Relations with the homeless During his 1993 campaign, Giuliani proposed to drastically curtail city services for the homeless, setting a limit of 90 days for stays in shelters. Opponent Dinkins accused Giuliani of punishing the children of the homeless with the policy. This contrasted with Giuliani's campaign promise during the 1989 campaign to build hundreds of new homeless shelters around the city. Advocates for the homeless sued the mayor over an alleged failure to provide proper medical treatment to homeless children. In 1998, when the City Council overrode Giuliani's veto to change how homeless shelters were run, Giuliani served an eviction notice on five community service programs, including a program for the mentally ill, a day-care center, an elderly agency, a community board office and a civic association in favor of a homeless shelter. Giuliani asserted he specifically chose the site because it was in the district of chief bill sponsor Stephen DiBrienza. The plan came under heavy criticism, especially for the eviction of the program serving 500 mentally ill patients, and Giuliani backed down. In an editorial,
The New York Times called the event a "dispiriting political vendetta" and asserted that "selecting sites [for homeless shelters] as a punishment for crossing the Mayor is outrageous."
Race relations A well-known Harlem minister,
Calvin O. Butts, who had previously supported Giuliani for re-election, said of the mayor, "I don't believe he likes black people. And I believe there's something fundamentally wrong in the way we are disregarded, the way we are mistreated, and the way our communities are being devastated. I had some hope that he was the kind of person you could deal with. I've just about lost that hope." After the minister criticized him, Giuliani diverted funds away from projects connected to him, and when Butts supported Governor
George Pataki's re-election, Giuliani told Pataki he should not accept Butts' support. (Pataki did accept the endorsement.) Giuliani said that by not dealing with black leaders, he could "accomplish more for the black community." Giuliani has been accused of supporting
racial profiling, specifically in the shooting death of
Amadou Diallo, a
West African immigrant, by the
NYPD under his watch. Many African Americans were outraged by
Patrick Dorismond's death.
Public schools General policy goals One of Giuliani's three major campaign promises was to fix public schools. However, he cut the public school budget in New York City by from 1994 to 1997 and trimmed the school repairs budget by , and test scores declined during his terms. His successor
Michael Bloomberg later said, "Giuliani never got his hands around the school system. There is no question that it's gotten worse the last eight years, not better." Giuliani has been accused of diverting funds for school repair from poor districts to middle-class ones. A large debt left after the Giuliani administration has resulted in less money to spend on education, according to some sources. Conflict between Giuliani and schools chancellor Ramon C. Cortines over some of the mayor's proposals for public education eventually resulted in Cortines' resignation. However, the decision on the policies was not up to City Hall, but the Board of Education. Cortines was the first of three school chancellors, all people of color who left office during Giuliani's tenure. Cortines' replacement as schools chancellor,
Rudy Crew, had been a close friend of Giuliani's for years, but their relationship soured over the issue of
school vouchers. Giuliani had said in his 1993 campaign that parochial school vouchers were "unconstitutional." Some speculated that Giuliani pursued the issue of vouchers at the expense of his relationship with Crew because he was looking towards an upcoming Senate run. When the city's five-year contract with schoolteachers ran out and negotiations with the city had not yet begun, teachers' union president Randi Weingarten said that a strike was not off the table if the city did not offer a contract. Giuliani told the press that he would put Weingarten in jail if she led a strike; under New York state law, government employees could not strike. Weingarten said that she would lobby the state legislature to allow employees to strike if the government had refused to negotiate in good faith. Giuliani objected to the teachers' request for a pay raise to align their salaries with those in the suburbs. Teachers pointed out the city's then budget surplus and the number of teachers leaving the city. Giuliani called for merit pay based on student test scores, a plan which was derided by teachers as ineffective.
Opposition to federal immigration law Giuliani was criticized for embracing
illegal immigrants because of his continuation of a
sanctuary city policy of preventing city employees from contacting the
Immigration and Naturalization Service about immigration violations, on the grounds that illegal aliens must be able to take actions such as sending their children to school or reporting crime and violations without fear of deportation. In 1996 Giuliani sued the federal government over a new federal law (
Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996) that overturned the 1985 executive order by then mayor
Ed Koch that barred government employees from turning in illegal immigrants who were trying to get government benefits from the city. He ordered city attorneys to defend this policy in federal court. His lawsuit claimed that the new federal requirement to report illegal immigrants violated the
Tenth Amendment. The court ruled that New York City's sanctuary laws were illegal. After the City of New York lost an appeal to the
United States Supreme Court in 2000, Giuliani vowed to ignore the law.
Role of press staff professionals Giuliani's spokeswoman, Cristyne F. Lategano (who would later deny allegations of an affair with her boss when his wife said Lategano's relationship with him had damaged her marriage), admitted that she and her staff refused to allow the mayor to conduct interviews with reporters who she thought would not be sympathetic to his views. Some reporters alleged that she had kept information from the public with her actions. After the police spokesman, John Miller, resigned in 1995, he said that Giuliani's press office had forgotten that public information was public. Some City Hall reporters maintained they were harassed by Lategano if they wrote something she found unflattering and that she called them late at night. Giuliani defended her, saying that he did not care whether his press secretary pleased reporters, and at one point gave Lategano a higher post as communications director and a $25,000 raise during a time when his office had called a budget crisis. In one incident, Lategano called newsrooms alleging improprieties by one of previous Mayor Dinkins' appointees. The allegations were later found to be false, and reporters said that the allegations by Lategano were meant to divert attention from tax improprieties of one of Giuliani's own appointees.
The New York Times wrote that the incident "put a cloud over the integrity of the Giuliani press office, if not that of the administration itself." Jerry Nachmann of
WCBS-TV said of the Giuliani staff's intrusions with the media, "I say without regret and with no remorse that as editor of
The New York Post I used to torture David Dinkins every day of his life. And there were calls. But the calls were never, 'Put the Mayor on before sports and weather.'" Time Warner executive
Ted Turner suggested that Giuliani had a conflict of interest because his wife, the broadcaster
Donna Hanover, was employed by a television station owned by Murdoch. In the wake of the unfolding Murdoch illegal surveillance and bribery scandals erupting in the US and UK, Giuliani was among a small number of public defenders of the accused Murdoch as "a very honorable, honest man" Giuliani was described by Federal Judge Denise Cote as having violated constitutional principles in an "improper" relationship with Murdoch's Fox News, and Giuliani's wife at the time benefited significantly financially from her employment at Fox.
Civil liberties Litigants filed several
civil liberties violations lawsuits against the mayor or the city. Giuliani's administration lost 22 of 26 cases. Some of the court cases which found the Giuliani administration to have violated First Amendment rights included actions barring public events from their previous location at the City Hall steps, not allowing taxi drivers to assemble for a protest, not allowing city workers to speak to the press without permission, barring church members from delivering an AIDS education program in a park, denying a permit for a march to object to police brutality, issuing summons and seizing literature of three workers collecting signatures to get a candidate on the presidential ballot, imposing strict licensing restrictions on sidewalk artists that were struck down by a court of appeals as a violation of artists' rights, using a
1926 cabaret law to ban dancing in bars and clubs, imposing an excessive daily fee on street musicians, imposing varying city fees for newsstand owners based on the content they sold, a case against Time Warner Cable, and an incident in which Giuliani ordered an ad for
New York magazine that featured his image taken down from city buses. The ad featured a copy of the magazine with the caption, "Possibly the only good thing Rudy hasn't taken credit for." Giuliani and his administration encountered accusations of blocking free speech arising from a lawsuit brought by Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church for removing the homeless from the church's steps against the church's will, and during his 1993 campaign, when he criticized incumbent Mayor Dinkins for allowing
Louis Farrakhan to speak in the city. After being criticized for impinging on freedom of speech, he backed down from his criticism of Dinkins. The 1999 award was the Center's first "Lifetime Muzzle Award," which noted he had "stifled speech and press to so unprecedented a degree, and in so many and varied forms, that simply keeping up with the city's censorious activity has proved a challenge for defenders of free expression." More than 35 successful lawsuits were brought against Giuliani and his administration for blocking free speech. In his book
Speaking Freely,
First Amendment lawyer
Floyd Abrams said Giuliani had an "insistence on doing the one thing that the First Amendment most clearly forbids: using the power of government to restrict or punish speech critical of government itself."
Virginia trash controversy On January 13, 1999, Giuliani suggested a "reciprocal relationship" whereby other states such as Virginia were obligated to accept New York City's garbage in exchange for being able to visit New York City's cultural sites. Then Governor of Virginia
Jim Gilmore III wrote in response, "I am offended by your suggestion that New York's substantial cultural achievements, such as they are, obligate Virginia and other states to accept your garbage." Other politicians also were upset about the proposed arrangement. Virginia State Senator William T. Bolling said, "This represents a certain arrogant attitude that is not consistent with the way we do business in Virginia." Even owners of trash repositories and other businesses that would benefit from the deal spoke against the mayor's statements, saying they gave New Yorkers and Virginians a bad name and would harm their business in the long run. One such owner, Charles H. Carter III, said, "Giuliani couldn't have said anything that could have harmed his own cause more. He is definitely not presidential material." The situation arose when Giuliani closed New York City's existing landfill, Fresh Kills on
Staten Island, calling it an "eyesore," although it contained 20 to 30 more years' worth of space for garbage. Critics alleged that the decision was made for purely political, rather than financial or environmental reasons. Staten Island had been an important constituency in electing Giuliani to his two terms, and would again be important if he ran for the Senate in 2000. The plan to export trash was expensive and not environmentally friendly. A year after the landfill closed, New York City's sanitation commissioner said, "Fresh Kills was really closed without an awful lot of thought, you know, if the story be told." Garbage trucks taking trash out of the city were estimated to make an extra 700,000 trips a year. The New York State attorney general's office sued the city for not properly taking the environmental effects into account. The lawsuit alleged that air pollution along Canal Street, leading to the
Holland Tunnel, had increased 16% due to the plan. Mayor Bloomberg now budgets a year to barge New York City's garbage to landfills in
Virginia and
Ohio. In five years, the city's trash budget rose from to more than because of the garbage transfer costs. The city cut back on recycling to save money. The
New York Times and
Daily News have both run editorials calling for Fresh Kills to be re-opened. ==See also==