On Rebuilding New York I’m a big believer that you can’t look at the World Trade Center site and answer, “What do you do with it?” in a vacuum. You have to look at needs for the whole area. Before you start building buildings you step back and say, “What are the needs?” People never want to do that. But that’s my engineering background. You start and say, “OK, who are we trying to help, what are we trying to accomplish?” and then you work your way down to “OK, who’s going to actually be in the buildings?” And then you say, “OK, what kind of buildings do they want?”
Keep in mind, in this day and age nobody’s going to build buildings on spec. The World Trade Center site was never a very viable complex. That’s why you had all the state offices and agencies and whatever there, and federal offices. They couldn’t rent out the commercial site.
On Keeping The Business Base The scariest thing is, you look across the New Jersey shore and there’s an enormous number of new buildings there and more under construction. Those will take the support jobs. All of those jobs were supposed to go over to Long Island City, and if you look at Long Island City on the other side of the East River, there’s one building, that Citibank office building. The rest never got built.
You’ve gotta go and convince those companies to stay. You’ve gotta invite ’em to Gracie Mansion to a dinner. You’ve gotta take them to the ball game. We have to work at making sure that they understand that they are special. Business leaders are no different from anybody else.
On Bailouts It’s a different kind of problem [from 1975]. The bad news is, back then the state could bail us out. Today the state probably doesn’t have as much money. Back then it was an expense problem that created the deficit. The expenses were out of control. Today it’s a revenue problem that’s creating the deficit. Very different things. Very different solutions. Back then the unions didn’t understand that they would have to bear the brunt of any downturn. Today all the unions understand that.
On Improving Schools You want to empower the principal and let professional educators have a lot more freedom to decide how to do the teaching. Hold their feet to the fire. I have no problems with rewarding people that do well. You can’t have merit pay per teacher. It just doesn’t work. But you could do it per school. I have no problems in removing principals that don’t give the function. But you have to give the principal authority to go along with the responsibility. And all of that, incidentally, depends on the UFT [United Federation of Teachers] contract. The next contract, assuming I negotiate it after Jan. 1, [will be about] changing work rules for cash. The work-rule change that I want: I want to empower the principal.
On Race Relations It would [be] great if race doesn’t come up in four years. Now, I don’t know if that’s possible. But you don’t, until you get out there, understand that all the minorities feel that the police abuse them and that they don’t have chances at city jobs and that minority businesses don’t have chances at city contracts. Keep in mind that a lot of the numbers don’t support the allegation. But the belief is just as bad as if it exists.
