It seems that Mayor Bloomberg may have heard the voters on the issue of his 18.5% property tax increase. At least he is making noises about rolling back. Since last November, the discontent the property tax hike sowed has been apparent, especially at Brooklyn and Staten Island. In February, the five candidates in a special election to fill a City Council seat at Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, all campaigned against Mr. Bloomberg’s levy.

The winner of that race, Vincent Gentile, had a campaign manager, Hank Sheinkopf, who understood the issue’s appeal. “This property tax thing has legs,” Mr. Sheinkopf told The New York Sun in February, explaining his theory that the property tax hike has reinforced an outerborough belief that people in Manhattan, and in City Hall, don’t understand outerborough concerns, like taxes on middle-class, single-family homeowners. The consultant, and the outer-borough types he understands so well, may be on to some thing: The impediment to rolling back the property tax is now an Upper East Sider, the City Council’s speaker, Gifford Miller.

“It would be great if we could cut it,” Mr. Miller said yesterday of the property tax. He added, though: “But we have to have fiscal responsibility.” According to Mr. Miller, “It’s a little early for us to be celebrating, given that we are faced with billions of dollars of budget gaps in the future.”Mr. Miller is right that there’s no reason to be celebrating. The budget gap is set to grow dramatically, to $2 billion in fiscal year 2005. And that number is based on the assumption that municipal workers wrench no pay increases from the city this year. The Financial Control Board, however, issued a staff report last week saying that a $1 billion jump in labor costs is easily imaginable. These are circumstances in which the meaning of fiscal responsibility is going to come to be understood as policies that unleash growth in the city’s economy, which is the opposite of what Mr. Miller is talking about and which is what we’d like to think Mr. Bloomberg is starting to comprehend.

Certainly things have deteriorated for the mayor since that February election where all five candidates ran against him; a June New York Times poll found the mayor with a 24% approval rating, the lowest for a mayor in the poll’s 25 year history. This number came out after Mr. Bloomberg supported the imposition of “temporary”sales and income tax hikes on New Yorkers, over the objection of Governor Pataki — who, incidentally, scored a higher approval rating of 42%. On the day that poll came out, Mr. Bloomberg all but endorsed the City Council speaker for reelection in a New York One interview, saying: “If he were in my district I’d probably vote for him.I think he’s doing a good job.” This was a shock to the Republican running against Mr. Miller, Jennifer Arangio, who expected the support of her Republican mayor. Given Ms. Arangio’s support for tax cuts, and the obstacle Mr. Miller now poses to Mr. Bloomberg’s reelection, maybe the mayor will think better of that endorsement.