State of the City ‘another Bloomberg snow job’

Mayor Michael Bloomberg blasted public employee pensions, current layoff rules and educators serving in the Absent Teacher Reserve in a State of the City address on Jan. 19 in which he said he would shrink the cost of government by going after public employee benefits rather than raise taxes to meet this year’s budget challenges.

UFT President Michael Mulgrew described the speech as “another Bloomberg snow job.”

In response to the mayor’s criticism of the cost of pensions to the city this year, Mulgrew said that the cost of pensions was spiking because of the Wall Street meltdown.

“His friends on Wall Street created this problem, but the mayor won’t join us in changing the law to let us sue the people who lost the money,” Mulgrew said.

The mayor also took aim at seniority provisions that govern public-sector layoffs, saying that current rules should be changed in part because laying off senior teachers saves more money than laying off a similar number of junior teachers.

Mulgrew responded: “I was disgusted. I have never heard a mayor say that people should be laid off on the basis of salary. He is saying people should lose their jobs for dedicating their lives to the children of New York City.”

ATRs were also in the mayor’s crosshairs in his speech. He asked Albany to help him deal with the ATR issue, which he called a “wasted” $100 million expense. He called for a limit to the amount of time a teacher can spend in the pool.

The ATRs — many of whom are veteran teachers who spent their careers in schools that the Bloomberg administration decided to close — were created by the Department of Education in the 2005 contract as a byproduct of former Chancellor Joel Klein’s insistence that principals should have complete discretion in hiring for their schools.

“I don’t know why the mayor has to go to Albany to get a change in a contract provision that he insisted on,” Mulgrew said. “The ATRs are in schools, they’re working, and the school system has the power to do right now the strategy we’ve recommended — to use them in schools to lower class size.”

The mayor vowed to gain concessions and givebacks in upcoming contract negotiations with unions representing city workers to address the budget shortfall. “I will not sign a contract with salary increases unless they are accompanied by reforms in benefit packages that produce the savings we need,” the mayor insisted.

Speaking before 800 officials and residents at the newly refurbished St. George Theatre in Staten Island, the mayor said pension reform would be his “number one priority in Albany” in the coming weeks. Bloomberg said that he would seek to increase the retirement age for new non-uniformed employees — which would include teachers — to 65.

In the only bright news for city schools, the mayor said he plans to double the number of attendance mentors to address chronic school absences, and he will seek private funds to boost the summer youth employment program.