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Council Speaker Adams Outlines State of the City Agenda Focused on Housing and Economic Mobility


City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams (photo: John McCarten/NYC Council Media Unit)


City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, a Queens Democrat, on Wednesday dedicated her second State of the City speech to the essential workers of New York City who “kept going and kept us going” during the pandemic. In her speech Adams announced an agenda for the year ahead focused on “economic mobility, housing, and healthier and safer neighborhoods.”

“Workers run this city. They put the people of this city over everything, and so should we,” Adams said, speaking at the Justice Sonia Sotomayor Houses and Community Center in Soundview in the Bronx. The speech was attended by dozens of elected officials including Mayor Eric Adams, Public Advocate Jumaane WIlliams, Comptroller Brad Lander, Council members, borough presidents, and district attorneys.

Speaker Adams announced a series of measures covering workforce development, higher education, early childhood education, affordable housing and homeownership, homelessness prevention, economic and industrial development, small business incentives, healthcare, public safety, and more. Those proposals were included in a detailed agenda she released Wednesday, titled “People Over Everything.”

Among the items on her agenda are a proposal to build new public housing developments; modernizing the city’s manufacturing zoning regulations; tweaks to the city’s Mandatory Inclusionary Housing policy; expanding eligibility for the Fair Fares discounted MetroCard program; a mobile health care hub for food delivery workers; and more. Some of her proposals require legislative action and support from the mayoral administration, and even the state in some cases, while others are a matter of increased funding in the upcoming city budget.

Though the speaker extended a friendly welcome to her fellow Democrat, Mayor Adams (no relation), her speech took direct aim at his proposed $102.7 billion preliminary budget for the next fiscal year. Speaker Adams and many of her colleagues have been severely critical of cuts the mayor has already made and additional ones he’s proposed across city agencies. They’ve focused many questions, including at the Council’s first preliminary budget hearings this week, on the mayor’s handling of city government personnel, including failures to adapt recruitment and retention policies as the city faces a major staffing crisis and his proposed reduction in budgeted vacancies.

“Proposals in a speech are meaningless if they are not consistent with budget decisions,” she said, pointing specifically to cuts to 3-K, libraries, and CUNY. And she stressed a particular urgency in addressing agency personnel shortages. “It has created a domino effect, and now New Yorkers who rely on essential services are feeling those impacts in real time,” she said, alluding to the city’s reduced performance on things like distributing food stamps to closing affordable housing financing deals.

The mayor’s budget scraps a previously planned expansion of pre-kindergarten for three-year-olds, another area where the administration and the Council find themselves at loggerheads. The administration has insisted that there are thousands of vacant 3-K seats that should be filled before the program grows any further, but the Council has pushed back.

“We must work to correct the course that has weakened our 3-K system,” Speaker Adams said in her speech. She pointed to the “hollowed out” Early Childhood Education division at the Department of Education, another victim of the staffing shortage. She also said that the 3-K program should be “revamped and expanded with a newly designed contract,” along with salary parity for early childhood workers.

Adams also recommitted to the effort to close the scandal-ridden and violence-plagued Rikers Island jail complex. Rikers is set by law to close by the start of 2027 and be replaced by four borough-based jails everywhere but Staten Island, a plan that is contingent on reducing the jail population to below 3,300. But the jail population has increased in the last two years, exceeding 5,800 as of the latest count, and there were more detainee deaths last year than in a quarter century. Mayor Adams and his administration have been openly skeptical that the closure plan will be achievable on the current timeline.

“The conditions at Rikers are only creating harm for everyone there,” Speaker Adams said Wednesday, stressing the need to invest in pre-trial and alternative-to-incarceration programs, and supportive housing with re-entry programs for people leaving the jail system. “Advancing the closure of Rikers is more urgent now than ever before – for both public safety and human rights,” she said.

The speaker did not otherwise delve too deeply into public safety, though she did call for greater investments in street safety infrastructure, expanded community safety solutions to violent crime, and increased support for the city’s two Overdose Prevention Centers, which the mayor just pledged last week when he released a plan focused on mental health and drug addiction.

Adams, the first Black City Council speaker, took the speech as an opportunity to tout the Council’s achievements in her first year in the role, leading the first woman-majority Council. Those included the passage of abortion protections, measures to tackle racial disparities in maternal health, legislation to curb racial and gender wage disparities, creation of the state’s first community-based trauma recovery centers, and the approval of 40 land use projects that will create 12,000 units of housing, to name a few.

“We will continue to advance solutions for New Yorkers whose needs have too often been marginalized, because when we respond through this lens of equity, all New Yorkers win,” she said. “This means focusing on the needs of women, who make up 60% of our city’s frontline workforce, and people of color, who are three out of every four frontline workers.”

Adams also celebrated the success of the CUNY Reconnect program, which she proposed and launched last year for CUNY students that left without earning their degrees. Since its launch, the program has helped 16,000 students return to college, exceeding the original goal of 10,000. “The overwhelming success of this program makes clear: we need to fully fund CUNY, and expand programs like CUNY Reconnect,” she said.

Housing was among the main areas that Adams addressed on Wednesday, with a particular focus on the New York City Housing Authority, the public housing agency which houses roughly half-a-million New Yorkers. NYCHA has suffered from years of underinvestment at every level of government, leading to dilapidated apartments and egregious living conditions that have harmed the health and safety of its residents.

Speaker Adams made an ambitious proposal to ameliorate those conditions by building new public housing developments for existing NYCHA residents on un- or under-used NYCHA-owned land. The new higher-density developments would require city, state, and federal funding and would also include other affordable and mixed-income housing, she said.

“I’m under no illusion that this is an easy or straightforward idea,” she acknowledged. “In fact, this ambitious task would require resources and close coordination from DC, Albany, and Gracie Mansion. But I present it even with its complexities, because we can’t keep tinkering around the edges of the status quo and expect to deliver transformative change that residents deserve.”

Adams also further teased the impending introduction of a Fair Housing Framework bill, which she first announced in December, to set local affordable housing production goals, and expressed her support for proposals in Governor Kathy Hochul’s budget plan that will help build more housing in the city including through mandatory local growth targets, converting office space to housing, and eliminating the floor-area-ratio cap in the city. And she said the city should update its Mandatory Inclusionary Housing policy, approved under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, to require more deeply affordable housing.

The speaker also pledged to strengthen programs to help preserve existing rent-regulated apartments and to expand affordable homeownership, and new legislation to make it easier for low-income families to receive rental assistance vouchers that prevent evictions.

In keeping with the theme of the speech, Adams announced several workforce development  proposals. She said the Council would work to reduce barriers to entry for civil service jobs and announced a new Social Work Fellows program that would cover tuition for college graduates and create a pipeline for them to join the city’s mental health workforce. She also said the Council will make a “multi-million-dollar” investment to create three more workforce development centers at NYCHA developments. And she promised legislation to ban non-compete agreements for workers.

The speaker is also proposing several economic development measures to boost small businesses, revive industrial manufacturing, and create programs for underrepresented entrepreneurs.

She proposed updates to the city’s manufacturing zoning to incentivize businesses to set up shop in abandoned industrial zones. “We are sitting on industrial goldmines that have been neglected,” she said. That proposal would be accompanied by legislation mandating citywide industrial planning, she said, “so we can transition away from fossil fuels towards green energy, support job growth and citywide needs.”

She said the Council would partner with Community Development Financial Institutions to build programs that will provide capital to under-represented entrepreneurs, Minority- and Women-Owned Business Enterprises (MWBEs), and small businesses. And she announced support for NYCHA residents that own their own small businesses.

Benefits for low-income New Yorkers were also on Speaker Adams’ agenda as she announced expanded guaranteed income programs and an expansion of the Fair Fares half-priced MetroCard program to New Yorkers with incomes below 200% of the federal poverty level, effectively doubling the number of low-income New Yorkers who are eligible (the cutoff is currently at or below 100% of the poverty level, meaning an annual income of $14,580 for an individual).

Adams also announced that the Council would push to expand year-round public access to swimming pools, invest in free swimming and lifeguard training programs, and pass legislation requiring the city to find locations for new public pools.

On healthcare, Adams announced a new mobile healthcare hub for deliveristas, the food delivery workers that were essential during the pandemic and whose number has skyrocketed as New Yorkers order more and more delivery. She also said the Council would expand funding for healthy food markets for NYCHA developments and would push the city to expand farmer’s markets year-round.

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

Read more by this writer.

City Council Questions Mayor's Additional Planned Cuts to Internal City Government Watchdog


City Council Member Gale Brewer (photo: Emil Cohen/NYC Council Media Unit)


The New York City Department of Investigation has lost 86 budgeted positions, 21% of its staff, in the last two fiscal years, and is being hit with further vacancy reductions in Mayor Eric Adams’ proposed $102.7 billion preliminary budget for 2024. Those cuts threaten to undermine the agency’s work to root out waste, fraud, and abuse in city government, as it continues to handle an unchanged workload with fewer resources.

The Department of Investigation (DOI) is a mayoral agency with law enforcement powers meant to be the inspector general for city government, operating without fear or favor toward the mayor. Given its powers, its commissioner is one of a very small number of mayoral appointments at that level of government that requires the consent of the City Council.

At a City Council budget hearing on Tuesday, DOI Commissioner Jocelyn Strauber testified to the agency’s dwindling staff and the efforts the office has taken to streamline operations in response. DOI has its own personnel budget and also receives funding from other agencies for dedicated Inspector General staff. For fiscal year 2024, which begins July 1 of this year, DOI’s overall budget proposed by the mayor is $45.27 million – a more than 15% cut from the budget adopted last year – while another $1.6 million will flow from other agencies and public authorities like NYCHA and NYC Health+Hospitals.

“This committee is concerned that after multiple years of reductions the department is not adequately funded,” said City Council Member Gale Brewer, a Manhattan Democrat and chair of the Council’s Committee on Oversight and Investigations, in her opening remarks at Tuesday’s hearing.

The mayor’s preliminary budget proposes a cut of 55 budgeted positions at DOI, from a budgeted headcount of 348 when the current budget was adopted last June to 293 for next fiscal year. That cut includes 18 positions that were added at the urging of the Council last year but not baselined in the budget as well as another 37 vacant positions that were cut as part of the mayor’s Program to Eliminate the Gap (PEG), wherein the mayor sought 3% in savings across most agencies.

As Strauber noted in her testimony, the PEG “hit DOI particularly hard because we already had a high vacancy rate due to difficulties in hiring and retaining staff over the past several years.” The agency currently has 63 positions that are vacant. “DOI is staff-driven, not program-driven, so our PEG cuts principally impact our headcount,” she said. Strauber, a former federal prosecutor, was appointed to the role by Mayor Adams during 2022, his first year in office.

At the same time as it continues to lose staff, DOI’s workload has increased on some fronts. In the 2022 calendar year, the agency received 12,580 complaints, an increase of about 3.5% from the previous year. It opened 940 investigations, 46 more than in 2021. There were also 1,526 active investigations and another 837 closed investigations, roughly consistent with 2021. The agency also reduced its backlog of personnel background investigations to about 910, down from a high of 6,500 in 2019.

“You've done more with less so I know you could do a lot more with more,” Brewer told Strauber.

Strauber emphasized that the agency has strived to fulfill its responsibilities. “I certainly don't think there's work that we're not doing or important investigations that we're not pursuing,” she said. But, nonetheless, the staffing reductions have had an adverse impact. “Overall there may be a slower pace of work and we are…trying to make good and efficient choices about how we pursue investigations. So we're doing everything we can with what we have.”

Strauber said the agency needs at least 30 more baselined positions at a total cost of just $1.7 million. That will free up staff to focus their attention on investigations rather than spending 20% of their time on administrative complaint intake, she said. Twenty of those staffers would include confidential investigators, auditors, lawyers, and other specialists, and six of them would be dedicated to a squad overseeing four agencies that handle more than $6.7 billion in capital projects. “That Squad has not been fully staffed to date which has hampered its ability to strategically establish its docket,” Strauber noted.

Strauber also said that without baselined funding, the agency will struggle to fill empty positions and hire more investigators. “We can't really recruit people where we don't have assurance that the money will be there,” she said.

“It is hard for me to envision how we could hire someone without a commitment that we have the funding to pay them for more than one year,” she later added.

When asked by Brewer about the potential for DOI workers to be allowed hybrid work schedules, including some ability to work from home, Strauber said it would make it easier to hire personnel. “Our hiring, we think, would be considerably easier if we could offer even a moderate remote hybrid option,” she said. Mayor Adams has insisted that all city employees report to their official workplaces, continuing a policy put in place by Mayor Bill de Blasio after the worst of the covid pandemic.

Brewer had broached the subject of DOI’s vacancy reductions and the administration’s stance on work-from-home policies on Monday, at the first Council hearing on the mayor’s proposed budget. At the hearing, Jacques Jiha, director of the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget, defended the cuts in vacancies as part of the broad effort to reduce spending across city government. On the issue of hybrid work schedules, he declined any real discussion, instead pointing to a pilot hybrid work program that the administration has agreed to explore with DC37, the city’s largest public sector union. Brewer stressed that many non-union employees, like those at DOI, should be offered a hybrid schedule, and pointed to the lack of hybrid schedules as a major barrier to hiring and retention.

On Tuesday, Strauber said that remote work had not negatively affected her agency’s work. “We had the vast majority of our staff work remotely during the pandemic,” she said. “Obviously that was a challenging time, but their ability to do their investigations really continued unabated. And certainly remote work we don't view as posing an issue to our ability to be productive and to work collaboratively as a team and as an agency.”

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

Read more by this writer.

At First Hearing on Mayor's Preliminary Budget, City Council Takes Aim at Agency Staffing Crisis


Budget Director Jacques Jiha (photo: John McCarten, NYC Council Media Unit)


City Council members repeatedly clashed with budget officials from Mayor Eric Adams’ administration at a hearing on Monday, pressing for answers about an ongoing staffing crisis at city agencies that has affected the delivery of municipal services. The hearing kicked off the weeks-long process of the Council’s public examination of Mayor Adams’ $102.7 billion preliminary budget proposal for the 2024 fiscal year, which starts July 1.

The first part of the hearing featured testimony from Mayor Adams' budget director, Jacques Jiha, who repeatedly stressed the fiscal challenges facing the city and touted the administration's careful budgeting. He and a series of City Council members engaged in rounds of back-and-forth where the members questioned the city's approach to its tens of thousands of vacant positions and rigid personnel policies. While Jiha offered a few notes of progress, he largely side-stepped what appear to be the most pressing challenges: a lack of hybrid work models and low pay scales that often can't compete with the private sector.

[READ: Is Mayor Adams' Spending Plan an 'Austerity' Budget?]

The mayor’s budget proposal is about $1.7 billion higher than the budget adopted by the Council last June, and slightly lower than the $102.9 billion that the city projected in its November budget modification that it would spend by the end of the current fiscal year. 

When Adams, a first-term Democrat, released his budget proposal in January, it included few new avenues of major spending, and made significant cuts across several city agencies to account for pandemic-era federal aid that is running out.

The administration also faces a slew of budget risks – unresolved costs of renegotiating expired labor contracts, funding services for tens of thousands of migrant asylum-seekers, lower stock market returns that will increase pension costs, cuts and cost shifts imposed by Governor Kathy Hochul’s state budget proposal, a possible recession, and tax revenues that are expected to slow after coming in higher than expected. 

As part of the preliminary budget, the mayor ordered city agencies to find 3% in savings under a Program to Eliminate the Gap (PEG), which saved $3 billion across the current and next fiscal years – including a reduction in almost 4,300 budgeted vacancies across city government in the current fiscal year.

City Council members, among others, have been particularly critical of the vacancy cuts and larger picture of tens of thousands of budgeted vacancies, arguing against what they see as an overall approach that has hampered the ability of city agencies to provide basic services and core functions. At the Council’s urging, the administration restored almost 400 vacant positions, including 340 for the Department of Social Services, but the central issue — discussed repeatedly at Monday’s hearing — remains the city’s ability to recruit, hire, and retain personnel.

“These reductions call into question the city's ability to provide essential services that support New Yorkers to say nothing of the goals laid out by the administration on housing, economic opportunity, and public safety,” said Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, a Queens Democrat, in her opening remarks. “The fact that these cuts are not distributed evenly, only magnifies this concern.” 

Adams and others have pointed to specific areas of concern including funding cuts to libraries, mental health services, CUNY, and prekindergarten for three-year-olds (3-K). 

The mayor’s Office of Management and Budget has predicted that the city will end the current fiscal year with a $2.2 billion surplus, which will be used to pre-pay costs for the next fiscal year. But the City Council has questioned those predictions, releasing its own forecast on Friday that projects a surplus that is $5.2 billion more than OMB’s projections for the current and next fiscal years. Council Member Justin Brannan, a Brooklyn Democrat and chair of the Council’s finance committee, said there is an “abundance of pessimism” in OMB’s tax and revenue projections, unlike the Council’s own numbers. “[A]fter reviewing the administration's preliminary budget, concerns that the Council raised last year about veering into unnecessary austerity have returned,” he said. 

Jiha said the Adams administration followed a “cautious path” as it prepared for the many risks it faced in creating next year’s budget. And he repeatedly deflected when questioned about the staffing crisis, which he attributed more to a tight overall labor market than city policies. Even with some reductions, there are more than 23,000 budgeted vacancies citywide – including, for instance, over 2,100 at the Department of Social Services, more than 670 at the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and more than 400 at the Department of Housing Preservation and Development. 

“Their challenge is that hiring has not caught up with attrition,” he said, noting that agencies hired 22,400 employees in the 2022 fiscal year and lost 24,500 to attrition. He did say that the city is “turning the corner” and that the municipal headcount increased by a net of 1,000 in the first seven months of the current fiscal year.

Jiha said the administration has taken several steps to address staffing issues including scrapping previous restrictions on hiring, shortening his Office of Management and Budget’s timeline for reviewing personnel actions, and new initiatives for recruiting and retaining workers. While he repeatedly pointed to job fairs the city has begun holding, he mostly tried to avoid discussing pay scales and hybrid work models for union and non-union employees. He did, however, acknowledge at one point under questioning that the lack of a remote work option is one of the reasons that the city has lost workers to the private sector.

Most recently, the administration reached a tentative contract deal with DC 37, the city’s largest municipal workers union, that included a $70 million equity fund for salaries for hard-to-recruit titles, and a plan to explore flexible work schedules that will allow for remote work for some employees. “The city has always been a passive employer…We don't aggressively go out there, try to recruit people,” Jiha noted. “We're changing that pattern.”

When asked by Council Member Gale Brewer, a Manhattan Democrat, if the Adams administration was offering non-union employees or recruits hybrid work schedules whereby they can work some days from home, Jiha acknowledged that the administration has made no such strides, only pointing to the exploratory effort in the tentative DC37 contract. “That's going to be part of the pilot,” he said. 

“People won’t work for the city if it is not hybrid,” Brewer responded. “You're not going to be able to hire good people.”

The DC37 deal and other likely labor agreements to follow, along with the growing costs of the migrant crisis, state cuts and cost shifts, and more have all yet to be fully accounted for, and will be included in the mayor’s executive budget proposal which is due in April. With the state budget due by April 1, the mayor will be able to take into account final decisions by Governor Hochul and legislators on a number of fiscal issues where the city is trying to push back on Hochul’s plans.

Jiha noted that the $4.4 billion DC37 agreement for 2021 through 2026 is mostly offset by the city’s labor reserves, and would lead to a net $2.9 billion increase in city spending through the 2027 fiscal year. But the pattern set by the contract will cost the city about $16 billion in total for all labor contracts to be settled through 2027. The state cost shifts, he estimated, would equal more than $1 billion annually – that includes about $530 million each year in additional contributions to the MTA, and $125 million in the current fiscal year in lost Medicaid funding, which will grow to more than $340 million annually.

Jiha also painted a dire portrait of the migrant situation, which has swelled the city’s shelter population and strained the budget. Last January, Jiha said, the city’s shelter population stood at 45,213, and it has grown to almost 80,000 between DSS shelters and humanitarian relief centers specifically for asylum-seekers. In total, shelter and services are estimated to cost the city about $4.2 billion between the current and next fiscal years. The governor has proposed $1 billion in state aid for that purpose while the amount of funding from the federal government remains uncertain – $800 million for migrant assistance nationally was appropriated in December, with the city expected to see much of it, but it has yet to be disbursed. 

“We are in a very difficult situation,” Jiha stressed. “In an era of limited and diminishing resources, we will have to make difficult decisions to balance the budget as required by law and simultaneously  prevent fiscal strain that will jeopardize our ability to deliver quality services to  New Yorkers.”

Throughout the hearing, Council members were largely focused on the personnel vacancies. They pointed to the Preliminary Mayor’s Management Report, which shows city agencies failing to perform their duties. For instance, the Human Resources Administration has shown significant delays in processing food stamp applications. After a marked slowdown last fiscal year, the housing department is predicting that far fewer new affordable housing projects will launch compared to before the pandemic. There has also been a drop in the number of new housing units to begin construction in the first four months of the current fiscal year compared with the same period in the previous fiscal year.

Jiha sought to reassure the Council that vacancies generally were not to blame, and that the administration is prioritizing resources where required. “We are more than happy to work with agencies,” Jiha said. “Agencies have enough heads but if there are certain areas of the operation that need resources, and if the resources are available, we will work with them and work with you.”

The hearing touched on several other issues in some depth as Council members asked questions, including the migrant crisis, cuts to a planned expansion of 3-K, nonprofit contracting, and more. 

One of the criticisms the mayor has faced is for his decision to pare back an expansion of 3-K for All, which was planned under former Mayor Bill de Blasio. Adams’ preliminary budget includes a $283 million reduction for the 3-K program, scrapping 6,000 new slots that would have grown the program from 55,000 to 61,000 seats. The administration has said the expansion was unnecessary since roughly 33% of 3-K seats are currently empty and the prior model was not right-sized for enrollment trends.

Asked by Speaker Adams about 3-K waitlists, Jiha said the administration has hired the consulting firm Accenture to study the distribution and need for 3-K seats. “It doesn't make any sense for the city to be spending money for 19,000 seats that are empty,” he insisted. 

Pressed by Brannan about the vacancies at the Department of Homeless Services, Jiha said the administration has prioritized hiring at the agency. “We're working with them, and they're making progress but…it's a very challenging environment and we’re trying to be as aggressive as we can be,” he said. 

Council Member Charles Barron, a Brooklyn Democrat, had some of the harshest criticism for the administration, in particular for the mayor’s budget PEG. “These are not PEGs. These are cuts to services and when you cut vacancies, you cut services no matter how you try to fix it up in your report,” he said. 

Barron insisted that the budget fails to invest sufficiently in Black and brown neighborhoods where poverty and unemployment is higher than other parts of the city. “You don't have a money problem. You have a prioritization of spending problem,” he said, as he encouraged his fellow Council members to reject the budget. “This time around let's use our power so no matter what they present, let's use the power of the City Council to be for the people and say this budget is not a priority of the moral position or the values of this Council when it comes to human beings living in the richest city in the world with abject poverty that is disgusting and shameful,” he said. 

Council Members Diana Ayala, Farah Louis, and Althea Stevens questioned the administration about delayed payments to nonprofit service providers. Jiha said the administration is working to improve its procurement process, and collaborating with the comptroller’s office to streamline contract registrations and payments. “This is the first time we're tackling this issue where we’re putting resources behind it to make sure we change our entire process,” he said.  

Council Member Pierina Sanchez highlighted staffing challenges at the housing department (HPD) and the decreased rate of new affordable housing being financed and built. “The housing crisis. It is number one on New Yorkers’ minds and I wager that it should be and it should remain number one in the administration's mind,” she said. 

Jiha said the slowdown of affordable housing creation is a much more complicated problem because of the global supply chain problems and a nationwide labor shortage. And he noted that HPD currently has 427 vacant positions. “Giving you a hundred more vacant positions is not going to solve your hiring problem,” he said, again not discussing some of the ways in which critics and supporters of the administration have suggested changing city policy to enhance hiring and retention.

Ahead of his own testimony to the City Council on Monday, Comptroller Brad Lander, a Democrat, released a detailed analysis of the mayor’s preliminary budget, along with a brief report on how vacancies have affected agency performance.

He highlighted the changing fiscal forecast for the city, predicting a “soft landing” but not a recession for the city’s economy. But he did note the various added costs and risks including the costs of the labor union deals, the effect of the governor’s proposal, and additional costs of migrant shelter and services. He also pointed out other areas that are under-budgeted including uniformed agency overtime costs, spending on charter schools and Carter special education cases, pupil transportation, and growing city contributions to the MTA. 

Lander had several recommendations for the administration including shifting more migrants out of shelter (by supporting work authorizations or transitions to permanent housing), reversing cuts to CUNY and public libraries, adopting a formula for Rainy Day Fund deposits, new hiring and retention policies, and support for higher taxes on the wealthy at the state level in order to increase revenue for the city to invest into services.

“Let’s be clear. While savings and efficiencies are necessary, they won’t be near enough to allow us to invest in the  ambitious programs we need to secure New York City’s economic success, while also closing the budget gaps we face,” Lander said in his testimony. “New funding will be necessary. This budget cycle is the time to ask Albany for the resources and authority to raise revenues necessary to invest in the City’s future.”

Like the City Council, the Independent Budget Office also predicted in testimony on Monday that the city will have higher revenues at its disposal. But IBO also pointed to additional costs such as spending at the Department of Education (which will be affected by diminishing federal aid) and overtime costs, largely at the NYPD, that have regularly been higher than budgeted. The settlement of labor contracts will also push spending up, IBO’s testimony stated. “While this does not come as a surprise, it does mean policymakers may be faced with tough choices, particularly in the outyears,” the testimony reads.

The City Council’s preliminary budget hearings will now shift to committee and agency specifics, and will last through March. Tuesday’s hearings include those on small business; environmental protection, resiliency and waterfronts; immigration; and oversight and investigations.

[READ: Is Mayor Adams' Spending Plan an 'Austerity' Budget?]

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

Read more by this writer.



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