Mayor Adams’ preliminary budget for fiscal year 2025 is surprisingly sunny — but the clouds could easily roll in again.
Good news: The $109 billion spending plan spares key agencies from earlier proposed cuts and reduces estimates of the migrant crisis’ impact on city finances.
Also helping: higher-than-expected tax collections and Gov. Hochul’s unexpected plan to send the city another $1.8 billion in migrant aid.
So the mayor has restored an NYPD academy class, five-man FDNY engine companies, garbage pickups, Sunday library hours and summer school funding — plus some boost to education, hiking funding to public charter schools from $33 million in FY25 to $729 million by FY 2027.
Yet Citizens Budget Commission chief Andrew Rein rightly warns that a “large fiscal cliff” still looms unless the city better controls overtime spending and “explicitly ends” many recurring programs that lack future funding.
To sum up: Months of careful cutting have allowed the mayor to share good news now, but he’ll likely need to pull out the ax again soon enough.
It’s certainly an improvement over the feckless spend-it-all attitude of the de Blasio years, but let’s hope Adams can move beyond the famine-then-feast dynamic to a steadier groove.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
