Blas Is Sabotaging the Next Mayor

Mayor de Blasio calls it his “Recovery Budget,” but it’s actually a sad bid to put some shine on his legacy while sabotaging his successor.

De Blasio’s own announcement of his record $98.6 billion spending plan for fiscal year 2022 crowed that “almost $6 billion in direct local aid will be used now through 2024, $7 billion almost in federal education aid also will be used by 2024.”

That doesn’t leave a lot of flexibility for the man or woman who takes the keys to City Hall in January 2022. And, as we noted recently, average New Yorkers will pay the price.

Top challenger Andrew Yang urged de Blasio to save 70 percent of the federal windfall to cover the costs of recovery in the coming years and to reduce the gaping multibillion-dollar deficits now locked in over the next few years.

Instead, the mayor is boosting the baseline budget by hundreds of millions. He’s not just dropping his hiring freeze, he’s adding tens of thousands of city jobs.

Leading candidate Eric Adams has similarly fumed at the mayor’s move to spend the windfall on pet projects that add thousands of new jobs to the baseline.

Heck, the mayor’s even trying to make his ThriveNYC debacle permanent, along with spending $234 million for a New Deal-style City Cleanup Corps that’ll hire 10,000 workers “to make the city cleaner and greener.” Adams says he’ll defund the CCC, as “we already have a Sanitation Department.”

“Had the city spread the federal money more evenly over a few years, it would have had time to restructure spending to increase efficiency and preserve services,” noted Andrew Rein, who heads fiscal watchdog Citizens Budget Commission.

But the mayor doesn’t care. Then again, de Blasio has cared about the price everyone else has to pay for his feckless self-indulgence.