New York City's better-than-expected budget could undercut Adams' funding plea

NEW YORK — New York City Mayor Eric Adams delivered some good budget news Tuesday. In a bit of irony, that stands to reduce his political capital.

The outspoken Democrat spent more than a year telling leaders in Washington that absent funding and policy changes at the border, New York City would be economically crippled from the costs associated with caring for asylum-seekers.

On Tuesday, however, Adams announced a balanced budget of $109.4 billion for the upcoming fiscal year, with the help of $3 billion in better-than-expected tax revenue, $1.5 billion in anticipated state aid and a $1.7 billion drop in projected costs of sheltering migrants.

As a result, Adams dramatically scaled back his threatened service cuts.

While the rosier budget picture could counteract some of the mayor’s record-low polling numbers, it worsens his negotiating position with Washington.

“It further undermines the argument because now he can’t even say: ‘Your bad policies on immigration are costing New Yorkers school teachers, police officers and firefighters,’” Bradley Tusk, a former adviser to Mayor Michael Bloomberg and founder of Tusk Strategies, which worked on a rival mayoral campaign in 2021, said in an interview. “But at the end of the day, that argument was never going to work.”

President Joe Biden was never going to be cowed into submission by getting blamed for New York City’s budget woes, Tusk said, as he is a shoo-in to win the state in this year’s presidential contest. He also noted New Yorkers direct their ire over municipal affairs at Gracie mansion — not the White House.

At a press briefing announcing his budget Tuesday, Adams said he has a responsibility to manage costs and that the additional revenue and savings will not detract from his advocacy in Washington.

“We still need help. We're not out in the woods. We're still getting thousands of people a week,” he said. “It's just that we're successfully getting people out of the system, and [if] we would have sat on our hands … that would have really ballooned his budget.”

Mayors are required by law to present a balanced preliminary budget each January.

Adams will also be facing political difficulty closer to home.

An otherwise helpful revision in tax revenue projections increased by $2.9 billion compared to the last projections released over the summer. But the dramatic change will empower the City Council, which must approve the budget before it takes effect July 1. Lawmakers have consistently pushed back on the mayor’s cuts and in December released new revenue projections that showed more money was available to spend — a claim Adams disputed.

“You’ve just created and exacerbated the bad will, because now they can’t trust what the mayor says,” former Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito said in an interview. “It just doesn’t bode well for future negotiations.”

Mark-Viverito, who was speaker from 2014 through the end of 2017, said that while the city’s Office of Management and Budget is always conservative with its projections, she never saw this level of reversal.

The Citizens Budget Commission, a nonprofit that advocates for fiscally conservative budgeting practices, said the revised revenue projection is a bigger jump than at any time during the last decade. However, when the initial projections were made over the summer, most economists believed a recession was in the cards — a view that has changed over the last six months as the national economy has proven more resilient than originally thought.

“Some public officials, advocates, and others will point to the savings plans and strong revenue already announced to avoid the necessary additional hard choices,” CBC President Andrew Rein said in a statement. “That would not be wise. More is needed to align recurring expenditures for all programs and close outyear gaps, including the fiscal cliffs.”