GOOD-TIMES BLAZ
Mayoral hopefuls fear he’ll leave fiscal mess
The rosy fiscal outlook Mayor de Blasio has enjoyed during his more than six years in City Hall will inevitably end — and the people running to replace him say they’re now bracing for the hard times.
The city has benefited from unprecedented uninterrupted economic growth for nearly a decade. This has translated into a city budget that shot up from $75 billion in 2014, de Blasio’s first year in office, to $93 billion last year, and to a city workforce that ballooned by roughly 30,000.
But the good times will grind to a halt — fears of the coronavirus seem to be accelerating that — and experts worry de Blasio hasn’t done nearly enough to cushion the inevitable fiscal blow for his eventual successor.
“They’re very likely to come into office facing serious fiscal stress,” said John Mollenkopf, a political science professor at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Maria Doulis, head of the fiscal watchdog Citizens Budget Commission, said de Blasio is at least partially responsible.
“The budget is larger. Many new programs have been added,” she said. “What that means is in order to preserve the stability of city services, larger reserves are needed than what the city has.”
Candidates vying for the city’s top job are concerned, too.
Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams predicted “serious financial problems” for whoever steps into the mayor’s office after de Blasio leaves.
“We’re spending at three times the rate of inflation,” he said. “We can’t continue to run this city in the dysfunctional way we’re running it.”
City Comptroller Scott Stringer described the city’s rainy-day fund in a recent budget presentation as “inadequate” and observed that despite higher spending on homelessness and the city’s jail population, neither area has shown any real signs of improvement.
City Council Speaker Corey Johnson has for the past two years pushed to expand cash reserves, arguing in 2018 that the city should sock away more.
All three are top contenders for mayor, and each recently talked about their own prescriptions for how to best approach the city’s financial situation.
Adams pointed to the city’s “bloated” workforce — under the de Blasio administration, it has grown from 297,349 jobs in 2014 to 333,433 jobs this year — and said the city needs to reevaluate the consultants it pays.
“We’ve created a culture of consultants and contractors that is just not sustainable,” he said.
Couple that with a future in which many municipal jobs could become obsolete, and Adams said there are the makings of the “great collapse of our employment system.”
To deal with a downturn, he would consider cutting city jobs through attrition, reducing spending on consultants and would institute realtime statistical analysis at city agencies — akin to the
NYPD’s CompStat — to better gauge effectiveness and efficiency.
Stringer, whose term as comptroller has tracked with de Blasio’s City Hall tenure, wants to expand the city’s cash reserves by an additional $2.7 billion and is proposing bringing back a “robust PEG program” to make government run more efficiently.
PEGs, or “programs to eliminate the gap,” are a policy Mayor Mike Bloomberg used to reduce agency-byagency costs. De Blasio instituted a PEG program in his second term.
“I have argued publicly, privately and in all my budget analyses that we’re simply not saving enough,” Stringer said of his recommendations to the de Blasio administration. “They refuse to listen.”
But it isn’t just a failure to save that’s the problem, said
Stringer. Waste in the city’s social services agencies and its Correction Department also needs to be addressed. Cost-per-inmate spending has climbed at city jails, and spending on homeless services has more than doubled to $3.3 billion since de Blasio took office.
“If you’re going spend $3.3 billion, fix the homeless crisis,” he said.
Loree Sutton, a less wellknown mayoral hopeful and de Blasio’s former veterans affairs commissioner, suggested that repairing relationships — de Blasio and Gov. Cuomo have feuded famously for years — is one intangible, but important, way to prepare for a downturn. Reforming the city’s property tax system and trimming the fat in government are other, more direct, methods, she said.
Johnson (D-Manhattan) said he would aim to trim through PEGs and cutting head count through attrition. Spending on core services, he added, are essential to ensuring the city’s long-term fiscal health, too.
“You need to invest in mass transit,” he said. “You need to keep crime low so that businesses and people want to move here. You have to improve the schools so families want to move here.”
A couple of options the candidates did not delve into too deeply were raising property tax rates and laying off city workers.
No surprise there, CUNY’s Mollenkopf quipped.
“It’s Political Science 101 that a politician or elected officials aren’t going to make painful choices until they’re up against the wall,” he said. “They’re certainly not going to talk about it.”