Critics of the Mayor’s Budget Put Forth Their Own Ideas

“We’re going to have to make some choices,” Mr. Bloomberg said during his weekly radio show with John Gambling on WOR-AM last Friday. “I can just tell you this: If you don’t cut A, then B’s going to get cut.”

Members of the City Council, community advocates and interest groups agree. But they have their own ideas about what B should be. With five weeks until a deadline for passing a budget, they are offering alternatives.

Not surprisingly, their proposals aim to save popular places and programs — firehouses, day care centers, rental vouchers for homeless families — and focus on the unpopular and the arcane.

Here are some of the alternatives that have been proposed:

CUT CONSULTANTS Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president, argues that the Education Department should vastly reduce its spending on outside consultants. According to an analysis by his office, spending on consultants increased to $142 million in 2012, from about $33 million in 2004. (The numbers exclude special education costs, often mandated by law.)

“The solution to the teacher-layoff crisis is somewhere in this executive budget,” Mr. Stringer said. “There is a tremendous amount of waste regarding outside consultants across city agencies.”

The department has said that the consultants are needed and that their cost is reasonable.

Bill de Blasio, the city’s public advocate, wants to cut back on information-technology consultants at the department ($52 million) and reduce spending on teacher recruitment ($20 million) and the department’s public affairs office ($2.6 million).

AGGRESSIVELY SEEK REIMBURSEMENTS The United Federation of Teachers argues that the city could mitigate teacher layoffs by claiming millions more dollars in federal reimbursements for services like transportation and speech therapy for special-needs students. Many of the reimbursements were halted after the federal government accused the city of lax reporting practices in 2005.

The city has been working to devise a new reporting system, which is supposed to be in place this fall, education officials said, and could allow the city to collect an additional $117 million in reimbursements next year.

But Michael Mulgrew, the United Federation of Teachers president, said that the city’s goal was too conservative, and that it should be working to recoup money from previous years. “With the mayor saying the budget is so tight that he has to do layoffs and cut services, how can he let this huge source of revenue go begging because of poor management?” he said.

Barbara Morgan, a spokeswoman for the department, said, “We continue to aggressively pursue reimbursements and are working toward a long-term streamlined solution.”

RAISE SOME TAXES The Council’s Progressive Caucus is among the few voices calling for more taxes. It has asked Albany to reinstate a tax surcharge for high-income New Yorkers, and other groups have pushed for an increase in the hotel room tax. But Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Mr. Bloomberg oppose raising taxes, virtually killing the idea in the Council.

COLLECT ALL EXISTING TAXES Several groups have urged the city to do a better job collecting taxes that are already on the books. District Council 37, the city’s largest union, has suggesting hiring more employees to collect taxes on billboards and cellphone towers (the union estimates that would bring in more than $40 million). The union has also suggested ending thousands of dollars in tax breaks for strip clubs. Marc LaVorgna, a spokesman for the mayor, said the city had been expanding its tax-collecting force, and noted that the union had previously criticized efforts to devote more staff members to collecting taxes.

TAX PLASTIC BAGS The Independent Budget Office has offered its own list of budget ideas, including imposing a tax on plastic bags used in supermarkets (estimated to bring in $94 million) and eliminating parent coordinators from schools (estimated to save $86.7 million).

As the Council begins hearings on the budget, even its own members say they will probably be unable to save everything.

“I’m not all that sanguine about my ability to restore every vital service,” Lewis A. Fidler of Brooklyn, the Council’s assistant majority leader, said. “One or more of these sacred cows are going to wind up slaughtered.”