ALBANY — Former Mayor Kathy Sheehan’s final budget book, the spending plan that helped push the city into its current fiscal mess, featured 45 photos of her.
The array included a photo of Sheehan sliding down the Lincoln Park pool waterslide, pictures of her interacting with schoolchildren, and several shots of the Democrat with shovels in hand at some groundbreaking or another. So frequent were the mayoral photos, you might have mistaken the budget for a personal photo album.
The intended impression, we can presume, was that of a city on the upswing thanks to the 12-year term of a mayor who had pulled Albany from the financial wreckage left by the prior guy. The pictures, along with the book’s boasting text, suggest that Sheehan wanted to tie herself to the budget, figuratively speaking, and hoped it would help define her legacy…