New York Daily News -
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Bloom's back on city: Mike
BY DAVID SALTONSTALL
DAILY NEWS CITY HALL BUREAU CHIEF
Thursday, September 16th, 2004
Agents blanketed the city with almost 10 million parking tickets last fiscal year - a blizzard of orange that netted City Hall a record $537 million.
The 9,997,000 tickets represented a 20% increase over the previous fiscal year, when Mayor Bloomberg hired 300 new traffic agents and doubled many parking fines in an effort to help the cash-strapped city.
Those are among the more pocket-pinching stats in the new Mayor's Management Report, an annual compendium of data that for the most part showed the city headed in the right direction.
During the fiscal year that ended June 30, crime dropped again, the number of city streets rated clean rose to a record high, traffic fatalities fell 10% and response times by police and firefighters were essentially unchanged.
"We have met New Yorkers' most pressing needs and are operating government efficiently and responsibly, despite the city's fiscal crisis and $3 billion in budget reductions," Bloomberg said.
Yet not everything was so rosy, especially among the city's poor.
The report, released yesterday, says that while fewer new families entered city homeless shelters last year, the total number of homeless families in the system reached a record high - an average of 9,091 each day.
Infant mortality rates rose slightly, as did the number of new AIDS cases.
The city's welfare rolls edged up for the first time in years - to 437,500, a rise of 4% but still well below the peak of 1.2 million in 1995.
Complaints about everything from rats to loud parties to potholes skyrocketed. But City Hall aides attributed those increases to 311, the city's new complaint line, which fielded a record 8 million calls last year.
Aides pointed to stats suggesting that agencies were staying on top of complaints. After last year's severe winter, for instance, pothole complaints surged 50%, but the city Transportation Department filled 96% of them within 30 days, according to the report.
The NYPD issued 30% more quality-of-life summonses than in the previous year. Cops attributed the hike to targeted crackdowns like Operation Clean Sweep and to 311, which steered some 400,000 complaints to the NYPD.
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