On the city level, the mayor has proposed cuts to the Human Resources Administration's own much-criticized job programs, with the longstanding BEGIN job-skills program facing complete elimination in Bloomberg's doomsday contingency budget. Also hit hard: the Parks Opportunity Program, which provides six-month transitional jobs in the Parks Department to welfare recipients, and which under the mayor's PEG cuts would lose 319 of its 2,322 positions this year, and 737 more in 2011. HRA spokeswoman Barbara Brancaccio says the city plans to use federal stimulus grants to shift current POP workers into Back to Work or other subsidized job programs. "The clients won't be affected, but the funding streams will change," Brancaccio says.
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"Normally I'd say it's gamesmanship, but all my prognostications of common sense in governing have gone out the window," says New York City Coalition Against Hunger director Joel Berg. He notes that this is the first year as mayor that Bloomberg hasn't proposed emergency food cuts in his regular budget. "They all need increases, so any cut would be devastating. I'm assuming the mayor knows that, and purposedly picked options so dire that he would call attention to what this would mean."
But with the state budget facing multi-billion dollar deficits, it could end up a game of chicken with no winners. Says Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies policy analyst Liz Accles: "Bloomberg may be bluffing, but I don't know that the governor is."
