The day Mayor Bloomberg began his third term, he said, “Conventional wisdom holds that by a third term, mayors run out of energy and ideas. But we have proved the conventional wisdom wrong time and again, and I promise you, we will do it once more.”
But now that Bloomberg is one year into his third term he might want to rethink that statement. The year began with reports that he directed $51 million in public and personal subsidies into a museum project led by Democratic mayoral rival Bill Thompson’s wife, dumping $2 million of additional city funding into it in the middle of the mayoral campaign.
Then it was disclosed that for the second year in a row, the mayor had quietly pumped more than $1 million into the state’s Independent Party without disclosing it as part of his own campaign spending. The party promptly turned around and gave $750,000 of the money to a shell company associated with key Bloomberg operatives.
Photo: James Keivom