Mayor Bill de Blasio said 22,000 city employees could be laid off in October because of the economic hit associated with the coronavirus pandemic without a plan to relieve the city financially.
“The overwhelming cost of local government is personnel. Where we put our money is into the people who provide services to New Yorkers, whether they’re first responders, healthcare workers, sanitation workers, educators, you name it,” de Blasio told reporters Wednesday, repeating a warning he first made in June.
“If you’re going to keep cutting and keep cutting, it has to at some point reach personnel. It’s just pure logic of budgets, and it’s very sad logic. I don’t like it one bit, and I want to avert this at all costs. So, that 22,000 number is painfully real,” he said, noting the increasing sense of urgency.
New York City lost $9 billion in tax revenue during the last fiscal year after the coronavirus sparked an economic downturn.
“We have to come to grips with the fact that on top of the healthcare crisis, on top of the economic crisis, we are now in a crisis here in the city,” de Blasio said in May. “Our fiscal situation has gotten worse. … But it’s not shocking to me.”
The New York City mayor is seeking a multimillion-dollar federal aid package to help assist the city, but he said Wednesday that plan “appears to be dead now.”
De Blasio is also in talks with municipal labor unions to make labor cuts that could save $1 billion, according to Politico.
“It’s a massive, painful number. It resembles the kind of things we had to do decades ago. But the job here is to try and avert it if we can,” he said of the 22,000 people potentially losing their jobs.
Retailers and other business owners in the city have felt the financial pinch and have closed their doors, in some cases for good.
J.C. Penney, Kate Spade, Subway, and Le Pain Quotidien permanently closed their locations in the heart of Manhattan, the New York Times reported Tuesday. Other large chains, such as Victoria’s Secret, TGI Friday’s, and Gap, still have their Manhattan locations but are keeping them closed even as they reopen locations in other areas.
“There’s no reason to do business in New York,” said Michael Weinstein, the chief executive of Ark Restaurants. “I can do the same volume in Florida in the same square feet as I would have in New York with my expenses being much less. The idea was that branding and locations were important, but the expense of being in this city has overtaken the marketing group that says you have to be there.”
Residents of the Big Apple are also packing their bags for the suburbs, with some citing coronavirus restrictions and an uptick in crime as reasons for their departure.
“People are fleeing the city in droves,” Moon Salahie, owner of Elite Moving & Storing in Yonkers, New York, told the New York Post. “The least movement would be the Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue crowds. Those people don’t have to leave because they have second homes.”
