Local elected officials joined representatives of the borough’s 12 community boards on Monday afternoon to protest Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed cuts that would cut funding to each board from $200,000 to $186,517. That amounts to a nearly 7 percent decrease.

At the rally, held outside of the Bronx County Courthouse on East 161st Street, Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr. said, “We’re here today because we want to protect our partners in government.”

Diaz said community boards are “the first place people go if a tenant is being threatened in terms of eviction by the landlords, when a family is looking for a place to sleep, or when senior citizens have no place to turn.”

Councilman Jimmy Vacca, who was the district manager of Community Board 11 for 26 years, recalled the budget cuts of the 1970s. “[The cuts were] meant to cut the legs off of multiple grassroots community organizations that wanted to protect and fight for their neighborhoods.”

“We’re hoping that the mayor is listening,” remarked Fernando P. Tirado, the district manager of Community Board 7. Tirado stated,

“We have been operating on a shoestring budget for over a decade,” and added the mayor should be using a, “precision scalpel,” instead of an “ax.”