Editor’s note: This story appears in the May 3-16 print edition of the Norwood News. It’s an extended version of last week’s post about the bill, which also included video of Council Speaker Christine Quinn walking out of the presser announcing passage of the living wage bill.

After nearly two years of campaigning and many significant revisions, the City Council last week passed a version of the controversial Living Wage bill, which was introduced by two Bronx council members and born out of a 2009 fight over wages at a shopping mall proposed to fill the Kingsbridge Armory.

The bill, which Mayor Bloomberg has vowed to veto, would require some developers that receive significant taxpayer subsidies to pay workers $10 an hour with benefits, or $11.50 without.

“The ‘Fair Wages for New Yorkers’ Act will guarantee that, when major developers take city dollars they will do right by their employees and taxpayers,” said Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr., who helped lead the campaign for the bill’s passage. “This legislation will fundamentally improve the way business is conducted here.”

Diaz and other city leaders hailed the bill as “historic,” though its scope was greatly narrowed from its original version. Council Speaker Christine Quinn — planning to run for mayor in 2013 — revised the bill to appease its critics, namely the business community, which argues it will stifle development and kill jobs.

In the amended version that passed, the higher wage mandate applies only to workers directly employed by developer receiving subsidies, but not to workers employed by tenants within those developments. So building maintenance workers at a publicly subsidized mall, for example, might be entitled to the higher wages, but retail employees at stores within that mall would not qualify.

The shopping mall plan for the Armory was rejected by the City Council in 2009 because the developer, Related Companies, would not agree to pay workers employed there a living wage, despite receiving millions in tax breaks and public subsidies.

Bronx Council Members Oliver Koppell and Annabel Palm, who sponsored the original bill, also made a number of changes to weaken the legislation in order to get it passed. The criteria for the projects that would have to comply was narrowed to developments receiving tax breaks of $1 million or more (up from the originally proposed $100,000), and excluded manufacturing companies, commercial tenants in affordable housing projects, and businesses earning less than $5 million in revenue.

In spite of these concessions, Mayor Bloomberg says he’ll veto the bill.

“If you want to encourage a business to open in a particular location that no one has been willing to invest in for decades, you cannot tell them that they have to pay a higher minimum wage than the competitor across the street. They won’t do it. And those jobs will be lost, and so will the tax revenues they would have generated,” he said in a statement last week.

Quinn called Bloomberg’s opposition “disappointing,” but said the bill has enough council member votes to override his veto.

“This year alone, city benefits to businesses and developers will cost taxpayers nearly $250 million,” Quinn said in a press release last week. “All we are trying to do is ensure that taxpayer investment is going to subsidize jobs that pay a reasonable wage.”

Bloomberg has threatened a lawsuit if his veto is overridden.