs, now at the heart of a federal investigation, was cut by 38 percent. There would also be less money to pay for security guards at cultural institutions, and a chess program for schools was cut.

A City of this size, complexity and age can get away with cutting capital spending for a year or two; beyond that, due to the age of our infrastructure, deferred maintenance inevitably results in higher costs down the road.

This is, in short, a classic election-year budget. Voters don't see the capital budget in the same way and with the same immediacy as they see their local library branch staying open for an extra day a week.

So, what's your top fiscal priority? Maybe schools for those thousands of kids in Brooklyn that don't have a seat in one? How about affordable housing? Maybe some infrastructure spending on the increasingly ramshackle MTA network? Or, to leave the City behind, how about we hook up the disadvantaged regions of upstate New York to broadband internet access?

What we don't need is another $350,000,000 in tax-free financing dedicated to the destruction of Yankee Stadium and its replacement by a new and vaster complex littered with VIP skyboxes that ordinary people will never see the inside of. But that's exactly what your mayor, Michael Bloomberg, is pushing for in Washington.

The Working Families Party is saying "Haha, no" to the idea. You can add your voice to theirs by going here. Because, you know, it's not as if George Steinbrenner and his stable of millionaires are panhandling for cash in the subway or anything like that.

Yes, it's time for another installment in the expanding file about media stories marked "Who the hell cares?".

In this case, the story - here's an extended discussion of it - that David Paterson supposedly

described Mayor Bloomberg in private as a volatile, Spitzerian, untrustworthy, out-of-touch, self-destructive billionaire bully.

Even if true, who. The. Hell. Cares?

Seriously?

This is the kind of media circus that prompts voters to despair. It's not as if there's a war on, and maybe the economy isn't really collapsing, maybe we don't have over 4,000 dead Americans (and dead Iraqis in their thousands, but we don't even count them), a President who broke the laws of the land with impunity, global warming, 4,000 kids in Brooklyn who don't even know whether or where they'll be going to school next year, the list goes on.

Today in the New York Post newspaper, columnist Fred Dicker sure lived up to his last name, since someone is surely going to get screwed by his front-page article. He reported that N.Y. Governor David Paterson said that, “Mayor Michael Bloomberg (NYC) is a nasty, tantrum-prone liar”. Dicker further states that Paterson claimed, “It is obvious that Bloomberg has little use for the kind of people who comes from Queens and Staten Island”. He further says of Bloomberg, that “you can’t trust him”. Look, I am not going to rehash the history of this dust-up; you can do your own research by going through the last four weeks of newspapers in this naked city. Also, I am not going to repeat all that Dicker claimed to have been said by our Cinderella governor (including the Spitzer comparison); go buy the paper yourself. I am however, going to accept (for now) that all of Dicker’s statements are true; at least until they are refuted or disclaimed by the governor.

Didn’t I warn you folks ‘bout them Harlem boys? As I told you: they “aint” easy. They are unafraid to throw a punch; unlike these elected wimps we have from Brooklyn (well, with the exception of Kevin Parker; I guess/lol). And finally this past weekend, out steps “Mr. Lucky” (N.Y. Governor David Paterson), and he goes straight upside Mayor Bloomberg’s head; right on the heels of Bad Boy Billy Perkins (see my column from last week). There must be something in that uptown water folks, we need to check it out; we need to import some to Brooklyn.

For those who were away for Father’s Day weekend, let me fill you in. Paterson’s people and Bloomberg’s people have been involved in protracted negotiations, to save the jobs of the fifteen-hundred-odd NYC Off Track Betting Corporation’s employees. These OTB folks were hanging in the wind for quite some time now, as the mayor and governor pondered what to do, about what was probably the only bookie operation in the world to be losing money. Bloomberg had been threatening for years to close down the operation. In fact over his tenure as mayor of NYC, he has appointed more than one inept deputy to oversee OTB; they dug deeper holes for the corporation as if deliberately trying to ground the organization. If you think I am lying, then go ask any OTB staff person to tell you the truth (off the record/ since many are intimidated). I have been hearing these grumblings for years; from clerks, district-managers, branch-managers, tellers, technical staff, custodians and the like.

Tuesday updates at the end

The crane collapses are unrelated – said the mayor in a strong sign that he just doesn’t get it. "It would appear that there is no connection whatsoever between the two accidents," Bloomberg said

What he’s saying (incorrectly, I think) is that the immediate causes of the crane collapse and deaths on 91 Street are likely not the same immediate causes of the crane collapse on 51 Street. (While defective equipment seems to be at fault in both, there is more.)

What seems plain to some of us is that Mr. Bloomberg and his falling-down Building Department are common threads here. It is Mr. Bloomberg who gave the marching orders and funding priorities which were directed away from inspections to his (now former) Buildings Commissioner. Did she do wrong? No one I’ve talked to in the construction community thinks so. She was marching to the beat of Mr. Bloomberg’s drum.

All the fun of ridiculing Mayor Bloomberg’s (all-fall-down) Building Department has subsided as yet another Crane collapse killed two, injured one, and damaged nearby buildings on East 91st Street Friday. (See also the NY Daily News excellent team report.). Ironically, (can I still use that word?) Mr.Bloomberg’s Building Dept. had just eased-up stringent rules requiring crane movements to be supervised by a DOB inspector . Dead at the scene was Donald Leo, 30, crane operator of Staten Island, who was in the cab as it fell. Sewer worker Ramadan Kurtaj, 27, of the Bronx and Kosovo, died in the hospital and a third was gravely injured. (For more on the lives of the fallen here is Lisa W. Foderaro's well researched follow-up.) "Union carpenter Simeon Alexis survived a gash to the chest," Newsday reported He was released from the hospital Saturday.

Update: The Manhattan DA's office is said to be investigating a possible crime in the crane collapse premised on the reuse of the cracked rotating plate (see below). More updates at the end of the post.

This was, of course, not the first crane trouble at this site and – in case you forgotten—not the first fatalities from falling structures like cranes around NYC In response to criticism Mr. Bloomberg suggested that perhaps the crane’s steel was defective, that construction was a dangerous job, that it wasn’t the DOB which had fallen down on the job, but the Contractor and finally, that the situation was “unacceptable and intolerable” --without explaining what he didn’t accept and what he wouldn’t tolerate.

In a city in which it is not a crime to shoot Sean Bell fifty times or Amadou Diallo 41 times, where black and Hispanic young men are stopped and frisked vastly in excess of their proportion of the population, it should not be a surprise that blacks & Hispanics are arrested for marijuana possession vastly more than whites (even though marijuana use is equal across ethnic groups). The surprise, as I see it, is that decent people don’t spit at Mayor Bloomberg and his police Commissioner. How often will NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Public Misinformation, Paul Browne, say things like the NYPD doesn’t engage in racial profiling without his nose growing from Police Plaza to City Hall? (I hate it when Mayor Bloomberg’s race policies make me write as though I were Al Sharpton.)

Rocco Parascandola of Newsday reports on a study released by the New York Civil Liberties Union:

The NYPD arrested more than 350,000 people for misdemeanor marijuana possession over the past decade -- a tenfold increase achieved by systematically targeting young black and Hispanic men and stopping them without cause, a report released Tuesday charges NYCLU,

The NYCLU press release, is here

SIBRO Civic (Staten Island and Brooklyn Civic) and South Beach Civic are sponsoring an Anti-Bloomberg Congestion Pricing Plan Forum, Sunday, April 6th at 7 PM in Xaverian High School, 7100 Shore Road,Brooklyn, NY 11209.

Speakers include Democratic Congressional Candidate Steve Harrison (NY13th CD, Staten Island/Southwest Brooklyn) and Queens City Councilman Tony Avella. One very prominent elected official is also trying to make it, but doesn't want his name released in case he can't it.

Councilman Bill de Blasio and Vinnie Gentile will send representatives.

There may also be speakers on behalf of the People with Disabilities community, who would suffer under the proposed congestion pricing.

Steve Harrison opposes Bloomberg's Congestion Plan, but not congestion pricing in theory.

For more information on Steve views on congestion pricing visit steveharrisonforcongress.com

Back and forth, up and down, three ways to Sunday: Michael Bloomberg has been teasing City and nation for over a year with hints he might be willing to offer his services as President, provided there was an ideological opening in the race.

Problem is, over the last year, the race has been turned entirely on its head. Instead of Clinton and Giuliani, the nominees will now most likely be Obama and McCain. Instead of hyper-partisan division, we have two nominees that appeal beyond their party's respective bases. In part as a result, Americans have consistently told pollsters that they're happy with their choices in this election (a satisfaction far more pronounced on the Democratic side, obviously).

Today, Mayor Mike drew the inevitable conclusion and announced he would not enter the race.

More, over the fold.

NYPD, it turns out, is not color blind. Sunday’s New York Daily News I-Team has wonderfully researched, well written article by Tina Moore, Benjamin Lesser and Greg B. Smith in which they show (definitively, in my opinion) that NYPD’s practice of Stop & Frisk on NYC subways is aimed at Hispanics and Blacks and unrelated to law enforcement purposes.

Because NYPD practices here are so outrageous, Mayor Bloomberg and his Police Commissioner must be held accountable for their vastly disproportionate racial impacts. As you may recall, NYPD has made every effort to hide the racial data generated by their stop and frisk program. Some of it has leaked out, (See, my earlier report with links here if you want further background).