About 100 Toledo city employees began receiving layoff notices on Thursday and Friday, learning that their jobs will end on January 4, Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz told The Blade — the first concrete fallout from voters’ rejection of Issue 16, the city’s public safety income tax, on November 3. The layoffs will reach across all city departments, and the number is higher than the roughly 73 positions the administration had warned about before the election, in part because income tax collections have come in lower than expected, The Blade reported.
The notices mark the moment Toledo’s budget debate stopped being hypothetical. For months, city leaders had presented the November vote as a fork in the road: pass the tax and fund police and fire at something close to current levels, or reject it and absorb cuts. Voters said no — and within ten days, the pink slips the administration had modeled as a worst case started going out, larger than the model.
Issue 16 would have raised Toledo’s municipal income tax from 2.5 percent to 2.75 percent for four years, with the money restricted to police, fire and neighborhood safety work. The quarter-percent increase was projected to bring in about $25 million a year, according to city finance officials who presented the plan to Toledo City Council’s finance committee on October 28. The measure failed on November 3, on a ballot NewsForce247 previewed in its Lucas County election coverage.
Before the vote, the administration’s no-tax scenario contemplated approximately 73 layoffs — filled positions, not vacancies — with roughly half coming from police and fire, Deputy Mayor Abby Arnold told the finance committee, as the Toledo Free Press reported from that meeting. Firefighters’ union president Joe Cira told the committee the same day that Toledo Fire & Rescue had no spare engines or medic units, that one west Toledo ambulance had been out of service, and that crews had recently worked a weekend 10 firefighters below minimum staffing, the Free Press reported.
The final number outgrew the warning. Kapszukiewicz told The Blade that about 100 employees are affected, that the cuts run across all departments rather than falling only on public safety, and that lower-than-expected income tax collections widened the gap beyond the Issue 16 shortfall alone. WTVG (13abc), The Blade’s media partner, reported the same account: layoffs effective January 4, 2027, across all departments, with the mayor attributing the larger figure to the failed tax and the softer collections.
Firefighters are among those losing their jobs. Joe Cira, president of Toledo Firefighters Local 92, said “upwards of” 20 firefighters are being laid off, The Blade reported — in a department the union says was already running below minimum staffing before any cuts. What that means on the street is still being worked out: pool closures and an end to curbside recycling remain under consideration as the administration assembles the rest of its savings plan, according to The Blade’s reporting summarized by the Ohio Flyover.
The structural problem underneath the vote is bigger than one levy. Toledo spends about $50 million a year more than it takes in, according to the city’s figures as reported by The Blade — a gap a single quarter-percent tax was designed to narrow, not close. The layoffs buy the budget time; they do not, by themselves, balance a spending plan that has been running ahead of revenue.
What we know — and what we’re still waiting on
What we know: about 100 city workers are being notified this week that their employment ends January 4; the layoffs span all departments; more than 20 firefighters are among them, according to their union president; and the mayor ties the size of the cut to Issue 16’s failure and to income tax collections running below projections, per The Blade and WTVG. What we’re still waiting on: the department-by-department breakdown of the 100 positions, whether police officers are included and in what number, and which service cuts — pools, recycling, or others — the administration will formally propose alongside the layoffs.
What happens next comes quickly: Kapszukiewicz sends his proposed 2027 budget to Toledo City Council on Monday, November 16, and council — which must act on any final budget changes — will take up the plan with the January 4 layoff date already on the calendar. Reporting in this article is from The Blade, as reported by WTVG and summarized by the Ohio Flyover and the Lake Erie Inquiry, with pre-election budget background from the Toledo Free Press.
Photo: MrJacon000, CC BY-SA
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