In New Ad, Ferrer Blasts Mayor’s Failure To Secure Education Aid

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The New York Sun

Dressed in a suit and tie, Fernando Ferrer walks on water – and four separate continents – in his newest television advertisement, which attacks Mayor Bloomberg’s failure to secure education aid from Albany.


The 30-second spot, Mr. Ferrer’s second recent negative ad, shows the Democratic mayoral nominee pacing around a two-dimensional black-and-white map of the world.


“When Mike Bloomberg wants something bad enough, he really goes out of his way to get it,” he says. “Like when he wanted the Olympics, he went to Germany, Singapore, and Ghana.”


Playing on a theme that was hammered home by Cablevision during the battle over building a Jets stadium on the far West Side, Mr. Ferrer said the mayor’s Olympics-related travels came at the expense of the city’s public schools.


“Or else,” he says in the ad, “maybe he would have gotten the $23 billion the state owes us for education.And all that he had to do was make one more trip to get it – to Albany.”


According to a Bloomberg campaign spokesman, Stuart Loeser, Mr. Bloomberg has traveled to Albany a dozen times to lobby for the Campaign for Fiscal Equity funds. Governor Pataki, however, has vowed to fight the court ruling and is appealing the decision handed down a year ago.


A professor of public administration at Columbia University,Steven Cohen, said the ad – and another, milder attack ad on affordable housing released by Mr. Ferrer yesterday – are attempts to capture free press coverage and attention.


“When you’re 30 points down, you have to do anything you can to capture attention,” he said. “A negative campaign ad and negative rhetoric is pretty much what we can expect from the challenger. … It’s about the only tactic left for Freddy Ferrer.”


Mr. Cohen said he’d be surprised if the Bloomberg campaign followed suit with its own negative advertisements, because, he said, “Then the two of them become peers.”


Mr. Ferrer for months has been criticizing Mr. Bloomberg over education dollars. His initial primary season proposal called for implementing a stock transfer tax, which would raise $1 billion a year in money that would be dedicated to paying what the candidate considers to be the city’s share of the extra education aid ordered in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit.Mr. Ferrer has said that the contribution from the city would “leverage” the rest of the money from that Albany. Mr. Ferrer never mentions in his ad that he has a proposal to tackle the problem of education aid.


Mr. Bloomberg has maintained that the city should not have to pay any of the additional schooling price tag associated with the court order. Rather, he says Albany, which has been found guilty of under-funding New York City public schools, should pay the entire cost.


While Messrs. Ferrer and Bloomberg each say they need CFE money to fund some of their education plans, most observers of the prolonged court battle say the money likely isn’t going to be forthcoming, at least while Mr. Pataki is governor.


“Unless either this governor or the next governor comes in and says ‘Let’s settle now,’ it looks like it’s going to continue going through the court system, and that will take a good amount of time as it already has,” the chief of staff at the Independent Budget Office, Doug Turetsky, said. “Unless the governor changes heart very soon, I wouldn’t count on it for the next year.”


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