So much for all the talk about how the new speaker of the New York City Council, Christine Quinn is ready to work cooperatively with Mayor Bloomberg. It turns out that the new speaker is hatching one of the baldest raids yet on the taxpayers – and doing it in a direct affront to the mayor, who, back in September, refused a deal offered by 1199 Service Employees International Union that would have won him the union’s re-election endorsement in exchange for putting 25,000 home health care workers on the city payroll at a cost of $1 billion a year. The union went with Mr. Bloomberg’s Democratic opponent, Fernando Ferrer, who refused to rule out putting the workers on the city payroll.

Now that Mr. Ferrer has lost the election, the union is pinning its hopes on Ms. Quinn. And she is playing along. Or so we gather from a press release that crossed our desk late yesterday from the union announcing, “City Council Speaker Christine Quinn to Announce the ‘Quinn Principles: Fair Labor Practices for Home Health Aides’; 1199 SEIU Launches Massive Home Health Aide Advocacy Campaign.” That’s how deep Ms. Quinn is in the union’s pocket – the press releases announcing her activities are coming from the union rather than from the speaker’s own office.

One of the reasons the people of New York elected Mr. Bloomberg rather than Mr. Ferrer is that they thought the mayor would guard the public purse from the demands of the public employee unions. It’s ironical that the Quinn initiative comes as the Washington Post is fronting, in today’s editions, the news that health care expenses have soared to an unprecedented 16% of the American economy. And as William Weld is campaigning for governor saying that Medicaid expenses – which in New York are more than California’s and Texas’s combined – are one of the two “big enchiladas” to be tackled in Albany. The event planned for today starts Ms. Quinn off on the wrong foot with the mayor – and the taxpayers.