Seeing double
In something of a budgetary pile-up, Mayor Adams and Gov. Hochul both released their fiscal year 2025 budget proposals yesterday, with the behemoth spending plans clocking in at $109.4 billion and $233 billion, respectively. The state budget came first, and eyes in City Hall and of NYC taxpayers were largely on its commitments on migrant funding, which the city was relying on to develop its own budget. The hoped-for $1.9 billion state commitment was there, along with an additional $500 million in reserves, which will cumulatively go towards reimbursing the city for services provided, maintaining state shelters at Floyd Bennett Field and other locations, and providing direct assistance like legal aid.
Despite the help, the city is maintaining significant budget cuts, except, of course, for the rather haphazard reinstatements that Adams has announced over the past several days, courtesy of reductions in projected asylum seeker costs and increases in tax revenues. Setting aside the extent to which these modifications were foreseeable — and indeed multiple budget observers had questioned the city’s math — we reiterate our call for the mayor to more explicitly lay out the decision-making in reversing certain cuts and not others.
Certainly the students whose CUNY classes have been eliminated and the parents who take their kids to public libraries would like to hear why the savings accrued from these institutions are more worth it than for other agencies. Nonetheless, the mayor is right that relentless spending upticks, especially as pandemic-era federal assistance disappears, are irresponsible. Also irresponsible is the Biden administration’s failure to commit so much as an equal part of the migrant spending. The massive state budget encompasses much more than asylum seekers, including billions of spending on schools, transit and housing, along with plenty of policy shifts beyond the dollars and cents.
Among the smarter ideas are a proposed fouryear extension of mayoral control of the New York City public schools — we would have preferred a permanent extension, the only real policy that makes sense, but we’ll take the multiple years — a shift in the schools-funding formula for outside of the city intended to benefit poorer districts, a renewal of the 421a tax incentive program for housing and Sammy’s Law for New York City to set reasonable speed limits.
As clean of a split as Hochul had with her predecessor in the executive mansion, one lesson could adapt from Andrew Cuomo’s reign — not to mention her own legislative efforts last session — is that the budget negotiation process is when a governor can be most effective, which is to say, during when she can best strong-arm through her priorities.
Hochul may have prided herself on a warmer and less confrontational dynamic with the Legislature, but the body’s unceremonious wholesale suffocation of her ambitious housing plan should have established well enough that the carrot only goes so far.
It’s high time for the stick, and legislators will wail and stomp their feet and hold press conferences and send out pointed releases, but they’ll still work with her when all is said and done. They have to. That’s not to say that the governor can or should adopt Cuomo’s schoolyard bully persona and vow to crush all dissenters, but there’s a happy middle ground that gets priorities passed, housing built, schools funded and New Yorkers served.