נייע וועבסייט, שטאטישע פעיראל פובליק!

The city's municipal workers earned an average of $69,124 last year - but the cost to taxpayers reached an eye-popping $106,743 because of skyrocketing fringe-benefit expenses, according to a report released yesterday.

The study, by the Citizens Budget Commission, found that city employees' salaries jumped 33 percent from fiscal 2000 to fiscal 2008, a period when the regional consumer price index went up 29 percent.

But fringe benefits - fueled by a 700 percent increase in the city's pension bills - were off the charts, soaring from $13,356 to $37,619 during the same time period.

And those were just the averages.

Firefighters, whose contracts call for built-in overtime and 20-year retirements, "cost" an average of $186,464 each.

Cops, with similarly generous benefits, came in at $164,045. Teachers and other instructional personnel averaged $98,505. The remaining civilian workers brought up the rear at $83,279.

The watchdog group placed some of the blame on Mayor Bloomberg, saying the pay raises he negotiated "have been generous in both historical and comparative terms."

The CBC added, "The latest settlements awarded civilian and uniformed unions at least 4 percent annual wage increases, well above projected inflation, with no concessions."

Carol Kellerman, the group's executive director, said the findings provide hard evidence that the city "can't continue to think the same way of our relationship with public-sector employees as we did before."

Mayoral spokesman Mark LaVorgna pointed out that the city is prohibited by state law from negotiating pension benefits, which is the chief driver of the escalating payroll.

"The mayor has been seeking pension reform for years, and we are finally seeing some movement, with Governor Paterson taking the lead and proposing the new pension tier the mayor has been asking for," LaVorgna said.

"Also, since 2000, there have been at least 46 pension sweeteners that have been passed in Albany that have increased our pension obligations. That doesn't even count the bills that were vetoed by the governor at the city's insistence."

The mayor is scheduled to release his grim preliminary budget for fiscal 2010 in two weeks, and it is expected to include layoffs at some agencies.

The CBC report landed on the same day that the Independent Budget Office warned that the city faced astronomical budget gaps of $4.3 billion and $7 billion in fiscal 2010 and 2011.

Analysts said the $7 billion deficit estimate represented 15.9 percent of city-funded revenues. Both figures were the highest since the IBO began keeping records in 1990.

In November, the mayor had put the gaps at $1.3 billion and $5 billion.

"The data keep getting worse," said one official.

Tax-revenue estimates in virtually every category were down, with $34.7 billion expected to come in this year, down 7.5 percent, or $2.8 billion, from 2008.