A Job for Mike

By: Nicole Gelinas

FINALLY: A real issue in the mayoral race. Last week, Rep Anthony Weiner, a Democratic contender for City Hall, proposed the only interesting idea of the contest so far - a city takeover of Gotham's state-run subway system.

Weiner wants state legislators to reform the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to give the mayor a majority stake on the authority's board. The mayor, not the governor, should control the city subways, Weiner argues, because the mayor is directly accountable to city voters.

He also accused Mayor Bloomberg of shortchanging city voters by not sticking up for them as subway service has visibly and steadily deteriorated this year.

Grandstanding? Sure - but grandstanders can be right.

Where his rivals for the Democratic nomination have staked out positions of irrelevancy (Fernando Ferrer stuck on poor, dead Amadou Diallo; everybody half-heartedly bickering over the West Side Stadium), Weiner has struck a nerve.

He's hit upon an issue that really does affect all New Yorkers. Plus, he's carving out voters from a soft spot Bloomberg can't afford to lose: Affluent and middle-class outer-borough residents.

The mayor is often characterized as out of touch with the needs of real New Yorkers - and on mass transit, he is: Bloomberg expects people to realize that he's not in charge of the subway system - and to leave it at that.

At City Hall last week, Bloomberg mused that it's "disappointing" that Gov. Pataki continually starves the MTA for cash - and noted redundantly (for those who ride the subway every day) that "if you don't keep your technology up to date - if you don't keep replacing things - you will have more and more breakdowns."

The mayor is not sufficiently outraged on behalf of riders. He should realize that voters aren't reading the organizational chart of the MTA - they want the mayor to feel their pain and to use his power to do something.

For middle-class, outer-borough voters, riding the subways is the only regular interaction they have with municipal government. These voters know that over the past three years, their taxes have gone way up - but not because they are receiving more or better city services.

Middle-class voters are reminded every morning and every afternoon that the one thing they do expect to get for their thousands each year in city and state tax dollars - a reliable, tolerable commute from the Bronx, Brooklyn or Queens into Manhattan - is an unworthy goal under Bloomberg's leadership.

Voters observe that the MTA, on its good days, is closing token booths and cutting service - and that nobody in charge seems to care. And they can see that Bloomberg is willing to smash heads together and cut red tape to get his stadium approved or to take over the public schools - but that he is content to leave frustrated subway riders at the mercy of Gov. Pataki and his unaccountable MTA.

Weiner's proposal for a city takeover isn't very radical. Gotham once did run the subways; it only relinquished control to Albany in 1968.

The city was then spiraling into fiscal and political crisis under Mayor John Lindsay - and had lost the will and ability to manage its own fiscal and physical resources. Gov. Nelson Rockefeller took the subways from Lindsay and dumped them into an authority with the state-run bridges and tunnels, so that bridge and tunnel surpluses could shore up subway deficits.

But that financial help carried an expensive price tag: Gotham's politicians had to give up their control over the city's most valuable physical asset.

It's a sign of how far the city has come since the 1960s that a candidate for mayor could propose that the city re-take control of the subways - and not be laughed out of the race. (It's also a sign of how much the state government has deteriorated since then.)

New Yorkers know that it was former Mayor Giuliani, not a state politician, who finally took New York back from the criminals and chaos of the '70s, '80s and early '90s. New Yorkers have also shown, by backing Bloomberg on his takeover of the schools from the old Board of Education, that they trust their mayor to try to reform Gotham's schools in good faith.

So why couldn't a strong, creative mayor fix Gotham's subways - and mobilize the investment necessary to modernize the system to improve reliability and ease long commutes from the outer boroughs?

Let's remember that city residents must pay for the MTA's mismanagement in the end - through poor service, ever-higher fares and job-killing taxes.

Taxpayers and riders can funnel their tax and fare dollars to Pataki - and watch that money disappear down the black hole that is the MTA. Or, they can take Gotham's decade-old recovery from municipal chaos to the next level - and help the next mayor take back the subways as the last mayor took back the city streets.