“The people of this City had to reach deeper into their pockets to get us through the past two years. They are the true heroes of this crisis. Now that the crisis is beginning to subside, it’s time to reward them, and reduce the burden on their shoulders.”

— Mayor Bloomberg, at yesterday’s State of the City speech

Mayor Bloomberg’s announcement during yesterday’s State of the City address that his preliminary budget would give homeowners a $400 rebate that the mayor inaccurately claimed “would roll back” his 18.5% property tax surcharge put us in a mind to recall the stingy old lady who gave her grandson for his birthday a teddy bear that the boy had lost at her house months earlier. But even this interpretation is over-generous. When the mayor instituted the surcharge, he explained that the idea was that all the city’s citizens were to “share the pain.” And now that the immediate fiscal crisis has passed, rather than end the surcharge the mayor has opted for a stealth redistribution that re-allocates money mainly to outer borough home owners, with no relief for business owners or apartment dwellers. In its blatant payoff of dollars from mostly Manhattan-based businesses and apartment dwellers for outer-borough votes, the speech is properly understood as the beginning of the mayor’s re-election campaign, just mid-way through his term.

How this is going to play out remains to be seen, of course. Thos. Ognibene, the former council member who is vowing to challenge the mayor in the Republican mayoral primary in September 2005, is reminding voters of the old adage, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” But it was far better for the mayor to return some of the real estate tax hike to voters than to add it to the spending side of the City budget.

And there was an upbeat tone to the address delivered by the most liberal Republican New Yorkers have seen since Lindsay and Rockefeller. Hidden in the mayor’s speech was the idea of a return to the priorities established by his predecessor: controlling crime, improving the quality of life, and lowering the city’s taxes. This, in conjunction with Mr. Bloomberg’s success at regaining mayoral control of the school system — his most important achievement to date — provide some reason for hope, though it remains to be seen how far the Mr. Bloomberg will take this as the pending election starts to clarify his mind.