Mayor Zohran Mamdani and City Council Speaker Julie Menin managed Tuesday to agree on a budget for the year that starts July 1 with just hours to go.
New Yorkers may wish they hadn’t bothered.
For starters, the ginormous $126 billion plan is, per city Comptroller Mark Levine, essentially unsound — as it relies on one-shots, fiscal gimmicks, phony savings and, basically, chewing gum to hold it together.
Mamdani & Co. managed to paper over the shortfall between spending and revenue this year — but they left monster gaps down the road.
Another huge worry: The plan sacrifices public safety by holding down the NYPD headcount, scrapping planned police academy classes that would’ve added another 580 cops, while upping outlays for more giveaways.
The Democratic Socialist mayor just had to cave to his fellow Defund-the-Police cronies who demanded not one cop more.
“I am proud to have worked closely with Mayor Mamdani and public safety advocates to ensure there was no increase in the NYPD’s headcount in this budget,” Queens lefty Tiffany Caban gleefully posted on X.
Meanwhile, retirement and other attrition will lower the headcount over the next few months.
Feel safer yet?
At the same time, the council insisted on injecting another $225 million into the city’s housing-voucher program, which is meant to help people in shelters move into permanent housing, even though its costs have mushroomed from $25 million in fiscal year 2019 to almost $2 billion last year.
In 2023, the program became a fiscal flashpoint when the council unwisely passed legislation expanding eligibility to people with higher incomes and to those facing eviction.
As the Citizens Budget Commission has warned, the program may cost less than shelter stays in the short-run, but it becomes “substantially more expensive over time.”
Indeed, Levine warns it’s growing at an astounding 4% per day, with unchecked spending likely reaching up to $20 billion over the next five years.
And the budget is chock full of other unaffordable and out-of-control outlays as well — most notably, $39.9 billion for schools, even though the city spends more per student than almost other major city in America, and gets mediocre results.
Oh, and that figure represents a $3 billion increase over last year, even as enrollment is declining.
Mamdani seems to think billions will fall from the skies — or maybe Albany or Washington or Wall Street — to cover the billions in gaps he’s now staring at in future budgets.
That’s the typical magical thinking of a socialist.
And when the magic fails, New Yorkers will be stuck with the bill.