Your Action Is Needed

The Executive budget proposes significant agency cuts as well as demands for wage and benefit cuts or 9,800 in potential layoffs.  We need you to let your legislators know that more cuts will jeopardize state services, threaten public safety and have a negative effect on the state’s economy and the fragile recovery. The budget also includes a tax cut for the state’s wealthy.  We believe there needs to be shared sacrifice and balanced solutions not just spending cuts.

Please take a moment to download the letter (Word version), personalize your message and mail it to your state legislators. The more personalized the letter the more impact it will have, handwritten letters have the most impact.

Also, if you haven’t provided your name and contact information please do so.  This will allow us to keep you informed and communicate with you as quickly as possible regarding critical information and activities surrounding the state budget and other PEF actions.

Thank you for taking action.

Ken Brynien
Arlea Igoe
Joe Fox
Pat Baker
Tom Comanzo

Word Version of Letter

PDF Version of Letter

Statement of PEF President Kenneth Brynien on Proposed State Budget

I met with the governor Monday; there were cordial discussions with no specifics. I provided our suggestions for addressing the budget gap and we agreed to work together to try to avoid layoffs.

On the Executive Budget proposal, the governor continues to insist pain will be shared in his budget.

Unfortunately, when he says this, it appears the pain will be shared by the workers who provide vital services and the state’s citizens who rely on them, rather than those responsible for the collapse of the state and national economy.

The Executive Budget calls for the potential of another cut of more than 11,500 jobs in addition to the more than 11,000 jobs already cut since the fiscal crisis began. Over the last 2 years, we have faced cut after cut in agency budgets; there is just nowhere else to cut and still have the agencies carry out their statutory missions.

If these cuts are adopted New Yorkers will no longer be able to count on vital services many take for granted.

We agree with the governor the state cannot just cut its way out of this crisis. We should all be working together to create jobs, not more layoffs.

Playing up to wealthy individuals and corporate interests in New York may be politically expedient, but it is bad economic policy. Two Nobel Prize winning economists, Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, believe an income-tax increase on the wealthiest is less harmful to the economy than massive cuts to state spending. They believe we need to keep as much money in the local economy as possible to effectively get out of this recession and restore jobs.

We will work with the governor to do our part to help during this fiscal crisis.

We are willing to sacrifice, but we will not be sacrificed.