Christine Quinn shares what it was really like to work with Mike Bloomberg

Mike Bloomberg is one of New York’s 20 most influential politicians of the past 20 years. See the full list.

Nearly 13 years on from the close of his third and final New York City mayoral term, Mike Bloomberg has been out of City Hall for as long as he was in it. Nobody could forget him, and many regard him as the city’s greatest modern mayor.

Across his tenure, he’d shattered a flurry of preconceived notions about what a mayor could accomplish. He was a Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-independent-turned-Democrat again, a billionaire businessperson elected to lead a city reeling from 9/11 on his first foray into politics. Believing he alone was the man New Yorkers needed to steer them through the 2008 financial crisis, he muscled through a change to the city’s term limits so he could stay in office another four years. His legacy is that of soaring innovation, revitalization, prosperity, financial collapse and controversy.

But few people know what Bloomberg was like during those years like Christine Quinn, who sat opposite him in negotiations as speaker of the New York City Council. Despite their political differences, the two were largely seen as more in lockstep than the typical mayor-speaker relationship, yet she’d still override his vetoes. For a time, many saw Quinn as Bloomberg’s clear successor and the person who would break the glass ceiling and become the first woman to lead the city, but her mayoral campaign was undone in part by that very closeness to the mayor. She knew Bloomberg well – both professionally and personally. Years later, she has much to say.

You and Mike Bloomberg were largely seen as more in lockstep than the typical mayor-speaker relationship. Looking back, how do you view your relationship? How often did you two meet?

He was very diligent about having fairly consistent weekly meetings. We had agendas, sometimes items from me, sometimes items from him and his side, sometimes a mix. So he took it very seriously and always showed up prepared.

He showed a lot of respect for the office of the speaker and a lot of respect for the body of the New York City Council, which I don’t think is always the case in those kinds of meetings and in those interactions. If I ever needed a separate private meeting for whatever reason, that was not an issue at all, he was like, “Yeah, sure, whatever.” That was always very significant. Same goes for his intergovernmental team, which always spent a lot of time with my folks, following up with my staff, all under his direction.

I would imagine that was a helpful note to start the relationship on.

Absolutely, I give him a lot of credit for that. I know for a fact that wasn’t always the case with every mayor and every speaker – just look at Eric Adams and Adrienne Adams.

Funny story, in the beginning of mine and Bloomberg’s relationship as speaker and mayor, every meeting I had with him would start with like 5-10 minutes of him berating me for having been against his plan to build a football stadium on the West Side of Manhattan. Every meeting! And we were well past that point, he had lost, it was time to let it go, and yet every time he would bring it up. Eventually, at some point months in, I was like “OK, enough already. Like we’ve done this.” So then it stopped.

A lot of people were initially surprised that you and Bloomberg got along as well as you did as mayor and speaker given some early tensions between the two of you, like your clash over the West Side stadium. What was your impression of him before you became speaker?

He always showed me respect.

I had a bill, the domestic partnership contracting bill, which kind of before marriage was a thing that said the city couldn’t contract with any entity that didn’t offer domestic partnerships. It was a reach, not because people were against domestic partnerships, but because there is at best a lack of clarity about whether the City Council has powers over contracting or whether the Charter Revision Commission of 1989 transferred all those powers to the office of the mayor. When Bloomberg was going out against my bill, he called me in advance. This is when I was a rank-and-file member, so he had always demonstrated a lot of respect to me.

I was also chair of the Health Committee in Bloomberg’s first term as mayor, so we passed the bill to ban smoking in most public places together. There was a real desire on the part of the Bloomberg administration to pass that piece of legislation in the first calendar year. While that didn’t quite happen, it was a quick turnaround, and I did everything in my power to make that happen. I made a commitment to him that we would get it passed by January and I lived up to that, so I think he knew I was an honest and fair broker.

What about your impression after?

All that to say, we were not two people who had never worked together, you know what I mean? I think we started from a place of mutual respect and mutual understanding that we could in fact get things done together.

Sometimes when you’re in office, you have to do things that are more political than substantive – I know that’s a shocker to hear. But I would be straight up with him. I would say, “Yeah, I believe in this, but we’re totally doing it for political reasons.” And he might say, “Well, I disagree with that, and I think this, I think that,” but ultimately he’d say that he appreciated my transparency as opposed to me trying to bullshit that something had no political overtones when it clearly did. I think Bloomberg didn’t have a lot of respect for those who did that kind of thing.

When we would meet, we would go through issues, and when we disagreed about an issue, we would disagree and then we would move on to the other items in the agenda. There was no “if you don’t agree with me on this, you are dead to me.” I think that probably comes from both who he is as a person but also his business background. If you wrote people off every time you couldn’t make a business deal with him, you’d probably lose a lot of people who at some point you could make a deal with.

I’ll give you another example, at one point there was a lot of conversation about closing firehouses. He had said that there are less fires at night and therefore it would be OK to close firehoses down overnight. But he had incorrect information, and when we informed him that in reality there are more fires at night he’d said: “I stand corrected.” He still wanted to close firehouses, but he was very clear that he’d been corrected. That’s a demonstration of character and a commitment to moving things forward.

Something that’s always fascinated me about politics is the convergence of these very different people working in close proximity who had they chosen a path outside of politics, they probably would have never interacted or had a relationship. How well did you actually know Bloomberg – or did anyone know him for that matter?

When I first entered this whole situation, I decided that the two of us would have a good working relationship. He and my predecessor did not, and I decided that we would. He was very happy to follow my lead on that.

If you are really working together, you do get to know them, their leadership and their staff very, very well. When Bloomberg’s mom passed away, whom he was very close to, he had a very small shiva at I believe his sister’s apartment. I was one of the people he wanted to be there. He knew Kim (Catullo, Quinn’s wife) well. He would always ask about Kim, asking specific questions about her law firm, how it was going, this and that. So you really do get to know people. I’m sure he knew when he sat down in a meeting with me if I was in an unrelated, pissy mood. I in turn knew if he was in an unrelated, pissy mood. Sometimes we’d have to barrel through and sometimes we’d be like “you know what, I think the last three things on this agenda we can just table.”

Take Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Speaker Julie Menin, very different people from different worlds who would probably have never interacted had they chosen paths outside of politics.

Certainly not. I think it depends a lot on the perspective of the people involved. Bloomberg and Speaker Gifford Miller had had a very contentious relationship, and I think he was a guy who got things done, a guy who was able to cut a deal. So the idea of being in this relationship where it was constantly adversarial, I think Bloomberg was looking for someone who could be more of a partner. Having been in the council under two different speakers who had varying levels of adversarial relationships with mayors, I realized that you could just get more done if you worked collaboratively when you could, and then when you couldn’t, you agreed to disagree agreeably.

Prior to Adrienne Adams, if you looked at the number of vetoes that were overridden, my City Council overrode more vetoes than any prior City Council. So this sense that we just rolled over and gave Bloomberg everything he wanted was not true. There was never a veto that we let stand. We overrode everything, which has not been the case with other speakers.

But to the credit of Bloomberg, he didn’t make it a “well, now you’re dead to me.” He understood that those things happened. Deals fall apart in business – they fall apart at the beginning and they fall apart at the end when you think you got it done. Vetoes happen. Vetoes get overridden. Sometimes he would take us to court and he would win. Sometimes we took him to court and we won.

The role of the speaker to serve as a check on the mayor seems to be a more prevalent line of thinking these days. What do you think of that power dynamic, and is the speaker role viewed differently than it was 15 years ago?

I think so. I think there has been a change, perhaps philosophically, perhaps politically, in the City Council as it relates to the speaker. There have been changes in the rules which decreased the speaker’s power. That’s made a difference. Some of the tools the speaker had, so to speak, to get things done, don’t necessarily exist anymore.

That said, it’s also about how you use the powers you have and how you wield them. I certainly think there are other examples of speakers post-rule changes who have been unable to figure out exactly how to remain as powerful as prior speakers.

Also not to bring up term limits, but most speakers are going to be one-term speakers unless a freshman gets elected speaker, which seems unlikely. So I think when you have somebody who is a two-term mayor and a one-term speaker, it has an impact.

To the point of term limits, that was one of the big issues that emerged under your tenures. You took heavy political shrapnel for Bloomberg while shepherding his loosening of term limits through the City Council and in the years after – like facing criticisms while running for mayor. What did you learn about Bloomberg and the way he wanted to govern through this?

Well, I think I already knew this, but it certainly emphasized that he was a man with a tremendous amount of self-confidence. Someone who really saw his position and ability to achieve for his city. He really felt that in a moment of crisis he was the guy who could be the steady hand, the real leader at the wheel. I think if you were somebody who had less of a belief in your ability, if you had less self-confidence, if you were more doubting of yourself, then you wouldn’t have ended up in a position where you sought to get that done. If you were somebody who was a person who had a lot of regrets, I think you would not have been able to move forward with that feat. I don’t think Mike Bloomberg is somebody who suffers from regrets.

Looking back, would you do anything differently? You were of course very careful while bearing the criticism over term limits, but the reality was it hadn’t been your idea, it was his.

I am somebody who does suffer many regrets. I am probably not as self-confident as I may appear at times. I think Mike Bloomberg is in fact that self-confident, but I’m a bit more of a fake it till you make it kind of person. So thank God that I never had a regret about acting on term limits. I think if I had, boy, it would have been very hard to forge on.

Do you think Bloomberg’s emphasis on stop-and-frisk policing during his mayoralty clouds his legacy?

Yes.

Care to expand on that a bit?

Mike Bloomberg, to his credit, is not a micromanager. He believes he puts the best people in place, and then he lets them do their thing. I think that’s a great thing, it’s certainly different from his predecessor Rudy Giuliani, who sought, for example, to run the Police Department and was a massive micromanager. Same goes with Andrew Cuomo, who was allegedly writing his own press releases. Bloomberg never did that.

He kind of said Ray Kelly’s the best police commissioner in the world, that was his perspective, and that he was going to let him do what he thought needed to be done. Crime stats were going down and Ray Kelly told him, this is critical, that they wouldn’t be able to keep crime down if they didn’t have stop and frisk. And Bloomberg went with it.

Look, the flipside of hiring the best people and letting them run with it, is even the best people can make mistakes. And you need to be the leader who’s not a micromanager, but is in place so that when things go sideways, you push the point, you ask the questions and you rein somebody in. I think Bloomberg’s kind of extreme sense of loyalty to his staff, which is generally a good thing, at times was taken to a level that was too much. Stop and frisk was an example of that.

Outside contracting was also a big fight under your tenure, with CityTime being the biggest scandal. Do you think Bloomberg handled that as he should have?

I think that’s another example of him being like “my people say it’s good, it’s going to be fine” and then not questioning and drilling down enough.

One of the best things about Mike Bloomberg was that when he believed something was right, he was immovable – like the smoking bill, like raising taxes after 9/11. Those were things that he got tremendous pushback for. His stats after his first year after doing both of those things was in the 30s, everybody thought he was dead. He probably thought he was dead. But he wasn’t losing sleep over it because he believed he was elected to do what was right for the city, and he believes both of those things were right for the city.

But one of the worst things about Bloomberg is when presented with contradictory evidence, he was, more often than not, immovable. He would dig in and you could not get him to change his mind. He was willing to go down in defeat when he believed in something. The West Side stadium fits into that, CityTime fits into that, stop and frisk fits into that. So even though I did give you an example where he changed his mind – with the firehouses – usually that was not the case.

Now, you respected it when it was something like the smoking or the property tax. You were frustrated, maybe even angry about it at times, when he was just like “no, that’s not what my people are telling me.” He had such loyalty to his people, which I generally really respect, but you know he was immovable.

Has your view on Bloomberg's impact on the city and his time as mayor changed in the past 13 years? If so, how and why?

To be slightly self-congratulatory, my perspective on Mike Bloomberg, but also my perspective on the Quinn/Bloomberg or Bloomberg/Quinn administration, my respect for what he did and the risks he took even with the recognition of the mistakes he made, and my respect for the way the City Council operated and existed, all that we were able to accomplish together, has only grown.

With all due respect to my successors – and the fact that it’s too early to grade Julie and Mamdani – I don’t think any other administrations or teams that succeeded us have been as effective, both in agreement and disagreement. We set a standard for both how to agree and how to disagree and how to get things done in both of those spaces.

Some people view Bloomberg as the best modern New York City mayor. What do you think about that? Who would you rank No. 1?

How are you defining modern? 

1950s on. 

If you do 1900, it’s hard to beat Fiorello La Guardia. Setting him aside, I would agree that Bloomberg’s been the best.

You look at somebody like Rudy Giuliani, and OK he got crime down, but he was also a horror show. He just trampled over civil rights without concern for those in need. He was a terribly, terribly mean person, and we’ve seen those sides of him, his true self, come out with his more recent behavior. Mayor (David) Dinkins is a trailblazer who broke boundaries, but obviously there were struggles that he had. Eric Adams, well that speaks for itself. And Mamdani, it’s too early to say. It would be great for the city if we’d have this conversation in seven years and the answer is now that Mamdani is the best mayor. But as of now, it’s Bloomberg. 

Anything else you’d like to add about Bloomberg? 

He was a weird eater, but he loved a Subway sandwich. It’s funny cause he was all about healthy stuff. He would either be on a diet and be eating nothing, and when you’d go to the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner with him or anything, he just got a salad. But when he wasn’t on a diet he would sometimes eat things like saltine crackers with butter and then salt on the butter.