On a rare day in the office, Richard Ravitch toggled among emails, discussed an op-ed newspaper column with a colleague and took several phone calls.
One of them passed along a request by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder to speak before the state legislature.
It's part of a busy schedule into which Ravitch shoehorned trips to Detroit, where he is consulting amid the backdrop of the nation's biggest municipal bankruptcy; book-signing parties in New York; a talk at New York University's Rudin Center for Transportation; and continued advisory work for the Volcker Alliance on state and local fiscal challenges.
It's life as normal for someone long regarded as a public service Mr. Fix-It.
"I've got the good fortune to have a lot of energy, even at the age of 80," he said smiling in his Rockefeller Center office adorned with historical city and transit artifacts.
Ravitch captured what he called "this crazy, eclectic life" in his new memoir: "So Much to Do: A Full Life of Business, Politics, and Confronting Fiscal Crises."
He chronicles the dark financial crises that engulfed the city and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in the mid-1970s to early 1980s. Later troubleshooting included stints as chairman of the sputtering Bowery Savings Bank and as New York lieutenant governor under David Paterson after Eliot Spitzer resigned as governor amid a prostitution scandal.
Alarmingly, he said, the specter of the 1975 New York City financial crisis hovers over cities and states today.
"Nobody learned the lessons from New York," Ravitch said during a lengthy interview. "Every other jurisdiction in the country claims a balanced budget, but they don't define the revenue part of it at all, unless they define proceeds as borrowing and asset sales. That's not a sustainable course.
"We're in deep doo-doo."
He favors budgeting under generally accepted accounting principles, which the state required New York City to adopt in 1975 as the city tried not to "drop dead," as that tabloid headline paraphrased President Ford.
"That was most significant," he said, noting that the city achieved budget balance under GAAP in three years.
Ravitch said a vivid example of budget gimmickry surfaced while he was lieutenant governor. While working on the fiscal 2011 budget, he noticed an item called "pension smoothing." The budget division showed him a bill that allowed the state and participating cities to make their actuarially required contributions to the pension funds not in cash but with 10-year promissory notes, so the state would not have to enter $600 million on the expenditure side of the budget and face pressure for layoffs or new taxes.
"They were calling it $600 million in savings. I was astounded," said Ravitch. "I said, 'Let's end this Orwellian double-talk. This is borrowing.'"
Red flags, he said, include the Detroit bankruptcy, Philadelphia's school district borrowing from the city to open its schools last year and Illinois' pension liability mess.
Though constrained in his comments about Detroit — bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes named him a non-testifying, unpaid consultant on matters of muni finance and viability — Ravitch spoke about the Motor City in general terms.
"It's a tragedy. You still have 600,000 people in that city that are underserved and underinvested in, and who are facing serious issues of survival. That's the human side," he said. "After World War II, there's been a steady decline in Detroit every year. And making promises to pay has added up to an $18 billion hole. Why did people keep extending credit?
"You go down the line. You see Chicago with its parking deal and Arizona selling its state capitol."
In the final report of their budget crisis task force in January, Ravitch and former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker called for financial transparency in government.
"I can't speak for the bond rating agencies, but my sense is they're getting more nervous," said Ravitch, who also is an independent board member at bond insurer Build America Mutual, representing public-sector members.
"S&P, I remember meeting with their senior people a few years ago and they told me New York State was rated A. I said 'forgive me, but what is rated A? Is it full faith and credit? Debt backed by the personal income tax? Agency debt? Do you keep it all together?' It's not like that anymore."
"Moody's has established its own methodology on pension funding. They're tightening up. They're getting concerned."
In "So Much to Do," his narrative includes the thrill of experiencing first-hand the "I've Got a Dream" speech by Martin Luther King speech in August 1963 and the chill of New York's banking leaders telling him point-blank in May 1975 that they would no longer underwrite the city's bonds and notes. The ensuing crisis put the city on the cusp of bankruptcy.
He sees parallels between Detroit today and New York in the 1970s. "From 1966 to 1975, banks underwrote and purchased products that the city had no chance of paying other than with the following year's borrowing," he said, voice rising with anger. "Finally, in 1975 they said they wouldn't write anymore."
In February, two months before banking leaders lowered the boom, the New York State Urban Development Corp. defaulted on $135 million of bonds. "They got scared after the UDC thing," said Ravitch.
The book also shines a light on major New York players, political and otherwise, Ravitch worked with over 35 years, including Mayor Ed Koch, governors Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo, and even Yankees owner George Steinbrenner.
He enjoyed working simultaneously with Carey and Koch, the latter becoming a personal friend over time despite sharp differences during Ravitch's MTA years, which ranged from ways to deal with the 11-day transit strike of 1980 to Koch's request to put wolves — "yes, wolves" — in the MTA yards to guard against further graffiti on subway cars.
"Carey and Koch lived such different lives and had different styles," said Ravitch. "Hugh Carey had 12 kids, Koch didn't have any kids."
U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan "was a dear friend." Other favorite people included labor leaders Lane Kirkland, Victor Gotbaum and Bayard Rustin.
In the book he wrote of Koch: "He was as narcissistic as any politician; but unlike most others, he could laugh at himself."
Carey: "He was extraordinarily smart, capable of understanding the nuances of complicated commercial and financial transactions and explaining them to politicians in their own language, even though many of them had trouble grasping basic financial principles."
Mario Cuomo: "There was no doubt that the fun quotient of the [MTA chairmanship] had been diminished by the governor's inexplicable hostility."
Steinbrenner: "[He] told me in classic language just what physically impossible act I should perform on myself."
Ravitch to this day relishes life as an independent thinker, to some an irritant.
While in the military and having earned his law degree, he got kitchen duty as payback for defending a fellow reservist — a Port Authority cop in civilian life — in a court-marshal proceeding. During the end of his tenure as MTA chairman, newly elected Gov. Mario Cuomo would not take his calls.
Early in his MTA tenure, one man — never caught — shouted Ravitch's name at MTA headquarters on Madison Avenue as he fired a gun and wounded an officer. The incident forced Ravitch to wear a 25-pound bulletproof vest during public appearances.
"People were asking me at a book party last night, how can they succeed in politics if they're an outsider?" Ravitch said. "I said, just don't attack. No ad hominem. Don't become a hater. Express your views with respect for the other person's point of view."
Peter Derrick, a transit historian, former MTA executive and author of "Tunneling to the Future: The Story of the Great Subway Expansion That Saved New York," recalled how effectively Ravitch worked on the MTA's initial capital plan independent of Carey.
"When I was working for John Caemmerer, then the chairman of the Transportation Committee, Ravitch pitched the capital plan. Caemmerer responded by saying 'Just tell us how we can be helpful,'" said Derrick, a visiting scholar at NYU's Rudin Center. "That started the whole negotiation, exclusive of the governor's office as opposed to today, where [Andrew] Cuomo wants to dictate the capital plan."
Ravitch's ways grated on Mario Cuomo — Andrew's father — who succeeded Carey. The elder Cuomo wouldn't take Ravitch's phone calls. "Cuomo didn't like him being independent," said Derrick. "With Cuomo, it was the same style of management as his son today, that of an egomaniac."
Jerry Kremer, a retired state assemblyman from Long Island and the author of "Winning Albany: Untold Stories about the Famous and the Not So Famous," said Ravitch's resume gave him more leeway.
"His credibility was sufficiently high that he could be more independent than the average person in the public eye. He didn't have to be politically correct," said Kremer. "He's the poster child for saying the sky is falling when it was actually true. He's like a Paul Revere trying to get governments to clean up their acts."
Ravitch said the city still has serious challenges facing new Mayor Bill de Blasio.
"Bill's got a steep learning curve," he said. "He's a man with a set of values that I admire, but it's a tough time to put those values into a plan because there's a shortage of resources."
Challenges include reduced state and federal aid, and deferred labor contracts with city employee unions.
According to Ravitch, straight talk can pay dividends years later. He recalled how the advocacy group Eastern Paralyzed Veterans Association endorsed him for mayor in 1989, nine years after it fought him over subway handicapped access when he was MTA chairman.
"The federal government threatened to withhold aid over the handicapped access, but we lacked the money to include a billion dollars in the capital plan. I invoked Henry David Thoreau and said we should engage in an act of civil disobedience," he recalled. "There were demonstrators in wheelchairs at the MTA office, some with missing limbs. My own kids thought I was some ogre that didn't care about handicapped.
"I told the TV people: 'The only reason they're here is because you're here. Turn off the cameras.'"
"A camera guy said: 'But we need a sound bite.'
"I said 'Bleep you.'
"Years later, when I ran for mayor, that group endorsed me, saying I was the only one that told the truth."
