Quinn Sees A Brighter City Budget

Pushing back against Mayor Bloomberg's proposed cuts to the city's education budget, the City Council speaker is saying schools should be shielded from excessive belt-tightening.

"Although we recognize that the Department of Education will have to sustain budget cuts, we want to, to the best of our ability, make sure that those are limited as possible cuts to the classroom," Speaker Christine Quinn said yesterday. She added that the council wants to avoid "principals having to make a choice between an after-school program and other additional resources for their school." In addition to maintaining funding for schools, she identified keeping six-day-a-week library service as a key priority for the council in budget negotiations.

In her response to Mr. Bloomberg's preliminary 2009 budget, Ms. Quinn said the council is projecting $650 million more in tax revenues than the mayor's office, as well as an additional $558 million in agency reestimates. She said the new numbers, along with $160 million in additional cuts to agencies, would free up $1.37 billion to reduce the impact of a difficult economic period.

The predicted increase in tax revenue appears to conflict with a steady stream of bad economic news in recent weeks, including the unexpected collapse of investment bank Bear Stearns, but Ms. Quinn said the council's revenue projections were based on more recent data than is available to the Bloomberg administration. "We're looking at the question later than they did," she said.

Ms. Quinn did say the city's economic outlook overall is bleak, especially for fiscal year 2010, and that the 2009 budget would require between $800 million and $1 billion in cuts from city services. A spokesman for the mayor, John Gallagher, said the city's Office of Management and Budget would update its revenue forecasts at the end of April, thus shedding more light on the city's economic health.