City couldn't be more wrong on school bus case

on December 14, 2010 at 7:48 AM, updated December 14, 2010 at 12:12 PM

Maybe you don’t have a child who either is or will be affected by the Department of Education’s decision to abruptly terminate a 42-year-old variance that had permitted some 3,000 Staten Island kids in the seventh and eighth grades to ride yellow school buses.

If so, you may have missed the intricacies of an intriguing lawsuit that exposes Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s deeply flawed character and the absurd state law that stokes his fantasy of being the city’s de-facto emperor.

Home-town hyperbole, you say? Let’s look at the facts.

Last week, Supreme Court Justice John A. Fusco ordered the city’s Department of Education to reinstate the variance, concluding that its action in terminating it was arbitrary and capricious.

In response, the city’s Law Department issued a statement that began: “The city and its Department of Education strongly disagree with the court’s conclusion.”

Now, let’s stop right there for a moment.

During the course of the case, the city argued that it should not have been named as a defendant because the variance was terminated by the DOE, and there is no principal-agent relationship between the two entities.

Since the petitioners did not challenge that contention, Fusco dismissed the action against the city. Why then did the city surface to condemn Fusco’s decision?

Next, the city’s statement accused Fusco of “ignoring the law.”

In fact, his opinion encompassed 26 pages and consisted of almost 7,000 words. Far from “ignoring the law,” Fusco cited 40 separate legal authorities, including the state’s Constitution, the Education Law, the chancellor’s regulations, learned legal treatises, and numerous court decisions, including holdings by the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court.

The statement further charged that Fusco ignored “the record.”

However, he specifically enumerated all 20 legal documents submitted to him. In addition to frequently referring to them, he discussed at length the testimony given by various witnesses, and the pages in the official transcript where it can be found.

The city and the DOE also asserted that Fusco ignored “equity.” Although inarticulately stated, the city probably intended to claim that it’s unfair to provide yellow bus service to Staten Island kids and not every seventh- and eighth-grade student in the city. But that assertion is without merit.


Disparate treatment becomes problematic only when it lacks a rational basis.

Given that Staten Island doesn’t have the comprehensive public transportation network available in the other boroughs, and that many of its streets - particularly, although not exclusively, those on the South Shore - have no sidewalks, it would actually be inequitable not to make reasonable accommodations to facilitate Island kids’ compliance with the state’s compulsory education law.

In any event, this objection by the city can be disposed of with finality by noting that Fusco did, indeed, address the matter extensively in his decision.

The upshot of all this is that the statement issued by the city and the DOE in reaction to Fusco’s decision is completely and demonstrably wrong.

Bloomberg’s reaction was even worse. For example, he vowed to pursue the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. In other words, while crying poverty on the one hand, and having already expended what is probably hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars defending the suit to date, he’s vowing to commit untold thousands more to get to the nation’s highest court.

Incredibly, this self-styled genius doesn’t realize that the Supreme Court lacks jurisdiction to hear any of the issues raised by the case.

Next, proving that he either didn’t read or didn’t understand Fusco’s ruling, Bloomberg claimed that he will assert his right to make budget cuts.

Hence, he misses the point that budgetary judgments that impermissibly jeopardize statutory or constitutional rights, or are otherwise unlawful, may properly be reviewed by the judiciary. This is hardly a novel idea. Federal courts routinely order cities to spend monies to force compliance with federal statutes, regulations or the U.S. Constitution.

Despite Fusco’s well-reasoned, meticulously documented decision, Staten Island’s seventh- and eighth-graders are still without yellow school bus transportation. This is because of an absurd state law that gives municipalities - but not you or I - an automatic stay of any order they wish to appeal by merely serving a one-sentence notice.

In this case, that translated into a six-month legal proceeding being effectively nullified in about 30 seconds.

The DOE estimates that eliminating the variance would save somewhere between $1.6 and $2.1 million, a tiny drop in the bucket that could unquestionably be made up elsewhere in the DOE’s staggering $21-billion budget.

No, this case is not about money but, rather, satiating Bloomberg’s enormous ego, quenching his unrelenting thirst for dictatorial powers and dismissing with disdain and defiance anybody who dares disagree with him.

His $18-billion net worth earns him tenth place in Forbes’ list of the richest people in America. But to the kids whose well-being he’s needlessly jeopardizing every day, and their parents on whom he’s inflicting constant emotional anguish, Michael Bloomberg’s net worth as a mayor and a man is a great big zero.