New York City’s improving fiscal situation seemed to foretell an easier path to passing the coming year’s budget, but the City Council and Mayor Eric Adams still disagree on key issues with days left before the deadline to reach a deal.
The council’s push to reverse cuts to cultural institutions, public libraries, parks and childcare are the chief remaining obstacles as negotiations continue ahead of the June 30 due date for the Fiscal Year 2025 plan. Council Speaker Adrienne Adams said Thursday that talks were “in a holding pattern,” while Mayor Adams used his own aerial metaphor earlier this week, insisting that “We’re going to land the plane.”
By Friday, there had been progress: a council member involved in negotiations told Crain’s that the Adams administration has agreed to restore $48 million for cultural institutions, just shy of the $53 million lawmakers are asking for. All told, the council wants to restore some $1.6 billion of the roughly $7 billion in spending cuts that Adams imposed starting last year.
“We’ve always maintained that there’s enough money there to restore all of these blunt cuts and save for a rainy day,” Council Finance Chair Justin Brannan said in an interview on Thursday. Council leaders have staged a series of rallies in recent days to raise pressure on the Adams administration, including an event for cultural institutions outside City Hall on Friday.
Housing is another key issue in budget talks. Advocates have warned that affordable housing construction will drop in the coming year, undercutting one of the mayor’s key priorities, unless the $2.1 billion in capital funding for the Housing Preservation and Development Department is increased by at least $800 million.
After months of cost-cutting and dire warnings about the impact of the migrant crisis on the city’s finances, Adams softened his tone earlier this year, canceling plans for additional cuts and even restoring some of the funding he had recently cut for the police, trash can pickups and pre-schools. He attributed this sunnier view to a mix of successful efforts to pare down spending on migrant care, new aid from the state, and his administration’s more optimistic tax revenue forecasts, which brought City Hall’s conservative numbers closer to projections from other observers.
The debate over Adams’ current $112 billion budget proposal has been less fraught than last year’s tense talks, which were colored by the mayor’s projection that the migrant crisis would cost $12 billion through mid-2025. The projection has since been scaled back to around $10 billion.
But many of the other cuts Adams ordered starting last year through so-called Programs to Eliminate the Gap will remain in place unless the council manages to undo them. That includes a $58 million reduction to libraries that the city’s three systems have said would eliminate weekend service, a $19 million cut that reduced Department of Buildings staffing and the $3 million cut that will spell the end of GrowNYC’s farmers market composting stands.
“The last budget was more challenged by the concern that we don’t have the money,” a council member involved in negotiating said Friday. “This time, we know we have the money, yet we’re still finding challenges in getting [the administration] to close those gaps.”
The council’s other key asks include restoring $55 million to the Parks Department to avoid potential staff losses and less frequent cleaning, and $170 million for the universal 3-K and Pre-K programs.
Watchdogs say the city still cannot afford to spend lavishly. The hawkish Citizens Budget Commission, in a letter to the mayor and council speaker this week, warned both leaders against under-budgeting items like NYPD overtime whose costs are consistently understated, and urged a $1 billion deposit into the city’s Rainy Day Fund over the next two years.
“Under-budgeting has increased to an unprecedented level — with Executive proposals that do not fully fund current programs and the Council’s acceptance of the practice and advocating for the addition of programs that would be unaffordable if fully funded on an ongoing basis,” CBC President Andrew Rein wrote. “The integrity of the budget’s estimates, the public’s belief that budget issues are real, and the fiscal stability of the city are all at risk.”
Under the mayor’s most recent budget plan, gaps between the city’s projected spending and its revenues are forecast to grow slightly in the coming years, hovering between $5 billion and $6 billion a year through 2028.
Nick Garber , 2024-06-21 19:26:40
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