GABE PRESSMAN, Host: -- Mayor Bloomberg said recently that the state of the city was good. Our guest today disagrees. Fernando Ferrer, former Bronx borough president who failed in his bid to win the Democratic nomination for mayor in 2001, is trying again. He hasn't announced officially that he's running, but it's clear he is. Ferrer has criticized the mayor for trying to build a stadium for the New York Jets on the West Side, and on other issues.

With polls showing that he does very well among Latinos and African-Americans, Ferrer is trying to build a much broader coalition, invading predominantly white precincts where Bloomberg's support is very high, in places like Staten Island and Howard Beach. A Quinnipiac poll this week showed that Bloomberg and Ferrer were tied, each candidate favored by 43 percent of registered voters. The mayor, according to this survey, came out ahead of other prospective Democratic challengers, including Council Speaker Gifford Miller, Manhattan borough president Virginia Fields, Congressman Anthony Arena and City Councilman Charles Barron.

Announcer: From Studio 6B in Rockefeller Center, this is a presentation from News Channel 4, Gabe Pressman's NEWS FORUM. Now your host, senior correspondent Gabe Pressman.

PRESSMAN: And good morning, and welcome, Mr. Ferrer. The Quinnipiac poll, as I just pointed out, shows that you're now tied with Mayor Bloomberg after leading him for months among the voters polled. He's gaining, and you, relatively speaking, are slipping. Is that true?

Mr. FERNANDO FERRER: Well, Gabe, first, I'm glad to be back with you again. Polls are going to go up and down, especially 10 months before any thought of a general election. I take them all in stride. What I'm focusing on, in fact, is the mayor's relative silence in the face of things like the governor's budget which cuts health insurance for working families, women and children, which increases college tuition, which maintains the sales tax, the most regressive tax in the state, which falls heaviest on working people and the poor in terms of buying clothes and other supplies for themselves and their families. Those are the things that I think are important and, I think, that New Yorkers are beginning to react to.

PRESSMAN: He's a Republican. He ran as a Republican. Do you think that his Republicanism is hurting New York City in that he's loyal to the governor and the president?

Mr. FERRER: Well, Gabe, I think everybody knows he's a Republican. And while some may try to make much of it, I prefer to focus on the policies. The mayor can't say, on the one hand, that he dislikes the policies that are hurting New York and New Yorkers and, on the other hand, support the very authors of those policies--a Republican president, a Republican governor, Republican United States senators and a Republican State Senate. You got to fish or cut bait here, Gabe. And my belief is those policies are hurting the city, are adding more to the cost of everything from rent to food to fuel to health care and certainly to education.

PRESSMAN: Speaking of the president, do you think that the Iraq War should be an issue in the mayoral campaign?

Mr. FERRER: Well, mayor, no borough president, no city council has a vote on the war. If anybody did, it might be a different outcome. But certainly we, as Americans, have a right, and Americans in public service and public position have an obligation to be heard on a war that--for which there was no real justification, and which has been incredibly expending our national wealth and ...(unintelligible).

PRESSMAN: Are you going to hold the mayor's feet to the fire because he is a Republican and the Republican president took us to war?

Mr. FERRER: Well, I think the mayor's in the right party, Gabe. He's in a party that's been authoring policies that have been detrimental to the middle class and to the working class. He's in the right party, and now he's got to defend those policies. I prefer to focus on the policies. Those policies have been hurting this city. And the mayor of this city doesn't work for a governor, Republican or Democrat, a president, Republican or Democrat, or any other legislature. The mayor of this city works for 8.1 million New Yorkers.

PRESSMAN: OK. To get back to the question, do you think the Iraq War should be an issue in that he's a Republican and it's a Republican president who's at the helm?

Mr. FERRER: I think it should be an issue only inasmuch as he's the mayor of New York, and the mayor of New York has an obligation to speak when resources, important resources, are being diverted from this city, such that we're shutting down firehouses in New York and building them in Baghdad.

PRESSMAN: And what about the boys from the five boroughs who are risking their lives?

Mr. FERRER: Not only the boys and the women from five boroughs who are risking their lives, but some, too many, who are making the supreme sacrifice.

PRESSMAN: Didn't mean to slight the women.

OK, let's talk about some of the issues that you just raised. There's the West Side stadium. The mayor strongly supports that, and there is considerable division in the community as to whether it should be built or it shouldn't be built to accommodate the New York Jets. What's your position on that?

Mr. FERRER: Well, Gabe, for a year and a half, I've been in opposition to the stadium. This has essentially been a fight among three billionaires, the decisions about this being made by two agencies, one state and one city, that nobody ever heard of and nobody ever elected, in somebody's back room. Now we...

PRESSMAN: Those agencies are?

Mr. FERRER: The Empire State Development Corporation on the state side, and the EDC on the city side. But here's the point, Gabe. The mayor, I think, has an obligation to take that argument out of the back room and put it before the voters. Now late last year, the mayor appointed a charter revision commission to investigate the fiscal health of the city. In my view, there's nothing that more profoundly affects the fiscal health of the city now and in the generations to come than the expenditures of untold hundreds of millions of dollars on a West Side stadium.

So the mayor has an obligation, I believe, and I call upon him to do that--I hope he's watching this broadcast--to call upon his charter commission to put this measure on the ballot this November for a vote. It's time to take the secret debate, the lack of disclosure on all the facts out of the back room, bring it in front of the public and let the people vote on it. And the only way they can decide on this issue, let them get a shot at this issue, let them decide how to spend their own money is to vote on this in a referendum this November, up or down.

PRESSMAN: Up or down, you would like a referendum on whether to build a Jets stadium.

Mr. FERRER: Let the mayor do the right thing and trust the wisdom of the people of this city. Let them decide. Let's have a robust debate and let them decide, once and for all, whether this should be built with taxpayer funds.

PRESSMAN: Now the mayor did have a referendum on something, and he stubbed his toe, the non-partisan election proposal, which you opposed.

Mr. FERRER: That's right, and nobody asked him to put this on the ballot. This was his own idea. I think most people in this city want an opportunity to decide this and to vote on the measure in November, this November.

PRESSMAN: So you're daring him to do that?

Mr. FERRER: I'm calling upon the mayor to do that, do the right thing, for not only the full access of people to a decision that will affect their own lives, but do the right thing in terms of a democratic process.

PRESSMAN: Why are you against building this stadium? Are you against having the Olympics? The stadium would be a lure to the Olympic Committee to locate the 2012 Olympics in New York.

Mr. FERRER: You know, Gabe, I don't know whether we're going to get them or not, but I don't think the Olympics in this city should masquerade as an economic development policy, nor should a West Side stadium, especially when we're talking among only three billionaires about spending untold hundreds of millions of dollars just on the stadium.

PRESSMAN: The billionaires are, to get it straight, are Mike Bloomberg, the Empire State Corporation and the Economic Development...

Mr. FERRER: No, Mike Bloomberg...

PRESSMAN: Right.

Mr. FERRER: ...the owner of the Jets, Woody Johnson, and the owner of Madison Square Garden, Chuck Dolan.

PRESSMAN: Who's very much opposed to it.

Mr. FERRER: That's right. But this shouldn't be an argument among those three billionaires. Let 8.1 million New Yorkers get a crack at deciding their own destiny and their own future. I believe if you give the people of this city all the facts in a timely way and let them vote up or down, they'll arrive at the right decision. What are we afraid of, the people deciding?

PRESSMAN: Some of the mayor's supporters might think this is a very cute way, on your part, of influencing the outcome of the election for mayor, by having a referendum that presumably you think a lot of people would vote no on at the same time that Mike Bloomberg is running for re-election.

Mr. FERRER: Gabe, if the mayor decides to call on his charter commission, which he can do, to put this on the ballot for a vote in November, I'll be the first to congratulate him for doing the right thing for democracy and decision-making in this city, and it should have nothing to do with an election which I hope will include me and him.

PRESSMAN: So you have thrown down the gauntlet.

Mr. FERRER: I'm calling upon the mayor to do the right thing.

PRESSMAN: Let's talk about some other issues, Mr. Ferrer, after this.

(Announcements)

PRESSMAN: And we're back here with Fernando Ferrer, a presumed candidate for mayor in the election of 2005.

You said, I believe, a few moments ago, that you hope to be on the ballot with Mayor Bloomberg. Is that an announcement that you're running?

Mr. FERRER: I expect to make the formal announcement in the next eight or so weeks, Gabe, but I have every expectation that I will be a candidate for mayor this year.

PRESSMAN: So this is an informal announcement without the benefit of a tuxedo.

Mr. FERRER: Just between us Bronx boys.

PRESSMAN: That refers to the fact that I was born in the Bronx and you were born in the Bronx.

Mr. FERRER: That's right, yeah.

PRESSMAN: Now having been through the mill, having gone through the heat of a Democratic primary in 2001 and losing narrowly to Mark Green, aren't you risking getting another bloody nose by going for it again?

Mr. FERRER: Gabe, where I grew up, bloody noses were the least of our risks. And, in fact, I didn't check my strong feelings about this city and its prospects, hope and possibilities at the door at the end of 2001. I still believe strongly that this is a great city that should be a better city for every New Yorker. And that's the only way it maintains it greatness.

PRESSMAN: Now Mike Bloomberg grew up in a middle-class family in Boston or in a suburb of Boston, and he can claim democratic roots, too, in a way, with a small D.

Mr. FERRER: I suppose he can in a small way. But Gabe, he's a Republican. He's in the right party, as far as I am concerned, with respect to the issues that he supports and the issues that he espouses.

PRESSMAN: Reputedly, he has $100 million, or he could have $100 million of his own money to spend. Does that present an insurmountable obstacle to you?

Mr. FERRER: Mike Bloomberg will have the full weight of his personal wealth, of the wealth of his charitable foundation and his giving and the weight of incumbency. But at the end of the day--and by the way, that is daunting. But at the end of the day, the people of this city and the voters of this city are no fools.

PRESSMAN: He's pri...

Mr. FERRER: We both have records. We both have a point of view. And in the marketplace of ideas, a positive vision for this city--not attacks, not a blizzard of mail in your mailbox or so many political ads on television that you have to turn your TiVo on to blank them out. But in the marketplace of ideas and positive visions for this city, well, I have a vision of this city that I hope will resonate with voters, and Mike Bloomberg will have all the opportunity and certainly all the means to promote and project his vision for the city.

PRESSMAN: Well, among the things in his vision--let's talk about his first--he prides himself on accomplishing the centralization of education and the improvement thereby of the school system of New York. He's done away with social promotion, he says, and--for third-graders and fifth-graders. He has parent coordinators in the school. So what's so wrong with that?

Mr. FERRER: Gabe, I would agree with you, that it was a stunning success in achieving mayoral control of the school system. I think he's been a failure in terms of what he himself promised New Yorkers, teachers and parents--dramatic improvements in the New York City public school system. When reading scores have remained flat for three years, that's not anyone's problem but his. He had the opportunity to turn that around. I believe he's failed in doing that. And I think if you talk to enough parents and teachers and kids in this city, they feel the palpable absence of a positive direction in the system, so much so that I don't think anyone could call the last three years of this school system a resounding success.

PRESSMAN: What would you call it?

Mr. FERRER: I'd call it, at present, a failure, but with an opportunity, with a real opportunity to achieve some strong gains for reading and math scores in this city. See, for example, the mayor chooses, in the social promotion initiative that he launched, third-grade hold-backs, his aim was to stop, and I think he was right, stop the practice in moving kids up a grade simply because they got a year older.

PRESSMAN: Yeah.

Mr. FERRER: But that missed a whole point of doing the things we all know work--certified teachers in the earliest grades, smaller class sizes, more consistent curriculum, longer school days, longer school years. We know those things work, and the question I have for the mayor is: Why aren't you doing them?

PRESSMAN: You would do that?

Mr. FERRER: I would do that instantly, rather than spend $32 million to try to move, last summer, 1,800 kids from level one to level two. At $17,000 a child, I would have spent that money reducing class size. I would have spent that...

PRESSMAN: Level one to level two in reading and math?

Mr. FERRER: In reading.

PRESSMAN: In reading.

Mr. FERRER: Yeah. Move them from level one to level two, like, 1,800 more kids, and I think that's terrific. But at the cost of $17,000 a kid, Gabe, that's an example of doing less with more.

PRESSMAN: `There's a spirit,' the mayor said in his State of the City message, `in the city now, a confidence, an expectation for the future that is new and exciting.' True or false?

Mr. FERRER: I think that's the spirit of New York that's always existed. We're a city of optimists. We're a city that can persevere through just about anything. Ask any New Yorker who ever lives through a blackout--and I've lived through three of them already--or lived through 9/11. We all know what it is to live through adversity, to live through challenge, to live through danger. That's not what we ought to be talking about. We ought to be talking about making this a better city for every New Yorker.

PRESSMAN: `We've taken our city,' the mayor said in his message, `from fiscal crisis to fiscal stability.' True or false?

Mr. FERRER: Oh, I think we have some very big fiscal risks around the corner, as I hope the mayor himself would concede. We have a looming multibillion-dollar budget deficit this year we're going to have to bridge. We have rising costs in the city. We also have rising challenges in the city. The mayor himself had indicated that he was, even in the midst of fiscal crisis, committed to building more affordable housing. Now that's an indication and recognition, I think, of the fact that this city is becoming less affordable to the middle class and to the working class. We have a crisis of affordability in this city, and it's something I think the mayor should be focusing on. That's something I want to focus on--housing, schools, health care, how we can work our way, if we're poor or if we're in the working class, from our station in life into the middle class is the great challenge of New York.

PRESSMAN: `We are creating new jobs,' the mayor said. True or false?

Mr. FERRER: Well, interestingly, if he's talking about the 900 jobs that increased in the month of December, that might be a signal achievement, but I don't think it represents anything more than a drop in the bucket. In fact, in the mayor's State of the City, he said, `We're at an all-time low in unemployment, 5.4.' A few days later, literally a few days later in the same week, we got the revised unemployment statistics, and we went up nearly a full point in unemployment. And that hits communities in this city that have some of the largest and most chronic unemployment where jobs are scarce. And those are the things we have to focus on--growing jobs in New York City, long-term jobs in New York City.

PRESSMAN: Specifically how?

Mr. FERRER: Training people to take these jobs, taking the chronically unemployed and moving them from welfare to work, making our school system work so that we can continually, as a matter of course, graduate literate and numerate children who are able to compete in an increasingly complex and global marketplace.

PRESSMAN: He said in his speech, `We are safer today than we have ever been in modern memory.' Are you saying that the appointment of Ray Kelly as police was not a major step in the right direction?

Mr. FERRER: I happen to like Ray Kelly, and there are a number of people in this city who knew that, had I become mayor, I might well have appointed him, too. Simple fact, however, Gabe, is we have a police force that, today, today, right now, is 6,000 fewer at all ranks than we were at the end of 2000. When we're not only trying to keep our city safe from domestic criminals but international criminals as well, that's a daunting job. In fact, while we're talking about that daunting job, we're also dealing with the fact that we still haven't settled our labor contracts with firefighters, police officers and teachers. Now that's a looming...

PRESSMAN: Well, how did the crime rate go down, then?

Mr. FERRER: Well, the--I would ask--I would not answer your question with a question. I would simply say the crime rate has gone down in this city because of the great work of the police department. They're doing double work. But it's also going down in Chicago. It's also going down in Los Angeles. I think we're dealing with national trends as well. But New York is a unique national target for terrorism. So in fact, we're asking cops not only to do two kinds of jobs, but when we have an event like the Republican National Convention in Madison Square Garden, we have 15,000 cops around that. When they're around that, guess where they are not. They're not in Staten Island. They're not in eastern Queens. They're not in the north Bronx.

PRESSMAN: OK. Let's come back and talk about some personal things, including the influence of your grandmother, after this.

(Announcements)

PRESSMAN: I'm back here with Fernando Ferrer, a presumed Democratic contender for the mayor's job.

Mr. Ferrer, in your life, your grandmother had a great impact, great influence, didn't she?

Mr. FERRER: Yeah, my grandmother and my mother. I was raised by both of them when my mother and father divorced when I was eight. She worked the last days of her working life in the best job she ever had, in the kitchen of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel.

PRESSMAN: She was a chef?

Mr. FERRER: No, she was working in the kitchen, cutting salads and doing other things, I mean, as so many thousands of people continue to do in this city, even in that hotel. And every time I go into a hotel like it or the Waldorf itself, see people who are working in the kitchen or serving the food and think about her. She worked hard to do better for herself and for her daughter and for us.

PRESSMAN: Did she have a message for you? Did she influence you in some particular ways?

Mr. FERRER: She was a very simple woman, but the message from her was from her example. She worked, didn't complain about it, worked as hard as she could. She retired. She was a member of Local 6, the Restaurant Workers Union. She had a great health system, and it saw her through until the day she died.

PRESSMAN: Education was important in her book?

Mr. FERRER: There was an expectation, a very high expectation that I would go to college and that I would do the best I could. That's something that perhaps is a little lost in telling all the stories about all of our lives, high expectations, what we expect of ourselves, what we expect of our kids. I think we need a lot more of that in New York.

PRESSMAN: More family influence, more of a family kind of structure?

Mr. FERRER: Well, look, I didn't have a two-parent family from the age of eight on, but I had high expectations. My mother expected me to go to college, to finish. I'm a lucky guy. Hope and opportunity met me halfway on Fox Street. I went to college on two scholarships. I took a state exam for a State Regent Scholarship.

PRESSMAN: What school did you go to?

Mr. FERRER: NYU.

PRESSMAN: Well, a fellow alumnus.

Mr. FERRER: University Heights.

PRESSMAN: No, I went downtown. But the Fox Street influence. You grew up on this street, same street that Powell grew up on, the outgoing secretary of State. Is that correct?

Mr. FERRER: Two blocks away. He grew up on Kelly.

PRESSMAN: And what did you learn there?

Mr. FERRER: How to play stickball, how to live a life with a lot of different kinds of people in the neighborhood I grew up. I'll give you an example. When I went down to get the paper, there was The Daily Mirror...

PRESSMAN: The Daily News.

Mr. FERRER: ...the Daily News, the Post, Il Progresso in Italian, the Forward in Yiddish, the Irish Echo. Everybody had a paper there. Everybody lives on the block.

PRESSMAN: Right.

Mr. FERRER: If you wanted to sample the great cuisines of the world, you just went to your friend's house for dinner. It was a great place to grow up.

PRESSMAN: And when the winter came, there was halavah in that Jewish candy store.

Mr. FERRER: And how many people know what halavah is?

PRESSMAN: Well, we'll have to discuss that some other time. Thank you very much, Fernando Ferrer...

Mr. FERRER: Thank you.

PRESSMAN: ...for joining us this morning. I'm Gabe Pressman. Have a great day.