Brooklyn Bridge Free No More?

It’s no mystery what Mike Bloomberg is going to run on in his bid for a third term — safe streets and good management. But what exactly would his Democratic opponent try and do to sour New Yorkers on their popular mayor?

If Anthony Weiner was to really run (which seems very doubtful at this point) he has already spent months sketching out an outer-borough populist case that paints Bloomberg as an elitist who was lucky enough to be mayor during one of the biggest economic booms in the city’s history. Weiner would be prepared to illustrate such an argument with the mayor’s own actionsand pet projects (see: Term Limits, Congestion Pricing, and Yankee Stadium).

Bill Thompson, on the other hand, has been far more coy. While he has mildly critical of Bloomberg on some issues (term limits, school control) he has shown little fire in the belly and even less campaign fire and brimstone. Thompson has shown no hints of a storyline he might use to bring the mayor down — until now.

Sunday Thompson joined Assemblyman Adriano Espaillat and a handful of other pols to blast the proposal emerging in Albany to toll the East and Harlem River bridges. The idea has been around for decades and was one of the key recommendations of the Ravitch Commission which was charged with finding a permanent fix for the MTA’s fast-growing budget problems.

In the past couple of days the idea of tolling the currently free bridges into Manhattan (from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Broadway bridge over Spuyten Duyvil — my personal favorite place-name in NYC) has gone from a non-starter to a no-brainer as the leaders of the Assembly and State Senate have both thrown support behind it.

The original Ravitch plan called for tolling the East River bridges at the same rate as the Midtown and Battery Tunnels and the Triboro Bridge while putting $2 tolls on the Harlem River crossings. Now Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith back the idea of tolling all the bridges at that $2 mark (or the same as the current subway fare at the time).

Leading the charge against this idea now appears to be Thompson’s first significant attempt at finding an issue that will help define him and Bloomberg. Tolling these bridges has always been easily spun as a Manhattan-centric idea (at least since Mayor Lindsay ordered up a study on it in 1970) designed to stick it to the working stiff. And so Thompson adopted a bit of that stand in Sunday’s news conference arguing “Harlem and East River tolls would burden many hard-working people who live in boroughs other than Manhattan and would drastically hurt small businesses, many of which already are struggling in this economy.”

Good as far as it goes but truth be told Assemblymember Jose Peralta seemed to strike the better campaign pose when he said “The MTA’s Harlem and East River toll plan would win approval by Robert Moses the Master Builder himself, with their idea to seal off Manhattan Island and make it only affordable to the wealthy.” Peralta is presumably not running for mayor, however.

Thompson is instead repeating his proposal from late last year to radically increase registration fees for large gas-guzzlers. It’s an idea that could very well work but his failure to get any traction for it with the only three guys in Albany makes him look no more effective than Bloomberg whose congestion pricing plan suffered an even worse fate.

Thompson has spent the last seven years as the city’s Comptroller dutifully presenting solutions but rarely engaging in the kind of hard-ball politics many of his ambitious predecessors became infamous for (paging Liz Holtzman!). If he’s going to take on Bloomberg and his big bucks he’s going to have to be more than the cerebral dispassionate solutions guy. New York already has one of those that voters say they basically like. His name is Mike Bloomberg.