{NEW YORK TIMES} -Kenneth S. Axelson, a J. C. Penney executive who was foisted on New York City Hall as a deputy mayor during the 1975 fiscal crisis to restore integrity to the city’s extravagant budget, and who left after a year with his goal largely accomplished, died on May 23 in Rockport, Me. He was 93.
The cause was chronic kidney failure, his son Stephen said this week.
Mr. Axelson, at the time a senior vice president for finance and administration at the department-store chain, was enlisted by Mayor Abraham D. Beame at the urging of Gov. Hugh L. Carey of New York and the bankers and other bondholders who had precipitated the crisis by refusing the city’s routine request to borrow more money.
As the first deputy mayor for finance, Mr. Axelson profoundly influenced the administration’s grudging response to what Mayor Beame himself acknowledged were years of “fiscal gymnastics” that had burdened the city with a $3.3 billion cumulative deficit. The annual operating budget then was about $12 billion.
When Mr. Axelson returned to the private sector in 1976, Felix G. Rohatyn, the chairman of the Municipal Assistance Corporation, which was created to borrow on the city’s behalf, said Mr. Axelson had “provided a level of integrity to the city’s numbers, and a degree of trust, that was unparalleled.” READ MORE OF THIS STORY
