With Spitzer at Helm, Mayor Will Push for Charter Schools

Mayor Bloomberg is planning an aggressive push to lift the state cap on the number of charter schools now that Governor Pataki is out and Governor Spitzer is in.

The mayor's Albany lobbying office is in the final stages of hammering out its new agenda, and City Hall officials say its top two priorities are already decided: securing the maximum amount of education money from Mr. Spitzer and getting approval for more charter schools.

"Charter schools are something that need to be addressed soon," a spokesman for the mayor's office of legislative affairs, Farrell Sklerov, said. "We're obviously hopeful that we'll be able to lift the cap in time to have charter schools opened for the next school year."

Although Mr. Pataki favored increasing the number of allowable charter schools, the speaker of the state Assembly, Sheldon Silver, denied him a deal on the issue during his final weeks in office. The dynamic between Messrs. Spitzer and Silver, both Democrats, could give the issue life again, depending on how much weight the new governor puts behind it.

As a candidate, Mr. Spitzer said he supported upping the statewide limit of 100 charter schools, but only two days into his first term it's unclear how aggressively he'll take it on.

The current proposal would increase the statewide cap to 250, with at least 50 of those schools in the city. The city has 15,000 charter school students, and another 13,000 on waiting lists.

Mr. Spitzer is sure to get pushback from charter school opponents, including the United Federation of Teachers, which endorsed Mr. Spitzer and is against lifting the cap.

Bloomberg administration officials were crossing their fingers yesterday in the hopes that Mr. Spitzer would declare strong support for their priorities in his "State of the State" speech today. Mr. Bloomberg is scheduled to be in Albany this afternoon for the address.

Some of the other items on City Hall's short list of priorities include changing the way judges are selected; pushing for a so-called collateral source bill that would ensure that city employees who win damages from the city through court judgments don't also get to collect their full disability payments, and allowing doctors to conduct HIV testing with only verbal consent.

The first two items are being pushed by the city's top lawyer, Michael Cardozo, who is scheduled to testify January 8 at a state Senate hearing on judicial selection reform.

The change to HIV testing is being pushed by Mr. Bloomberg's commissioner of Health and Mental Hygiene, Thomas Frieden. Mr. Spitzer has not yet publicly said where he stands on the issue, but opponents have expressed concerns about the legal gray areas that could emerge from not having a patient's signature before an HIV test is done. Still, it is the education items — both the charter schools and the education funding — that are expected to be front and center. Mr. Spitzer has indicated that he will earmark more than the $1.93 billion a year in aid to city schools that a court ordered, but has said that he wants the city to contribute some of the additional funding. Mr. Bloomberg opposes that idea.

The policy director at the Albany-based New York Charter Schools Association, Peter Murphy, said the new political atmosphere in Albany "bodes well for any kind of agenda the mayor wants."

"Someone like Mayor Bloomberg will have a better shot with a first-term governor than with a third term," Mr. Murphy said. "In Pataki's third term, he was on his way out, everybody knew it, and he didn't have the kind of leverage that the new governor will have in his first term."

Bloomberg administration officials said they expected "high-level discussions" in the near future with Mr. Spitzer's staff and with both chambers of the Legislature. In the past, charter schools have opened their doors within six months of securing approval.