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'No New Yorker Goes Hungry': De Blasio Announces Next Steps to Combat Food Emergency


hunger food pantry

De Blasio visits a food pantry in Brooklyn (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)


As the coronavirus crisis was unfolding in New York City last month, Mayor Bill de Blasio named his sanitation commissioner, Kathryn Garcia, as the new “food czar” to lead the implementation of a massive effort to ensure New Yorkers don’t go hungry. With the city already home to over a million “food insecure” people, the scale of the need accelerated quickly as hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers lost their jobs, school buildings closed, and food pantries struggled to stay open.

The city announced over 400 sites where families with children could pick up food each weekday, then expanded that offering to adults without children, allocated millions of dollars in emergency food bank funding, began coordinating delivery of meals to seniors, and took other initial steps.

According to experts on hunger and food insecurity, one of the major challenges New York City faces amid the current crisis is identifying the population that needs assistance because of the rapidly evolving situation in the city. The city appears to be taking sweeping measures to try to ensure everyone who needs food gets it.

On Tuesday, de Blasio visited the Campaign Against Hunger food pantry in Bedford-Stuyvesant to thank workers there and highlight the importance of emergency food, then dedicated the bulk of his Wednesday coronavirus briefing to the city’s new anti-hunger plans.

“Today I am announcing a $170 million initative to make sure every New Yorker gets what they need and no New Yorker goes hungry,” de Blasio said from City Hall on Wednesday morning, announcing that over the last month the city had provided over 4.5 million free meals. “Thank god we have a strong foundation to build on. All those food pantries and soup kitchens, all the amazing organizations out there that have been doing work all over the city for years and years.”

Called Feeding New York, the plan includes four main planks: First, scaling up and adjusting existing food delivery systems through the Department of Education and Department for the Aging, working with the Office of Emergency Management and under Garcia’s leadership, along with other partners. Second, hiring drivers licensed by the Taxi and Limousine Commission to deliver meals, yielding 11,000 individuals already to both bring needy people meals and provide earnings to drivers who are hurting.

Third, securing the supply by using $50 million to invest in a food reserve that will hold 18 million meals in case of a disruption in the food supply chain. And fourth, protect grocery store workers by telling stores they should “require customers to wear face mask coverings to protect employees and customers” and ask any non-compliant customers to leave. The city is also coordinating with vendors to ensure non-medical personal protective equipment can be accessed by grocery stores, and that the stores can directly place orders for equipment.

“Now, I was in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, but this challenge is literally in every neighborhood, because if you have no money, how do you get food?,” de Blasio said on Wednesday. “And we know that the massive unemployment that we're experiencing is literally every zip code, every part of the city. So, whoever you are, wherever you are, if you need food, we're here for you, and there should be no shame. I want to emphasize this. It’s no one's fault that we're dealing with this horrible crisis. Anyone needs food - we're here for you. You don't have to think twice. Of course, it's for free. Just pick up the phone or go online. And if you need information, you can go to nyc.gov/getfood. You can call 311. You can find all the places, all the ways we'll get you food. Please do not hesitate and spread the word to everyone you know.”

The mayor estimated that the city will have served about 10 million free meals in the month when April ends, and that May could rise to 15 million meals.

De Blasio’s announcement also comes on the heels of dire warnings from food banks in New York City and across the nation, and announcements from both the state and city governments of $25 million each to help food banks acquire food and pay personnel as the largerly volunteer-run nonprofits struggle to staff their operations. In her role as food czar Garcia is also working with those nonprofits, as well as entities at all levels of government, private companies, and various city agencies.

“The real focus is on both the supply side and also on operations to make sure we are getting food to our most vulnerable,” Garcia said on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show last week. “Some who were vulnerable before and some who have become vulnerable because of the epidemic.” The city is striving to make sure the pandemic “doesn't become a tragedy about hunger,” she said.

"Despite this crisis, we will not let any New Yorker go hungry, " de Blasio said last week after visiting a school meal hub at P.S. 1 in Manhattan. "With more New Yorkers asking where their next meal will come from, our 435 Meal Hubs are here to serve them. And none of this would be possible without the hard work of the meal service workers on the front lines. We cannot thank them enough for their service.”

While this is not the first time that New Yorkers have experienced times of crisis leading to food insecurities across the city, it may be the worst or among the worst in modern times given the massive job loss and lag in income so many are facing, even as the federal government has passed a stimulus to send people checks and the state is working through a backlog of unemployment insurance claims. There’s a tremendous amount for Garcia and others to figure out, though the city’s approach appears to be to cast as wide a net as possible and not require anyone to justify a need for food.

“Our biggest challenge, which is very different from what we saw, for example, in [Hurricane] Sandy, is that we don't have a population that's already identified that needs assistance, right? The population keeps growing,” said Grace Bonilla, administrator of the city’s Human Resources Administration (HRA), during an online panel discussion convened at the end of March by The Hunter College NYC Food Policy Center. “The rate of growth from neighborhood to neighborhood is different. And I'm speaking for an agency that has to operationalize food, making sure that we're meeting the needs of so many people as they're losing their jobs. Then that also is a moving target.”

Kate MacKenzie, the director for the Mayor’s Office of Food Policy, agreed, explaining that delivering services to New Yorkers becomes hard when you have to continuously reevaluate the same problems when populations grow or change.

“The fluid state of everything, right? Of the number of people that we need to feed, of the trucks on the road. Everything changes by the hour. So trying to solve for something that the next day needs to be solved for again,” MacKenzie said.

With school buildings closed to teachers and students, and many children relying on schools for multiple meals a day, it was a natural move for the city to turn schools into the 435 meal hubs across the five boroughs, which are open on weekdays. A spokesperson for the mayor said that individuals and families can collect enough food for the weekends on Fridays.

As city government takes a more active approach to managing the exacerbated hunger crisis -- a crisis that was immense even before coronavirus decimated the local economy -- the city’s food pantries, soup kitchens, and other such places where food insecure people can get food have also kicked into another gear, but they are struggling to stay open and secure and provide enough food.

There has been huge demand on the food pantry system with this coronavirus pandemic. According to a City Council press release from the end of March, 32% of food pantries and soup kitchens had quickly shut down, with more expected to follow, thus leading to the push for the $25 million in emergency aid that was announced soon after.

Joel Berg, CEO of Hunger Free America, said on the Max & Murphy podcast that “they are having trouble operating. It is important to note how ill-equipped they were to deal with the hunger problem even when times were good. As wonderful as these agencies are -- they’re run by the best people I’ve ever met in my life, most of them are volunteers -- even in good times, less than one-tenth of the dollar amount of food that the federal nutrition assistance programs provide, and if you include all the federal programs, probably less than one-twentieth of the food that SNAP, what used to be called the food stamp program, the school meals, or the women, infants, and children’s program provides.”

Meanwhile, the recent federal stimulus package will provide New York with $38 million for Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) Commodities, nearly $16 million for TEFAP Administration, and a little under $35 million for The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), according to Derek Thomas of FPWA.

Before the emergency city and state funding was announced, the City Council called for the $50 million, $25 million from the state and $25 million from the city, to help food pantry and food assistance programs remain open through the crisis.

“According to Met Council, the combined $50 million will provide funding for over 19 million meals, which will allow for 2.1 million balanced and healthy food packages each consisting of nine meals per USDA guidelines,” a press release said, also noting that more money would be needed after the $50 million.

The money was approved soon after. De Blasio was then asked about it at an April 11 briefing, and said that while it will help, he believes the food situation will get worse before it gets better, and that improving access to food for New Yorkers will be increasingly important.

“I'm not confident yet that everything that is going to be needed is in place. That's why I named a food czar, Kathryn Garcia, and that's why I've said to her, whatever it's going to take, we're going to put forward the resources to make sure that everyone has food. We literally have to have a simple standard,” de Blasio said. “No New Yorker goes without food and what the folks in the Department Education are doing, which is amazing, 435 sites that have now been up over the last week or more where anybody, any adult can come in and get breakfast, lunch and dinner, grab and go as for as many family members as possible. That to me is the kind of thing we're going to have to do on a really big scale going forward to make sure that everyone has food.”

That line of thinking led to Wednesday’s announcement of the additional efforts in the new Feeding New York plan.

On WNYC, Garcia stressed the challenges with the volunteer base at typical nonprofit emergency food providers, in response to a caller question. “We think it’s absolutely critical to support this particular network,” she said. “This is where we are seeing the most challenges with being able to staff things, with many people being ill or sheltering.” Seniors often volunteer at soup kitchens and food pantries, and also happen to be the most vulnerable population to the novel coronavirus.

“We do have standardized guidance for people, our volunteers, who are wanting to do some home deliveries, who are working in kitchens or pantries or any volunteer capacity for that matter,” MacKenzie said during the Hunter discussion. “Volunteerism is an essential function, but it’s also trying to reconcile that with social isolation. Practices and protocols. So that is something to be mindful of. I think particularly, this is the marathon, this isn’t a sprint here. And whether it’s this week or in June, there’s going to be opportunities for people to plug into a way that makes sense for them.”

City Hall is now making an effort, as part of the Feeding New York plan, to deploy city staff to 14 food pantries across the city that are short on volunteers and are recruiting more through NYC Service, Garcia said at Wednesday’s briefing with the mayor.

Berg mentioned remote opportunities for people to get involved. At his own organization, there are opportunities to work the phones, calling grocery stores and other important entities, and working on the national hunger hotline.

Still, Berg stressed the importance of the larger, government-backed programs that help people secure food, with the nonprofit network playing a key supporting role.

“There are 800 to 1,000 of these agencies and while that sounds like a lot, there are 8,000 retail establishments that accept SNAP,” Berg said on Max & Murphy. “Most of these agencies, in good times, were only open maybe once or twice a month or sometimes once a week or a few hours a day. It’s no shock that a volunteer-run system with many of these people running these programs who are senior citizens, that a fair amount of them have been forced to close down.”

Other organizations are also trying to fill the gap and feed more New Yorkers. On April 8, de Blasio announced that New York Road Runners will donate $100,000 to the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City to provide 10,000 meals to frontline healthcare workers.

Bloomberg Philanthropies, established by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has donated $6 million to World Central Kitchen specifically for meals for health care workers in public hospitals. De Blasio praised his predecessor for that gift during Wednesday’s briefing.

The benefits programs run by HRA that help New Yorkers access food are becoming increasingly important as people lose their jobs amidst this crisis. Bonilla said that HRA has worked hard to move its services online while retaining the ability to process applications.

“Normally, on any given day we would get 6,000 applications [for assistance],” Bonilla said. “We’ve got about 16,000 in one day. That was at the beginning of the crisis, and we are trying to make sure our folks are working from home so that we can keep them safe, but that they are also able to process the unprecedented number of applications we are getting.”

Garcia explained that New York State has put in an application for Pandemic Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (PSNAP), which is pending with USDA. Another program the New York congressional delegation has been advocating for is Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (DSNAP), which relies on a federal disaster declaration.

As the city moves into a second month of extreme social distancing and stay-at-home orders, vulnerable populations, especially seniors, must be at the forefront of the operations, officials and advocates alike have said.

But with the closure of senior centers and the move to expanded food delivery, some seniors have not been getting the food they rely on.

“Now there's a different initiative for those, for the senior citizens who need help for folks who are homebound, for folks who are vulnerable and that the only solution for them is a delivery. There's also a growing delivery system,” de Blasio said at his briefing on April 7.  “This is something Lorraine Cortés-Vázquez [the Department for the Aging Commissioner] has been working on from the beginning and it's building all the time. So, anybody who truly needs a home delivery can call 3-1-1 and we'll get them that delivery. Or they can go to nyc.gov/getfood to sign up.”

As part of the new $170 million plan, Garcia explained that the city is going to register entire buildings of seniors run by NYCHA, city agencies, and nonprofits. In addition, case workers can directly enroll New Yorkers into the free meal delivery system.

[New Yorkers can find the nearest meal hub or food pantry here, find more information on food access here; or text NYC FOOD or NYC COMIDA to 877-877]

***
by Katie Kirker, Gotham Gazette

Read more by this writer.

Ben Max contributed to this article.

Amid 'Really Tough Process' Adjusting to Coronavirus Recession, De Blasio Set to Release Executive Budget


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Mayor de Blasio gives a budget presentation (photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)


For his first six years in office, Mayor Bill de Blasio enjoyed the fruits of a booming economy and massively increased the size and cost of city government. But this week, he will present his executive budget proposal for the 2021 fiscal year facing a possible $6 billion revenue shortfall, hundreds of millions in cuts and cost shifts from the state, and almost complete uncertainty about the future as the coronavirus outbreak continues with New York City at its epicenter. 

De Blasio’s preliminary budget proposal for the 2021 fiscal year, which begins July 1, was a $95.3 billion spending plan, up more than $20 billion since he took office in 2014. Year after year, the mayor has taken advantage of quickly growing tax revenue, increasing the municipal worker headcount by more than 30,000 and only paying lip service to finding savings and efficiencies at city agencies. Though his administration kept putting away money in reserves – nearly $6 billion for the current fiscal year – budget watchdogs warned that it would be insufficient to survive a sustained recession. What the city faces now is no mere economic downturn.

Coronavirus, estimated to have now killed more than 10,000 New Yorkers as of April 14, presents a fiscal crisis of unprecedented proportions. It’s unlike previous recessions, which had cost the city between $15-20 billion in lost revenue over three years. There is no clear end in sight to the crisis and no guarantee that even once it is over, the city will be able to bounce back as quickly as it did in the past. That has forced the mayor toward the first truly hard budget choices of his tenure.

The city has already found $1.3 billion in savings and cost re-estimates under a Program to Eliminate the Gap (PEG) that the mayor quickly instituted after the outbreak. But far from recurring savings, it includes programmatic cuts and delays that may not be sustainable, and some will be far from palatable to New Yorkers. It also reflects adjusted spending estimates as a result of the coronavirus’ impact on how city residents access local government.

For instance, the PEG includes a $100 million reduction in fair student funding, and $124 million saved by cancelling the Summer Youth Employment Program. It delays the expansion of the 3K for All program, temporarily reducing expenditure by $43 million. It includes $52 million that wasn’t spent on snow removal this winter, though there’s no guarantee that next year will be as mild a season. Another $106 million is meant to come from a hiring freeze and vacancy reductions at city agencies.

The mayor has even said the city may have to consider borrowing in the short-term to cover costs, for which it would need authorization from the state Legislature.

“[W]e've had to go through a really tough process around cuts to the budget and savings and PEG program,” de Blasio said at his daily coronavirus briefing on Tuesday, when he was asked about the prospect of seeking that authority from Albany. “But we're going to have to look at everything to figure out how we get through this.”

Mayoral spokesperson Laura Feyer would not say whether the city plans to draw on its reserves to cover costs for the coming year, among other details about cash-flows and prepayments that Gotham Gazette inquired about. “We will be presenting the budget this week and will have more to say then,” she said in an email. “One thing you can count on now and always: we are committed to keeping New Yorkers fed, safe, healthy and sheltered.”

It’s unclear what new savings or savings plans de Blasio will announce when he presents the executive budget this week. 

There could be some relief, as the city is anxiously awaiting the next round of emergency funding from the federal government, which is currently being negotiated among Congressional leaders and the Trump administration and may be aimed at state and local governments experiencing steep revenue shortfalls. In media appearances on Wednesday morning, de Blasio emphasized that those funds will be crucial, particularly in ensuring that the city's emergency response mechanisms and services aren't hobbled. "We're not going to be able to provide basic services and actually have a normal society if we don't get help from the federal government so we can restart, so we can actually have a livable working city again," the mayor said on CNN's New Day. "If it doesn't come from the federal government, it's not going to happen. So Congress has got to get back and do a stimulus that helps cities, helps states, helps everyone get back on their feet and actually sustain a normal economy again."

But there is also the possibility of mid-year cuts from the state, with the recently-approved state budget allowing Governor Andrew Cuomo to periodically reduce spending if state revenues should come in below already-lowered expectations. As it stands, the budget could add several additional costs to the city’s books, including $200 million for healthcare, among others.

[Read: 10 Ways the New State Budget Impacts New York City]

There are also new costs the city is accruing in fighting the coronavirus, such as additional spending on emergency food and related services. The city has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars on its coronavirus response, the mayor's office told Gotham Gazette.

In an analysis released March 23, city Comptroller Scott Stringer projected the city already faces losses of up to $6 billion in revenue between the current and next fiscal year from the economic effects of the coronavirus.

“The City should explore all budget actions that protect essential services, the social safety net, and our long-term fiscal health, and the federal government must step up with substantial financial support for New York City as the epicenter of this crisis,” said Hazel Crampton-Hays, a spokesperson for Stringer, in a statement to Gotham Gazette. “In that context, while it would be premature to rule out any specific course of action, we urge caution before the City engages in borrowing to cover operating costs, which would create debt service obligations that have the potential to crowd out funds for the very services and people we are trying to protect.”

The city often uses revenue surpluses at the end of the fiscal year to prepay certain costs, such as debt service, for the next fiscal year. As the comptroller noted in his analysis, the city expected a surplus of $2.7 billion, and if those funds are used to balance the budget, then next year’s budget gap would potentially increase to $4.5 billion, a number that would have to be closed by the time a spending plan is approved in June.

The City Council is the other key participant in the city budget process. A spokesperson for Council Speaker Corey Johnson said, “We are facing unprecedented budget challenges with rapid shortfalls in revenue and rising unemployment, but we must continue to deliver for the thousands of New Yorkers who rely on that social safety net, especially our most vulnerable populations: the elderly, homeless, disabled and low-income families. We are going to have to make very hard decisions about where to find savings and efficiencies. At this point, nothing is off the table.”

Johnson has said the City Council is working to develop ways to hold budget hearings digitally -- the Council was in the midst of its hearings on de Blasio’s preliminary budget when the coronavirus shutdown began. On April 7, Johnson and Council members who chair budget committees offered a formal response to the mayor’s budget, noting that de Blasio’s spending plan was released in early January when the city was in a very different place.

“The impact of COVID-19 on our economy has been much like the effect of the virus itself – sudden and with a quick decline,” said Johnson, Finance Committee Chair Danny Dromm, and Capital Budget Subcommittee Chair Vanessa Gibson.

They gave their “estimation of the components of the baseline budget that are essential and must be preserved even in the face of impending budget cuts,” and while recognizing the need to cut the budget, said “as we make the tough decisions about where to find savings and efficiencies, it is imperative that the basic social safety net programs remain untouched, and in some cases expanded with additional investments.”

They identified seven key areas for protection and even increased funding: Maintaining Public Health; Addressing Food Insecurity; Protecting the Senior Population; Keeping New Yorkers Housed; Supporting Human Services Providers; Protecting Tenants and Small Property Owners; and Supporting Small Business.

Budget watchdogs have several prescriptions to rein in costs, though some may be hard pills to swallow for the mayor. While it will not help in the current crisis, they have renewed a push for creating a dedicated rainy day fund, which requires state legislative approval. And they all agree though that short-term borrowing should not be the mayor’s first instinct.

“Borrowing funds is the last resort,” said Andrew Rein, president of Citizens Budget Commission, a nonprofit watchdog organization. “The first step is to look at savings and make significant changes. That certainly hasn't been the pattern in this administration but we need bold action now.”

Rein said the mayor should deliver, at minimum, a $3 billion savings plan for the next fiscal year focused on agency efficiencies, with savings that will recur year after year. “This is not a one year problem,” he said. 

[Read: Coronavirus Recession Makes New York City Rainy Day Fund More Urgent, Watchdogs and Legislators Say]

The outyears will also be impossible to predict, since there’s no telling when people will be able to go back to work and when major industries that the city relies on like tourism, food service, and hospitality will recover. “We haven't experienced a shock of this kind before so it’s not readily clear what the response from tourists, from New Yorkers, from businesses will be in terms of how quickly people get back to normal,’ said Ana Champeny, Citizens Budget Commission’s director of city studies.

Nicole Gelinas, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, said the “easiest thing” would be to institute a public sector wage freeze, which could save the city a significant chunk of money but is an unpopular decision that the mayor is unlikely to embrace.

Part of the problem with planning the budget, Gelinas noted, is not knowing the level of aid to expect from the federal government. “Unless we get tens of billions of dollars of federal aid in the Northeast or Mid-Atlantic, we're going to not have a very good recovery,” she said, “and then you don't want what should be a temporary crisis to become a permanent crisis."

Gelinas said the city should focus on maintaining core services – such as fire, police, EMS, corrections, and sanitation – instead of cutting them, which is what she criticized in the mayor’s $1.3 billion PEG.

“I think it's disturbing how quickly they went to make cuts to frontline services,” she said, noting the cuts to bike lane construction and organics collection programs. “If that's the first thing you're going to cut that saves you like a tiny, tiny fraction of a percentage of the budget, it doesn't seem like you’re starting out in the right frame of mind.”

***
by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

Read more by this writer.

Note - this article has been updated with the mayor's comments from a CNN New Day interview. 

Coronavirus Recession Makes New York City Rainy Day Fund More Urgent, Watchdogs and Legislators Say


fiscal year prelim

Mayor de Blasio gives a budget presentation (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)


As Mayor Bill de Blasio desperately searches for solutions to the city’s financial woes caused by the coronavirus outbreak, lawmakers and fiscal watchdogs are advocating for legislation that, had it been approved years ago, would have helped the city better weather just such a storm by allowing it to create a dedicated fund for fiscal emergencies.

In January, de Blasio had proposed a $95.3 billion budget for the next fiscal year, which begins July 1, that was a more than $20 billion increase in spending since he took office in 2014. But the coronavirus burst the bubble of consistent economic growth that the city had enjoyed for nearly a decade and allowed de Blasio and the City Council to so drastically expand spending. The recession brought on by the pandemic now threatens to lead to a more than $6 billion drop in projected city revenue, which will need to be made up for through some combination of reserves, cuts, federal funding, and other measures.

It’s the kind of rainy day that budget watchdogs including City Comptroller Scott Stringer and organizations like the Citizens Budget Commission and the Manhattan Institute had been sounding the alarm about for years, insisting that the city’s reserves, just under $6 billion currently, would be completely wiped out in the face of a sustained economic downturn. And none of those predictions came close to imagining a scenario where the city would be the country’s epicenter of a viral outbreak wreaking havoc across the world.

The city’s current reserve funds include $1 billion in the general reserve, $250 million in the capital stabilization reserves, and $4.7 billion in the Retiree Health Benefits Trust fund. But those funds cannot be placed in a separate savings pot and built up each year, because of the state law that determines how the city budgets its money. A dedicated “rainy day fund” is prevented by the Financial Emergency Act of 1975 – passed by the state Legislature when the city faced insolvency – which requires the city’s budget to be balanced. Revenues must equal expenditures -- even the reserves are achieved through a form of annual fiscal tricks.

State Senator Brian Benjamin, a Manhattan Democrat who is exploring a 2021 run for city Comptroller, proposed legislation in October that would give the city the authority to create a municipal contingency and tax stabilization reserve fund. Though it is too late for the city to put away additional rainy day funds for this fiscal crisis, Benjamin said the coronavirus fallout highlights the need to create a savings system for the next eventual crisis the city will face.

“This is the moment where this makes the most sense from a forward planning standpoint,” Benjamin said in a phone interview. “What I have every intention to make sure we get
this year is, in this moment when we’re feeling the pain, when we're making the cuts that we have to make on the state level, we have to make big cuts on the city level, we make the right decision to create a rainy day fund to help the future legislators have more options.”

In last year’s general election, New York City voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot question that would change the City Charter to facilitate the creation of a rainy day fund. It now only requires state authorization.

“It doesn't say you have to put in $5 billion now, $10 billion now, $20 billion now,” Benjamin said of his bill. “It just creates the apparatus that can then allow things to occur. So that to me should be a no brainer.”

Benjamin’s bill comes with strict safeguards for when the city could dip into a rainy day fund. It would only be allowed in the case of an economic recession, where the city sees two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth. He insisted that provision is crucial so the city does not use the fund for one-time purposes that would otherwise be unjustified.

Assemblymember Robert Carroll has sponsored a companion bill to Benjamin's proposal. Last week, the two legislators and Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams wrote to Governor Andrew Cuomo, calling on him to support the legislation and quickly activate a rainy day fund for the city.

Despite the companion bill, however, it seems any final legislation may end up being a compromise. A separate bill has been proposed by Assemblymember Edward Braunstein, though it does not contain the same safeguard as Benjamin’s and Carroll's proposal. Benjamin has been negotiating with Mayor de Blasio’s office and Braunstein to create a version they can all agree on, and he said that the Senate leadership has been supportive.

“We're reviewing the bills,” said Laura Feyer, a mayoral spokesperson on budget matters.

Mike Murphy, a spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, said in an email, “It is something we will have to discuss as a conference.” A spokesperson for Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie did not respond to a request for comment.

Budget watchdogs have been pushing de Blasio to create more robust reserves for years, particularly as they watched expenditure skyrocketing under his tenure with inadequate controls on waste and inefficiency.

Citizens Budget Commission, which helped lead the charge for the rainy day ballot measure put forth by a Charter Revision Commission, last year recommended that the city put away the equivalent of 17% of tax revenues in order to survive a recession like previous ones, which could lead to an estimated $15-20 billion drop in revenue over three years. Deposits in the fund should be mandatory during times of growth, and the fund should be established with strong criteria for when it is utilized.

“If we had this rainy day fund in place and had followed CBC’s guidelines for the recovery that is now over, we would be in a radically different position in the city,” said Andrew Rein, CBC president, in a phone interview, estimating that the fund would have held $9 billion by now.

Rein emphasized the importance of restriction on using the fund. “If you open it up wider, it can be used for a slush fund, for a minor occurrence, to fund new programs,” he said.

Besides an economic recession, CBC also recommends allowing the fund to be used in “severe emergencies” that are clearly defined in the law. “There should be some sort of guideposts to tell you what is ‘severe’ and so we recommended something like at least a 1% drop in expected revenues or 1% increase in spending so that you're not tapping the funds for what is sort of smaller expenses that come up,” said Ana Champeny, CBC’s director of city studies.

Though the mayor has repeatedly insisted that city reserves are at “historic levels” compared to past administrations, fiscal watchdogs like CBC and the Manhattan Institute’s Nicole Gelinas note that the $4.7 billion Retiree Health Benefits Trust fund does not count as a true reserve. That money, they say, should only be used for its intended purpose, to provide retirement benefits for municipal employees, rather than to help the city cover its expenses in times of emergencies.

“I think that it's worth creating a rainy day fund as part of the next state budget cycle and trying to look beyond the crisis to long-term reforms,” said Gelinas, noting that it’s far too late to be useful for the current crisis.

She also pointed out that the lack of a robust rainy day fund has left the city riddled with uncertainty and couched in a wait-and-see posture as Congress negotiates over the next round of emergency relief.

De Blasio has already announced some steps to shore up city finances, including a new Program to Eliminate the Gap (PEG), which requires agencies to identify certain savings for the mayor to evaluate, to cover some of the shortfall. But the administration has so far only found ways to reduce $1.3 billion in spending. Those cuts are mostly programmatic, and are neither recurring savings nor actual efficiencies in government function, experts have pointed out. Many of them simply reflect lower-than-expected expenditures because of the fallout of the coronavirus outbreak.

De Blasio has indicated more cuts to his spending plan are likely when he presents his Executive Budge, due April 23. That outline will then form the basis for further negotiations with the City Council. The city is also awaiting the possibility of a federal bailout of municipal finances in a fourth coronavirus package that is being negotiated.

And the mayor has also floated the idea of short-term borrowing to meet expenditure needs, which is also precluded by the Financial Emergency Act.

“If we did have a $5 billion or $10 billion cushion, we would be in a much better position to say, ‘Okay, let's see where things are in six months,’” Gelinas said. “Is the pandemic over? Have people come back to the city? Have businesses reopened? But we have very little room for error. We're basically so dependent on the federal government right now.”

***
by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

Read more by this writer.

Note - this article has been updated to reference Assemblymember Robert Carroll's bill and a letter sent by him, Senator Benjamin and Brooklyn BP Adams to Governor Cuomo. 



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