Longtime first deputy comptroller STEVE NEWMAN will be retiring next week, after seven years with ALAN HEVESI and 16 with former comptroller HARRISON GOLDIN. While city government watchers might have expected the veteran to hang in until Hevesi gets his shot at the mayor’s office, Newman said he feels it’s time to hang up his hat. (The generous city retirement package that’s pulling scores of mid-management types into early retirement didn’t hurt, either.)

The city Department of Housing Preservation & Development said Friday it would be reorganizing its 7A program, which will no longer be run by SUSAN CARR. On Thursday, two housing inspectors were injured after falling through the floor of a Brooklyn building involved in the program, but the department insisted in a statement to City Limits that the reorganization was “planned before the accident and is unrelated to it,” adding that “the change has nothing to do with Susan.” (The 7A program, which puts dilapidated buildings in the care of court-appointed managers, has shrunk considerably in the last decade.)

And given some of GEORGE W. BUSH’S recent unlikely successes, we’ve started paying more attention to other hard-to-imagine scenarios–like the rumor that holds that city welfare commissioner JASON TURNER might be up for a top-level job at a Bush administration Health and Human Services.