BY KEVIN DUGGAN
Amid this year’s massive
budget shortfalls, Mayor Bill
de Blasio’s offi ce is asking the
city’s community boards to voluntarily
lay off some of their
paid staff to help lighten the
load, but several local civic panels
have resisted City Hall’s
calls to sacrifi ce their workforce.
The head of one southern
Brooklyn board said the cuts
would make it harder for the
boards to advocate for everyday
constituent issues like garbage
pickup or tree pruning.
“Absolutely not, we have a
very small staff to begin with
and for us to voluntarily get
rid of another staff member is
out of the question,” said Theresa
Scavo, chairperson of
Sheepshead Bay’s CB15.
Scavo and several other
Brooklyn boards have rejected
the demand by the Mayor’s Offi
ce of Management and Budget,
which asked civic gurus in
a teleconference on Aug. 19 to
consider cutting back their paid
staff, which is usually around
three people per board.
Hizzoner has threatened
laying off 22,000 municipal employees
across all city agencies
by Oct. 1 to balance a $9 billion
city budget defi cit caused by the
COVID-19 pandemic.
Departments expected some
of their employees to get their
30-day notices Monday, but de
Blasio delayed handing out
pink slips after union leaders
urged him to take time to fi nd
other means of cost cutting, the
Wall Street Journal reported.
A spokeswoman for the
mayor declined to give a specifi
c date for the layoffs, saying
it was a “day by day” timeline.
“On the new date, the mayor
spoke to this today. It’s a day by
day thing,” said Laura Feyer.
Feyer refused to say whether
any of the boards have already
volunteered redundancies, but
noted that all agencies from the
mayor’s offi ce on down have
been asked to cut their workforce
and that the best way to
avoid that was for the state to
allow the city to borrow money.
“The City has lost billions
in revenue due to the impact
of COVID-19. All agencies and
organizations that have paid
staff, including community
boards and offi ces of elected offi
cials, have been asked to participate
in labor savings,” Feyer
said. “Long term borrowing authority
from Albany is the best
solution to avoid layoffs.”
The city’s 59 community
boards consist almost entirely
of 50 unpaid members each, but
they also have a handful of salaried
city employees, such as a
district manager and a couple
of supporting staff.
These workers run the
boards’ district offi ces, fi eld
complaints from residents, and
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Members of Downtown Brooklyn’s Community Board 2 at their last inperson
meeting in March Photo by Kevin Duggan
organize meetings for board
members and the public to give
input about neighborhood issues
ranging from state liquor
licenses to proposed mega-developments.
In the coronavirus era, the
boards have met online via
video conferencing platform
Cisco WebEx, and the head of
Downtown Brooklyn’s Community
Board 2 said that one of
their hires, who started work
just before the pandemic broke
out, used her background in a
digital work environment to
help CB2 more easily transition
to virtual meetings.
“One of my new hires comes
out of the digital world and
working remotely — she has always
worked remotely in recent
jobs — and she has just stepped
in and stepped up,” said Rob
Perris.
CB2 voted unanimously at
a recent executive committee
meeting to not lay off any of
its paid staff, which consists of
three full-time employees and
one part-timer.
Perris echoed Scavo’s concerns
that a reduced staff would
make it harder to hold bureaucrats’s
feet to the fi re to resolve
issues in the districts.
“You need to go back and
back and back to a mayoral
agency in order to get a resolution,”
Perris said. “With less
staff we’d more readily accept
defeat.”
‘Absolutely not’
Community boards reject mayor’s request
for layoffs amid COVID-related budget cuts
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