Bloomberg: 'If We Don't Act Now, When?'

Mayor Bloomberg's plan to achieve an environmentally friendly New York by 2030 will meet resistance in the state Legislature, in the City Council, and even from those who come after him in the mayor's office.

Laying out what he called the most aggressive attack on global warming that any city has ever undertaken, Mr. Bloomberg yesterday unveiled 127 separate initiatives that could help New York City have the cleanest air of any large American city by 2030. Among the ideas was charging drivers a fee to use Manhattan's busiest streets during peak hours.

Mr. Bloomberg would also increase access to parks, plant more trees, aim to make housing more "affordable," open up waterways for recreation and to reduce water pollution, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30% in the next 25 years. The goal of his plan, more than 18 months in the making, is to make the city cleaner and healthier as it prepares for an expected influx of 1 million new residents by 2030. It could also help the mayor appear to be a leader on a global issue that could be a key topic in the 2008 presidential race, which Mr. Bloomberg could enter as an independent candidate.

With only 983 days left until the mayor is term-limited out of office at the end of 2009, city officials acknowledge that the success of their long-term vision for New York City would depend largely on the support of future mayoral administrations.

Almost 40% of Mr. Bloomberg's 127 initiatives, including congestion pricing, would require approval from the state Legislature or a non-city agency to move forward, and are unlikely to be addressed before next year's legislative session, analysts say.

Even before Mr. Bloomberg announced the specifics of his plan, opponents of congestion pricing, perhaps the most contentious proposal in the 127-point plan, began to mount.

The city's proposal to charge cars an $8 fee to enter Manhattan south of 86th Street during peak hours, first reported in the New York Sun last week, is garnering the most criticism from elected officials.

"This would be an extraordinarily heavy lift," Senator John Sabini of Queens, the top Democrat on the State Senate's transportation committee, said. "This has a broader hit than the commuter tax."

"I can't imagine what the political coalition you could put together to get congestion pricing done," Rep. Anthony Weiner, the only announced mayoral candidate for the 2009 election, said in an interview yesterday. "It's going to be a rather substantial tax on people already struggling to make it."

Mr. Weiner said he was uncertain that congestion pricing would even reduce congestion. "If you increase capacity the marketplace will gravitate toward that choice," he said.

In an interview yesterday, a City Council member who is chairman of the council's transportation committee, John Liu, said he questioned how much of the mayor's plan could be accomplished, and how much was "fluff:" bold, headline-catching overtures made in advance of a possible Bloomberg presidential bid as an independent. Senator McCain, one of the top Republican candidates, is expected to make a big environmental speech this week, and Vice President Gore, an activist against global warming, is a possible late entrant into the Democratic field.

"Success is not measured by how great a speech sounds, it's measured within the scope of what you can accomplish before your time is up," Mr. Liu said. "There's skepticism in the council body about Mike Bloomberg's real intents and aspirations, that this is nothing more than at best pipe dreams and at worst empty campaign rhetoric."

Council Member David Weprin of Queens estimated that more than half of his colleagues on the council would oppose congestion pricing, and Council Speaker Christine Quinn said in a statement that she had "concerns" about road pricing as a successful traffic-reducing scheme.

An assemblyman from Westchester, Richard Brodsky, who for several years has sought to pass legislation banning any fees for the use of public streets, likened the plan to "gentrifying the streets," arguing that with pricing, only the wealthy could afford to drive. "Congestion fees are a way to make class an issue in environmentalism," Mr. Brodsky said in an interview yesterday.

Standing on a podium in the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life in the Museum of Natural History, the mayor defended his decision to advocate for a three-year test program of congestion pricing.

"The question is not whether we want to pay, but how we want to pay," Mr. Bloomberg said in front of a crowd of more than 800 representatives of the business community, elected officials, and environmental groups that listened to his speech beneath the museum's iconic 94-foot blue whale.

The $8 fee would be offset by any tolls paid to enter the city. Trucks would pay a $21 fee to enter Manhattan under Mr. Bloomberg's proposal. The fees would be collected through a combination of E-Z Pass and cameras photographing car license plates.

The mayor held up what he called a "modest fee" to use the city's roads against the potentially higher cost of increased asthma rates, more greenhouse gases, lost business, and wasted time "we could be spending with family."

Mr. Bloomberg said yesterday that the city came up with $8 as a number that would not "break the bank — for businesses and for those who have to drive." He acknowledged that the fee would have to be "high enough to encourage more people to switch to mass transit." Only 5% of New Yorkers who work in Manhattan commute to work by car, he said. Mr. Bloomberg's road pricing plan is modeled after a system that has significantly reduced traffic in London since it was implemented in 2003.

In another proposal likely to generate opposition from state officials, including members of the Spitzer administration, Mr. Bloomberg announced that he would ask state lawmakers to create a "Sustainable Mobility and Regional Transportation Financing Authority," or SMART Authority, which would serve as a bank for mass transit expansion projects in the region, and would be controlled jointly by city and state officials. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the city's transportation department, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey would apply for dollars from the authority to fund transportation projects. The authority would be funded by about $400 million annually from congestion pricing revenues, as well as $200 million from the city's operating budget and matching funds from the state.

The state Legislature, though, is unlikely to turn over any decision-making and funding power to the city without a fight. "It's a return to a sharing formula when the city used to contribute regularly to MTA money," Mr. Brodsky said. He said the state would not automatically match transportation funds, as envisioned in the mayor's plan.

The CEO and executive director of the MTA, Elliot Sander, was not in attendance for yesterday's elaborate roll out. A spokesman said Mr. Sander had a personal obligation and could not make it. Last month, Mr. Bloomberg did not attend the groundbreaking for the Second Avenue subway, because of a scheduling conflict.

Other significant proposals Mr. Bloomberg announced yesterday included a new partnership between the Department of Education and the Parks Department to open 290 public school playgrounds after hours for public use as city parks. He also announced a tree-planting initiative that would bring 1 million new trees to the city in the next 10 years.

The Bush administration indicated in a statement yesterday that it would support the city's efforts on congestion pricing. The Secretary of Transportation, Mary Peters, called the plan "the kind of bold thinking leaders across the country need to embrace if we hope to win the battle against traffic congestion."

Mr. Bloomberg said that the pilot program would be paid for through federal funds that the city plans to apply for by the end of the month. In a front-page article on December 4, 2006, The New York Sun reported "The city will likely apply for federal funds next year to conduct a pilot study on how charging a fee to drive on Manhattan's most congested streets could help reduce city traffic," although the article included a comment from a mayoral spokesman who claimed that the city had no plans to apply for the funding.

Mr. Bloomberg ended his Earth Day announcement with a challenge to New Yorkers to think big. Quoting the composer George Gershwin's piece, Mr. Bloomberg said, "They all laughed at Rockefeller Center. Are you laughing, too?"