The New York Times - November 16, 1986
Bruce Lambert

* Overcrowded jails have erupted in inmate uprisings, followed by accusations of guard brutality.

* Homelessness has risen to new records, and two shelter guards have been arrested in the stabbing deaths of two of the homeless.

* Experts have warned that AIDS threatens to become a national catastrophe - and New York has always had the most cases.

* Mass transit needs a multibillion-dollar refinancing; midtown is so congested that entry fees have been proposed for automobiles.

* School officials, wrestling with a heavy dropout rate, are split over a birth control program for teen-agers; they also have announced they need $4.5 billion to rebuild the system.

* And all this was capped last week by the rebellion of the police force against Commissioner Benjamin Ward's rotation plan to help inhibit corruption, by a growing budget gap that forced the Mayor to impose spending cuts and by the resignation of his trusted Corporation Counsel in the continuing exodus from the administration.

The extent to which corruption has distracted or impaired the administration is a matter of dispute. Earlier this year, the Mayor acknowledged that the scandals had delayed his agenda but said he was resolutely moving forward. To show he meant business, he undertook such controversial initiatives as his proposals to restrict smoking in offices and public places.

More recently the administration made news with proposals to house prison inmates on ferryboats, to build new shelters for the homeless in every borough and to test distribution of clean needles to drug addicts as a means of slowing the epidemic of acquired immune deficiency syndrome - a plan Mr. Koch rejected last year after consulting prosecutors, who opposed it.

But Raymond D. Horton, head of the Citizens Budget Commission, is worried. "I don't think anybody would quarrel with the proposition that the city has slipped behind in what it's doing," he said, though he praised the new commission the Mayor appointed Monday to reform the city's tax structure. He warned that major municipal labor negotiations in coming months will pose new fiscal hazards.

City Comptroller Harrison J. Goldin, a potential mayoral rival, put it more strongly. "The corruption phenomenon is consuming the administration's time, energy and focus needed to deal with so many problems, so they have a way of suddenly appearing to get out of hand," he said.

Meanwhile, one phase of the scandal drew nearer to resolution last week as the defense rested in the Federal trial of Stanley M. Friedman, the Bronx Democratic leader, and three co-defendants. Closing arguments were scheduled to begin Tuesday in the New Haven courtroom where the four defendants face charges of corrupting the city's Parking Violations Bureau.

Mr. Rohatyn is sympathetic and supportive of the Mayor. "It's a very, very difficult job, being Mayor of New York," he said, "and made more difficult by all of a sudden waking up and finding yourself in a cesspool of corruption that keeps popping up, which has to have a debilitating impact on government.

"The Mayor has been a good mayor, energetic and thoroughly honest, but let down by people around him. This is a very difficult time for him and the city's problems."

Some critics blame a lack of planning, a charge leveled at Mr. Koch long before the scandals erupted. "There's a bunker mentality in City Hall," said Councilwoman Ruth Messinger, a frequent Koch critic. "For nine years, this administration practiced crisis management." The scandals impair the administration, she said, as it struggles to keep top officials and "devotes more and more energy to a corruption watch."

"Let me out of town," said a School Board member, Edward L. Sadowsky, a former chairman of the City Council Finance Committee. He blames much of the city's predicament on a shortage of money. "Really," he said, "we're reaching a point of inadequate resources to solve problems because of the fiscal crisis and the deferral of solutions and because now the Federal Government will no longer help."

Mr. Sadowsky added: "We need a sense of vision of what we're trying to do. That's absent."

Responding to such attacks, the Koch administration points to initiatives like last week's proposal to install 630,000 residential water meters - a politically unpopular move designed to conserve water and ease the need for costly new supply systems.

Mr. Rohatyn, at least, remains hopeful. "The city has overcome a lot of terrible things in the last decade," he said. He offers the same prescription that rescued the city from bankruptcy: "a sense of realism and very strong political leadership." Even so, he said, the problems "are so large that the best you may be able to do is contain them - and the moment you do, something else happens."

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