Mayor Adams’ latest budget proposal would “cause a lot of harm to New Yorkers in need,” Council Speaker Adrienne Adams said Thursday as she vowed to fight a long list of agency cuts baked into his spending blueprint.
The speaker, who’s not related to the mayor, leveled the broadside against his $106.7 billion executive budget plan a day after he unveiled it at City Hall.
Speaker Adams decried the budget’s Programs to Eliminate the Gap, or PEGs, which she said will strip billions of dollars from key social service, education and cultural agencies.
“There are various [agencies] right now that are hurting, that have been hurting for a long time and because of the PEGs that have been implemented will continue to bleed out and cause a lot of harm to New Yorkers in need,” the speaker told reporters Thursday.
A spokesman for the mayor, who has enacted three PEGs since taking office, defended the austerity as necessary at a time of great fiscal uncertainty driven by the local migrant crisis, unfulfilled labor contracts, inflation and fears of an economic slowdown on the horizon.
In spite of the cuts, the spokesman, Jonah Allon, argued that the executive blueprint “preserves essential services and continues to improve the lives of everyday New Yorkers.”
“In fact, 60% of this budget — $62.5 billion in total — goes to education, health care and social services,” Allon said.
The mayor’s first 2024 fiscal year spending proposal, unveiled in January, also drew jeers from Council Democrats. But the speaker’s latest comments marked a rhetorical escalation.
Her remarks set the stage for a turbulent final stretch of negotiations between the Council and the mayor’s team before they must adopt a final budget by July 1.
Mayor Adams’ first PEGs subjected nearly all city agencies to two rounds of 3% shaves to their budgets that could not be based on staff layoffs or service reductions. Instead, the belt-tightening had to be based on cutting vacant positions and other creative bookkeeping maneuvers.
The third PEG, rolled out earlier this month, subjected most agencies to 4% budget trims, with city officials saying that round could be based on service cuts.
In her Thursday press conference, Speaker Adams said the back-to-back austerity measures amount to a total city government budget reduction of more than $4 billion through fiscal year 2024.
Short-staffed agencies like the Human Resources Administration and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development — which are tasked with processing welfare benefits like food stamps and maintaining the city’s affordable housing stock, respectively — will not be able to sustain those type of cuts, the speaker said.
“Many agencies agree that the work that they do is not sustainable in its current fashion, and if we support this type of a budget that continues to take away from essential services, that is certainly not going to be to the benefit of the people we are sworn to serve,” she said.
In reference to deepening application backlogs that are causing major processing delays, the speaker added: “New Yorkers are not getting the help they need, whether it’s food assistance, housing vouchers or other important services.”
Mayor Adams’ executive budget rollout called off some of his most controversial proposed cuts.
That included exempting the city’s three public library systems from the latest round of 4% shaves.
In a press conference Wednesday, the mayor said he opted to give the libraries a pass because he said they would’ve likely been forced to shut down branches on weekends and scale back educational and social programs.
He also said other agencies identified enough savings to allow his administration to “not cut a single penny from libraries.”
But the speaker said that comment from the mayor was misleading. Though he spared the libraries from the most recent PEG, they are still subject to the previous ones, which are designed to extend into the next fiscal year, she said.
“Our libraries, CUNY, and other essential agencies and services that New Yorkers rely on are still facing significant cuts that are harmful,” Speaker Adams added.
One of the her few accolades for the mayor Thursday was that his executive budget amended city tax revenue projections to align with the Council’s more optimistic ones. The mayor’s team previously pointed to their lower projections as a justification for cost-cutting.
“We are not over-projecting our tax revenue estimates as some have accused us of doing,” the speaker said. “We’re really, really glad to see the executive budget reflect that our projection was accurate, and that there are resources to invest in New Yorkers and the essential services they need.”