NYC Council asks court to dismiss Mamdani lawsuit to block $10,000 bonus for teacher aides

Cayla Bamberger, New York Daily News on Sep 17, 2026

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NEW YORK — The New York City Council on Thursday asked a Manhattan judge to dismiss Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s lawsuit to block $10,000 bonuses for public school paraprofessionals.

At issue is whether the Council’s legislation, which was passed to address a perennial shortage of special-education teacher aides, ran afoul of New York state labor law that requires pay raises to go through collective bargaining.

“The City Council unanimously — I want to stress that — unanimously passed Local Law 129,” Council Speaker Julie Menin, D-Manhattan, said at a news conference with the United Federation of Teachers in front of City Hall on the Council’s motion to dismiss. The UFT represents the unionized paraprofessionals,

“Let me be clear,” Menin said. “Our City Council bill in no way circumvents the Taylor Law. Our City Council bill was written as an emergency retention bill. And guess what? Our bill goes away if the administration collectively bargains this.”

“We had to act, and that’s why we passed our bill. So we are vigorously defending it in court today.”

Matt Rauschenbach, a Mamdani spokesman, in a statement said that paraprofessionals’ “invaluable contributions to our schools have not been fairly compensated.” The administration has previously said it supports the idea of raising paraprofessional pay, but not through the Council’s legislation.

“We have been negotiating in good faith to address this inequity permanently,” Rauschenbach said. “As we work toward a resolution to the litigation and to protect collective bargaining, the City will continue working with UFT and all our labor partners to make meaningful investments in the workers who keep our city running.”

The Council’s response, filed in a state trial court, requested the judge either decline to hear the mayor’s case or find the legislation not in violation of the Taylor Law.

“In the face of this educational and fiscal emergency, the Mayor asserts he has the exclusive power to end this crisis, through collective bargaining. But he hasn’t made it happen,” wrote the Council’s general counsel, alongside attorneys at the law firm Emery Celli.

“Instead, 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.”

The lawyers argued the Taylor law did not intend to “remove local legislatures’ pre-existing powers to pass laws improving public employees’ wages or working conditions.” The 1960s Taylor Commission itself, which recommended giving public workers the right to bargain collectively, “expressly recognized that it was ‘possible’ under the Taylor Law for a union to negotiate a contract and ‘then to seek further benefits through changes in … legislation in the locality.'”

In the decades since, lawyers for the Council wrote that public workers have won occasional “legislative victories” that “secure benefits outside of the bargaining process.” 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 “longevity bonuses” for police officers.

Mamdani supported the bonuses on the campaign trail, but changed his tune once in office. 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 — and filed his lawsuit later that day.

The Council estimates the pay bump will cost $325 million in 2027 over two fiscal cycles — a price tag the Mamdani administration has warned could rise if other municipal workers seek bonuses too.

The first of four installments, totaling $10,000, is scheduled for January. Paraprofessionals have an annual starting salary of $33,000.

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.

Michael Mulgrew, the UFT president, said a recent teachers union survey found 8,000 paraprofessional vacancies, which are either left unfilled or rotated through by substitutes — a lack of consistency that could harm students with disabilities.

“That’s 8,000 children not having their paraprofessionals,” Mulgrew said at the news conference. “That’s thousands of children who cannot even get to school because they don’t have someone to transport them.”

Undrea Polite, a paraprofessional at P.S. K369 Coy L. Cox School in Brooklyn, put it bluntly: “What you’re doing is by fighting this bill,” she said, “it’s showing me that you don’t care.”

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