("it" being a $4 billion bailout from Hochul who is running for reelection.)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5866242&forum_id=2Reputation#49882875)

A generous influx of state resources from Gov. Kathy Hochul and a new tax on luxury second homes will help Mayor Zohran Mamdani balance a $125 billion budget.

By Sally GoldenbergDana Rubinstein and Benjamin Oreskes

May 12, 2026

Three months after Zohran Mamdani claimed New York City was facing a budgetary crisis of generational proportions, the mayor announced on Tuesday that he had closed the gap, thanks to an infusion of state resources from Gov. Kathy Hochul and some routine belt tightening.

The announcement came as the mayor released his first executive budget, which totals about $125 billion for the coming fiscal year. The spending plan, which is still subject to change before the City Council ratifies it by a June 30 deadline, comes amid a lackluster job market and an uncertain economic forecast made hazier by the war with Iran.

Like any budget, and particularly any mayor’s first, this budget has also come with its share of drama, political missteps and unfulfilled campaign promises.

As she runs for re-election, Hochul comes to the rescue

Past mayors and governors allowed poisonous interpersonal dynamics to hamper their ability to deliver for city residents. By endorsing Ms. Hochul early for re-election this year, and working with her to expand child care funding, Mr. Mamdani is now enjoying the fruits of a relatively positive relationship with the governor.

Earlier this year, Ms. Hochul committed $1.5 billion in state aid for a host of municipal services. The state budget, which has not yet been finalized, is also expected to include a host of policy changes and revenue increases that will funnel another $4 billion to the city over the next two years.

The largest share — about $2.3 billion over two years — is expected to come from the city’s delaying certain pension payments, a change that requires state approval and buy-in from municipal unions.

The mayor and governor also expect another half-billion dollars to flow from the new tax surcharge on second homes worth more than $5 million that Ms. Hochul recently announced. But the city comptroller recently argued that number might be overly optimistic, and New York City’s byzantine property valuation system means that the new tax would come with substantial implementation challenges.

The city is expected to save another $1 billion over two years from several changes, including the state’s expected agreement to delay a class-size mandate in public schools (despite Mr. Mamdani’s support for the mandate as a candidate); more school aid from the state; and the assumption by the state of a larger share of death benefits for families of police officers, firefighters and emergency medical workers.

State officials said the city will gain another $361 million from “other actions” that they have yet to explain.

The developments appeared to show that Ms. Hochul and Mr. Mamdani had gotten through a somewhat bumpy period and were eager to highlight their constructive and mutually beneficial partnership. The city, as a creature of the state, needs Ms. Hochul’s support on many matters. Ms. Hochul, who is facing re-election this year, needs Mr. Mamdani’s help in turning out Democratic voters in New York City.

“For years, the relationship between City Hall and Albany has been defined by dysfunction and infighting,” Mr. Mamdani said in a statement. “Governor Hochul and I, however, share a belief that government works best when we work together on behalf of the people we serve.”

But a fiscal watchdog, the Citizens Budget Commission, warned against the mayor’s proposal.

“The pension gimmick balances this budget on the backs of future New Yorkers — making residents in the mid-2030s pay for closing the fiscal year 2027 budget gap,” the organization said in a statement.

Mamdani fixes a political misstep, but backtracks on two campaign promises

Mr. Mamdani ended his threat to raise property taxes on New York City homeowners by nearly 10 percent if the state failed to raise taxes on wealthy individuals and big corporations.

The tax increase would have brought in almost $15 billion over four years, but ran into pushback from the moment Mr. Mamdani raised the idea. It sparked outrage among politicians representing Black homeowners, including some City Council members who would have had to approve the measure. From the beginning, the Council speaker, Julie Menin, said it was a nonstarter, and Mr. Mamdani began backing away from the threat nearly as soon as he made it.

This budget also highlights the extent to which Mr. Mamdani has had to backtrack on several campaign promises, as he has transitioned from an insurgent democratic socialist candidate to mayor of New York City.

Though he promised on the campaign trail to drop City Hall’s opposition to the expansion of a rental voucher for poor New Yorkers, the cost of the program prompted him to reverse that stance.

As a candidate, he also expressed support for the state’s requirement that New York City reduce the number of students in classrooms. As mayor, he now backs the state’s intention to delay implementation of that mandate.

Asked about his shifting position on the rental voucher program, which the mayor is negotiating with the City Council, Mr. Mamdani called the service an “invaluable tool to help homeless New Yorkers who are getting out of shelter.”

He and his budget director, Sherif Soliman, insisted they are not cutting the program, but did not address in detail their decision not to expand it.

After cutting funding for libraries, Mamdani restores it

It was a modest cut in the context of the city library systems’ budgets, but when Mr. Mamdani slashed $29 million from them, uproar ensued. In part, that is because the move was so at odds with Mr. Mamdani’s democratic socialist political brand and evoked the library budget battles of his predecessor, Eric Adams.

Those cuts have since vanished.

Even so, the mayor has yet to live up to his campaign trail promise to devote .5 percent of the city’s budget to libraries.

“Preserving these crucial funds makes it possible for the city’s public libraries to maintain the vital services and programs New Yorkers want and deserve,” said the Brooklyn Public Library president, Linda Johnson; the New York Public Library president, Anthony Marx, and the Queens Public Library President, Dennis Walcott, in a joint statement.

Mamdani’s budget relies on a politically risky pension-funding gambit

To balance this year’s budget, Mr. Mamdani is proposing to delay payments into New York City’s pension funds.

The city has five pension funds representing teachers, police officers, firefighters and other unionized municipal workers. The returns, which are invested, total about $300 billion.

The mayor’s plan, which would save $2.3 billion through the end of the upcoming fiscal year, would involve restructuring the city’s contributions to the funds following an overhaul instituted in 2013 by Bill de Blasio, then the mayor of New York City, and Andrew M. Cuomo, then the governor. At that time, the mayor changed the city’s pension payment obligations following a drop in the assumed rate of return, to 7 percent from 8 percent.

City and state leaders agreed to stretch out payments for future bills through 2032.

Police officers’ pensions would be unaffected by the proposed change, as their union, the Police Benevolent Association, is opposed to the plan.

John Nuthall, a spokesman for the P.B.A., said that neither the P.B.A. nor the fund that administers police pensions have agreed to the amortization. Representatives for the Uniformed Firefighters Association and District Council 37 had no immediate comment.

Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, said pension board trustees would review the proposal.

The city comptroller, Mark Levine, a Democrat, said there was a logic to the mayor’s proposal on pensions. “Otherwise we’d hit a big cliff in 2032,” he said.

“This really is once-in-a-generation windfall,” Mr. Levine added. “I’d want to use it to bolster our reserves, ideally, or prepare some way for the long term — not just cover expenses for today.”

Mamdani’s budget cuts into reserve fund

In Mr. Mamdani’s first budget proposal in February, he drained several of the city’s reserve funds, which are meant to provide a cushion during economic turmoil. This version replenishes some of them, but leaves one with only the legally required minimum of $100 million — its lowest level since the pandemic.

The partial reinstatement of reserves seems designed to win favor with the bond ratings agencies, who have for weeks suggested they might downgrade the city’s credit ratings, if the mayor was to tap into the reserves.

Any such downgrade would have made it more expensive for New York City to borrow.

Ana Champeny, the Citizen Budget Commission’s vice president for research, noted that the $100 million minimum was established in 1975. “There’s no way that is enough money in 2027,” she said.

Sally Goldenberg is a Times reporter covering New York City politics and government.

Dana Rubinstein covers New York City politics and government for The Times.

Benjamin Oreskes is a reporter covering New York State politics and government for The Times.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5866242&forum_id=2Reputation#49882895)

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Zohran Mamdani’s unbelievably dishonest NYC budget

By Ken Girardin and John Ketcham

Published May 12, 2026, 4:05 p.m. PT

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Mayor Mamdani spiked the ball Tuesday, as the city’s budget crunch seemed to go away as quickly as it had appeared.

He announced that Gov. Kathy Hochul and state lawmakers would dallop a few extra billion dollars on Gotham over the next few years to patch up the city’s suddenly balanced budget.

But the mayor’s revisionism, coupled with the slipshod manner in which the budget is being balanced, gives reason to worry that he will struggle to handle less avoidable fiscal challenges ahead.

The mayor insists he “uncovered” a massive budget deficit upon taking office, a strange term to describe something that had been warned about for the better part of a year, including by state comptroller Tom DiNapoli.

New York City is now in its fourth year of spending more than it collects, and spending has far outpaced inflation for a decade.

So instead of taking a scalpel to city agencies, the mayor took the train to Albany.

Mamdani, to his credit, accepted lawmakers’ offer to scale back or at least postpone a state edict, albeit one he supported, that’s driving some of city’s budget agita: a “class-size” mandate enacted at the teachers’ unions’ behest, despite plummeting enrollment.

Usually, cash-strapped mayors look for efficiencies by reforming or ending underperforming programs or freezing new hires. But that would be “austerity.”

But Mamdani’s still accepting the false premise that we need more teachers, and he’s counting on state taxpayers to pick up part of the cost in coming years.

If anything, the DOE needs consolidation — as our colleague Danyela Souza Egorov argued this week — rather than funding failing schools with declining enrollment.

An estimated 134 city-run schools expect to have fewer than 150 students come autumn.

About $850 million in hoped-for savings will come from claiming revenues the city is owed, managing overtime, and “improving the efficiency of public services.”

That’s easier said than done.

What happens when those collections don’t materialize, or when the city needs more police shifts?

The biggest chunk of “savings” is even less defensible.

Mamdani has reportedly gotten the governor and state lawmakers to agree to change the way New York City’s under-funded public pension plans pay off debt they incurred a generation ago by making overly rosy assumptions about how their investments would perform.

The city wants to reduce those debt payments and instead pay it off over a longer period, likely well into the 2040s — meaning tomorrow’s workers will be taxed extra to pay for city services delivered before some of their parents were born.

This is a one-time fix, if you can call it that, which the governor and the mayor are turning to outside of a recession or emergency.

Don’t forget: A chunk of the city’s budget gap disappeared in part because tax receipts, including those from Wall Street bonuses, came in higher than expected.

What Mamdani is hailing as a triumph for democratic socialism amounts to a state bailout standing on a pension gimmick wearing a trenchcoat.

Hochul has given him billions in direct funding, plus her blessing to punt costs almost a whole generation into the future.

He’s positioning the city for an even higher expense structure in later years — without a plan for paying for it.

But he’s not going to be able to lean on the governor forever.

The state’s tax revenues are even more volatile than those of the city, because its tax code is even more dependent on the fluctuating incomes of high-earners and corporations.

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What do you think? Post a comment.

And the city’s ability to count on revenues from those sources could be threatened by the mayor’s affinity for making videos about them.

Pension gimmicks and temporary fixes are no substitutes for the sort of spending prioritization that comes from proper management.

Mamdani appears largely unwilling to confront what’s causing the city’s costs to spiral out of control.

If he waits until it’s too late, he won’t just have to talk about austerity — he’ll have to show it in practice.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5866242&forum_id=2Reputation#49882900)

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With latest lifelines from Hochul, Mamdani balances NYC budget

The mayor released a spending plan that hinges on a controversial delay on city pension payments.

By Chris Sommerfeldt and Joe Anuta

05/12/2026 05:49 PM EDT

NEW YORK — After months of doom and gloom, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani unveiled a dramatically sunnier fiscal picture for the city Tuesday: A $124.7 billion executive budget that is balanced without drawing down reserves, increasing property taxes or cutting into service delivery.

In large part, he has Gov. Kathy Hochul to thank.

A $5.4 billion budget gap projected in February is no more, having been filled with several new revenue streams and savings programs — most of which came from Albany — including a new tax on wealthy homeowners.

“Through new revenues, savings and a renewed partnership with the state, we pulled New York City back from an existential fiscal brink,” Mamdani said at a City Hall budget presentation.

In a direct form of aid, Hochul has agreed to provide $1.4 billion in fresh funding for city programs over this fiscal year and the one beginning July 1 — including $600 million for youth initiatives and $202 million for reimbursing families of public safety officers who die in the line of duty, according to Mamdani’s plan. Those pots of funding used to be covered by the state, but were shifted over to the city’s tab, mostly under former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration.

Mamdani’s executive budget also pencils in $500 million in annual revenue from a yet-to-be-finalized pied-à-terre tax on pricey properties in the city — another measure contingent on state permission. When another $150 million in yet-to-be-finalized school aid from the state is added to a previous $1.5 billion allocation of direct state aid and $1.2 billion in child care funding, Hochul will have played a major role in rightsizing the city spending plan.

“Today, we are fulfilling the promise to make free universal child care a reality, making significant investments in education, public safety, and infrastructure while providing the city the resources they need to continue to fund critical services for New Yorkers,” Hochul said in a statement.

Tuesday’s spending deal is also likely to temper criticism of Mamdani’s budgetary chops that might have otherwise come from multiple directions: ratings agencies who threatened a downgrade over his use of reserves during an economic expansion; Black homeowners furious over the prospect of increased property taxes; his base, which might have revolted at the prospect of service cuts; and those in the business community who felt a thirty-something democratic socialist was ill-suited to rescuing the city from near-financial ruin.

But for all the improvements Mamdani has made to the city’s fiscal health since February, his executive plan is still shored up by a raft of short-term measures and payment deferrals that are making budget watchdogs uneasy about the city’s long-term fiscal health.

As part of her lifeline to the city, Hochul is providing a state approval allowing Mamdani to extend the period over which public pension contributions are made, a change expected to save the city $1.6 billion in the upcoming fiscal year but provide diminishing returns in out-years. Such a move will require support from four of the city’s five public pension funds, adding a potential obstacle to getting it across the finish line.

Andrew Rein, president of the fiscally hawkish Citizens Budget Commission, panned the pension contribution delay, arguing it saddles future generations with an unfair burden.

“We have to solve this budget gap today, and basically by stretching out pension payments we’re asking people in the mid-2030s to solve the 2027 budget gap, and that’s simply not fair,” Rein said. “We’re going to ask people who don’t even live here yet to help us balance the budget now.”

Earlier this year, Mamdani lambasted former Mayor Eric Adams for under-budgeting city programs, which resulted in the massive deficits Mamdani’s administration is now contending with. But in stretching out the timeline for city pension payments, Mamdani may also be saddling a future mayor with the tab for his decision to kick the can down the road.

City Comptroller Mark Levine told reporters after being briefed on the budget that he did not necessarily oppose the pension contribution adjustments but would like that revenue to be saved instead of spent.

“If you refinance your house, you have a big windfall. Maybe you put it into your college fund for the kids as opposed to spending it right away,” he said by way of analogy.

In another can-kicking exercise, Mamdani’s plan banks on $500 million in savings from delaying implementation of a state law mandating smaller class sizes in city public schools. While pushing off the deadline will give the city some temporary reprieve, Mamdani will eventually have to comply with the requirements.

The class size implementation delay requires state action, and Mamdani offered a vague answer when asked how he can guarantee the projected savings before a deal has been reached in Albany: “That’s an active conversation with our partners in Albany, as well as in labor, and we are confident.”

The mayor also found around $1.2 billion in unused salary money as a result of the city’s smaller-than-expected headcount in the current fiscal year, which the budget office is using to fund recurring expenses.

These measures come as the city is facing a challenging fiscal environment going forward: Personal income taxes are projected to dip slightly in the current and next fiscal years while outyear budget gaps are expected to climb to around $7 billion in fiscal year 2029 and north of $9 billion the year after that.

Though the governor has played a critical role in helping Mamdani balance the city’s books, she held firm against his push for increasing income taxes on millionaires and business taxes on major corporations this year. Her resistance on that front marked a setback for Mamdani, whose successful 2025 campaign was centered on the idea that those two core taxation policies could help bankroll his costly proposals to greatly expand free child care programs and make public buses free.

Mamdani has still taken a tax-the-rich-related victory lap over the pied-à-terre surcharge, which is expected to impact people who own secondary homes in the city worth more than $5 million. His executive budget banks on generating $500 million in annual revenue from that new surcharge, even though the specifics of its implementation remain unclear as state budget negotiations continue in Albany.

In an apparent effort to keep momentum going on the taxation front, Mamdani’s executive budget includes a proposal to decrease the credit individuals receive for paying the city’s Unincorporated Business Tax, or UBT, a move that would generate $68 million in new revenue. The UBT credit benefits about 24,000 high-income earners in the city, according to Sherif Soliman, Mamdani’s budget director, who noted that it can be scrapped by the city without state intervention.

Council Speaker Julie Menin — whose body will use Mamdani’s executive proposal as the basis for the final round of budget talks before a June 30 adoption deadline — included a proposal to phase out the UBT credit for high-income earners in the Council’s spending plan from last month, making its adoption likely.

In a statement after a private budget briefing with the mayor, Menin and Council Finance Committee Chair Linda Lee said they will “closely review” his latest proposal and hold hearings on it in the coming weeks.

“We appreciate that the administration has moved toward an approach championed by the Council that identifies savings and avoids raising property taxes or raiding reserves,” they said.

When it comes to slashing city spending, Mamdani is projecting more than $500 million in savings that come from curtailing the cost of housing vouchers and homeless shelters — a move that runs counter to his pledge to expand the voucher program during his 2025 campaign. Savings goals incorporated into Mamdani’s last spending proposal were set to trim around another $1.7 billion, with Tuesday’s budget proposal listing off a raft of belt-tightening at agencies, such as trimming $100 million in “unnecessary” non-salary expenses at the Department of Education. Additional savings will come from investments in special education in the hopes of staving off legal costs.

One of the largest allocations in Mamdani’s plan is $40 million for his signature Office of Community Safety, with $26 million of it being set aside for hate crime prevention.

The new investment will go to staffing and contracting at the office, which is a pared-down version of the department of community safety that Mamdani floated during last year’s campaign. Even with the new funding, the office — which is supposed to spearhead the city’s responses to mental health, homelessness and hate crime crises — only has a budget of about $300 million (most of it repurposed from existing programs), a far cry from the $1.1 billion Mamdani pledged during the campaign.

Thanks to the newly identified savings and funding commitments from the state, Mamdani’s plan is also expected to reverse cuts to the city’s public libraries and parks that he included in his first budget proposal in February. Still, he falls short of his campaign promises to dedicate 1 percent and 0.5 percent of the city’s overall spending to libraries and parks, respectively.

Between all the cost cutting, Mamdani’s executive proposal clocks in at $3 billion less than the preliminary plan he rolled out in February, when he issued a clarion call about the city facing its “biggest budget gap since the Great Recession.” At the time, Mamdani said he would need to increase the city’s property taxes and raid its budget reserves unless Hochul caved to his demands for income tax hikes on millionaires and business tax hikes on corporations.

Both of Mamdani’s drastic contingency proposals were met with fierce pushback, and ultimately he was able to produce an executive budget without taking either step.

“It has not been easy,” Mamdani said. “But we have balanced the budget, and we have done so without placing the burden on the backs of working New Yorkers.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5866242&forum_id=2Reputation#49882906)

https://x.com/justinjpearson/status/2054317572091257198?s=46

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5866242&forum_id=2Reputation#49882899)