With no plans for endless migrants, Adams can’t truly claim his budget is balanced

Nicole Gelinas

Opinion

By Nicole Gelinas

July 9, 2023 | 5:52pm

In his fiscal-year 2024 budget, inked just before the July 4th holiday, Mayor Eric Adams made it clear that he’s accepted that New York City is on its own in the migrant crisis the White House helped create.

What the mayor hasn’t made clear is what he’s going to do about his own part in making this mess, other than keep shelling out the bucks.

The ongoing migrant crisis — or, rather, the city’s failure to deal with it — makes a mockery of budget planning.

More than 100,000 people are regularly sleeping in city-run shelters, apartments or hotels, more than half of them migrants — double the shelter population of 18 months ago.

This burden has caused New York’s budget to explode.

Let’s not even talk yet about the new fiscal year, which started July 1.

First, consider the last fiscal year, which ended June 30.

Last year at this time, Adams projected the budget to be $79.4 billion (not counting federal and state grants).

Instead, it clocked in at $81.5 billion — an overrun of nearly $2.1 billion, or nearly 3%.

That means taxpayer-funded spending for the year that just ended — Adams’s first budget as mayor — was up a whopping 9.5% over Mayor Bill de Blasio’s final big-spending year.

That’s double the (still-elevated) 4% inflation rate over the past year.

Less than half of this jump is for the higher salaries and benefits for public workers Adams has awarded over the past few months.

The city’s workforce is actually down 3,080 people, or 9%, compared to last year’s projection.

The city didn’t make any grand new investments in infrastructure, or launch any new broad multibillion-dollar programs.

Nope, the only thing that changed is the migrant crisis, costing an unexpected $1.4 billion.

The fact that the crisis totally blew out last year’s budget, and that we didn’t know the full impact until now, means we can’t say anything with certainty about this year’s new budget.

The city is already projecting additional migrant spending of another $3.4 billion, which is more than the $2.9 billion projected in April — pushing up overall taxpayer spending by 1.5%.

That extra spending widens the deficit next summer to $5.1 billion, up from a projected $4.2 billion.

Why did projected migrant spending rise so much just from April’s guess?

Because Adams has finally admitted the obvious: Washington isn’t stepping in to help.

The extra half billion in spending over the past three months is something he now calls an “asylum seekers federal shortfall.”

Of course, there is no such thing as an “asylum seekers federal shortfall.”

The federal government never offered us any money to house migrants, and never even hinted at offering us any such money. Adams should not have assumed we would get any.

Adams and the City Council should similarly stop claiming this year’s new budget is balanced.

“It is on time, balanced and fiscally responsible,” the mayor has said.

But with no long-term strategy to deal with migrants seeking city shelter, that’s impossible to say.

Already, the city’s projections of migrants have been wildly off.

In April, New York projected that it would be housing 70,000 migrants by next June.

With the level already above 50,000, and with 2,500 more arriving each week, we’ll reach that level by fall. 

Now that he has acknowledged — in writing — that the federal government isn’t stepping up, what is Adams’ plan?

Yes, President Joe Biden made this mess, by refusing to acknowledge the obvious: Most of the people crossing the border are not likely eligible for asylum, as they’re not war refugees or victims of persecution.

But Adams made this mess, too, by refusing to recognize that New York’s shelters can’t do something they weren’t designed for — indefinitely host an unknowable number of global migrants, rather than a small, finite population of New York City’s traditional homeless.

On the one hand, he sometimes observes that New York cannot house the entire world, at least not without running out of money for public services.

On the other, he keeps opening “welcome center” after “welcome center,” makeshift shelter after makeshift shelter.

The latest plan, no more solid than previous discarded plans involving tent cities and gyms, is to house migrants in public schools over the summer.

What happens when summer is over?

Until Adams has a real plan that goes beyond the next eight weeks, New York City’s new budget is nowhere near balanced.

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.