Mayor Bloomberg did a terrific job when he spoke on Friday to the American College of Trial Lawyers at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. We reprint his prepared remarks on the opposite page. The mayor might have been a bit too polite when he asked this school of sharks to stop gnawing on the city’s various appendages. He even sought to appeal to their sense of civic duty. But he got onto the right plane when he sought to put the matter of tort reform in the political context. The trial lawyers have long invested against reforms of the system that brings them these big judgments. So they were clearly annoyed upon being told by the mayor, “We need reform and we need it now,” a reference to the tort gold rush in New York City, which cost more than half a billion dollars in the 2001 fiscal year. The mayor insisted that he intends to reduce this “half-billion dollar ‘tort tax,'” as he called it. The president of the New York State Trial Lawyers Association, Jeffrey Lichtman, promptly told the Associated Press, “It is regrettable that the mayor is seeking to eliminate the budget deficit by attacking those defenseless victims.”

No doubt Mr. Lichtman understood the potential impact of placing the tort issue in the context of a budget deficit looming at between $5 billion and $6 billion. In that context, the tort lawyers — who take an enormous share of the judg ments they win — tend to come into view in a different light. As the mayor said, these tort costs represent 10% of the budget gap. We’re not so sure hizzoner helped himself by digressing as to ways the city could spend money saved on tort cases (he said that reducing by half the city’s payout could help New York afford 5,000 more teachers or firefighters); clearly what the city needs to do is not spend but save. But given that Mr. Bloomberg has been claiming that there is no way to close the gap without raising taxes, it is encouraging that he is seeking out other ways the city can save money. The property tax hike he’s talking about saddling everyone with will barely cover the trial lawyers.

Clearly they’re not going to retreat at such talk. Mr. Bloomberg mentioned that it seems that every morning at the senior staff meetings the city’s corporation counsel, Michael Cardozo, reports another ludicrous jury verdict against the city. Mr. Cardozo recently stopped by the editorial rooms of The New York Sun to offer some insight into how the city plans to deal with the tort attack. One way is the establishment of a risk management unit in the law department, probably not a big bucks saving proposition. Another is an aggressive push for tort reform at Albany and the City Council (for that matter, New York could play a leading role in the debate at Washington). While the trial lawyer friendly state legislature is paralyzed on such measures, there will be on November 12 a City Council hearing on two bills that would limit pain and suffering awards to $250,000. The mayor’s case will be harder to put over now that he’s thrown in with the tort lawyers and their demagoguery in the matter of secondhand smoke. But it’s nice to see a leader of the city starting to engage on this issue.