The Bloomberg "bullpen" at City Hall is here to stay, thanks to Mayor de Blasio's refusal to spend taxpayer money on extravagancies like office space arrangement.
According to the Daily News, removing the cubicles and replacing them with a more traditional office would be “prohibitively expensive” for a city government that is trying to strike deals with the more than 300,000 unionized workers that Bloomberg left without a contract.
“It’s noisier than a regular office environment,” Dominic Williams, a de Blasio staffer, told The Daily News. “There are pros and cons to it. We can work with it and we're making it work for us.”
Former Mayor Bloomberg prided himself on the bullpen arrangement, where he sat at just another regular open-air desk like any other unapproachable average joe billionaire. Ironically, the more populist de Blasio prefers a private office—he's taken residence on the first floor of City Hall. But that doesn't stop him from just dropping in on employees, like a terrifying progressive giant.
“He'll just come in, walk up to someone's desk and talk to someone,” Williams said. Fortunately for staffers, his giant shadow always precedes his arrival by several minutes.
