When Mayoral Candidates Deliver

Artful governing pays off in the end with tremendous results:

Early this year, Christine C. Quinn, the speaker of the New York City Council, held a news conference at City Hall to announce that she had resolved one of the most contentious issues to face the Council during her six-year tenure — a proposed law that would raise the wages of workers in developments subsidized by the city.

. . .

This week, three months after her initial announcement, Ms. Quinn, a likely candidate for mayor next year, said that she had at last completed revising the measure, and that it would be “the most impactful living-wage law in the United States.”

But it now exempts even more employers, and by her office’s estimate, just 400 to 500 low-wage workers a year will benefit.

The Great Thing About Parks, Playgrounds And Various Open Spaces

The great thing about parks, playgrounds and various open spaces is that you can always rely on finding a broken swing to distract folks from whatever issue you need them distracted from:

An audit released by City Comptroller John Liu’s office claims that the Parks Department was slow to fix dangerous conditions in some playgrounds — and might have missed regular inspections.

Liu, who’s still dealing with the fallout from the arrest of his campaign treasurer, said that the agency would sometimes neglect to fix nasty problems — such as rusted and broken equipment — even after they were “flagged for repair.”

As Long As It’s In Brooklyn, There Is Hardly Anything Marty Markowitz Won’t Support

If only Borough Presidents were about shaking up the system . . . but then there’d be no Borough Presidents:

A shadowy group calling itself Occupy Brooklyn is set to rally in Grand Army Plaza on Saturday — the first big protest in Brooklyn — and unlike many mainstream Democrats and Mayor Bloomberg, Borough President Markowitz is offering some support.

“It was only a matter of time before the . . . rallies made their way to Brooklyn,” Markowitz told us. “There is no doubt that Americans — those in the ‘99 percent’ — are hurting, and we can all agree that some of the issues being raised by these protests . . . are concerns we can all rally around.”

The Problem With War Metaphors

Is that they make you sound crazy, and probably only serve to annoy the very people you’re ostentatiously trying to “help”:

Stringer sees public schools as the front lines in the battle.

As it stands, the onus is on school employees to detect bedbugs and call the city for help. Instead, Stringer wants the city to hire an army of inspectors and exterminators to search for and destroy the creatures.

“We’re forcing principals and teachers to act like CSI inspectors,” he said. “It’s like fighting a building fire with a garden hose.”

“You can’t fight this epidemic with a paltry, small army,” he said. “We’re in the middle of this bedbug war. We’ve already lost the Waldorf, we lost Lincoln Center, hundreds of residential buildings, and now we see we’re losing public schools.”

Isn’t Scott Stringer basically telling you not to patronize the Waldorf or Lincoln Center?

I’ve heard of grandstanding about food, grandstanding about museum exhibits, grandstanding about flight delays and even grandstanding about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but I don’t think we’ve ever seen grandstanding about bed bugs. Can’t wait for that mayoral run.

Have Ferry Accident, Will Travel

You can afford to be a little scrappy (“Mayor Bloomberg is not going to treat the governor poorly, with disrespect!”) when you were the only guy on the scene while weekend news happened:

Of course, Gov. David A. Paterson was there because the Andrew J. Barberi ferry had crashed four hours earlier, injuring dozens and raising the specter of the 2003 crash of the very same boat, in which 11 people were killed. After visiting the scene of the crash, Mr. Paterson returned to Manhattan by ferry, telling the television cameras that people “should not even hesitate to use it.”

He boarded the ferry accompanied by two aides in suits, a uniformed state trooper and several camera crews. The governor wore a smart pinstripe suit and a tie. This alone set him apart from about 99 percent of the riders on the weekend ferry, when the commuters give way to camera slingers. The majority of the passengers seemed to be tourists, and most of them foreign, so the governor’s presence was met with many mute stares.

But soon enough, constituents noticed. “Hey, governor!” a man in shorts called out, and the governor smiled and waved.

The mayor was in Bermuda I take it?

Location Scout: Staten Island Ferry.