NYC mayor cuts $4.76 billion in budget

NEW YORK, Feb. 13 (UPI) -- With New York City still reeling from the terrorist attacks, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced Wednesday his first budget aiming to close a $4.76 billion deficit.

"A slowing economy and the Sept. 11 attacks opened a projected $4.8 billion deficit for the fiscal year 2003 budget," Bloomberg said. "You will be just as safe on the streets as now, I hope the streets will be just as clean, but some services you are used to getting may be cut back, but we hope none of them will really hurt in a physical sense."

Bloomberg's Fiscal Plan and Preliminary Budget for FY 2003 totals $41.3 billion and calls for no new taxes and no layoffs, but all city agencies would be cut and higher fees are proposed.

In the budget:

* The NYPD would remain at 39,100 after 1,600 recent retirements. The police budget would be cut by 7 percent or $212 million;

* The fire department would be cut by 6 percent or $62 million, but an additional 73 firefighters would be hired;

* The Board of Education would be cut by 7 percent or $361 million;

* The Department of Housing and Preservation Development would be reduced by 26 percent or $18.6 million;

* Services for the homeless would be cut by 17 percent or $38 million;

* $39 million would be cut from the libraries;

* Expansion of a daycare program would be postponed, saving $80 million;

* Suspending the city's recycling program of cans, bottles and plastics would save $57 million.

"This budget hurts everybody," Bloomberg said. "It is a spread your pain, no sacred cow budget, in these tough fiscal times, we must learn to do more with less."

According to Bloomberg's budget, the mayor's office, the borough president's offices, the city council, the comptroller and public advocate's offices all would be cut by 20 percent.

Bloomberg said city services would be evaluated to see if they are needed or working effectively. The mayor said an example of some of the service cuts would be the animal shelters which are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

"In order to keep feeding kids in school we'll have to ask you keep the stray cat or dog overnight because the shelter hours will be cut back to 12 hours a day, seven days a week," said Bloomberg. "The libraries may have to cut back hours."

One controversial item will be the suspension of the city's recycling program, a system Bloomberg called "inefficient."

"It's not being cut forever, just temporarily for, hopefully, just a year," Jordan Barowitz, a city hall spokesman told United Press International. "Right now it costs $130 a ton to dispose of refuse and $240 a ton to recycle bottles, plastics and cans -- it's costing the city more to recycle than to dispose of these materials and by disposing of them we save almost $60 million a year."

Bloomberg wants to change the state Beverage Container Law, passed in 1982, so that the city would collect the cans and bottles that currently have a nickel deposit when purchased and have the city take over this function away from the grocery stores. Food stores currently take the bottles and cans back and return the five-cent deposit back to consumers. It's estimated the city would get $50 million from the container deposits.

"We would call it a recycling user fee and the consumer wouldn't get the nickels back but the consumer wouldn't have to return the container back to the store," Barowitz said. "But the paper recycling would continue and the fine for not recycling newspaper would go up from $25 to $50."

Bloomberg said he will push the state Legislature in Albany to approve a $1.50-city tax on a pack of cigarettes. The mayor also wants to add a $1 city tax on monthly cell-phone bills.

The Republican mayor's budget cuts total $1.8 billion and he proposed to make up the difference in the deficit by adding $1.5 billion to the city's current $40-billion debt load. In addition, Bloomberg wants $500 million more in savings through attrition and an early-retirement program that would result in the reduction of 5,000 jobs from the city's 250,000-member workforce.

He also wants a slowdown of cost-of-living increases for city pensioners. Bloomberg is also calling for cutting the capital budget by more than $1.5 billion.

To further reduce the deficit, the new mayor wants $800 million in additional aid from the state and federal governments.

The cuts will be on top of $1 billion in cuts made by former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani following the terrorist attacks. Before Sept. 11, New York City had carried a surplus.

(Reporting by Alex Cukan.)