Lack of Reform from Mayor Bloomberg on City Marshals

NEW YORK, NY — Supermanager Mike Bloomberg has tackled public schools, cleared the smoke out of bars and nudged crime down to historic lows.

But there’s one bunch that’s been a lot tougher to reform: the guys who tow your car for unpaid tickets.

Bloomberg pledged four years ago to open up the notoriously clubby and lucrative city marshals program, which has long been dogged by tales of political cronyism and thuggery.

The promise sounded great, but the results are less spectacular. Since 2003, the mayor has made just nine new appointments – including the most recent, his former bodyguard.

Aides said the mayor didn’t know that retired Lt. Stephen Biegel, a supervisor in the City Hall security detail, had applied to the program until after a screening committee approved him.

Still, it did little to dispel the notion that the jobs go to the politically savvy and the well-connected – especially when another three of Bloomberg’s appointments have equally cozy ties. They’re relatives of current marshals.

Marshals rake in millions of dollars doing an unpopular job. They tow the cars of scofflaws, evict tenants from apartments and seize property from debtors.

Last year, 41 marshals collected $162 million in debts, paid the city $1.8 million in fees – and pocketed $38 million.

They’re not on the city payroll, but they’re appointed by the mayor for five-year stints. Once they get the gig, marshals rarely leave.

To be fair, nine new appointments is nine more than former Mayors Rudy Giuliani or David Dinkins ever bothered to make. The citizenry wasn’t clamoring for marshal reform when Bloomberg took it upon himself to revive a committee to recruit and screen applicants in 2003.

It’s not easy to find people with the right combination of brains and brawn, people who can run a business that takes things away from New Yorkers – important things like their homes and cars.

“You have to have the right personality to execute that,” said Peter Madonia, the mayor’s former chief of staff who took over the committee earlier this year. “That’s an unusual set of skills that are required here.”

Despite talk of reform – and even the appointments of three women – City Hall hasn’t made straightening out the marshal program a top priority.

Madonia is pinning his hopes on a new recruitment drive that targets organizations whose members are most likely to be qualified. That includes public safety retirees, who have for the past year been eligible to become marshals while still collecting their public pensions.

But no advertising whizzes have been hired to come up with a snazzy marshal campaign – and no extra staff have been brought aboard at the Department of Investigation to do dozens of required and labor-intensive background checks.

The creeping pace means that although the mayor has reappointed 22 marshals he inherited when he took office, another 13 are still working on expired terms because in four years, their applications for reappointment have yet to be processed.

And it means jobs are still going to those in the know.

“That’s exactly what we want to change,” Madonia said.

That sound you hear behind him is the clock ticking down.