Bill him for it

Mayor de Blasio’s got a bad habit of procrastinating when it comes to big decisions, and his mid-year city budget update is no exception. The revised spending plan, the penultimate November budget modification he’ll produce as New York City’s mayor, too frequently advertises as “savings” what are actually just fixed expenses scooted into future fiscal years, a maneuver that delays instead of confronting difficult choices and leaves whoever’s elected to City Hall next year holding the bag.

This year’s $92 billion spending plan is set to grow by more than $5 billion, nearly 6%, in the fiscal year starting July 2021, and will reach a behemoth $101.3 billion by 2024, 10% bigger than this year’s budget. By January, just a month from now, de Blasio will have to come up with tax hikes or spending cuts to close an estimated $3.8 billion budget deficit.

The mayor’s promised to achieve $1 billion in labor savings each of the next three years, but has offered no details on his progress negotiating any real efficiencies with labor unions.

Meanwhile, the budget reflects a city propped up for months through roughly $40 billion of desperately needed federal stimulus, which pumped blood through the sick city’s arteries as 900,000 people lost their jobs. The city’s regained only 300,000 of those jobs since it began reopening, a fragile recovery jeopardized by a potential second wave of COVID cases and new lockdowns.

We’re anxiously awaiting a federal stimulus and crossing our fingers New York City’s tax revenues will recover quickly when vaccines arrive, but de Blasio’s spending plan assumes hotels will quickly fill up again and that sales taxes will spring back to pre-pandemic levels within a little more than a year.

As we’ve seen far too many times before, it’s wishful thinking from a poor planner.