NATION IN BRIEF : NEW YORK : Koch Urges Dinkins to Increase Taxes

In his last State of the City address, Mayor Edward I. Koch urged New Yorkers to stand behind his successor and said many of the upcoming fiscal woes of the city’s first black mayor could be blamed on Ronald Reagan and George Bush. “If he fails, the city fails,” Koch said of mayor-elect David N. Dinkins, who knocked him out of a fourth-term bid in the September primaries. Speaking to a joint session of the City Council and the Board of Estimate, Koch painted a dire picture of the city’s fiscal future and advised Dinkins to raise taxes. The mayor criticized the Reagan and Bush administrations’ “no new taxes” policies, which he claimed have forced state and city governments to raise taxes to make up for lost federal funding.