New York City Mayor Eric Adams on Thursday proposed a $102.7 billion budget for this coming fiscal year, offering few details while pushing through further cuts to the city’s workforce as the economy slows, Wall Street slashes jobs, and inflation remains high.
(Bloomberg) — New York City Mayor Eric Adams on Thursday proposed a $102.7 billion budget for this coming fiscal year, offering few details while pushing through further cuts to the city’s workforce as the economy slows, Wall Street slashes jobs, and inflation remains high.
Under a plan released on Thursday, the city budget is balanced for fiscal year 2024, which begins July 1, and is nearly $4 billion lower than projected spending for the current fiscal year. But the mayor’s projections call for a $3.2 billion gap in 2025, $5 billion in 2026 and $6.5 billion in 2027.
Adams said the city achieved much of its savings by taking down 4,300 vacant positions, and he pushed back against critics — including city Comptroller Brad Lander and City Council leaders — that have said staffing levels are leading to agency service cuts.
“Some would argue that vacancy reductions result in agencies not being able to do their jobs. Don’t believe them,” Adams said.
But there’s already evidence the vacancies are having an impact. The city’s social services department is facing some of the largest vacancy levels in city government and it’s resulted in delays of more than 30 days in processing food stamp applications. Library officials have warned that the planned cuts will force them to reduce services, and a reduction in the education budget will likely coincide with a shrinkage in the city’s preschool program.
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City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams and Finance Committee chair Justin Brannan said the budget presentation failed to address the concerns they had raised earlier in the day.
“Many of our concerns with the mayor’s November plan remain with the fiscal year 2024 preliminary budget,” they said in a joint statement. That came after they announced the city council’s plans to push back against reductions to services that they deem vital.
Other city officials pointed to a lack of a clear vision in the early budget release, with Lander saying the budget “meanders with little direction.”
The city is contending with $1 billion in unanticipated costs for services provided this year to 40,000 recently arrived migrants, who are filling up the city’s homeless shelters and schools. It has spent $366 million through December on that effort.
The city is also dealing with the end of pandemic stimulus funds, increasing health care costs and new contracts with nearly all the city’s unions.
“These settlements will add billions of dollars to our city’s budget,” Adams said.
Adams also countered claims by the City Council that he was cutting city spending by too much. In an earlier statement on Thursday, Speaker Adams and Brannan said the mayor’s plan to cut funding to libraries, schools and other social services “undermines the health, safety, and recovery of our city.”
“I know there will be those who say we should do things differently, that we should extend ourselves further,” Mayor Adams said during his afternoon presentation at City Hall. “But as mayor the buck stops with me.”
(Updates to add city spending on migrant influx and quotes from city officials throughout.)
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