Maybe City Hall ought to shut down. That seems to be the message from our second-guessing state and federal judges. Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Kathryn Freed is but the latest example.
Believing she has not only the authority but the technical background to override FDNY experts, Freed banned the city from using firetrucks more than 11 years old for anything but fires, as The Post's Julia Marsh reports today. Even gas or hazardous-material emergencies would not be grounds to roll out these trucks.
The legal case for Justice Freed's overreach may be thin, but the precedent, alas, is extensive. On Monday, federal Judge Shira Scheindlin found one of the city's most effective crime-fighting tools, the NYPD's stop-and-frisk program, unconstitutional. Earlier, another federal jurist, Nick Garaufis, had in effect named himself fire commissioner by dictating the department's hiring policies.
Kathryn Freed
Garaufis was slapped down by a higher court, so maybe Freed figured that left an opening. In any case, she dismissed warnings by folks such as Chief of Department Edward Kilduff — who surely knows better — that her restrictions will potentially endanger "numerous lives."
True, only 13 trucks are affected. And the city is hoping replacements arrive soon. But however limited Freed's decision may be, it is but one part of the slow drip of a strangling overreach that takes authority from officials who run our most vital institutions and gives it to an insulated caste of unaccountable judges who substitute their own whims for public policy.
And then we are shocked when we find these city institutions become almost impossible to run.
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