Mark Page

To see Mark Page testify at a City Council finance hearing is a bit like watching a standoffish professor defend an academic paper to a panel of overconfident college first-years.

Some questions to the city's budget director are well informed and intelligent. Others are asked as if they are.  read more »

Despite some evidence suggesting that Michael Bloomberg doesn’t have the authority to stop the $400 property-tax rebate checks from going out, the mayor told reporters this afternoon that the issue is fiscal, not legal.  read more »

The head of the Citizens Budget Commission, Carol Kellerman, draws a comparison between Michael Bloomberg's use of $2 billion set aside to pay for future health-care costs and draining a trust fund.  read more »

Mark Page, the dry but not humorless city budget director, has been testifying for two and a half hours in the City Council chambers, mostly defending the mayor’s plan to rescind the $400 rebates and assuring one skeptical councilman that “your premise, that the world ends June 30, 2009, I don’t think is realistic,” and that an eye has to be kept on the city’s long-term financial health.  read more »

With the city's fiscal future looking bleak in the coming years, city Comptroller Bill Thompson is pushing at today's meeting of the Financial Control Board for a rainy day fund for the city's budget, in order to better balance the bad times with the good.

Following up on his report issued yesterday, the city's chief elected fiscal official highlighted in prepared testimony the rising debt burden of the city, a pot of tens of billions of dollars that has swelled as the Bloomberg administration has pushed economic development projects and modernization of crumbling infrastructure.

The result to the budget: A whole lot more city money going to debt service as revenues fall.  read more »

Here’s Mark Page trying to respond to Eric Gioia’s agressive inquiries about the budget at City Hall today.

Robert Jackson didn't approve of fellow Councilman Eric Gioia’s line of questioning at a hearing on the Council's phony-appropriations scandal this afternoon.

“I think it was political grandstanding on the part of Eric Gioia and his run for public advocate. But, quite frankly, I don’t know if he received any brownie points in that.”

Councilman Eric Gioia grilled the city’s budget director about the slush fund scandal during a heated Council hearing in City Hall just now.

Gioia asked, pointedly, whose job is to make sure there are no phony organizations in the city budget and what guarantees exist to ensure there are no fake groups in this year’s budget.

The budget director, Mark Page, said at one point that he felt like he was “being grilled by a local prosecutor.” He added, “I’m not sure this is the forum for you to be asking me these questions.”

When pressed about whose job it was to catch the phony groups, Page said that his agency got a list from the City Council, implicitly laying the blame with the head of the City Council, Christine Quinn. (One of her top aides, Chuck Meara, was sitting in the front row in the City Council chambers during the hearing, taking note of the exchange.)

Page told Gioia, “Your question about assurance from me that there’s nothing fraudulent in the line items [of the budget], logistically, is -- looking backwards -- is a problem for me as to how to do it.”  read more »

State Budget Director Laura Anglin is pushing back against what she calls the “inaccurate and higly misleading” comments made this morning by City Budget Director Mark Page, who told the City Council that the state is shortchanging the city.

In a public statement released today, Anglin argues that the city is blaming the state for a national economic downturn, and the city isn’t pulling its own weight.

Excerpts from Anglin’s statement after the jump.  read more »

Saying that the city is going to receive a “direct hit” from the budget Eliot Spitzer proposed, Mark Page, the city’s Director of Management and Budget, just announced that City Hall is seeking an additional three percent cut in city spending, on top of the five percent cut they announced earlier.  read more »