Demonstrators don’t want new budget horrors

Last week was a busy one at City Hall. A veritable parade of potential victims protesting Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed budget cuts took turns occupying its steps at various times.

All of them shared one basic message: Stop demanding more sacrifices from working people.

Impressively, more than 3,000 people — teachers, child-care workers and activists from across the five boroughs as well as children and parents in danger of losing affordable child-care, which would force them to quit their jobs — rallied on the steps of City Hall.

Their message was a simple one: The City Council needs to reverse Bloomberg’s disastrous cuts and fully restore the child-care funding eliminated in his proposed city budget for the new fiscal year, which begins July 1.

“Our community, like many others across this city, is being devastated by these cuts,” said Li Jung Chan, an assistant day-care teacher in Chinatown during the rally. “We’re counting on the City Council to do the right thing.”

If the mayor’s budget is approved, 47,000 low-income and working-class children would be pushed out of after-school programs.

“If the city takes my son out of child-care, I won’t be able to keep my job and support my family,” said Mayra Delgado, a legal assistant in Manhattan and the mother of a 3-year-old. “In tough times, the child-care that working families depend on should be the last thing the mayor and City Council cut.”

Impressive as it was, the childcare protest was not the only one.

Hundreds of advocates for homeless children who would be left to fend for themselves, and hundreds of supporters of the city libraries which would have to close many branches or drastically reduce their hours of operation if the mayor’s plan is approved, also rallied at City Hall last Thursday.

If the mayor’s budget is ap- proved, public libraries, one of the few free services used by millions of working-class people in New York at a time of growing poverty, unemployment and homelessness, would be decimated. The Queens Library system alone would lose $26.7 million, which means that 605 people would lose their jobs, 18 libraries would close altogether, 30 more would close four or five days per week.

Only one library would be open on Saturdays, and there would be no Sunday library service at all.

A draconian reduction of $7.2 million from the New York City Department of Youth and Community Development’s already insufficient $12 million budget for homeless youth is also on the block in the mayor’s budget.

“Mayor Bloomberg gives lip service to serving the city’s youth, but this budget reflects his true priorities,” says James Bolas, director of education with Empire State Coalition. “The budget for youth homeless services is already beyond inadequate, and these cuts will show Bloomberg turning his back on homeless youth.”

According to the Campaign for Youth Shelter, the the department provides only 250 youth shelter beds. In 2008, the Council released the results of a census of New York City’s homeless youth, which found there were 3,800 youths without shelter.

These would be some of the consequences of the mayor’s budget. If it sounds like a horror story — it is.

Bloomberg, who last Thursday vetoed the popular living-wage bill the Council had passed by a wide margin, seems to have forgotten that he was elected to be the mayor of all New Yorkers, low-wage workers and the poor included.

The message the City Hall demonstrators are sending Bloomberg is an end to devastating budget cuts that disproportionately affect low-income New Yorkers.