Mayor, comptroller clash on RNC benefit

A city comptroller’s office analysis from before the Convention started has also raised serious questions about the mayor’s claim, projecting a possible net loss of $281 million for the four-day Convention.
“Definitely not,” said Patrick O’Brien, when asked if the Convention was good for business. “Absolutely not,” he said. O’Brien is owner of Tracks Bar and Grill, a commuter bar in Pennsylvania Station underneath the Convention site that is also a highly rated seafood restaurant.
In what would have been a pretty slow week anyway, O’Brien cancelled all deliveries of seafood and sent 20 percent of his staff home. As he expected, the Convention slowed things down even more.
“I believe we were able to get some seafood in at one point,” said O’Brien, who added there was no direct benefit to businesses in the area and, in fact, that the reverse was true.
“I’d say my business was off 50 percent,” he said. But he did acknowledge that hotels that were rented to delegates and restaurants in those hotels probably did a better trade than usual last week.
The New York City Comptroller’s Office analyzed the likely costs and benefits to the city before the Convention started. In a statement that the office still stands over, the comptroller, William Thompson, said: “Based on . . . analysis of the economic costs and potential losses of the event, the convention will yield little positive economic impact on New York City and may have a negative impact. The convention will cost area businesses millions of dollars in lost productivity due to commuter delays and business slowdown.”
But the mayor stuck to his claim that the convention meant big bucks for the city as he and officials continued to face a string of accusations about the treatment of protestors during the convention, where some protestors, including a 17-year-old boy, found themselves in jail without due process for over 42 hours in a holding pen on Manhattan’s West Side quickly dubbed “Guantanamo on the Hudson” by protest leaders.
It is probable that the city will be held to a court order that mandated $1,000 fines, perhaps as compensation payments, for protestors who were held without due process.
Slow processing led to many of the protestors having a long wait in jail, according to lawyers for the city, but protestors, who reminded the mayor of their constitutional right to protest, said the long time in jail was more to do with keeping vocal anti-Bush protesters off the streets.
Criticism of the mayor reached a peak at the weekend after he compared some protestors to the terrorists who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks, saying: “a handful of people have tried to destroy our city by going up and yelling at visitors here because they don’t agree with their views. That’s exactly what the terrorists did, if you think about it, on 9/11. Now this is not the same kind of terrorism but there’s no question that these anarchists are afraid to let people speak out.”
Later Bloomberg backed off his statement, but continued to praise police action during the Convention, saying that innocent people probably got arrested, but that was only to be expected.
“You can’t arrest 1,800 people without having somebody in the middle who shouldn’t have been arrested. That’s what the courts are there to find out afterward,” Bloomberg said last week at the Convention’s temporary host committee headquarters near the Garden.
The mayor then moved directly to addressing the numbers. Convention operations brought $177 million into the city economy and visitor spending amounted to another $80 million, Bloomberg said.
The Comptroller’s Office said before the convention that overtime for cops would total $50 million alone.
The city’s Independent Budget Office offered another interpretation: “We don’t do analyses of single events because the data are very hard to measure. The results are subject to many, many different assumptions,” said spokesperson Douglas Turetsky. “Results can be very dicey.”