We welcome this week’s court ruling, more than 1,500 days after the end of Bill de Blasio’s embarrassing run for president, that the last mayor owes the City of New York — that’s you and you and you, the taxpayers — $475,000 for misusing public funds on a police security detail as he jetted about the country in pursuit of a political brass ring that was always obviously out of reach. It’s never too late for ethical comeuppance, even years after the fact.
In a confidential advisory opinion dated May 15, 2019, the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board had told the then-mayor that taxpayers could cover salaries and overtime of officers, but not food, lodging and other costs. De Blasio then flatly ignored the guidance — prompting the Board to issue a hefty fine on June 15, 2023.
The chutzpah didn’t end there. De Blasio then went to court that very day to try to get the attempt to make him pay up dismissed, claiming his use of taxpayer funds was based on murky guidance by the ethics board. That just wasn’t true.
It isn’t often a judge’s written rhetoric reads as a scoff, but that’s the only way to interpret Acting Manhattan state Supreme Court Justice Shahabuddeen Ally’s 80-page ruling. Contra Big Bill, Ally said the mayor was “expressly and specifically informed” that the city could not foot the bill for his security costs. His legal challenge, said Ally, was “entirely baseless,” as well as “perplexing.”
But wait, there’s more. De Blasio’s “position essentially eliminates his own agency in the choices he made,” he wrote, adding that “the remarkable contention that he is somehow not subject to the City’s conflicts-of-interest laws” is plainly meritless.
And so, the tab the former mayor tried to pawn off with about as much grace as the guy who inelegantly scampers to the bathroom just before the restaurant check is delivered is back in front of him: $319,794 (and 20 cents) in airfare and other travel costs, and $5,000 in fines for each of 31, count ‘em, out-of-state trips.
Readers may remember how the city’s Department of Investigation in 2021 dinged de Blasio not only for the presidential campaign, but to help move his daughter from her Brooklyn apartment to Gracie Mansion, as well as ferrying his son Dante around New York and to college in Connecticut.
“It’s essentially a concierge service,” said the commissioner back then, “primarily for Dante.”
There are of course, more serious offenses by public officials. We don’t here claim that de Blasio is the worst guy out there. But that shouldn’t be the question. The question should be whether a mayor of New York honors his duty to protect taxpayer funds, or looks for opportunities to bend them to his personal and political gain.
Some commentators suggest that the mayoralty of Bill de Blasio is already looking pretty good in hindsight. We don’t dispute that (at least before COVID hit) he did a good job reducing crime while dialing down the footprint of the NYPD, and building a universal pre-K program that hundreds of thousands of families rely on. But anyone trying to rehabilitate de Blasio’s image has to reckon with his sanctimonious arrogance and personal penchant to ignore rules when they happen to apply to him. It just wasn’t very pretty.
