Bill de Blasio Has to Pay NYC a $9 Registration Fee to Become Mayor, But What About the Unrequired Inaugurations?

New York City’s mayor has to pay a $9
registration fee when filing his oath of office form, a
bureaucratic procedure the city’s other elected officials also have
to complete, a fact highlighted by the Wall Street
Journal, which also notes that in 2001 the fee was only 15
cents, the amount it had been for a century.  The
Journal
reports:

From a legal standpoint, the signing of the form, the
payment of the $9 fee and the signature in the official register
are the only requirements for Mr. [Bill] de Blasio to assume the
powers of the mayor at 12 a.m. Wednesday.

For ceremonial purposes, Mr. de Blasio plans to recite the oath of
office at two different points on Wednesday. The first is scheduled
to take place at Mr. de Blasio’s home in Park Slope at 12:01 a.m.,
with Attorney General Eric Schneiderman officiating. That event is
considered private for family and other special invitees, but will
be streamed live on the web at nyc.gov.

A private event streamed live for the world to see is an apt
encapsulation of the way de Blasio has been able to capitalize
politically on his private life. When de Blasio’s adult daughter
announced last week she had a substance abuse problem, in a video
produced by the de Blasio campaign, Chris Smith
explained in New York:

Yet packaging and releasing the news after De Blasio
has been safely elected, on Christmas Eve, when many civilians and
much of the media is otherwise occupied, muffles the immediate
headlines — though it will stoke questions about how De Blasio can
make his family such a prominent part of his political life and
demand privacy at the same time… When I asked De Blasio, not along
ago, about whether it was dangerous to turn his wife and kids into
media figures, he answered serenely but emphatically. “You have to
understand, our family is different in the way we think about
things,” he said, describing how his politics and his family were
so intertwined as to be inseparable. “This is who we are, this is
how we live, this is how we’ll always live.”

The “public” inaugural ceremony to be held at noon tomorrow at
City Hall, meanwhile, will have Bill Clinton swearing in de Blasio
in an event the mayor-elect
promised would be “for all New Yorkers.” The Journal
doesn’t specify whether that ceremony is taxpayer-funded, though
it’s safe to assume that at the very least the security-related
expenditures will be, and that the $9 fee won’t come close to
covering them.