Politics & Government

10,000 Jobs Cut? Bloomberg Slashes City Budget

Teacher layoffs, library closings, more could hit Forest Hills.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a series of drastic cost-cutting measures Thursday morning, slashing the budget of every city agency, the effects of which could be deeply felt in communities like Forest Hills.

The cuts include eliminations of city jobs in the form of layoffs, reductions in library and education funding and more. They're all in the interest of closing a budget with a gap of more than $3 billion for Fiscal Year 2012.

Bloomberg justified the cuts, saying the city's workforce had grown too large to sustain without the benefit of federal funding that is slated to end this year.

Find out what's happening in Forest Hillswith free, real-time updates from Patch.

"We face a significant challenge for next year, as federal stimulus dollars run dry and the city still suffers from the impacts of the national economic downturn," Bloomberg said. "We began working to attack next year's deficit immediately after passing this year's balanced budget, and there is still more work to do. More spending reductions are going to be necessary, and we have to continue to reduce the number of employees we have by not filling positions — we simply cannot afford the size of our current workforce."

The most deeply felt cuts are likely to be those in education, where the city is slashing $350 million from the budget. That loss will reduce the number of jobs in the department by more than 6,000.

Find out what's happening in Forest Hillswith free, real-time updates from Patch.

In addition, library funding will be reduced by $20 million, resulting in the likely closure of libraries for one additional day per week citywide.

The police department will lose 350 civilian jobs and stretch their vehicle budget further, while the staff at 20 firehouses across the city will be redeployed overnight, possibly resulting in the closure of some firehouses.

All told, Bloomberg said, the city will eliminate more than 10,000 jobs in the next two years.

, district manager of , said the cuts would definitely be felt.

"We do understand that the city and state and country has a tough economic situation going on, and we will try and work with what we have,  but it's getting harder to do," Gulluscio said. "I'm really concerned with the big four: police, fire, sanitation and education. Those three are so paramount to what we do every day that cutbacks in those areas are serious."

Gulluscio said he worried about taking the city back to its troubled past — in particular the dirty, crime-afflicted New York of the 1970's.

"I go back to the 70's when there major cutbacks in the city of New York...schools were hurting at that point, and that's what we've been trying to build our way out of. We're trying to build this education system and now we're going to cut back teachers?"


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