With laws critical to the city’s future days from expiring — and little movement in Albany — Gov. Cuomo and the Legislature are trying to blame the looming meltdown on everyone else.
Please. The governor and Legislature have known for years that rent regulations affecting 2.5 million New Yorkers would lapse on Monday.
The 421-a tax break, key to building housing the city urgently needs, will run out that same day.
And the law giving Mayor de Blasio control over schools — without which chaos would return — will die on June 30.
Yet now that they’re on the brink of blowing those deadlines, they bleat it’s de Blasio’s fault, or Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara’s.
Particularly phony is the excuse that Bharara’s corruption charges against former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and former Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos have put a kibosh on legislative negotiations.
In fact, there’s plenty of talking going on. The true sin is that Democratic Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and Republican Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan have proven grossly incompetent at leading their chambers.
Take, for example, the hotly contested 421-a tax break issue.
Designed to encourage housing construction at a time when the market was in the doldrums, the law offers benefits to developers that are now too generous. Its formulas need to be rewritten — but neither the Senate nor the Assembly crafted a bill to achieve the objective. Nor did Cuomo.
De Blasio stepped into the vacuum on May 7, delivering to Albany a complex plan to adjust the breaks and to use them more effectively as a catalyst for affordable housing production. The product of consultations with housing advocates and developers, de Blasio’s scheme thoughtfully balanced economics and social policy.
Still, the mayor ran into construction union complaints that he hadn’t mandated so-called prevailing wages on building projects — a step that would sharply depress affordable housing production. Cuomo took up those cudgels, and then he knocked de Blasio for presenting the proposal six weeks before the end of the legislative session.
Could de Blasio have gotten there earlier? Sure. But to suggest that Albany is incapable of acting within six weeks to is convict the mayor of violating funhouse rules. Because, ultimately, 421-a is a state law, and Cuomo and the Legislature are responsible for its fate. Now.
