Even Dinkins Loyalists Cringe at Budget Cuts : Deficit: N.Y. mayor’s draconian proposals are seen as a retreat from progressive policies he vowed to pursue.

David N. Dinkins is in trouble. Just ask Antonia Dosik.

Dosik, 46, head of a nonprofit community services agency in a blue-collar section of Queens, put in many an off-duty hour in 1989 to help elect Dinkins as New York’s first black mayor.

“I was very heartened,” she said. “I didn’t expect miracles, but I did expect an understanding of how things worked on a neighborhood basis that I never felt when Ed Koch was mayor.”

Like many another Dinkins booster, however, she now says her hopes have been dashed by the mayor’s new “doomsday” budget. To close a projected shortfall of $3.5 billion in the fiscal year beginning in July, Dinkins has proposed draconian measures that hit hardest at his own constituencies: organized labor, social services advocates, neighborhood groups and New York’s black and Latino communities.

Pink slips would be handed to more than 28,000 city workers, ranging from teachers to housing inspectors to street cleaners. The Central Park Zoo and all 32 outdoor city pools would be closed, along with many homeless shelters, health clinics, libraries and fire stations. The city’s arts budget would be cut almost in half, while one-fourth of the city’s 295,000 street lights would be turned off.

In addition, a program to curb the city’s high infant mortality rate would be abandoned and many senior citizen programs would be dramatically curtailed.

Dinkins also proposed a hike of almost $1 billion in local taxes that no New Yorker looks on with favor.

But to many of his backers the mayor’s financial plan adds up to only one thing: a retreat on the progressive policies that he has so long espoused and promised to implement if given the city’s top political job.

“He might as well be Mayor Koch. Anybody could have come up with this slash and burn budget,” said Dosik, whose organization is threatened with extinction by the $58,000 loss in city funding.

The City Sun, a Brooklyn-based black weekly newspaper, labeled Dinkins and New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo the “Doomsday Duo” and declared that between the two “black New Yorkers are sunk.”

Cuomo, in his latest state budget plan, has proposed $4.5 billion in spending cuts and the elimination of 18,000 state jobs to help plug an anticipated $6.5-billion shortfall, second only among states to California’s projected $14-billion deficit.

“Cuomo’s almost genocidal budget cuts in no way contradict his well-documented history of hostility toward and open contempt for the black community,” the City Sun said in a scathing editorial. “But Dinkins. How does one explain Dinkins’ voluntary adoption of the Cuomo Method of Dealing with Blacks--his own people?”

Labor leaders describe union members as shocked by Dinkins’ budget. They said there is still hope that the state might increase aid to the city, but these days, Albany is wrestling with budget woes of its own.

“We cannot focus on the city package properly now, and we cannot until we see what we’re doing in terms of revenue,” said Assemblyman Saul Weprin, a Queens Democrat who heads the Ways and Means Committee.

Cuomo said he would ask the Municipal Assistance Corp., which engineered the city’s rescue from fiscal crisis in the 1970s, to raise at least $200 million in reserve funds to help the city out.

With whatever added money the city might get from MAC, Cuomo told reporters at a news conference in Manhattan last Thursday, “you do zoos, you do parks, you do police, you do all the wonderful things that the people need. You do services. Maybe you even reduce the taxes, I don’t know.”

But MAC Chairman Felix Rohatyn looked askance when informed of Cuomo’s remarks. Just the day before, Rohatyn pointed out, he himself had been forced to withdraw a four-year, $1-billion plan to help the city because a major Wall Street bond rating agency said the proposal would cause an immediate downgrading of the city’s bonds.

Dinkins fought back tears and choked with emotion as he discussed his proposed budget cuts with social services advocates and reporters after a television address May 8 to break the bad news to the city.

Aides to Dinkins say the days since have been among the toughest the mayor has endured since taking office in January of 1990.

Dinkins tried to blame Koch’s spending habits for much of the city’s woes, accusing him of adding 52,000 workers to the payroll during the boom years of the 1980s, thus costing the city millions of dollars it now sorely needs.

But Koch countered that, as Manhattan borough president during many of those years, Dinkins had not objected to the increased spending but, in fact, had urged Koch to shell out even more.

In a characteristic burst of vitriol, Koch told the New York Post that Dinkins is a “one-term mayor who lacks leadership and has failed to convince us that he can lead us through bad times.”

Richard Wade, an urban history professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center and a sometime adviser to Cuomo, contends that Dinkins failed to face up to the city’s fiscal problems in time.

“He should have said what he has been saying now, 10 months ago,” Wade said. “Everybody saw this crisis coming. He doesn’t take advice from people outside his group like the business community or the academic community. His great trouble is the people around him are all thinking: ‘This is the first black mayor and, therefore, we owe it to our constituencies not to touch anything.’ ”

Just how touchy those constituencies can be was vividly illustrated back in October when Dinkins, after granting a 5.8% pay raise to teachers and proposing a $1.8-billion plan to put more cops on the street, clamped a wage and hiring freeze in municipal employment and announced that 15,000 workers might have to be laid off.

“The mayor has declared war on the unions in this city,” roared Barry Feinstein, president of the 20,000-member Teamsters Local 237. “He has spit in the eye of public employees.”

Feinstein says labor’s beef with the mayor on that occasion and on several subsequent spirited confrontations with City Hall was Dinkins’ failure to consult with union leaders. More recently, Dinkins’ attitude has changed, Feinstein said, as he has reached for every helping hand in sight.

Dinkins has repeatedly said that help is needed from “our friends in Albany, in our municipal unions and in the Municipal Assistance Corp.”

But even if he succeeds in getting through the immediate crunch, Dinkins may never be able to return to a spending plan that will satisfy all in his 1989 coalition.

A study by the Citizens Budget Commission, a Manhattan-based nonprofit budget watchdog group, contends that both the city and state of New York face long-term budget gaps that will not be closed by a national economic recovery.

“The city faces a . . . 1995 gap equal to 14% of its projected expenditures,” the study said. “The state faces a total gap of . . . nearly 8% of projected expenditures in 1995.”

More than 100,000 jobs have vanished in the New York metropolitan area since September of 1989 alone.

“This is not your run of the mill recession in New York,” said Samuel M. Ehrenhalt, regional commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “New York got in this recession early and there’s no indication that the New York situation has bottomed out.”

Dinkins, who says the recession has robbed the city of more than $1.5 billion in projected tax revenues since January, is banking heavily on economic recovery to revive the city’s finances and pave the way to a restoration of his social agenda.

But even if all his hopes come true--if he gets what he wants from his “friends” and if the economy bounces back--it may be too late for many groups like Antonia Dosik’s Gateway Community Restoration Inc. in Queens, which operates a variety of programs from housing counseling for senior citizens to a delinquency prevention project for teen-agers to summer arts performances at a local park.

“We might not be able to survive in the interim,” Dosik said. “It’s not just the city, but our state money’s in absolute limbo. Even if it’s all restored eventually, we’ll probably be out of business by then.”