About 100 Toledo city workers will be laid off effective January 4, 2027, Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz has told The Blade, in cuts the mayor said run higher than previously expected after voters rejected the Issue 16 income tax and city income-tax collections came in lower than expected, WTVG 13abc reported Friday, November 13, citing its media partner The Blade.
The layoffs will be across all city departments, according to The Blade’s reporting as carried by WTVG. Layoff notices began going out on Thursday and Friday of this week, The Blade reported.
The number marks a sharp escalation from the scenario Toledo leaders put in front of voters before the November 3 election. At an October 28 City Council finance committee meeting, the administration outlined a worst case of roughly 73 layoffs if Issue 16 failed — about half of them in the police and fire departments — and council members warned at the time that cuts were likely unavoidable without new revenue.
Issue 16 was the city’s ask: a temporary quarter-percent income-tax increase, from 2.5% to 2.75%, expected to raise about $25 million a year for police, fire and neighborhood safety, including recruit classes and traffic enforcement, according to the city’s pre-election presentations. Voters turned it down on November 3.
That left the administration balancing its 2027 budget against two holes at once — the revenue Issue 16 would have provided, and income-tax collections running below what the city expected, the mayor told The Blade. The result is a layoff count roughly a third larger than the pre-election worst case, spread across the whole workforce rather than concentrated in public safety.
For Toledo residents, the practical questions are about services: which desks, crews and programs lose people on January 4, and what that means for everything from street work to recreation. City leaders had already flagged youth programs, city pools and curbside recycling as possible pressure points during the pre-election budget debate, though the administration has not published a department-by-department breakdown of the roughly 100 positions.
The timeline moved fast once the votes were counted. Toledo’s budget deadline has been looming since election week — WTVG reported on November 9 that the deadline was approaching after the income tax defeat — and within ten days of the election the discussion shifted from scenarios to notices: the roughly 73-layoff outline from the October 28 finance committee became about 100 actual layoff notices going out November 12 and 13, according to The Blade’s reporting.
The stakes reach beyond the workers themselves. A layoff spread across all departments lands differently from one concentrated in a single agency: it can mean slower response and thinner staffing in the services residents touch daily, on top of the police and fire staffing questions that dominated the Issue 16 campaign. And because the mayor ties part of the increase to income-tax collections coming in under expectations, the cuts are also a signal about the city’s underlying revenue — not just a single ballot measure — heading into the 2027 budget year.
What we know — and what we’re still waiting on
What is confirmed, through The Blade’s reporting carried by WTVG, is the scale and the date: about 100 workers, across all departments, effective January 4, with notices going out this week, and the mayor attributing the size of the cut to Issue 16’s failure and softer income-tax collections. What has not been released yet is the list — which departments lose how many positions, whether union bumping rights change who ultimately leaves, and what service reductions follow. Those details are expected to surface with the budget itself.
Toledo’s budget fight has been building for weeks alongside the city’s other economic storylines, from a housing market where Toledo homes are staying on the market longer as listings rise to new employers still arriving, including Crash Champions opening its first greater Toledo repair center in Holland.
What happens next comes quickly: the mayor sends his proposed 2027 budget to Toledo City Council on Monday, November 16, The Blade reported, and council must act on a final budget with the January 4 layoffs built into it. NewsForce247 will follow the council’s deliberations and publish the department-level detail when the administration releases it.
Photo: MrJacon000, CC BY-SA