City Hall Dispatch: The man in the middle
Photo: NY Mag
Why is this man smiling?
Probably because he is the lone man in the room. After over a year of build-up, the fate of the mayor's plan to charge drivers to come into (most of) Manhattan rested on the hunched shoulders of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.
And he gave a big 'ol no:
"The conference has decided that they are not prepared to do congestion pricing," he intoned in his famous old baritone. "I think you can speak to the members of the conference who have made that determination.Many of them just don't believe in the concept. Many of them think this bill is flawed. So an overwhelming majority of the conference that opposes congestion pricing, and for that reason, the congestion pricing bill did not have anywhere near a majority of the Democratic conference, and will not be on the floor of the Assembly."
Dude has been in kind of a spot here. Probably no part of the city would be more helped by congestion pricing than Shelly's Lower East Side/Chinatown neighborhood, which is tangled mess of double-parked cars and dirty exhaust. But Silver has always had two constituencies: the voters in his district and the 105 members of the majority party in the lower house in Albany. He's survived for speaker for so long not by keeping an iron grip on power (like his colleague in the upper chamber, Joe Bruno) but by getting members of caucus what they need, and, for the folks back home, he's been a master at wrangling concessions for his district.
So what do those members need now? Apparently to be able to get into Manhattan without having to fork over 8 bucks.
This one was close, with Albany sources telling us, both Senate leader Joe Bruno and Gov. David Paterson hoping to deliver this one for Mayor Bloomberg, which Hizzoner desperately wanted for his legacy.
But alas, what Shelly wants, Shelly gets. Which you've probably noticed every time you've gone to check out a game at the West Side stadium.
Interestingly, for the first time in a while, Silver's getting a vigorous primary challenge from a couple of young bucks who want to shake the status quo upstate.
Obviously, they got a tall task ahead of them, but Messrs Newell and Henry may finally have something of the break they were looking for
--David Freedlander
