Mayor Eric Adams announced a revised $111.6 billion budget plan on Wednesday that avoids new spending cuts and increases estimates of the city’s tax haul, reflecting his administration’s increasingly sunny view of New York’s finances. But the proposal rebuffs the City Council’s request to undo far more of the billions of dollars in cuts he has ordered since last year, setting the stage for a tug-of-war with lawmakers in the coming weeks.
The budget restores $80 million for childhood programs, cultural organizations and police classes that he had previously cut starting last year, when he warned that the migrant crisis and shrinking federal aid would lead to alarming shortfalls in the coming years. And City Hall says it has staved off the need for further cuts thanks to an improving economy, money from the state and its own efforts to pare down spending, especially on migrants — although critics have charged that the administration overstated the need for the initial cuts in the first place.
“Thanks to our discipline and prudent approach, we’re able to invest in the things that matter to New Yorkers,” Adams said in a City Hall speech on Wednesday. The mayor has made a show in recent months of reversing some of the cuts he ordered beginning in November, no doubt conscious of polls that showed his approval rating plummeting amid widespread disapproval of his budgeting.
Adams’ executive budget, which has grown compared to his $109 billion January plan, will serve as a framework as he and the council negotiate a budget for the 2025 fiscal year due by July. Thanks to the improving fiscal picture, this year’s budget fight is shaping up to be less acrimonious than last year’s, when Adams and the council fought bitterly over spending cuts.
Adams noted clouds on the horizon in his speech on Wednesday, citing a slowdown in the housing market and a projected slowing of tax revenues due partly to the sluggish commercial real estate market. That means tight spending will be needed, rather than relying “on revenue alone,” Adams said.
Still, City Council leaders have said they will push to restore much more of the $7 billion in cuts that Adams imposed unilaterally starting in November, citing their own numbers that showed tax revenues coming in $3 billion above the mayor’s estimates.
City Hall officials said Wednesday that they are now forecasting an additional $2 billion in tax revenues across fiscal years 2024 and 2025, bringing the administration’s conservative estimates more in line with rosier forecasts by the City Council — and even the typically cautious Citizens Budget Commission, which likewise said the administration was underestimating how much money it had. The city will also benefit from the $2.4 billion in migrant aid in the just-approved state budget.
Adams’ new budget keeps a vast majority of the prior cuts that aroused opposition in the council and elsewhere. If the council gets its wish, lawmakers would add about $2 billion in spending to the mayor’s budget to undo those cuts, like the $58 million reduction to the public library system that could spell the end of weekend service, a $19 million cut that reduced Department of Buildings staffing and the $3 million cut that ended GrowNYC’s farmers market composting stands.
“We have consistently said that the budget cuts made by the administration were far too broad and have negative impacts on our constituents and the stability of our city,” Council Speaker Adrienne Adams said April 1.
The mayor began backing off his belt-tightening approach early this year. After previously threatening to impose three sets of across-the-board 5% budget cuts to all city agencies, Adams softened the second round of cuts in January and canceled a third round that would have been implemented this month.
Adams’ administration now says it has achieved its goal of reducing its spending on migrant care by a combined $2.3 billion, slashing its estimate for the total cost of the crisis from $12 billion to about $10 billion. Adams’ budget director Jacques Jiha has said the savings came from reducing the services and staff at migrant shelters, compelling more migrants to leave shelters by controversially capping their lengths of stay, suing to block more charter buses from transporting migrants to the city, and trying to reduce its reliance on costly emergency contracts.
But gaps between the city’s projected spending and its revenues are now forecast to grow over the next three years to about $17 billion through 2028, slightly higher than what City Hall forecast in January.
Watchdogs like the Citizens Budget Commission have said the city likely faces even bigger deficits, since Adams’ budgets have omitted expected spending on police overtime, housing vouchers and other expenses. The CBC urged policymakers to drop their longstanding practice of funding programs only one year at a time.
Other critics, meanwhile, have continued to argue that there was never a need for the harsh cuts Adams ordered starting last year through so-called programs to eliminate the gap, which let him impose midyear cuts outside of the annual budget process. Experts noted that the administration did not update its revenue projections in the same November plan when it ordered cuts, despite the improving national economy.
Had City Hall used more up-to-date numbers, as past administrations have often done, “they certainly would have had a more ample fiscal situation,” Louisa Chafee, director of the Independent Budget Office, told reporters during a briefing in February.
The administration has rejected some critics’ claims that it exaggerated the city’s fiscal peril in hopes of winning more federal aid for the migrant crisis.
Nick Garber , 2024-04-24 18:53:57
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