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After court rulings preventing New York City from laying off 200 carpenters and 9 deputy sheriffs, Mayor Bloomberg says that he will have to start laying off employees now, to get some of them through the court process. The city has already scheduled 5,000 layoffs for the next 18 months, a number that is expected to rise when the Governor releases his budget. The firefighters and fire officers union announced that they were filing documents with the Office of Collective Bargaining an hour after the Mayor's statement. The documents are to prevent the Fire Department from cutting staff at some of the busiest engine companies, a move that would save around $30 million is overtime. A 15 year contract with the Uniformed Firefighters Association expired at midnight, and the change went into effect then. the Mayor said that if the changes were stopped, the city would have to shut down firehouses, a claim which the union said was false, adding that it showed how out of touch the Mayor was with the city.