Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat is continuing the protest strike in the city. Municipal kindergartens are being shut down, and municipal services are being withheld throughout the city. Schools and special education facilities are working as usual.
The strike continued after a meeting yesterday between the Jerusalem municipal workers' committee and the Ministry of Finance failed to yield results. Barkat then met at his home with senior municipal officials and other parties in order to decide on a course of action.
At the meeting, the workers' committee presented a legal opinion according to which the Court injunction banning the strike was binding only on the municipality, not the workers' committee. It further emerged that Minister of Finance director general Shai Babad had offered the municipality a 5% increase over last year's budget, amounting to NIS 525 million, the same as a previous offer that did not meet the municipality's demands.
Barkat is now threatening to fire hundreds of cleaning workers and make cuts in the municipality's budget for education, welfare, and sports teams if the Ministry of Finance does not increase its allocation for the Jerusalem municipality. The full plan for budget cuts prepared by the municipality lists economic measures the municipality will have to take if the extra NIS 300 million it has been seeking from the Ministry of Finance in recent weeks is not granted.
In addition to firing hundreds of sanitation workers, the municipality is threatening to stop renting dozens of classrooms from private parties at an annual cost of NIS 100 million designed to relieve the city's shortage of classrooms. The city's welfare budget will also be cut, with support for welfare institutions being reduced. The municipality is also threatening a "deep cut in the budget for community support, which will deal a critical blow to neighborhood services." Also on the agenda is "a cut in support for cultural institutions and sports associations that will cause their collapse. Budgets for children's cultural and sports activity in the haredi (ultra-Orthodox), Arab, and general sectors will be cut."
Senior Jerusalem municipality figures assert that after negotiations with the Ministry of Finance, Minister of Finance Moshe Kahlon had agreed on an NIS 800 million grant for Jerusalem this year. They stated, "This promise by the minister of finance has not been honored, and the money has not been transferred. Nor has the municipal plan for construction of 1,000 classrooms essential for the city's schoolchildren been approved."
Barkat said, "I call on the minister of finance to intervene personally and immediately in the crisis, so that we do not reach a situation in which we will have to fire workers and cut services. The Ministry of Finance's refusal to transfer the promised money for Jerusalem will be fatal for Israel's capital, for which the minister of finance is directly responsible." He added, "This is a real and broad-based battle by all the organizations in Jerusalem, who are unanimously saying that the abandonment of Jerusalem must end."
Published by Globes [online], Israel Business News - www.globes-online.com - on January 31, 2017
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