Mixed Area Reaction To State Of The City Speech

More than two years into the steepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, most northeast Queens residents are well accustomed to living within their means.

Today, during his 10th  speech, Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed to force a cash-strapped City Hall to do the same.

Coming months after the mayor's for the upcoming fiscal year, it was a message that received a mix of reactions from area residents, workers and at least one local elected official.

"There are people in the bureaucracy that we can rid of," said Ken Egbert of The Bronx, on his way home this afternoon from a job in Douglaston. 

Egbert added that to get the city's fiscal house in order, he didn't mind paying a little bit more in taxes — which ran contrary to the mayor's pledge not to raise levies and instead "grow our way out of these tough times."

The no-new-taxes pledge was only one part of the mayor's budget balancing plan that prompted a diverse range of reaction from city residents.

Another cost-cutting proposal outlined in the mayor's address involved cutting the pensions of city workers, the prospect of which didn't sit well with Agnes Dembrowski, a private-sector employee shopping at the Barnes and Noble in Bay Terrace this evening.

"They work hard, city workers. They need to retire with money in their pockets," Dembrowski said. "I have nothing against paying my taxes to help them."

Another city resident at the Bay Terrace bookstore, Barry Johnson, fell more in line with Bloomberg's proposal to balance the budget by taking a second look at government obligations to public-sector employees.

"Lowering pensions would be better than raising taxes," Johnson said. "If it's not that big of a drop, that would work."

In terms of pension reform, Councilman Dan Halloran, R-Whitestone, expressed skepticism that powerful unions representing public employees would allow for substantive pension reform.

“Today the mayor hit on many important themes on which we agree — such as the need to cut spending and reform our bloated pension system," Halloran said in a statement released after the mayor's speech. "But what is the city doing to accomplish this goal? The city certainly isn’t standing up to special interests and lobbyists and has shown little enthusiasm to cut taxes."

Another city resident, Clay Glad of Brooklyn, cast the mayor's pension-cutting proposals in terms of an ongoing battle between the public and the private sector.

"It's about a continuing denial of public life," he said at a Starbucks at Little Neck Plaza on Wednesday night. "It's about transferring money from the public to the private sector."