New York City’s budget director was grilled Tuesday by the City Council over recent cuts by Mayor Eric Adams to close billions in projected budget gaps, with the two sides feuding over why the spending cuts were necessary.
Jacques Jiha, the head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), told council members that increased spending on asylum seekers between June and November widened a projected $5 billion gap to more than $7 billion – requiring the city to make more cuts.
Those programs to eliminate the gap, or PEGs, were spread across all city agencies at around 5% of their respective budgets.
Jiha said the city had received some additional money from the state and federal government – approximately $1.9 billion from the state and $156 million from the feds – but it wasn’t enough. And, he said, the city would need more outside help to continue to fund its spending on the migrant crisis, instead of just making cuts to that spending and the rest of the budget.
“We simply cannot rely exclusively on PEGS to fund asylum seeker expenses,” he said. “It is not sustainable.”
Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, though, pushed back on the administration’s contention that the city’s financial woes are due to the migrants.
“Many factors are contributing to the gaps of our city’s out-year budgets, and asylum seekers are not to blame,” she said at Monday’s hearing, citing slowed economic growth and the expiration of COVID-related funds.
In a recent op-ed, the council’s leaders called for more “surgical” cuts and finding new ways to close the gaps without reductions, like re-evaluating some tax breaks and going after uncollected fines and fees.
The across-the-board cuts announced in November reduced garbage pickups, limited the city’s composting program, ended Sunday service at the New York, Queens, and Brooklyn public libraries, delayed the start of new 3-K and pre-k classes by six months, and slashed $570 million from the city’s education department.
The police department also cut its next five upcoming academy classes for new recruits, and the fire department reduced staffing at some firehouses.
The cuts, announced five months after the mayor and Council had committed to a budget for the year, are widely unpopular with New Yorkers, with 83% of voters saying they are concerned the reduced spending will impact their own lives, according to a new Quinnipiac poll. Just 22% of New Yorkers said they approved of Adams’ handling of the budget while 66% said they disapproved.
After months of lobbying the Biden administration for more support, Adams this week conceded that no further help is expected from Washington any time soon, saying that he shares New Yorkers’ anger with the federal government.
‘Mismanaging this Entire Process’
Many of the cuts affected the most vulnerable New Yorkers, council members said, like the Parks Opportunity Program, or POP. The program – which was funded through the Human Resources Administration to connect New Yorkers to work within the Parks Department – was entirely cut in November’s budget modification.
On Monday, Councilmember Shekar Krishnan, a member of the council’s progressive caucus that held a hearing before the rally protesting the cuts, asked about replacing staff from the POP program who clean most of the city’s parks. Jiha replied that the Parks Department would get funding to hire full-time workers.
However, a spokesperson for the Parks Department told THE CITY on Monday that they were told they’d receive a budget for around 400 seasonal cleaning and maintenance positions.
Much of the criticism from the city council was about the for-profit contracts paid by the city to care for thousands of asylum seekers. Comptroller Brad Lander last week restricted City Hall from being able to approve some emergency contracts, which Mayor Adams criticized as an unnecessary act of “tying our hands.”
“This city is mismanaging this entire process and we need to hold them accountable,” Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, said about the city’s spending.
Louisa Chafee, the director of the city’s Independent Budget Office, had a more optimistic look at the city’s financial outlook.
“IBO estimates a budget surplus this year and the budget deficit for 2025 to be notably smaller than OMB’s estimate,” she said during her testimony. But, she continued, “There is more uncertainty, however, around both revenues and expenditures in the later years of the financial plan.”
