In State of the City, de Blasio emphasizes day-to-day feats – and a $2.5 billion trolley line

Looking over row after row in the Bronx’s Lehman Center for the Performing Arts, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio spent stretches of his third State of the City address marveling at the sheer size – and impact – of the municipal workforce he commands.

De Blasio boasted that crews had cleared enough snow after the recent blizzard to fill Yankee Stadium 66 times. The mayor said the city has repaved enough miles to connect the city to Las Vegas. And for least seven minutes, he commended uniformed workers who aid the vulnerable: NYPD and paramedic personnel who delivered babies on and near highways, a correction officer who guided to safety a woman with Alzheimer’s wandering along a busy boulevard, and an off-duty officer who convinced a man not to take his life.

The bulk of Thursday night’s speech consisted of de Blasio whipping through achievements and touching on banner initiatives like creating affordable housing and enhancing employee benefits. But unlike his prior annual addresses, he made a point of embracing the more day-to-day elements of his executive post – even tacking on words like “clean” and “effectively” to routine refrains about striving to end inequality.

“Our vision is one New York, working for our neighborhoods – all of our neighborhoods,” de Blasio said. “Our vision means we have to use the tools of government to fight against inequality and to fight for a strong future for all our families. It means we need to manage government effectively for a safe, clean, economically strong city with an improving quality of life.”

This year’s speech was relatively light on new initiative, although there were several that addressed quality of life concerns. De Blasio said 350 countdown clocks showing when city buses are expected to arrive would be installed by the end of the year, and the city would allow drivers to pay their parking meters by smartphone. Soon, he said, the city would pick up trash along high-traffic corridors on Sundays and holidays and bolster anti-graffiti efforts so that 40 million square feet are removed annually.

During the speech the news broke that two police officers had been shot elsewhere in the Bronx, but de Blasio was not notified until he concluded his address. The mayor touted a new 200-member NYPD gun suppression division had already led to indictments. Police officers will also receive “implicit bias” training this spring to help identify and change unconscious behaviors that may affect their performance. And by the summer, a neighborhood policing initiative would expand to 11 additional precincts.

The mayor outlined a citywide plan to allow private sector workers at companies with at least 10 employees to opt into a retirement savings program, but otherwise de Blasio detailed mostly local initiatives: a $91 million revitalization initiative in downtown Far Rockaway, a request to develop a swath of Governors Island and plans for a Neighborhood Health Action Center offering medical care and SNAP assistance in Brownsville.

Likely the priciest project mentioned by de Blasio was a $2.5 billion plan to build a streetcar along the East River waterfront between Astoria in Queens and Sunset Park, Brooklyn. In response to “explosive growth” along the waterfront, de Blasio introduced the 16-mile route that would connect 40,000 public housing residents to major employment hubs, generating $25 billion in economic activity over 30 years and potentially changing the lives of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers. Its fare would be the same as a single-ride MetroCard.

However, the value capture financing mechanism that would be used to fund the so-called Brooklyn Queens Connector is not one that could as easily support a new transit upgrade in a less affluent area, such as a new subway line along Utica Avenue in Brooklyn he proposed this past spring. The mayor’s office said the $2.5 billion for the connector would be raised by issuing tax-exempt bonds through a new local development corporation. The city would pay off this debt by capturing a percentage of the increase in nearby property values expected to be spurred by the route.

“This is more financially viable than a Utica Avenue subway, even though both may be good ideas,” said Nicole Gelinas, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “One of the reasons [the Utica Avenue route] probably didn’t go anywhere is because there’s nothing like this - there’s no new development; there’s no surge of wealthier people moving to the neighborhood; there’s no great desire for upzoning.”

Gelinas said the connector between Brooklyn and Queens seemed like a solid investment, despite utilizing a similar financing mechanism struggling to pan out as planned at Hudson Yards, where it was used to finance the extension of the No. 7 train to the Far West Side of Manhattan. She said it’s clear people want to live near the East River waterfront because the boom has already started. In contrast, the 2008 recession prevented development in the Far West Side, and the city wound up spending more than anticipated paying off debt to the Hudson Yards project for a longer period than initially planned, according to New York City Independent Budget Office Chief of Staff Doug Turetsky. Additionally, the Hudson Yards project receives about $60 million annually in property tax revenues that would otherwise go to the city’s general fund.

The Citizens Budget Commission pointed out the city’s $2.5 billion commitment to the MTA’s 2015-19 capital plan is equal to the current estimated cost of the connector project. And Jamison Dague, a research associate with the commission, said that depending on what agency or entity the city has manage the route, the city may spend even more subsidizing the streetcar once it’s operating.

“There is sort of a second master at work here beyond what makes the most sense for the transit system,” Dague said, noting that decision-making gets complex with transit investment in general, while putting aside the mayor’s latest proposal. “If you have a funding stream for one [project] … does that mean that you don’t do it just because there is another project somewhere else that might be able to help more people, but you don’t have a way to pay for it? It gets tricky.”