(Laura Cavanaugh)
For a guy who doesn’t take cabs, Mayor Bloomberg is facing an extraordinary taxi bill: a $1 billion shortfall for the city treasury that he warned yesterday could force him to lay off city workers.
That’s how much extra the mayor says he’s going to have to slice from the city budget after a judge blocked him from selling 2,000 new yellow-cab medallions.
“The appeal probably won’t be heard for a while,” Bloomberg explained. “So we’re going to have to start cutting and economizing long in advance.”
Layoffs are a real possibility.
“Attrition doesn’t work in a slow economy,” he said when a reporter asked if pink slips would be considered. “You got any other questions?”
The city was counting on pulling in $635 million this year from the medallions, $365 million next year and $460 million in 2015.
With the next two years as his immediate worry, Bloomberg said the $2.5 billion budget deficit projected for fiscal 2014 has suddenly ballooned to $3.5 billion over the next 22 months.
One insider charged that Bloomberg has no one but himself to blame since he allowed the medallion sale to be tied to his controversial proposal for creating a new class of outer-borough taxis.
“He was fighting every step of the way [for the outer-borough plan],” said the insider. “He should never have counted on the [medallion] money in the first place.”
But in adversity there also may be opportunity.
The judge tossed the mayor’s grand taxi expansion plan on the grounds he didn’t get approval in advance from a reluctant City Council before pushing it through Albany.
One source suggested Bloomberg might now have leverage to go before the council for that approval, warning that he’d otherwise be forced to impose very serious service cuts.
“These threats are really designed to lay this all on us or the council,” worried one taxi industry source.
The source said the politically influential taxi industry is willing to support a bill authorizing the medallion sale alone without the outer-borough component.
Accepting such a course, however, would leave Bloomberg without what he wanted in the first place: a fleet of cabs that exclusively serve residents outside Manhattan.