Mike's Personal Mayoralty

A bit more on the changes in senior staff at City Hall, where a source tells The Politicker that the departing chief-of-staff, Peter Madonia, won't be replaced. Instead, Ed Skyler and Patti Harris will split the chief's responsibilities, with key agency heads, like Ray Kelly, reporting directly to the Mayor. The bottom line here is that Mike is dispensing with a layer of technocrats who ran the mechanics government while the Mayor and his people learned their way around, veterans of city government like Madonia and first Deputy Mayor Marc Shaw. The core of the new cabinet -- Deputy Mayors Harris, Sheekey, and Skyler -- is composed of people who worked for Bloomberg LP, and who will be likely to follow the Mayor back to the private sector (if not into the presidential campaign of Sheekey's dreams). So this will probably be a much more personal term than the last one, in the sense that Rudy Giuliani's mayoralty was intensely personal. (Mike, who has no organized opposition, is in that way more powerful than Rudy.) Now he's losing a buffer of permanent bureaucrats, a change that comes with an upside (more control) and a downside (more excess). In any case, it'll be all Mike.