Bill de Blasio was pacing the conference room, listening to small-business owners in Long Island City, Queens, bemoaning municipal red tape, when he relayed the tale of a frustrated laundromat owner whose water bill was inflated, erroneously, by an extra zero.
“The system is not based on trying to give you a ready, available opportunity to appeal, or a fair way to actually make sure that all the facts are looked at,” Mr. de Blasio said, prompting a few “Yes! Yes!” incantations reminiscent of a Sunday service. “Let me ask — how many people in this room have seen their water bills go up sharply in the last year? Raise your hand.”
Up rocketed a dozen or so arms, vindication for Mr. de Blasio, who has increasingly made amplifying the concerns of small-business owners a cornerstone of his expected campaign for mayor of New York, and a cudgel with which to critique not only Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg but also one of his probable rivals in the Democratic primary, Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker. He does not have the bully pulpit or the historic candidacy that have allowed Ms. Quinn to garner much of the attention thus far, but he is also freer to run with the voice of a populist outsider, despite having held public office for years.
Mr. de Blasio, the city’s public advocate, has sharpened his pitch since a reporter first tagged along with him six months ago. He now stokes audiences by noting that, after hearing complaints at forums, he filed a lawsuit recently against the Bloomberg administration for data on city revenues from fines, which have nearly doubled in the last decade.
“If small-business people in this city did not have those additional burdens, if they could depend on not being socked with those additional charges, it would be easier for them to grow, it would be easier for them to employ more people — it’s as simple as that,” he said at the forum, held at LaGuardia Community College.
Mr. de Blasio is also deploying more sarcasm. Asked by one businessman about the confusing signs governing the proliferating bicycle lanes that eat up parking spaces for delivery vehicles, a frequent topic, he quipped: “You obviously missed a new law that says all signs have to be in hieroglyphics now.”
And when someone vented about the time-consuming frustrations of challenging certain fines, Mr. de Blasio replied, “I want to say, in defense of the Environmental Control Board, they are slightly more fair than the Spanish Inquisition.”
Mr. de Blasio’s de facto five-borough listening tour, largely under the auspices of his day job as public advocate, has echoes of the early stages of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2000 Senate race, which he managed. Yet Mr. de Blasio dismisses the suggestion that his sojourns are part of a long-term realpolitik to enhance his mayoral prospects.
“This is how I did things long before I became public advocate,” said Mr. de Blasio, a longtime Brooklyn resident who previously represented Park Slope on the Council. “You need a feedback loop to be an effective public servant, and you need to refresh it all the time.”
During a visit in June 2011 to a preschool in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Mr. de Blasio marveled at the advanced curriculum being taught to underprivileged children. That experience shaped his much-discussed proposal earlier this month to tax the wealthiest New Yorkers to bolster early education — a suggestion that Mayor Bloomberg promptly dismissed as “dumb.”
During a round-table discussion in January with the Bronx Chamber of Commerce attended by about 15 small-business owners, Mr. de Blasio got an earful about excessive and inaccurate water bills. Seven months later, he convened a public hearing, the first by a public advocate on any issue in recent memory.
One of the most frequent complaints Mr. de Blasio hears is about traffic and parking, and he can relate to them, because he usually drives himself to events. So now, with more than 36,000 miles on his two-year-old city-issued Ford Escape hybrid, he has no shortage of stories about battling traffic on the Cross Bronx Expressway (“That’s where schedules go to die”) or dialing 311 (“I call in when I see a traffic light not working”).
“For the mayor, the bullpen is the center of the universe,” Mr. de Blasio said during a recent drive to Queens, his headset draped over his head, and pink Spalding balls nearby. “For me, it’s being out in the neighborhoods, and overwhelmingly in the outer boroughs.”
No event appears to be too small. Such was the case when he attended a recent lunch meeting of the Greater Jamaica Development Corporation with six people, including two longtime Queens political insiders.
Mr. de Blasio zeroed in on the tax status of the development corporation, a nonprofit organization whose finances have been questioned. The corporation’s annual tax bill jumped from $600,000 to $1.5 million after the Bloomberg administration revoked the tax-exempt status of parking garages it operates.
“Obviously we want to help,” Mr. de Blasio said, adding that he was considering a broader idea to help nonprofit groups. “You can’t make some of this stuff up.”
