{"id":349254,"date":"2026-09-17T13:26:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T13:26:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/349254\/"},"modified":"2026-09-17T13:26:11","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T13:26:11","slug":"nyc-council-asks-court-to-dismiss-mamdani-lawsuit-to-block-10k-bonus-for-teacher-aides","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/349254\/","title":{"rendered":"NYC Council asks court to dismiss Mamdani lawsuit to block $10K bonus for teacher aides"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New York City Council on Thursday asked a Manhattan judge to dismiss Mayor Mamdani\u2019s lawsuit to block $10,000 bonuses for public school paraprofessionals.<\/a><\/p>\n

At issue is whether the Council\u2019s legislation, which was passed to address a perennial shortage of special education teacher aides, ran afoul of New York state labor law that require pay raises to go through collective bargaining.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur legislation was passed unanimously by the Council<\/a> and provides a narrow, temporary workforce stabilization payment to address this emergency while fully preserving the collective bargaining process,\u201d Council Speaker Julie Menin (D-Manhattan) said in a statement.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are confident in the Council\u2019s authority to enact this law and will vigorously defend it so that our paraprofessionals receive the support they deserve and our students have the professionals they need in their classrooms.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Council and the United Federation of Teachers, which represents the unionized paraprofessionals<\/a>, plan to hold a news conference on the City Hall steps late Thursday morning.<\/p>\n

The Council\u2019s response, filed in a state trial court, requested the judge either decline to hear the mayor\u2019s case or find the legislation not in violation of the Taylor Law.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the face of this educational and fiscal emergency<\/a>, the Mayor asserts he has the exclusive power to end this crisis, through collective bargaining. But he hasn\u2019t made it happen,\u201d wrote the Council\u2019s general counsel, alongside attorneys at the law firm Emery Celli.<\/p>\n

\u201cInstead, he has filed this legal challenge to Local Law 129, hoping that the Court will give him legal and political cover for his failure to address the problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

The lawyers argued the Taylor law did not intend to \u201cremove local legislatures\u2019 pre-existing powers to pass laws improving public employees\u2019 wages or working conditions.\u201d The 1960s Taylor Commission itself, which recommended giving public workers the right to bargain collectively, \u201cexpressly recognized that it was \u2018possible\u2019 under the Taylor Law for a union to negotiate a contract and \u2018then to seek further benefits through changes in \u2026 legislation in the locality.’\u201d<\/p>\n

In the decades since, lawyers for the Council wrote that public workers have won occasional \u201clegislative victories\u201d that \u201csecure benefits outside of the bargaining process.\u201d The legal filing gives the examples of a 2001 local law requiring the city to pay for health insurance and a recent state law enacting \u201clongevity bonuses\u201d for police officers.<\/p>\n

Mamdani supported the bonuses on the campaign trail, but changed his tune in office<\/a>. Rather than veto the legislation, which the Council had the votes to override, the mayor opted last month to allow the bill to lapse into law \u2014 and filed his lawsuit later that day.<\/p>\n

The Council estimates the pay bump will cost $325 million in 2027 over two fiscal cycles \u2014 a price tag the Mamdani administration has warned could rise if other\u00a0municipal workers seek bonuses too.<\/p>\n

The first of four installments, totaling $10,000, is scheduled for January. Paraprofessionals have an annual starting salary of $33,000<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Both Mamdani and the UFT have expressed optimism about how talks are going to permanently raise paraprofessional salaries in the next round of collective bargaining.<\/p>\n

Michael Mulgrew, the UFT president, said a recent teachers union survey found thousands of paraprofessional vacancies, which are either are left unfilled or rotated through by substitutes \u2014 a lack of consistency that could harm students with disabilities.<\/p>\n

\u201cInstead of solving this crisis we are fighting it in court,\u201d Mulgrew said in a statement. \u201cMake this make sense.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The New York City Council on Thursday asked a Manhattan judge to dismiss Mayor Mamdani\u2019s lawsuit to block…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":349255,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[67,85,267,9,24,264,12,56,63,65,64],"class_list":["post-349254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-education","tag-latest-headlines","tag-local-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-county","tag-news","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-nyc-headlines","tag-nyc-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349254"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349254\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/349255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}