Late Bloomer

At 4:11 p.m. last August 14th, the lights flickered out across New York City, and Michael Bloomberg, who was drinking coffee in a Brooklyn diner at the time, turned on the most rousing performance of his mayoralty. Throughout the great blackout, Bloomberg was a ubiquitous and calming force. He was on CNN, coolly assuring everyone that the crisis was no act of terrorism; on the Brooklyn Bridge, cheering commuters walking home in the heat; on the radio, explaining the inner workings of the electric grid; in a darkened stairwell, trudging up 19 floors for a late-night hash-out with the head of the local power company.

The New York media, accustomed to beating up on Bloomberg, was suddenly impressed. "Bloomberg Shines in Outage Darkness," Newsday said.

Most politicians would have let the blackout story end then and happily ride the goodwill for as long as possible. But Mike Bloomberg is not like most politicians. As mayor, he is guided by the same contrarian instincts that helped him build Bloomberg L.P., the successful media empire that made him one of the richest men on the planet. And his business impulses tell him this: No matter how good a job he's done at something, it's always worth looking for weaknesses, in order to do better next time.

So, just three days after the lights came back on, Bloomberg asked a mixed group of people from the public, private and nonprofit sectors to perform a frank analysis of the city's blackout response. They uncovered all sorts of unseen management failures, in communications, transportation and planning. And there was Bloomberg, at a press conference in October, handing this work of self-criticism to a pack of reporters.

Bloomberg acknowledged the risks of such brutal honesty. "Hopefully they won't criticize, but they'll take it in the manner that the study was done: We did a great job, can we do better?" Wishful thinking. The press took the bad news Bloomberg gave them and ran with it. "911 Blackout Chaos--Frantic Callers Were Left in the Dark," headlined the New York Post.

Such are the ups and downs of New York's "businessman mayor," a man who usually tries to do what strikes him as the rational thing, and almost always pays a political price for it. Bloomberg campaigned for office in 2001 on the basis of his private-sector credentials, arguing that what the city needed after September 11 was a successful businessman to turn it around. To show his freedom from special interests, he spent $73 million of his self-made fortune on his election. Three years later, it's clear that Bloomberg's business know-how, coupled with the independence he bought, is often an asset in his work as mayor. Just as often it is a liability.

Yet Bloomberg has learned a lot about politics since his early months as mayor, when he appeared at times to possess none of the most routine political instincts for his job. When the city's intake center for the homeless overflowed, Bloomberg suggested that an unused jail in the Bronx could be used as a backup. "He didn't understand the symbolism of it all--putting homeless families in a jail," says Arnold Cohen, director of the Partnership for the Homeless. "He was so politically tone deaf in the beginning that he was surprised by how vehement the opposition was."

NO RESPECT

The bottom line is that the city finds itself with both a successful mayor and a widely disliked one.

Bloomberg's accomplishments are many. He prevailed, where his predecessors failed, at persuading the state legislature to give him control of city schools. He steered the municipal government out of a deep fiscal crisis, turning a $6.4 billion budget gap in fiscal 2004 into a $1.9 billion surplus. He passed a controversial ban on smoking in bars and restaurants, setting a trend for cities around the country. All the while, crime on Bloomberg's watch continued its remarkable plunge--even with 4,000 fewer cops on the street and with the added pressures of protecting against terrorism. By the numbers, New York City is about as safe a place, the mayor likes to point out, as Port St. Lucie, Florida.

But for all the accomplishments, most New Yorkers continue to find Bloomberg aloof and out of touch. Much has been made about his frequent jaunts to his estate in Bermuda. More comfortable giving a PowerPoint presentation than chatting up voters, Bloomberg is struggling to find a populist groove. His 24 percent approval rating in a New York Times poll last summer was the lowest for any mayor since that poll began in 1978.

It is the conservatives who are most upset with Bloomberg at the moment. They were not always enamored of his predecessor, Rudy Giuliani, but they did see him as a champion of tax cuts and privatization in City Hall. They hoped that Bloomberg, a lifelong Democrat running as a Republican, might be similarly inclined. Once in office, Bloomberg quickly alienated the Republican base in Staten Island and Queens by raising property taxes 18 percent. "They thought they were electing Rudy's choice of successor," says E.J. McMahon, of the Manhattan Institute. "Then he called for the largest property tax increase in the city's history."

NEVER EXPLAIN

In some ways, Bloomberg's lack of political sensitivity should have been no surprise. Most successful executives who win high office promising to "run government like a business" find that is an impossible promise to keep: Business and government are two different enterprises. Moreover, unlike some widely publicized businessman- mayors of other cities in recent years--such as Richard Riordan in Los Angeles or John Hickenlooper in Denver--Bloomberg had no experience in public life outside of his extensive philanthropy work. He was as close to a pure political novice as any city is likely to get.

Even in business, Bloomberg had no shareholders to answer to. He was beholden to no one but himself. In his 1997 memoir, "Bloomberg by Bloomberg," he declared himself a member of the "never apologize, never explain" school of management. While he was free to practice that doctrine, CEOs of publicly-held companies aren't--let alone elected officials. "He's not a corporate guy," says Kathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, a business group. "He's an entrepreneur."

An engineer by training, Bloomberg understood how technology could help financial firms to analyze market data quickly and smartly. When he left his equities trading job at Salomon Brothers in the early 1980s, he began building computer terminals, which came to be known as "Bloombergs," to do just that. By the early 1990s, Bloomberg terminals sat on nearly every desk on Wall Street, and in financial capitals around the world--available to clients who could afford the price (currently $1,700 a month). Bloomberg later added a business newswire to his media offerings, along with radio and TV programming and a few magazines. Since becoming mayor, Bloomberg no longer runs the company, but he still owns 72 percent of it, enough to rank him 36th on the Forbes list of wealthiest Americans, with a net worth of $4.9 billion.

Bloomberg's critics, especially conservatives disdainful of his tax increases, see unhealthy parallels between the wealthy entrepreneur's view of his product and the mayor's vision for his city. In a 2003 speech, Bloomberg described New York as a "luxury product"--a high- cost place to do business but also a place of such opportunity that people and companies would gladly pay extra to locate there. "He clearly thinks taxes matter very little to very few people," says McMahon. "It's a 'Tiffany city' vision that reflects a person who spent most of his career in a high-margin, price-insensitive business."

BULLPEN GOVERNMENT

Bloomberg brought a few physical trappings from Bloomberg L.P. into City Hall. The most obvious is his workspace without walls. Shunning a private office, Bloomberg had a large chunk of City Hall's second floor remodeled into a wide-open room of cubicles. The "bullpen," as this area is known, looks rather like a trading floor, or an old- fashioned newspaper city room. There is a fully stocked snack bar at one end--another import from Bloomberg L.P.--and some meeting tables out in the open. The mayor's desk sits in the center (with a Bloomberg terminal on it, of course), and he is surrounded by his deputy mayors, chiefs of staff and schedulers.

Bloomberg has always worked in a transparent environment like this, and he thinks it opens communication up and down the chain of command. Nobody needs to schedule meetings or leave messages to ask the mayor's opinion on something. They just stick their heads over the divider. "You don't have to peel back the layers to get into the inner sanctum," says Gino Menchini, Bloomberg's commissioner for information technology, who visits the bullpen frequently.

The denizens of the Bloomberg bullpen are meritocrats, with a broad range of backgrounds in business, government and nonprofit work. "If you look at the talent he's picked, they're not from political clubhouses or former candidates for office," says Mitchell Moss, director of the Taub Urban Research Center at New York University. "It's a very different team, picked for their knowledge and skills, not for their political party."

Bloomberg delegates tremendous authority to his managers, as he was known to do at his company, and lets commissioners take credit for their accomplishments. That helps explain why there's been almost no turnover in Bloomberg's upper-management ranks, which is unusual in the New York pressure-cooker. Bloomberg's style stands in stark contrast with that of Giuliani, a notorious micromanager who centralized decision making and hogged the spotlight. Where Giuliani's ego battle with top cop Bill Bratton ended with Bratton's ouster, Bloomberg gives police commissioner Ray Kelly lots of leeway. "He does let his people run things," Kelly says of the mayor. "But he says clearly, 'Don't screw up.'"

Though Bloomberg prefers, as the saying goes, to let his managers manage, he does like the details: He can talk at length about trash collection or pothole repair. And he makes a point of prioritizing unsexy goals that are nevertheless crucial to the city's business climate. He settled scores of lawsuits filed against the city during the Giuliani years, saving on litigation costs and removing managers from the confines of court decrees. He's also quietly pushing an overhaul of the byzantine building code, in hopes of making it easier and less costly to construct housing, offices and retail space in New York.

Bloomberg's planning department, for instance, is conducting the most ambitious re-zoning of the city's land in a generation. Hoping to ease a severe housing crunch, planners are upzoning under-utilized land along the Brooklyn waterfront and around subway stations for high- density housing. At the same time, they are zoning for new mixed-use business districts in all five boroughs. The goal is to give Manhattan room to continue growing as a center of global commerce--while at the same time creating low-rent space for back-office businesses in Queens, Staten Island and the Bronx. Describing these changes, Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden sounds less like a bureaucrat than a corporate product development manager. "We're creating different products for different markets so the city can compete regionally and globally," Burden says.

CALL ANYTIME

Bloomberg's biggest import to government from the private sector has been an ethos of customer service. When selling data terminals, Bloomberg installed a button on the machines that his clients could push to request individualized service. His City Hall equivalent to that sort of pampering is the new 311 telephone hotline. New York has consolidated 16 city call centers down to one and trained its 500 call takers to answer nearly any question--or to know where to transfer the caller to if they can't answer. Streetlight out? Call 311. Not sure where to send your sewer bill? Call 311. Need directions to Yankee Stadium? Call 311.

Bloomberg isn't the first mayor to institute 311--Chicago and Baltimore have both had it for years--but New York's effort is stunning in its scope and complexity. A caller speaking Swahili is immediately transferred to a linguist who determines what part of the world she is from and then transfers her to a Swahili-speaking operator. Bloomberg himself frequently calls 311 (in English), and he promotes it relentlessly in press conferences and on his weekly radio show. The line gets 34,000 calls a day.

Call in a noise complaint, and it immediately dings the computer of the desk officer in the police precinct that handles it. Crime calls, obviously, take precedence, but at NYPD, word is out that quality-of- life calls matter. In many ways, what Bloomberg has instituted is a direct descendant of the much-publicized Compstat tracking system that revolutionized crime-fighting in New York and other cities in the 1990s. If a precinct is showing sluggish response to noise calls, the commander is likely to get a tongue-lashing.

In fact, 311 isn't just a complaint line but a powerful management tool. During the blackout, when 311 received 175,000 calls over two days, weary operators noticed that a lot of diabetics were calling to ask how long their unrefrigerated insulin would last. That information shot up the chain of command and before long, Bloomberg was on the radio telling New Yorkers what to do with medicine in their warming refrigerators. More recently, noticing that noise complaints are the top reason for calling 311 (there were 255,000 noise complaints last year), Bloomberg proposed an ordinance cracking down on barking dogs, loud air conditioners and other nuisances.

STRIKE BIKE

But Bloomberg's technocratic skills can be hard to separate from his flaws as a politician. New Yorkers tend to reward showman mayors, such as Giuliani or Edward I. Koch, who come off brash and kinetic as the city itself. Bloomberg rarely looks comfortable in public appearances, and often sounds like he is merely going through the motions.

One Friday in June, Bloomberg performed the annual rite of opening city pools for the summer. As he had the year before, the mayor jumped into the waist-deep water at a pool in Queens, hoping to demonstrate some solidarity with the common people. Mostly he managed to look uncomfortable in a soggy white polo shirt. Kids splashed and played with each other but not with the mayor. "If he didn't have to deal with the masses," says Doug Muzzio, a Baruch College political scientist, "I think he'd be perfectly happy."

For a man who ran a large media company, Bloomberg has a knack for flubbing his photo-ops. Late in 2002, transit workers threatened to go on strike, forcing New Yorkers to ponder how they'd get to work without subways or buses. Hoping to set an example, Bloomberg, who rides the subway each morning, purchased a bicycle and trotted it out for the cameras--a $540 mountain bike. The strike was averted, but Bloomberg's pricey "strike bike" endures as a lasting symbol for anyone who thinks the billionaire mayor is out of touch with the working classes.

The one trait that may have served Bloomberg best as an entrepreneur- -decisiveness--tends to get him into trouble in politics. Bloomberg has shown a tendency to move without bringing interest groups on board, turning them into opponents rather than allies.

Last year, the Democrat-turned-Republican launched a personal crusade to take political parties out of city government altogether. He proposed a ballot initiative to create nonpartisan elections. Rather than trying to build grassroots support for the measure, Bloomberg spent $7 million of his own money on promotion. It wasn't just the city's powerful unions, entrenched in party politics, that came out against him. The League of Women Voters and other good-government groups opposed it on the grounds that it could harm minority representation. The measure was trounced by a 70 to 30 percent margin.

Another example, during the worst of the budget crisis, was the mayor's plan to begin levying tolls on the bridges connecting Brooklyn and Queens to Manhattan. For such a politically volatile proposal, one certain to spark an outcry in the outer boroughs, Bloomberg did little to prepare the public or political leaders. Instead, the plan came out as an obscure line slipped into his budget: congestion pricing--$800 million.

Gene Russianoff, senior attorney for the New York Public Interest Group, says that his group supported the idea but that Bloomberg botched the execution. Now it's dead for the foreseeable future. "A different mayor," Russianoff says, "might've sat down with the Brooklyn borough president before announcing this, and said 'I know you'll hate this and probably attack it publicly, but if it happens, maybe we can get something for Brooklyn in return and you can pull your punches a little bit.'"

Bloomberg frequently boasts of his lack of political indebtedness to anyone as a crucial political virtue. Some think he carries that principle too far--and fails to realize that debts payable and receivable can be turned into genuine assets later. "He uses the word 'owing' as a negative," says Steven Cohen, a Columbia University political scientist. "But in government, it's not just a matter of owing. It's about relationship building, community building and consensus building--not about owing. That means going to Staten Island, a huge base of voters for him, but also Harlem and the Bronx and meeting with community leaders there, too."

Indeed, the problem with Bloomberg owing nobody anything is that nobody owes him anything either. "I get the feeling that he really believed he could govern as a businessman in the style of the progressive reformers who wanted the city governed as a city manager would with no reference to ideology," says Steven Malanga, of the Manhattan Institute. "It's impossible to govern New York City this way."

GETTING IT

As the 2005 election nears, however, Bloomberg the businessman is perhaps grudgingly turning into more of a politician. He doesn't jet off to Bermuda as much on weekends and has on several occasions pointed his private jet toward tropical islands that are important to more New York voters: Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. Closer to home, he's spending much more time than he used to in the Outer Boroughs, especially in neighborhoods that voted for him in 2001. Traditionally, New York mayors deliver their State of the City address in City Hall. Bloomberg gave his last one in Queens and the one before that in Brooklyn.

The businessman-mayor is also learning how to pander a bit. When the city recently projected a budget surplus for the fiscal year just ended, he suggested sending all homeowners checks for $400--a thank- you note reminding them of the upside of his property-tax increase. In another move, Bloomberg responded to anti-development sentiment in Staten Island and Queens by demanding downzoning in certain neighborhoods. That conflicts with his goal of building more housing in the city. But it is what these neighborhoods want, and Bloomberg is going to give it to them. People who watch Bloomberg closely say he seems more comfortable in his political skin. "He's growing into the ceremonial aspects of the job," says Fred Siegel, a veteran city observer and professor at Cooper Union.

One frequent target of City Hall, the bars and clubs represented by the New York Nightlife Association, has seen a turnaround in Bloomberg's style. Last November, the mayor proposed a change in licensing rules for establishments that want to stay open past 1 a.m. Complaining that bars and clubs weren't consulted about the changes, the association fought it, and the proposal was shelved. Eight months later, when Bloomberg proposed his noise ordinance, the administration specifically sought out the association's input. "They wanted us at the press conference announcing this," says Bob Zuckerman, executive director of the association. "It was a very different approach, and one that was extremely welcome."

Bloomberg's poll numbers are rising--his latest approval rating stands at 50 percent, according to a Quinnipiac University poll--but the electorate is still uneasy. Only 40 percent say that Bloomberg "cares about the needs and problems of people like you." Yet 64 percent say he is honest, and 65 percent say he has strong leadership abilities. In other words, New Yorkers may not like Mayor Mike but they admit the city is safe and the streets are clean. For Bloomberg, that may be just enough.