'Still A Ways To Go': Last City Council Budget Hearing Sets Stage for Final Negotiations
NYC Budget Director Jacques Jiha (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)
The New York City Council held its final hearing Tuesday on Mayor Eric Adams’ $99.7 billion executive budget proposal for the 2023 fiscal year, pressing the administration to fund several outstanding requests ahead of the June 30 deadline for the next budget.
In her opening remarks, Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, a Queens Democrat, commended the Adams administration for funding several Council requests made in the official response to the mayor’s preliminary budget including additional money for mental health emergency response, increasing headcount at the Parks Department, and restoring some cuts to the Department of Sanitation. “However, the Council believes there is still a ways to go before our work is done,” she said.
Since the mayor’s initial budget proposal in February, the city’s economy has picked up momentum and the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued new revenue forecasts that estimate an additional $1.6 billion flowing into city coffers in the current fiscal year.
Speaker Adams pointed to the Council’s own revenue predictions, which are much more generous than OMB’s, and estimated that the city could have more than $3 billion in additional revenue in the current year and $1.9 billion more in the next fiscal year.
“Now we know we need to roll significant amounts of money into next year to balance the budget and that the city faces many risks in the future,” she said. “But we also know that we presently have significant pressing needs. We can provide ourselves with a responsible cushion accounting for these risks while still addressing the city's critical needs.”
The speaker detailed a series of Council funding priorities aimed at tackling the inequities exposed and exacerbated by the pandemic. “This is not only the right thing to do, but also the sound fiscal thing to do. You don't keep repairing a house while leaving structural issues that caused the damage unaddressed,” she said.
The list included additional funding for health and mental health, affordable and supportive housing, a property tax rebate, pay parity for special education pre-K providers, career counselors in schools, a citywide expansion of restorative justice programs, district attorneys, public defenders, the Board of Correction, the Department of Sanitation, food access, and more.
OMB Director Jacques Jiha continued to emphasize the city’s prudent fiscal management, touting the mayor’s Program to Eliminate the Gap (PEG), which cut and saved about $2.4 billion over fiscal years 2022 and 2023 largely through personnel via attrition. The budget also reduces the budgeted municipal headcount in fiscal year 2023 by 7,000 workers without layoffs.
He pointed to “manageable” outyear budget gaps – $3.9 billion in FY2024, $3.4 billion in FY2025, and $3.7 billion in FY2026 – and touted the $6.3 billion in planned reserve funding, including $1 billion in the general reserve, $1.2 billion in the newly-created Rainy Day Fund, $3.8 billion in the Retiree Health Benefits Trust fund, and $250 million in the Capital Stabilization Reserve.
Jiha pointed to several positive developments for the city including jobs growing faster than the national rate, tourism rebounding, and record Wall Street profits. But he warned that the city’s outlook is “cloudy” as he pointed to uncertainties including market volatility, higher interest rates, the effects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and a high commercial vacancy rate as private businesses have been slow to get workers back to offices.
A major financial uncertainty that the city is anticipating is the expiration of municipal labor contracts this year, which the city has yet to fully budget for. Jiha said the administration has begun to prepare for that by adding $1.7 billion across fiscal years 2022 and 2023 to the city’s labor reserve, which would fund a 0.5% percent annual wage increase for the first two years. The Citizens Budget Commission, a nonprofit fiscal watchdog, has said that those reserves may be “woefully insufficient” and that a 3% raises over three years would increase spending by $3.8 billion annually by fiscal year 2026.
With the city enjoying an abundance of cash, Council members questioned Jiha about why their priorities weren’t funded. Those issues will be front and center over the next several weeks as the two sides of City Hall move to closed-door negotiations and many Council members and advocates press their asks publicly.
Speaker Adams pushed Jiha on increasing transparency in the budget, noting that the Council’s request to add more units of appropriation went largely unheeded. “Without transparency, none of us can be accountable for our decisions. But the current method for budgeting does not allow for this accountability,” she said.
Jiha said the challenge is balancing transparency with the necessary flexibility to adjust spending as required and struggled to provide the speaker with any specifics despite her multiple attempts. “We will work with you to see what additional [units of appropriation] would be beneficial as we move toward adoption,” he said.
Adams also pointed to several policy items on the Council’s agenda including increased funding for senior health care, tackling food insecurity, two first-of-their-kind trauma recovery centers the Council wants to create, reallocating funding to convert hotels into housing for homeless families, and more. In each area, Jiha promised to collaborate on the Council’s demands while pointing to investments the city has already made.
Other Council members touched on various priorities as they proceeded to question Jiha.
Council Member Justin Brannan, a Brooklyn Democrat and the Council’s finance committee chair, pushed for more funding for the Equal Employment Practices Commission to increase its headcount. Jiha said the administration was first seeking to fill vacancies at the agency before they would revisit the question of more funding.
Brannan also pushed for funding for a $150 property tax rebate, which Jiha said the administration supports in principle but would need state authorization to provide.
Council Member Selvena Brooks-Powers, a Queens Democrat, asked about efforts to expand trauma care services, additional funding for the city’s Streets Plan and potentially reinvesting speed camera revenue in underinvested communities.
Council Member Gale Brewer, a Manhattan Democrat, urged the administration to expand the city’s composting program and to embrace a mandatory composting bill that was recently introduced before the Council.
“We're just looking for the best method, the most efficient means of doing it,” Jiha said, noting that the city’s incipient curbside composting program wasn’t picking up high enough volumes to justify it.
Council Member Lincoln Restler, a Brooklyn Democrat and co-chair of the Council’s Progressive Caucus, took exception with the administration for funding a 500-worker increase in the headcount at the Department of Correction at a time when the agency has failed to control the crisis at Rikers Island, which is already slated for closure. “How is this fiscally responsible?” he asked.
Jiha said the additional staff is necessary as the city moves to end solitary confinement in jails and to provide adequate supervision of detainees.
But Restler noted that hundreds of corrections officers have regularly called out sick from work, causing staffing shortages and hampering jail operations. “We need to hold these folks accountable. The strike via sick-out is totally unacceptable,” he said.
Council Member Charles Barron, a Brooklyn Democrat, was, as he often is, perhaps the most critical of all the members, condemning the administration for a budget that he said does not invest in the most vulnerable Black and brown communities. “We have to stop this conservative Republican austerity budget where the rich are getting richer as you see on Wall Street and the poor are getting poorer,” he said.
Comptroller Brad Lander, in his testimony on Tuesday, also shared projections that the city is doing better than expected and will see $3.3 billion in additional revenue above OMB’s predictions for the current fiscal year. “The city’s near-term fiscal position is bright, but clouds are on the horizon,” he warned, echoing the risks that Jiha outlined.
Lander also noted that the city faces a $1.3 billion fiscal cliff by FY2026 because of several expenditures that have consistently been underfunded such as overtime costs, homeless shelter spending, and “Carter case” spending for students with special needs. The city has also used one-time federal stimulus funds for recurring programs such as the expansion of 3-K, he noted.
Lander called on the administration to bolster reserves, reiterating a proposal he released on Monday to require a $2.5 billion deposit in the city’s Rainy Day Fund each year when revenues allow – $1.8 billion more than what the administration has added for the next fiscal year. That would give the city a reserve balance equal to 10% of annual spending, “enough to provide cushion for the first two years of a recession,” Lander said. “We believe this is not only prudent but also reasonable and achievable.”
The Independent Budget Office, a nonpartisan city agency, shared similar optimism about the city’s recovery and the potential roadblocks to it. George Sweeting, IBO’s acting director, said its revenue forecasts were higher than OMB’s, while acknowledging the same risks including high inflation, federal funds that will run out, and expiring labor contracts.
“Our economic forecast relies on the assumption that the Federal Reserve will succeed in its efforts to tame inflation by tightening monetary policy without causing a recession,” Sweeting said. “However, this is far from certain and presents the greatest risk to IBO’s economic forecast of continued modest growth over the entire forecast period.”
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
In Response to Covid, Manhattan Borough President Seeks to Mandate Improved Indoor Air Quality Standards
Manhattan BP Mark Levine (photo: William Alatriste/NYC Council)
Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine is planning to introduce legislation to mandate improved indoor air quality standards to preempt future disease outbreaks and limit successive waves of COVID-19.
Levine, who previously served on the City Council and made a name for himself during the pandemic as chair of the Council’s health committee, is working with Council Member Keith Powers, a fellow Manhattan Democrat, and has requested the Council’s legislative division to draft the bill (borough presidents can introduce and request legislation but they cannot vote on them).
Levine first announced his proposal at a recent CityLaw breakfast hosted by New York Law School. “[We] are beginning a major push that I think will be critical to protecting us long-term from this virus, from future waves, and similar transmissible diseases, which is we want to have high standards on air quality in buildings in New York City, something that we simply don't have now, that we've never really adequately addressed,” he said. “We're preparing legislation that we hope will make this analogous to fire safety provisions but of course focused on things like air flow and filtration in public buildings, commercial buildings, even residential buildings.”
As Levine noted, the coronavirus spreads most aggressively through the air in enclosed indoor spaces with poor ventilation. It prompted broad discussions about the adaptations that office buildings, public venues, and city schools, for example, would need to make to ensure that people safely return without the risk of covid transmission. As some covid restrictions have been rescinded and mask and vaccine mandates rolled back by the Adams administration, those discussions have taken on added urgency, particularly as the number of cases in New York has risen dramatically and pushed the city into “high-risk” territory.
“As we've come out of other public health crises we have reenvisioned our buildings, and I hope that we come out of this pandemic rethinking indoor air quality,” Levine said in a phone interview with Gotham Gazette. “We've just spent decades creating buildings that are hermetically sealed and that really was the dominant architectural style of much of the last generation. And that turns out to be really unhelpful when a pandemic hits.”
Levine’s bill is still being crafted but he hopes to apply the standards both to new construction and also existing buildings. “It's the kind of long-term work that we should be doing now because we could have future, serious waves of covid and because there could be other airborne pathogens which we want to protect against,” he said.
At the federal level, the Biden administration prioritized improved indoor air quality as part of its National COVID-19 Preparedness Plan released in March, and the Environmental Protection Agency issued a “Clean Air in Buildings Challenge” with guidance for anyone who manages a building to create plans for cleaner indoor air.
“The most common way COVID-19 is transmitted from one person to another is through tiny airborne particles of the virus hanging in indoor air for minutes or hours after an infected person has been there,” wrote Dr. Alondra Nelson, head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Deputy Assistant to the President, in a March blog post. “While there are various strategies for avoiding breathing that air – from remote work to masking – we can and should talk more about how to make indoor environments safer by filtering or cleaning air.”
She noted that the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan includes $122 billion for schools and $350 billion for state, local, and tribal governments that could be used for air quality upgrades. “Scientific and public health evidence supports practical, actionable solutions for cleaner indoor air. It is time for a national conversation on how better indoor air quality can help us all live healthier lives,” she wrote.
There are different sets of regulations on indoor air quality applicable in the city depending on the classification of buildings. Office buildings, for instance, have to abide by guidance set by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) while residential buildings are guided by local law and building codes. The EPA’s guidance on indoor air quality is just that, advice rather than a requirement, though the Clean Air Act does set regulations to protect against exposure to certain chemicals and materials.
“I think those standards need to be reconsidered in light of the two-and-a-half years we’ve been through,” Levine said.
“Mayor Adams supports strong air quality standards to protect the health and wellbeing of all New Yorkers. We will review the legislation when it is introduced,” said a spokesperson for Mayor Eric Adams, in a statement.
Unlike other protective measures taken during the pandemic, Levine said building air quality improvements aren't likely to run into widespread political opposition though it may require higher costs for real estate developers.
“Retrofitting is always more challenging, but I think owners want to be able to sell their buildings as safe as possible in what could be an era of contagious airborne diseases,” he said. “As we're trying to get people to come back to the workplace and want people to feel safe in public buildings and their homes, I think this will be good for business.”
A spokesperson for the Real Estate Board of New York did not say whether the group might support the proposal. “Throughout the pandemic, REBNY members were quick to adapt their properties to improve air quality, ensuring greater filtration and safety measures were in place. We look forward to reviewing any proposed legislation,” said Christopher Santarelli, REBNY’s director of media relations.
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
New Law Plus Population Shifts Means Significant Coming Changes for New York City Council Districts
New York City Council Districts
As New York wades through a chaotic congressional and state redistricting cycle, a new law could significantly alter the process for redrawing New York City's 51 City Council districts, which began earlier this month.
The city's Districting Commission must contend with population increases in almost every City Council district and an overall influx of roughly 630,000 residents citywide since the last post-Census redistricting cycle ten years ago. This year, commissioners also have to adhere to a new state law limiting the amount each district's population can deviate from one another.
The new law cut the allowable difference in population between the biggest and smallest districts by half, from 10% to 5% of the average district size. Experts say losing that population leeway could make it harder to meet other legally-mandated criteria, like maintaining the voting power of racial minority groups and "communities of interest."
"I don't know if it makes it impossible for them to balance these criteria," said Steven Romalewski, director of the CUNY Mapping Service. "But it definitely makes it more challenging because it's a tighter band and that means more lines will definitely have to change."
The first set of draft maps from the New York City Districting Commission is due June 7. The Commission, which is appointed by the Mayor and City Council and empowered to draw the final Council district maps, is holding a preliminary hearing on Thursday, May 26. Another two rounds of hearings and proposed maps will take place in the second half of 2022, with final maps to be presented to the City Council in December. City lawmakers may object to the commission's final maps but cannot stop a second revision from going into effect.
The new districts will be used starting next year in the primary and general elections for another two-year City Council term. Any special elections through November 2023 will use the current maps.
Local districts don't have the same constraints as congressional maps, which must have almost the exact same populations. Because local districts represent smaller populations, the law has allowed a level of deviation to make it easier to maintain parts of district character.
But in October, Governor Kathy Hochul signed a new state law requiring the largest and smallest county and local districts to have a difference in population no greater than 5% of the mean district size. New York City’s Law Department has determined that provision applies to the city, superseding the 10% maximum deviation allowed under the City Charter.
When she signed the law, Hochul said it was intended to extend districting criteria set forth in the U.S. and New York State constitutions and the New York City Charter to county and local governments. The law also prohibits maps from diluting the vote of racial and language minorities or favoring a particular party or candidate, among other requirements.
"As bad actors across the country work to undermine public faith in our electoral institutions, the importance of clear and uniform rules to govern political representation has never been more critical," Hochul said in a statement in October. "This law will ensure the entirety of our state is governed by rules that are derived directly from the federal and state constitutions and ensure the right to equal participation in our political process."
That deviation allowance has been abused to pack or depopulate districts. During the last redistricting cycle, State Senate Republicans used it to overpopulate Democrat-heavy Senate districts in New York City as part of horse-trading with then-Governor Andrew Cuomo and the Democrat-controlled Assembly.
New York City has seen population growth over the last decade, expanding from 8.2 million in 2010 to 8.8 million in 2020, according to U.S. Census data. In particular, the city's Hispanic- and Asian-identifying communities have grown by 154,000 and 345,000 residents, respectively. The Black and white populations have shrunk by 84,000 and 3,000, respectively.
With 51 Council districts and a population of roughly 8.8 million, New York City's average district must have about 173,000 residents. Under the 5%-deviation rule, that means the largest district cannot be larger than the smallest by more than roughly 8,650 residents. Under the old 10%-deviation standard, the largest district could have had 17,300 more residents than the smallest.
With every border on the drawing board, there are a lot of possibilities in what the commission can do. It gives mapmakers enough wiggle room to alternately add or subtract roughly 4,325 voters from each district or, in the most extreme scenario, add or subtract about 8,480 residents from a single district and distribute that change across the remaining 50 districts.
"The Districting Commission will continue to review all relevant legal mandates that apply to New York City’s redistricting process for the City Council," said Ali Rasoulinejad, the commission's chief of staff, in an email to Gotham Gazette.
Impact on Council District Maps
According to a CUNY Mapping service analysis, 17 Council Districts currently have populations exceeding the 5% deviation. Only two districts are big enough to exceed the previous 10% threshold.
Council District 10 at the northern tip of Manhattan, is one of two districts in the city that lost residents (along with District 7 directly to the south) and now has a population deviation above 5% (though still below 10%). Its borders will need to expand to make up for the lost population.
"Does it expand south, does it expand into the Bronx, and by how much," Romalewski wondered about District 10. "That also could impact the demographics of the district."
The district is predominantly Latino, currently spanning the Washington Heights, Inwood, and Marble Hill neighborhoods, and represented by Council Member Carmen De La Rosa.
According to Romalewski's analysis, most districts saw population growth in the last decade with some increasing by over 15% between 2010 and 2020. In that category are Council District 17 in the South Bronx, District 3 on the west side of Manhattan, and the contiguous group of districts comprising gentrifying neighborhoods along the East River waterfront in Queens and Brooklyn, home to a great deal of housing development in the last decade, and into central Brooklyn – among others. Council District 3 and District 33, on the Brooklyn waterfront, now have populations that would even exceed the 10% threshold.
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How the map-drawing will unfold is anybody's guess but political interest groups are already looking at how the new population deviation limit will impact their representation.
The new State Senate maps created by a court-appointed special master last week added two new districts wholly or partially within New York City and increased the number of majority-non-white districts from 20 out of 26 to 23 out of 28, according to Romalewski.
With roughly 29% of residents and 15 city lawmakers, Latino representation in the City Council is currently in proportion to the overall Latino population. LatinoJusticePRLDEF, a legal advocacy group for Latino New Yorkers, wants to see the new Council district lines account for the influx of Latino residents and their movement across district lines.
The group has identified nine majority-Latino Council districts and four that are 30-40% Latino. "Those are districts that we're going to want to maintain this cycle," said Cesar Ruiz, a legal fellow at LatinoJustice.
"This imposition is going to limit the way we can draw districts," said Ruiz, whose team is currently seeking community input to inform its own proposed maps, which it plans to present to the city Districting Committee. "We know communities of interest can be as big as a block or housing development or as large as a county or township. With [5% population deviation] it is going to make it more difficult to incorporate larger communities of interest."
Communities of interest are residents who have shared public policy goals, which are often identified along shared ethnic, linguistic, or religious lines, but can also apply to the constituents of a community center, for instance.
That is especially true in the Bronx, which, along with Brooklyn, saw the largest increase in Latino residents – an uptick of 8% each. The group is also considering how the city's new noncitizen voting, which allows hundreds of thousands of legal permanent residents (mostly green-card holders) to vote in municipal elections, will impact the political map.
LatinoJustice is part of the Unity Map Coalition, which in 2010 and 2020 developed proposed maps intended to meet the legal requisites while preserving the voting power of racial and linguistic minority groups. Ruiz said the coalition is planning to replicate its Unity Map strategy at the city level.
Applying the New State Law
Marc Wurzel, a Republican-appointee on the city's Districting Commission, is concerned the shift to a lower population deviation threshold will hamper the commission's work. "Where we try to meet our obligations to keep communities intact and keep districts compact, and also try to account for communities of interest, I think that process becomes more difficult when you have less room to work with," he told Gotham Gazette in an interview.
"I've gone through it twice with ten percent and I think the process worked pretty well. This is going to be a new experience," he said.
Wurzel raised similar concerns at the commission's first public meeting on May 11, where he also argued the state law may not apply to New York City because the city's process isn't driven by a local lawmaking process.
The Law Department disagreed with that interpretation. "For the city to claim that that [provision] also doesn't apply to the city when [it] is explicitly carved out for all local governments would be, we think, a very risky act," Spencer Fisher, a Law Department attorney, said at the meeting.
"I think the Law Department does take risky positions when it is the city's interest to do so. And I think this is one area where it is in the city's interest to pursue this," Wurzel rebutted.
Wurzel is the general counsel at the Grand Central Partnership, which manages the Grand Central Business Improvement District. That BID falls within City Council District 4, which according to Romalewski's maps currently has a population deviation above the 5% threshold. That means its borders will have to shrink, potentially carving the BID into multiple Council Districts.
A legal expert involved in drafting the state legislation told Gotham Gazette it should apply to New York City. "That's something that the commission is going to have to deal with as are all county and local governments across the state," they said.
Council Districts Exceeding the 5% Population Deviation Threshold
Manhattan: District 1, 3, 4, 6, 10
The Bronx: District 18
Queens: District 22, 23, 26, 28
Brooklyn: Districts 33, 37, 40, 41, 43, 45
Staten Island: District 51
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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
@GeringerSameth @GothamGazette
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