New York, NY –
Mayor Bloomberg says the city needs to close a 5 billion dollar budget deficit by making deep cuts. WNYC's Ailsa Chang has the details.
REPORTER: He says you don't measure the quality of city services by the quantity of city spending. So he's looking to lay off about 834 city employees and it looks like those workers will mainly come out of the health department, the department of finance and the department of housing preservation, to name a few. Who won't get cut: police officers, firefighters, corrections officers and sanitation workers. He also said he'd be eliminating about 20 fire companies, some nurses in various elementary schools, HIV caseworkers, but there won't be any tax increases. That said, he said you can forget about raises. There's no money even just to keep the current amount of employees the city has right now.
WNYC's Ailsa Chang.
Carol Kellerman who's the president of the citizen's budget commission says the mayor's budget is actually putting a rosy spin on things. But she applauds the mayor for not proposing tax increases.
KELLERMAN: In this kind of an economy, any tax increases are counter productive. We have to start to learn how to run our government with the amount of revenue that we have.
Budget negotiations with the city council will continue through the spring. The 2011 fiscal year begins in July.
Ailsa Chang is an award-winning journalist who covers criminal justice, terrorism and the courts for WNYC. She found her way into public radio after practicing law for five years, and can definitely say that walking the streets of New York City with a microphone is a lot more fun than being holed up in the office writing letters to opposing counsel.
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