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Buried deep beneath the marbled New York County Surrogate's Courthouse are 100,000 cubic feet of documents ranging from a copy of the sales document signed by Peter Minuit in 1626 to the original plans for Central Park to Fiorello La Guardia's mayoral papers.
These are the Municipal Archives, the crown jewels of a tiny city agency Mayor Rudy Giuliani wants to dismantle but can't get rid of. The mayor's difficulty in eliminating the Department of Records and Information Services--which spends just $3 million of the city's $31.8 billion budget--provides a case study of the hazards of trying to reinvent government in a city where every expenditure has its own constituency.
In this instance, the mayor's plans to merge the agency--known by its acronym, DORIS--with the much larger Department of General Services has outraged the city's small but vocal archival community. They and their allies on the City Council have effectively blocked the move.
Stalemated by stalwarts
"One of the frustrations the administration feels is that its attempt to restructure city operations is being thwarted by many groups," says Donna Lynne, the mayor's director of operations. "On the one hand we are urged by the council and outside groups to reinvent and reengineer, but then we are criticized when we don't keep DORIS a separate agency."
Critics of the merger say, however, that...