Adams’ Latest Budget Restores Cuts to Cops, Pre-Schools

New York City’s financial outlook is on the upswing following wins in the state budget, better Wall Street profits, and a return to pre-pandemic tourism numbers, Mayor Eric Adams said Wednesday, as he presented his executive budget ahead of negotiations with the City Council.

The $111.6 billion proposed budget restores some of the cuts made since last November, including to the 3-K and pre-K programs.

It also makes permanent funding for the housing-voucher CityFHEPS programs, adding about 300 more vouchers, budget director Jacques Jiha said. The budget also restores police academy classes for the New York City police department through the rest of the year, which will result in more officers for NYPD.

Adams — who held a rally outside City Hall before his presentation at noon — said the balanced budget shows the resilience of the city amid the unexpected hits of the pandemic and migrant influx.

“Our fiscal year 2025 executive budget reflects this can-do spirit, reflects our core values and shows what we can accomplish with strong fiscal management and committed leadership,” the mayor said in a live-streamed video.

The proposed budget is more than $2.2 billion higher than the preliminary plan he introduced in January, boosted in part by better-than-expected tax revenues.

The tax revenue was revised by more than $619 million in the current budget, reaching $1.7 billion for next year, the mayor said.

The savings instituted since the mayor took office in 2022 also contributed to the improved financial outlook. As a result, Adams said they did not include other “programs to eliminate the gap,” or PEGs, in his proposed budget.

The mayor’s proposal will be deliberated between his office and the City Council before they agree to a final budget by July 1.

Councilmember Justin Brannan, the chair of the council’s finance committee, said Wednesday the mayor’s executive budget doesn’t do enough to fully fund programs like libraries and pre-K and 3-K. The council’s own finance experts believe the city is leaving more than $1 billion on the table.

“What we saw today in the mayor’s executive budget, it restores a fraction of those costs, but not everything,” he said. “So there’s still a lot of work to do.”

The city’s financial blueprint includes $16.9 million for a Job Connections initiative to place 500 young New Yorkers in career readiness and job placement programs. It also includes the restoration of funding to some cultural programs — but not the more than $58 million cut from the city’s three library systems.

Most libraries across the five boroughs will continue to only be open five days a week, when the previous standard was six until last year’s cuts, officials said. Seven-day service was slashed during citywide cuts in November.

The lack of funding will also delay the reopenings of branches that are being renovated, spokespeople for the libraries said, and also affect staffing.

Adams said later Wednesday that the libraries, like city agencies, had to meet certain goals to reduce their budget and called on them to tap into their private funds and endowments to meet service needs. He said they were not cut in this budget, but he also didn’t restore any of their cuts.

“There’s not one savings we found that we wanted to do — we had to navigate us through,” he said.

New York Public Library spokesperson Jennifer Fermino said the institutions have restrictions on how they can use their private funds, which are not enough to make up for money from the city budget.

“Simply put: this is not how endowments work,” she said in a statement.  “The purpose of the library’s endowment is to fund our world-renowned and public Research Libraries in perpetuity. It is not only fiscally irresponsible, it is in most instances not legally possible to use the endowment to replace the cuts to our city funding.”

Mixed Indicators

The latest budget proposal is much more optimistic than the fall, when the mayor slashed programs and agency budgets and warned of even more cuts, blaming an increase in spending on the asylum seeker crisis.

But the city’s financial woes aren’t done. The budget gaps over the next two years are $5.5 billion annually — and $5.7 billion for fiscal year 2028, according to the mayor’s plan.

Budget experts say the city should continue to be more prudent in spending and finding ways to trim spending.

“While the budget may be fiscally stable for the coming year, [higher revenue estimates] cannot hide the danger if spending growth isn’t restrained,” said Andrew Rein, president of the business-backed Citizens Budget Commission. He noted the executive budget increases spending funded by city revenues by more than 6% or double the rate of inflation.

And the mayor said he remained cautious, noting weaknesses in the commercial real estate market and “mixed” economic indicators nationally.

Heeding the calls of groups like the Citizens Budget Commission, the mayor took steps to deal with the end of federal pandemic aid and other one-time funding that’s been used for education, and address some of the costs of the expansion of housing vouchers.

Funding for many educational initiatives on special education services and pre-K are now covered by recurring city revenues, Adams said. In addition, future budgets assume that the city will spend an average of $700 million a year on housing vouchers.

Still, housing vouchers could cost more than $2 billion a year, and a state law mandating smaller classes could add another $1.4 billion to spending in future years. The CBC estimated the total of spending not accounted for in the budget to be about $2 billion.

The mayor said the combined $17 billion in deficits projected for fiscal years 2026 through 2027 were within historical averages but his estimates do not include the possibility of a recession.  He also decided not to increase the city’s $8.2 billion in reserves.

State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli almost immediately called for bolstering  the rainy day funds, which are at a record in terms of total amount but will decline to less than 7% of expected total spending of $122 billion in fiscal year 2027.

“The city’s reserves remain well below peers on a share of spending basis,” DiNapoli said in a statement.

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