Workers have been busily preparing the stage for tomorrow's post-ticker tape parade ceremony where Mayor Bloomberg gives the Super Bowl XLVI Champion Giants keys to the city. The ticker tape parade begins at 11 a.m. at Battery Place and Washington Street, and then the floats go up the Canyons of Heroes to Worth Street, to be showered with tons of locally sourced confetti, which is an upgrade after toilet paper celebrations. more ›

On Saturday, Parents for Occupy Wall Street led a Rally Against NYPD Bullies, to denounce "bullying and specifically the recent actions of NYPD Police Brutality." Kids painted signs and 5,000 paper hearts in Union Square, "one to represent each peaceful protest arrested over the past 3 months," and brought them to the gates of City Hall. But NYPD officers standing watch apparently didn't appreciate the arts and crafts, and began tearing them down to cries of "Shame!" and several children weeping. more ›

Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott warned today that the city is facing “strong possibility” of a school bus strike next week, one which Bloomberg says would result in "chaos." Local 1181 of the Amalgamated Transit Union is threatening to strike over the city's plan to ask for bids for service to transport special education pre-kindergarten children for next school year. “So the union is threatening an illegal strike that would harm the education of more than 152,000 students if it doesn’t get its way. And that’s just outrageous,” Bloomberg said at City Hall earlier. more ›

Nine years after Science Applications International Corporation bled the city's coffers of $600 million for Mayor Bloomberg's timekeeping fiasco that no one seems to care about, the company has fired three executives linked to the project. In a letter obtained by the Daily News, SAIC's CEO wrote to employees yesterday, "The kind of behavior we have seen in CityTime is criminal and is an affront to everything SAIC stands for as a company." It's unclear whether he scribbled in the margins, "But we're still keeping the cash." more ›

Former Secretary of Defense and closet flesh-eating lizard Donald Rumsfeld once said, "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want." The statement can be applied to the Department of Sanitation's lack of tire chains during last year's blizzard that kept everyone's block nice and smelly. But it appears that Sanitation will attempt to wing it on the cheap again this year: instead of buying new ones, they're going to instruct workers how to make better use of the old ones. more ›

Remember CityTime? It's Mayor Bloomberg's $740 million boondoggle to modernize the city's payroll administration that—oh look, Willow the cat! Anyway, it turns out that Bloomberg is really good at wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on implementing technological advances that years later appear to be abject failures. The Times reports that $363 million has been spent on Nycaps, a plan to "modernize" the personnel information on the city's employees that originally was budgeted for $66 million in 2002. That's right, $297 million spent over nine years for a website made in 1996. more ›

City Councilman Jumaane Williams (D-Brooklyn) and Kirsten Foy, Public Advocate de Blasio's Community Affairs Director, were arrested this afternoon after the West Indian Day Parade in Brooklyn. NBC New York reports that based on witness accounts, "the confusion began when Williams and...Foy...attempted to exit the parade route to attend a luncheon at the Brooklyn Museum. After passing through an initial police checkpoint, Williams and his group were blocked by three police officers from exiting the route." more ›

Well, that was fast! After little more than a year the former mayor of Indianapolis and blizzard whipping boy Stephen Goldsmith is stepping down as Deputy Mayor of Operations "to pursue private-sector opportunities in infrastructure finance." He's being replaced by DEP head Cass Holloway, who (funny that) used to be the chief of staff to the previous Deputy Mayor, Ed Skyler. more ›

The firehouses will not be closing. As part of the same City Council budget agreement that saved 4,100 teacher jobs the 20 fire companies that were being threatened with closure, including the Ghostbusters firehouse, have been saved. Protesting works! more ›

Governor Cuomo and Mayor Bloomberg's bromance has gotten off to a rocky start. Cuomo wowed Albany by passing a money-saving budget on time, Bloomberg deemed the resulting cuts to New York City "an outrage." The two have vehemently disagreed in the past on the Last In First Out policy for the state's teachers, which the mayor said kicks "some of our best teachers to the curb," while the governor compared Bloomberg's favored bill to the one limiting collective bargaining efforts in Wisconsin. Now, sources tell the Post that the mayor is cutting Cuomo out of the planning efforts for the 10th anniversary of 9/11 in part because the governor removed Christopher Ward—"a Bloomberg guy"—from the head post at the Port Authority. more ›

We knew that Mayor Bloomberg's city budget was going to be painful, but we didn't realize it would lead to a fight between reporters at City Hall. Witnesses tell the Daily News that two reporters, WABC 7's Dave Evans and blogger Rafael Martinez Alequin, got into a heated exchange while listening to Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott, with Evans saying, "Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me like that again, or I’ll flatten you," and Alequin replying, "f---ing f-----t." Uh-oh. more ›

The rally for women's health wasn't the only protest to happen in Manhattan yesterday. Hundreds of protesters gathered at City Hall yesterday morning in support of government worker unions in Wisconsin. Wisconsin lawmakers debated a proposal made by Governor Walker that would end collective bargaining. Protesters said an end of collective bargaining was an attack on the middle class: “We’re reducing American workers’ wages to a global, Third World wage,” one woman told CBS 2, “and it makes the people at the top wealthier." more ›

Kelsey Grammer, beloved to the masses as everyone's favorite stuffy barfly shrink Frasier Crane, has been embroiled in a dramatic, bicoastal divorce that cost him $50 million, but he is now free to marry his 29-year-old fiancee Kayte Walsh. TMZ spotted him today at our own City Hall (the marriage bureau?), but it turns out his 27-year-old daughter Spencer got married. more ›

Mayor Bloomberg has gone on an efficiency rampage and installed "count-up" clocks that staffers must turn on at the start of meetings to show how much time has passed. "We're not here to sit around and meet with each other—we're here to get things done," the mayor's press secretary tells The Wall Street Journal. Four of the clocks are already in place at City Hall, and eight more are on the way. It's unclear how staffers will cope with this constant reminder of the inexorable onward march of time, but they should probably be glad Bloomberg hasn't taken their chairs away (yet). As Bloomberg wrote in his autobiography, "It's amazing how much quicker and more focused stand-up conferences are." more ›

Yesterday, the official City Hall portrait of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani was unveiled. Giulaini joked, "You wonder why it took so long for my portrait to get painted. I'm superstitious about portraits. They're for dead people. I have this whole superstition. So [wife Judi] talked me into it. And you unveiled the portrait, I'm still here, I guess the superstition doesn't work." But he wasn't joking when he discussed 2012 with a reporter. more ›

Yesterday, Notify NYC alerted people, "U.S. military aircraft are scheduled to perform 3 separate flyovers near the Statue of Liberty on Oct 22nd at 11AM, 1PM and 2PM," but then followed up today with, "The military aircraft flyovers of the Statue of Liberty scheduled for today, October 22 have been cancelled." But there will be "a low flying helicopter flight over City Hall Park in Manhattan today, October 22 between the hours of 5 PM and 8 PM for a film shoot." more ›

Not satisfied with the no apology they received from Mayor Bloomberg over his insensitive "cowboys and Indians" statement, members of a number of Indian Nations gathered on the steps of City Hall to chant for "leadership." Onondaga leader Oren Lyons explained to the Times-Union, "What's wrong with a Jewish man egging on a black man to shoot an Indian?...I had a lot of respect for that man and what he's done in New York City, but now...His people went through a holocaust and they have a museum in Washington, D.C., to show the pictures. We don't have a museum to show the holocaust; they wouldn't show the pictures." more ›

[UPDATE BELOW] Police are currently deploying a tall ladder to forcibly remove a demonstrator named Jessica Sunflower (if that is in fact her real name!) from a tree in City Hall park. Sunflower and other activists converged there this morning to protest a change in city rules that would cost community gardens legislative protection against housing developers. These rules will replace a 2002 agreement that allowed some gardens throughout the city to thrive over the last decade. more ›

Over the past few weeks, the City Council has been moving from City Hall into temporary offices on Broadway, because a $106 million renovation project is being conducted on the 198-year-old building (it was completed in 1812). The AP, which calls it "one of the nation's oldest continuously-used city halls," reports that during a smaller renovation project a few years ago, "Officials found widespread failings and alarming decay: cracks through the trusses that support the roof, a rotting basement floor, wiring that was known to spark and dangerously sagging ceilings." more ›

The NY Times used the Freedom of Information Act to find out exactly who is landing coveted City Hall internships. And, SURPRISE, many of the interns are the children of the rich, famous and/or connected: "They are the children and relatives of boldface names, like Lloyd C. Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs; Peter G. Peterson, co-founder of the Blackstone Group; and Laurence A. Tisch, who was a hotel mogul and chief executive of CBS... The roster has also included grandchildren and stepchildren of people with ties to Mr. Bloomberg and his friends, including the grandson of Robert A. Caro, chronicler of Robert Moses, and the stepson of Neil Simon, the playwright, who endorsed Mr. Bloomberg last fall." more ›

After the NY Times reported on the apparent lack of diversity among Mayor Bloomberg's senior City Hall staffer, the City Council may be taking a look. According to the Times, "The New York City Council is considering holding oversight hearings into racial and gender diversity at the top levels of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s administration, according to council members." more ›

The NY Times has a front-page story on the apparent lack of diversity in Mayor Bloomberg's top ranks: "Despite a pledge he made when he took office to make diversity a hallmark of his administration, Mr. Bloomberg has consistently surrounded himself with a predominantly white and male coterie of key policy makers," based on the NY Times' study. Though NYC's non-Hispanic white population is 35%, "Mr. Bloomberg presides over an administration in which more than 70 percent of the senior jobs are held by whites, and he has failed to improve on the oft-criticized diversity record of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani." more ›