Fiscal Intelligence

De Blasio was paid as an SEIU consultant while he ran for the New York City Council in 2001. His soon-to-be first deputy mayor, Anthony Shorris, a ubiquitous career bureaucrat, left the Bloomberg administration in a dispute over his own SEIU consultancy contract. Emma Wolfe, de Blasio’s political gatekeeper, is a former SEIU organizer, and Dominic Williams, Shorris’s chief of staff, is a one-time SEIU operative. So Team de Blasio will obviously view things through SEIU-tinted glasses.

Union Feeding Time at City Hall by Bob McManus – City Journal.

For years, the trustees granted annual bonuses to retirees and fattened worker-savings accounts with high guaranteed rates of return, siphoning crucial assets out of the retirement system, even as Detroit’s finances deteriorated. By one estimate, reported in the Detroit Free Press in September, the bonuses and guaranteed-interest programs cost the pension funds nearly $2 billion in contributions and foregone investment returns—money that might have made the pension system well-funded today and allowed retirement benefits to remain untouched.

Who Really Betrayed Detroit? by Steven Malanga – City Journal.