Yassky’s Cuts

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The New York Sun

With the City Council and Mayor Bloomberg in the midst of negotiations over this year’s city budget, most of the suggestions we’re hearing are for increased spending. So it’s refreshing to see a council member come forward with some suggestions, however modest, for saving the city some money.

The city’s budget this fiscal year is going to end June 30 with a roughly $1.2 billion surplus. That’s the result of a crushing state and local tax burden — the highest in the country. One of the reasons taxes are so high is wasteful spending by the city government.

David Yassky gives two examples. The first relates to the city’s jails. Four stand empty, including one on a prime piece of land in downtown Brooklyn. The city’s capital budget includes plans to spend $16 million on renovations to the Brooklyn jail, even though the facility has no inmates and there are no plans to house inmates there. “If we don’t need it anymore, let’s sell it,” Mr. Yassky says, describing “spending money on buildings that they have no plans to use” as “a textbook example of government folly.”

The second relates to street sweeping. There are parts of the city where motorized street-sweeping vehicles brush their way through the streets twice a week. Each street-cleaning means that residents who park their cars on the street have to move them, which is a pain.”The residents would be overjoyed to have just once a week,”Mr. Yassky says.”I don’t see why we should be spending money on services people actually don’t want.” He reckons that the $70 million the city spends each year on street cleaning could easily be reduced by $1 million. And he says Council Members Bill deBlasio and Simcha Felder agree with him.

If the other Council Members — including Speaker Gifford Miller — would take a break from their demagoguery against Mayor Bloomberg’s budget cuts and start coming up with savings of their own, maybe our government’s spending could shrink to a level at which we New Yorkers would no longer have to pay the most taxes in the country to support it.


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