NEW YORK — Mayor of New York City Erik Adams and the head of the City Council agreed to a $112.4 billion budget on Friday, ending months of conflict over budget cuts that sent the mayor’s approval ratings to record lows.
The handshake agreement, which comes just days before the start of the fiscal year on July 1, calls for about $800 million more in revenue compared to the previous version of the spending plan. released in aprilThat extra money enabled both parties Avoiding proposed cuts to libraries, cultural institutions and preschool education.
“We have done our job,” Mayor Adams said at a press conference at City Hall on Friday, “and we will continue to do our job the right way and get results for the people of this city, working-class people who have often been ignored.”
The budget, which must be approved by Council before Monday, also provides for an additional $2 billion in capital investment for affordable housing over the next two years.
But not all of the cuts the mayor proposed last fall were reversed.
The cuts at the City University of New York continued. And while the mayor and the council recovered approximately $20 million for preschool education, the program still faced a $150 million deficit compared to the previous year’s spending plan. This shortfall is likely to spark further outrage from advocacy groups that have criticized City Hall’s financial strategy.
Yet many of Adams’ spending cuts were the result of less controversial measures, such as lower-than-expected spending on health care by city employees. In other words, the restorations announced this week were a small part of the more than $7 billion in savings combined between last year’s budget and one announced Friday, last year’s budget, but they caused a excessive political headache for Adams.
The source of that migraine can be traced to overly bleak revenue projections from the city’s budget office – a powerhouse with few controls in the Adams administration.
Last fall, both the mayor and his budget director warned of a potential recession and the cost of housing tens of thousands of migrants from the southern border. Based on that dire prospect, Adams issued an executive order in September requiring agency heads to cut spending by a total of 15 percent over the next seven months.
Adams and his budget department believed the decision was necessary to keep the city solvent in the worst-case scenario.
But the edict turned out to be both overly cautious and politically toxic.
A December Quinnipiac University poll found that the mayor record low support — with weakness even among a key constituency since his 2021 election — driven by concerns about budget cuts. A broad coalition of affected organizations, advocacy groups and council lawmakers voiced their displeasure. And the mayor did himself no favors by appearing to relish a fight with the city’s library system, which scrapped Sunday service in response to a mandate to cut spending.
In January, City Hall began correcting course. In a preliminary budget plan released that month, the government revised up revenue forecasts so dramatically that it was able to cancel some of the planned cuts and reverse others.
Throughout the process, members of the City Council argued that there was enough revenue to avoid many of the cuts altogether. Thursday’s announcement not only validated their arguments, but also capped a bitter negotiation process in which they extracted concessions from the Adams administration without giving up anything at the negotiating table.
“We believed in the strength of this city and its resilient economy,” Council President Adrienne Adams, who is not related to Eric Adams, said at the news conference Friday. She praised the council’s economists for “guiding them correctly.”
“We were clear about the challenges, but we were also clear that we have the resources to invest in New Yorkers and protect what they rely on,” she added.
The City Hall rotunda was all smiles Friday as the mayor entered with a model airplane in his hand — a nod to his earlier comments that “AA Airlines,” as he called his partnership with Chairman Adams, “would let the plane countries” based on the budget.
While the cuts pose a major threat to the mayor’s standing among his base as he raises money for his 2025 re-election campaign, the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonprofit organization that advocates for cuts, says the money saved by the cuts last budget year and in 2025 the coming year were essential to keep the budget in balance.
“We saved more than $7.9 billion. We have recovered $349 million,” the mayor said Friday. “We have shown financial responsibility.”
Madina Touré contributed to this report.
