Never one to shrink from a challenge, Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City unveiled his spirited, nine-point agenda to tame the city’s record budget gap through the creation of 400,000 jobs. In his State of the City address, delivered earlier today at Brooklyn College, the mayor’s objectives, Newsday reported, are to encourage small business growth, expand the funding of infrastructure projects, and emphasize environmental reforms.
Comparing the recent financial meltdown to the turmoil he inherited as mayor in January 2002, Bloomberg referenced the city’s struggle to get beyond 9/11 as their catalyst to keep pressing forward.
"After 9/11, we did it, as New Yorkers, together. And now, we'll do it again," Bloomberg’s prepared statement read. "We will get New York City through these hard times with the same approach that has always worked for us."
Objectives highlighted from the advance text include a $10 billion advance to create more capital infrastructure jobs, a reduction (or elimination altogether) of a tax affecting 17,000 small businesses, and the extension of the No. 7 train, along with construction of a police academy and libraries for Queens and Brooklyn, to further job creation.
"I like challenges, and this is certainly going to be a great challenge," said Bloomberg, the multimillionaire founder of Bloomberg LP, to reporters at a Wednesday news conference.
City officials estimate that Wall Street, after finishing one of its bleakest years, cast New York into a financial freefall with an estimated $1.3 billion budget gap through 2010, coupled by the projected loss of 140,000 jobs.
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