'The System'

When I wrote this I debated over how to write it.  I don't mean the facts, but rather the tone.  Should I write it with the benefit of 12 years of hindsight and reflection or, as I chose to, imbue the narrative with the same spirit and energy I had in working 'The System' back then.  It seemed to me that stopping every few sentences to explain and nuance our thinking would only be self-serving.  Instead, I decided to place myself back then and express all that I was thinking and feeling.  I tend to think that more than any piece I will publish, 'The System', will engender the most personal criticism.  Look at my Postscript thoughts after you are done reading for my reflections.

Since the days of Rome, and probably even before, administrators forced to cede power to their bureaucracies have sought for ways to regain it ; or at the very least to capture the knowledge of what was being done or given away in the name of Rome.

Rome in this example is City Hall.  And the empire?  The forty-plus city agencies. Mayor after mayor had tried to varying degrees to bring agencies under control with no success. To achieve some accountability as to what favors they were doing for elected officials and to allow City Hall and the Mayor’s three lobbying offices: Washington, Albany, and the City Council, to use that information to help effectively lobby for the Mayor’s legislative agenda to the maximum extent possible, was the eternal struggle.

The problem was that elected officials spanned so many different administrations. Further, they established relationships with bureaucrats in the inter-governmental departments at the agencies that outlasted each and every mayor. They could easily circumvent whatever process City Hall tried to implement or install through the lobbying offices. It’s ridiculous to have the Department of Transportation doing Assemblyman X a favor while the Mayor’s Albany lobbyist is trying to lobby him to vote on a piece of legislation having no knowledge that DOT had just approved that major street project he covets.

Wouldn’t it be the ultimate objective to bring all the agencies to heal and marry all those requests with the lobbyist’s ability to grant them and tie that to our legislative agenda and make the whole process foolproof?

Beginning in 1994 Rudy Giuliani began complaining to Peter Powers that he was extremely unhappy with how out of control the agencies were inter-governmentally. At one early meeting the Mayor said, “We have to get this under control. We don’t know what they’re doing and for whom. It’s not helping push the legislative agenda. Is it helping Bob or Martha?” He was referring to our Albany and City Council lobbyists, Bob Harding and Martha Hirst.

He wanted the inter-governmental departments at the agencies brought under control and he wanted the favors they were doing as well as those of the commissioner and deputy and assistant commissioners filtered through City Hall. It was a task often dreamed of by previous mayors but considered foolishly impossible. No one could bring the agencies in-line. And if you could it would take an army of staff. They, the agencies, would tie you in knots and run you ragged until you gave in. That is what bureaucracies do. They force you to submit. They throw up roadblocks, impossible barriers and timetables.

Rudy was very clear on what he wanted and Peter Powers heard him. So began a series of meetings Peter and I had as to what this should be. Naturally, as I was Coordinator of Inter-governmental Affairs for the Mayor’s Office, this project was going to land with me. Eventually he asked me to submit a proposal. Which I did. I came  into the office on a weekend during a blizzard to type it along with Alyssa Dragone, Richard Schwartz’s Chief of Staff. Not owning a home computer or knowing anyone who did in late 1994 it was the office or nothing.

I originally based it geographically; having a staffer handle issues per borough, but headcount problems caused Peter to cut back on the number of people assigned to the project and it became agency based. Peter approved the project in the beginning of 1995. I went to work immediately to create its infrastructure.

My plan as presented and approved was this:

1. Eliminate all inter-governmental departments at the agencies. They were breeding grounds for the type of behavior we were trying to eliminate. Each agency would have an inter-governmental liaison designated to my office. Farm out functions of prior intergovernmental departments throughout the agency. Any requests for dispensation were to be sent to me. Peter would agree to refuse to listen to any. He would back me up and state that upfront.

2. Create a unit in my office (IGA) of three people, each one owning specific agencies.  Each person would develop a relationship with that agency.

3. Each commissioner and deputy commissioner would be instructed by Peter that any further requests for ANYTHING from elected officials must be relayed to the IGA office and await a response.

4. All intergovernmental liaisons at the agencies would be instructed to tell elected officials a response would be forthcoming shortly.

5. Have the Mayor’s Office of Management Information Systems create a mapping system and marry it with a database to track all the requests. Additionally, have the ability to query the database to aid the lobbyists.

6. Have Peter commit to play enforcer as needed.

The project would work like this: A call from Sanitation would come in. The person in our office who liaised with Sanitation would fill out a form. If it were from a state official they would hand it off to the Albany lobbying office down the hall. If the legislature were in session and that office was in Albany it could be handled by phone, but the form always gets filled out. The database wasn’t going to be able to be linked up to the IGA office, my office, the Albany office and the city council office; the infrastructure wasn’t there yet. In lieu of that I insisted that there be a record of each and every request. The person in the Albany lobbying office would either OK the request or take it under advisement to check with Bob Harding. They would get back to the person in my office who would record it in the database and then let the liaison at Sanitation know the answer. That was it. In order to get total agency buy-in I had promised them that we would never hold them up from returning a phone call to an elected official’s office for more than 24 hours. They of course didn’t believe me. I never broke that promise.

My first visit was to Pam McDonald and T.J. Mignone, the Director and Deputy Director of MIS at City Hall. I needed this project created and quickly. After hours of meetings to ascertain exactly what I wanted and to determine what I needed it to do, came the news. Well, the good news was MapInfo was an off-the-shelf product and all they had to do was download the computer tapes from City Planning that contained the various elected officials and their districts. The bad news was that the query functions would have to be built from scratch. But using  SQL server development software they could do it. This was much better software they told me than they had used in the past. “OK”, I said, “Time, time. I need this quickly. This is a priority.”

I began hiring staff.  I contacted the Wagner School at CUNY and asked them to send me resumes. At this time fate intervened. Tom Regan, an associate of my fathers from his days working for Gov. Hugh Carey, called and asked if I’d look at this kid named Luke Cusack who’d just moved to NY from D.C. I said I would and ended up hiring him for the project. Luke wound up staying and becoming my Chief of Staff and overseeing the project.

Soon a rudimentary version of the software was ready for testing. It worked like this. You could type an address into the MapInfo and all the elected officials associated with that address would come up. Or using the mouse you could zoom in on a specific block and address. Once there you could right click and a box would appear telling you all the elected officials. The MapInfo piece was linked to a database that was now going to track whatever the staff member in my office entered as the agency request we approved or denied. Further, if the councilmember was the requester for a street rebuilding, but of course it also happened to be in a state senator’s district, it would go on his tracking too. It would be noted however that he did not request it. A later version of the software did this automatically. That was done because too often elected officials were saying during this difficult budget time, “my district isn’t getting any services from you people.” In this way we could show that we had provided services for that state senator when in fact we were really doing it for the councilmember but we had the documentation nonetheless that the services were provided. It would certainly shut him up.

While this was going on I conducted an analysis of all the agencies in order to discover who had inter-governmental departments and which would be targeted for elimination. Moreover, as City Hall was constantly on a headcount reduction program and we had no extra money, the new positions in my office would be funded out of those agency lines that I eliminated. Yes, I had a conflict of interest in eliminating them, but I wound up eliminating more than I would use for funding the office so not much of an argument from where I sat.

As I said earlier, Peter and I had agreed that there would be no reprieve should any Commissioner complain about the loss of staff. I did relent on one position. That was at City Planning. I bought Chairman Joe Rose’s argument to keep his full-time IG person but it probably had as much to do with his and his deputy’s staking out Peter Power’s office and refusing to leave until I came out from a meeting.  Lesson - sometimes persistence pays off.

Very soon we were all using the shorthand phrase ‘The System’ to refer to the project and it caught on. One day I had a ‘Deep Throat’ moment in Peter’s office (the comment relates to a scene from the movie 'All The President's Men').  There was a meeting attended by me, Bob Harding and Peter. Bob Harding had become ‘The Systems’ chief booster. He saw its enormous potential. He also realized the enormous amount of time and effort it was going to take for whomever ran it in the beginning. At some point in the meeting Bob referred to ‘The System’.  Peter gave him a strange, quizzical look, “‘The System’?  What the hell’s ‘The System’?”  “That’s what we’re calling the inter-governmental project in Russell’s office,” Bob explained. Peter laughed, “Oh, I like that. OK, ‘The System’."  From then on it was officially christened ‘The System’.

Slowly the switch was flipped on and the requests started coming in. The Albany and city council offices were complying nicely. The Washington office had refused to participate. The head of that office, Alice Tetelman, had made it clear she saw no possible use for her in ‘The System’. We had asked her to try it on a test basis but she said no. We had all mocked Alice’s abilities at our weekly legislative meetings where she appeared via speakerphone and Peter Powers presided. Seth Kaye did a mean Alice impression. She was a horrible lobbyist and worse yet, in City Hall speak, wildly off-agenda. She was very left. But she was a friend of Denny Young and Peter kept her on.

At first I had two and then three people staffing the IGA office, as it was called to everyone officially. Each one handled 10-12 agencies. Pretty soon they were swamped. MIS had been working overtime and were updating ‘The Systems’ capabilities. My role, besides managing, was to crack the whip. Non-compliance was met with a fierce and swift response. If word reached us, and it always did, that a project, a favor, a grant, an initiative - ANYTHING - was given or greenlit without our office knowing about it, I immediately called the deputy commissioner. While it is true that I developed a reputation as a Rudy loving prick I also had one as someone who was pretty fair. If the deputy gave me a reasonable response, fine we moved on. If not, then I immediately called the commissioner and explained why this is unacceptable. That rarely happened. The worst offenders were the Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection. But they both met their fates for this and for other reasons.

It’s never been written that I contributed behind the scenes greatly to Commissioner Marilyn Gelber's demise based on her and her deputy’s lack of compliance with ‘The System’.  Peter called her a number of times in my presence as her deputy, Ben Esner, would not comply with our requests. This was actually useful to me since at the time other commissioners knew Peter made those calls on my behalf and he had no trouble making them.

My staff was happy because as a good manager I backed them up and they knew it. They sensed it on the other end of the phone. They loved to tell me stories of an IG liaison at an agency who was giving them a hard time. One phone call to the deputy or commissioner from me and in many cases the commissioner would call my staff member back personally and apologize. That’s a pretty heady thing for green kids but I taught them to take all this in stride. Keep your head about you and remember why we exercise power and when to do it.

But crack the whip we did and tightened the grip. Slowly the number and type of things we were capturing was increasing exponentially. The agencies were checking with us before they did anything regarding elected officials; it was beautiful. Areas that had never occurred to us were pouring in. Local police precincts have regular evenings where the community meets with the captain or the precinct commander. Guess who sponsors those? The city council member or maybe the assemblyman. Well now the PD was checking with IGA first. I had an idea. Councilman X had traditionally sponsored that precinct’s community night. But Councilman X was a Rudy hater. Why not offer it to State Senator Y who was a Rudy fan?

Lot cleanings. I had never given one seconds thought to lot cleanings. Apparently a cherished plum is to expedite the Department of Sanitation’s priority list of lot cleanings. They are those lots you might drive by just filled with huge piles of trash that have accumulated in a neighborhood and have become a terrible eyesore. Elected officials apparently called DOS all the time to get certain lots moved up on the list. Not anymore!

With DOT it was street repaving, street rebuilding, stop signs, road bumps, street lights - could be anything. We had VIP official business permits a long time ago. Those were handled by my office with DOT.

All of the initial complaints from the agencies were proving unfounded. They said when I eliminated their IGA departments that the workload would be too much.  But it was working out just fine. I had agreed to revisit any crisis but so far none had come up.

I met with Peter regularly and he was thrilled. Peter and I were of one mind on this matter. We did not have a great, warm working relationship. But when it came to ‘The System’ we were singularly joined on this. We knew what Rudy wanted and moreover we agreed wholeheartedly with him. Also, we both loved technology. It was exciting that computers were providing a big part of the answer to this long vexing problem. He loved that I was finding all these ways to help our friends and freeze out those who didn’t support the Mayor. Peter regularly asked for and received printouts on elected officials he was scheduled to meet with.

It was his opinion that resources were extremely tight. We were cutting the budget all the time. If we had to decide where to rebuild a street, all things being equal, why not go with a friend? It was ridiculously simplistic and all things were never equal at DOT when making those decisions, but hey it worked for me.

Peter is the same guy who kept insisting to me and everyone else after the 1993 election that we had won and never made a single promise to anyone in order to achieve victory. Patently ridiculous, I was there. But hey, if it helped him to govern as deputy mayor afterward - OK.

I was in Rudy’s office shortly after an update meeting with Peter. We had just finished one of the first monthly Comptroller's meetings when Peter made reference in something he said to ‘The System'.  Rudy was thrilled. He asked me to describe it. I told him about its functionality and how it was helping the lobbyists. I told him we had near 100% agency compliance as well as the types of things they were now reporting. It was generally an update session. “That’s exactly what I wanted. That’s great. You did that in record time,” he said. He squeezed my shoulder really hard. He’d never done that before. He was buoyant. “Peter, you’ve got to keep doing this,” Rudy said. “Yes, Mayor,” Peter agreed.

Soon I knew ‘The System’ was working well because the various parties were squawking. Elected officials were complaining to the agencies in increasing number; which was being passed on to the IGA office. The word back from me was, “I don’t care.” It was their job to take the heat. For the most part the agencies were rising to the occasion. The elected officials hated that their contacts, built-up over years, were now useless. They hated that it took a day to get their requests responded to. But here is what they hated most. True story.

Assemblyman X personally calls DOT asking for something. He is in Albany. The liaison at DOT calls my staff member at IGA with the request. She calls the lobbyist in our Albany office who handles transportation issues who is in Albany as the legislature is in session. Coincidentally, that lobbyist happens to mention it to Bob Harding who is heading to the Assembly and who approves Assemblyman X’s request. Bob Harding sees Assemblyman X on the floor of the Assembly and says, “Oh by the way I just approved your request at DOT.” Assemblyman X says, “Holy shit, how could you know about that? It happened 10 minutes ago.”

That was the power of ‘The System’. It had the power to really make you believe we had total control of the bureaucracy. And if you were Assemblyman X you might as well play ball as try to circumvent us. It was frightening. Partly it was meant to frighten you.

I loved ‘The System’. I loved having created it, enforcing it, managing it. It was rewarding providing the information so that Bob or Martha could print out data on a member who said, “you guys do nothing for me”, and there it was in black and white, chapter and verse. It scared the shit out of them when they saw that printout. I did it on the steps of City Hall with a few city councilmembers myself. I loved the looks on their faces. In some instances they had no idea their offices had been asking for things. But mostly they just didn’t know we tracked them and that we tracked EVERYTHING. They were shocked. But mostly what was rewarding to me was that I was moving Rudy’s agenda forward. This was a great device.

Soon the agencies began to complain. The power of ‘The System’ began to reach everywhere. It had been assumed by the agencies from the beginning that it would be short lived. They would try a number of tacks to foil me. But I anticipated each and every one and in the order in which they threw them at me. While it’s true Weber and Wilson didn’t prepare me for this in their respective works on bureaucracies and administration in college, I fancied myself something of an expert on management technique, and I could smell what was coming next at each juncture.

First, they would withhold. But I had spies everywhere and I would vector each item from its origin at the elected officials’ office, to the granting at the agency, to the community level. I would hear of it, make no mistake, now that word was out. The agencies soon realized withholding only brought terrible headaches from my office and it quickly stopped.

Next, they would collude with the elected official to continue their prior cozy relationship to find ways to make our life in IGA difficult. Problem for me? Hardly. Fire the liaison immediately. All IGA liaisons now were my responsibility even if they worked and reported to their agency. Some liaisons had deputy commissioner titles and duties. That problem stopped with the first firing.

As the British knew they had won the Battle of Britain when the Germans began bombing the cities, so I knew we had broken the agencies when they decided to overwhelm us thinking we could never handle the load. They assumed we would never want the mundane bullshit they were handing us and that we could never turn it around in 24 hours. And once we said, “Why don’t you decide some of the smaller stuff yourself,” they had won. Then they could exercise discretion and resume withholding. But I had no intention of ever saying that. I had geared this from the beginning to capture everything.  Bob, Martha, Peter, Rudy and I understood it was all or nothing for this to work. The agencies were never going to hear me give them back anything. I’d been preparing for a challenge like this for years and I knew I could do it.

Around this time word had reached the Department of Personnel (DOP) of my continuing complaints about the intern and fellows programs they were running. While it was very nice to have all these eager young Harvard and Yale students running around City Hall, they were all extremely left wing, none were from local New York colleges and none had any love for our mayor. Now I wasn’t asking for all the interns to be Rudy lovers or from Queens College but at least one. Was it impossible to find a 2O year old conservative? I didn’t think so. I had been one. I believed the screening process at DOP was the problem and let it be known I planned to make war on it unless there was a change. Peter’s chief of staff, Gordon Campbell, the permanent government’s representative inside the administration was a big fan of the program at DOP. He tried to argue that left meant neutral. I knew that to be a standard argument of the left.

DOP finally heard of my complaints. They thought they had a foolproof way to get rid of me. I was called by the First Deputy Commissioner who said that they were starting their interviewing process for the new round of interns. Would I like to be an interviewer? “Sure”, I said.  "One thing”, he said, “you have to agree to stay for two whole days of interviews and see all the candidates, those are the rules of the program.”

Now no senior City Hall staff member would agree to that, they wouldn’t have the time. He assumed Russell Harding would of course say, “no thanks.” “Sure”, I said. “No problem. Let my office know.” He was shocked, my staff told me later, that I had agreed. I had my staff clear my schedule.

My two days there were instructive. There were plenty of local college kids who were jazzed by the mayor’s agenda. One girl from Yale told me flat out she didn’t like the mayor and thought he was a racist. Sure enough she got through the process.

I made sure a few local kids were selected this time and picked one for my office. It was worth my time to give the local kids a chance. We even picked a few conservatives in that round. I told that story to Rudy in the van one day and he asked if any were from Manhattan College. Too hard a lift for me I explained to him with the DOP crowd.

Once we started to meet the flood of agency requests in a timely fashion the agencies had lost and they began to submit - ‘The System’ now worked. But it wasn’t just the agencies. Everything now went through IGA.  As an example. DEP had made a terrible mess of homeowner’s water bills. Elected officials wanted to sponsor evenings in their districts with ratepayers to resolve disputes in conjunction with DEP or the Mayor’s Office of Operations, which had assumed the role of fixing this problem. Seth Kaye, the mayoral staff member who covered DEP, knew that it had to be cleared through IGA and ‘The System’ before those evenings could proceed. No unfriendly councilmember was going to sponsor such an event.

Certain agencies balked. Cultural Affairs thought we had no right to look at their grants, but we thought otherwise. Fran Reiter, the deputy mayor overseeing Cultural Affairs, called me but I explained it was all benign. I merely wanted to see the list. They eventually sent me the list. And I did remove one grant. All items were properly recorded into the system.

Over the coming months I met with the Mayor alone and in groups where ‘The System’ was mentioned frequently. He loved the control and its breadth. At one final legislative review session in the COW he specifically asked, “Is this all being entered into ‘The System’?” “Yes”, I said, “everything is entered into ‘The System’. “Good”, he responded.   Another time, in his office to have a grants application signed, he asked me how 'The System' was going.  I remembered that I had a printout among the papers I was carrying.  "Has Peter ever showed you a printout from 'The System'?  I asked.  "No, he hasn't."  I gave him some elected officials printout, I don't remember whose.  He carefully examined the pages.  "This is great.  And everything gets captured?  "Oh yes", I said.  Rudy responded, "That's fantastic.  Great job."

In the spring of 1996 I had decided to take a job at the City’s Economic Development Corporation. My relationship with Peter had deteriorated at the same time as his had with the Mayor. They were practically not speaking at this point although few people outside of the inner circles of City Hall knew this. Rudy wanted him out badly but was shrinking from directly confronting him about it. Naturally this mainly revolved around Cristyne.

I was going to wait Peter out but he showed no signs of leaving and he had begun to place all sorts of conditions on his exit. Mastro was waiting like a spider trying to orchestrate all this as he would assume Peter’s deputy mayorship in some form. Gordon Campbell’s elevation to Commissioner of Homeless Services was one of the prices Peter extracted from the Mayor as payment for leaving. He then double crossed everyone by not announcing his own resignation on that same day as previously agreed and instead announced another chief of staff to replace Gordon. You could hear the collective gasp in the Blue Room.  We all walked out speechless.  Mastro was furious.  We couldn't believe he had actually double crossed Rudy.  Gordon was supposed to be the final payment in Peter's list of demands for exiting. Peter also ended up demanding a party at Gracie Mansion for his current and former staff as more payment for his departure.  That had never happened before or would happen again.  It was unprecedented.  But it just went to the fact of how badly Rudy wanted him out. I don't even think Rudy attended. I was his only former staff member not invited.  I wrote him a letter telling him that notwithstanding our differences, I thought it was a petty thing to do.

As for my own departure - my office was going to be broken up. The Office of Grants Administration was going to be overseen by the Deputy Mayor’s Office. My staff was going with me. The rest of the office’s functions would be parceled out. The big question was who would take over the running of ‘The System’?

Unbeknownst to me, Bob Harding had gone to Peter and requested to take it over. He would be in charge. He would hire someone as a combination of me and Luke to run it.  The increasingly strained personal relationship between me and my brother finally came to a parting of the ways over this transition.  I had been telling him for two months that I would be leaving and taking Luke with me to EDC.  I bugged him regularly to hire someone to take over responsibility for 'The System'.  I even offered to find someone for him.  As the date approached for us to leave for EDC Bob announced that he hadn't done any looking and that Luke had to stay until such time as he found someone.  I was furious.  Bob had two months to do this and further Luke was not an indentured servant.  I told him I would go to Peter but he informed me that Peter had already blocked Luke's departure.  I called my father to get him to intervene but he refused.  It took Bob about another eight weeks but he found some flunky kid to take Luke's place.  ‘The System’ without me, and Luke as chief of staff, soon withered and died due to Bob Harding’s lack of faithful attention to it. It was eventually shut down. I never knew what happened to the data that we had accumulated.

Did we meddle in what were otherwise vital essential government functions? Perhaps. But the Mayor of the City of New York wanted every area of city government reached, no corner left untouched. It was the only way ‘The System’ would work. He knew that. And he was right. We proved it.

POSTSCRIPT

What a great experiment that was. Could you bring the agencies under control?  Sure, if you wanted to. There’s no question that many would argue this was a fruitless exercise performed by control freaks, done to reward and punish for strictly partisan reasons.  I would argue that for eight years this was Rudy Giuliani’s Administration; he had every right to know the goings on within the far flung reaches of his empire. We used modern, sophisticated, organized tools to affect that control. 

I’m grateful that Rudy Giuliani ordered us to create a process for what became known as ‘The System’.  Equally proud that I could offer him something that in some small part aided in transforming New York. As has been recently noted, his successful legislative agenda is one of his most lasting legacies to the City.

Comments

[RA Harding]

Thanx for another nice comment, Dimitri. Too bad you never leave a real e-m address.

RAH

[dimtri]

Another good read. Also quite detailed and complex, will have to reread it later. Keep up the good writing.