Mayor Bloomberg and the City Council were headed towards a budget deal tonight to avert 4,100 teacher layoffs and keep open 20 fire companies that were on the chopping block, sources said.
The sources said that the teachers’ union came up with savings to protect its threatened members by relaxing regulations affecting a teacher reserve pool.
Layoffs were still on the table at city agencies whose members are represented by District Council 37, the largest municipal union, because its leaders didn’t offer similar savings, the sources said.
DC 37 was also a holdout on Thursday, when other unions in the Municipal Labor Committee were prepared to offer the administration $262 million sitting in an unused health benefits fund to “buy back” more than 5,000 jobs on the mayor’s cut list.
That deal fell apart, when Bloomberg rejected the MLC’s demand to transfer another $110 million from that fund to enhance benefits for various unions.
“They have asked for some things we could not possibly agree to,” the mayor said yesterday.
One labor leader speculated that Bloomberg’s position hardened after Gov. Cuomo announced that state employees had tentatively accepted a new contract with no raises in the first three years, unpaid furloughs and increases in health care premiums.