Don’t call it austerity

The $88.1 billion budget Mayor de Blasio and Council Speaker Corey Johnson agreed to Tuesday is $6 billion less than the spending plan the mayor envisioned in January, cuts the necessary result of coronavirus-induced body-blows to the city’s tax revenues.

We’d call this shrunken budget a necessary course correction for a spendthrift mayor who’s swelled the budget three times the rate of inflation, except it’s not clear the course has actually changed. Many of this year’s savings are the result of spending delays and other gimmicks; some could wind up being a mirage.

The mayor has no plan for how he’ll get $1 billion in promised savings from labor. And for the first time in years, the city is smashing the piggy bank, using $4 billion in savings to replace revenue shortfalls. We can’t pull that nifty trick next year or the two years after, when budget experts estimate deficits of $6.9 billion, $6.1 billion and $5.8 billion, respectively.

The city urgently needs to gird for a future in which the ever-rising tax revenues we once took for granted are no longer guaranteed, if tourists and New Yorkers who fled don’t return, and telework takes over.

The big battle inside the budget war was advocates’ arbitrary demand to slash $1 billion from the NYPD budget, a dramatic anteupping from a very different demand made in May to do that over four years.

Curbing tensions is essential; radically dialing back policing in neighborhoods experiencing spikes in homicides and shootings is dangerous.

De Blasio and the Council got to the madeup number in part by moving deck chairs, like shifting control of homeless enforcement and school safety from NYPD to other agencies. Might work, might not. Plans to slash $300 million of overtime spending are likely fiction, if past overtime cap promises are any guide.

Because he seems to think scratching a new recruiting class doesn’t add up to a hiring freeze, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, invoking an obscure City Charter provision, is threatening to stop collection of property taxes. He would not dare.