A good day for libraries, but others are feeling a tight budget

Good morning. It is Friday. We’ll look at the deal for a $107 billion city budget. We’ll also see why this could be a particularly bad tick season.

Librarians were happy. Proponents of transit, to a lesser extent.

Mayor Eric Adams and city council speaker Adrienne Adams agreed on a $107 billion budget deal Thursday after months of bickering over which city services should be prioritized.

The mayor had wanted wide-ranging cuts in what he called “a budget cycle dominated by major challenges and unexpected crises,” including the migrant crisis, new job contracts involving city workers and an uncertain commercial real estate market, which could reduce municipal revenues. The Council’s Progressive Caucus countered that cuts would be devastating.

With a projected $5 billion budget gap for fiscal 2025 and even bigger deficits for the next two years, some watchdogs said the budget deal should have done more to set sail. What they arrived at “is essentially a one-year budget that unfortunately once again delays the sensible but difficult choices needed to stabilize the city’s fiscal future,” said Andrew Rein, chairman of the independent Citizens Budget Commission.

Under the budget agreement, funding was restored to several Council priorities that the mayor had focused on, including the city’s three public library systems.

After warning that the proposed cuts would force many branch libraries to close on weekends, the libraries launched a campaign to boost support, with social media posts from celebrities such as Sarah Jessica Parker And Chelsea Clinton. Outside the New York Public Library headquarters in Manhattan, a large banner appeared with the text ‘No cuts to libraries’.

Top officials from the three systems said on Thursday they were “thrilled” with the outcome.

“In the midst of unprecedented efforts to ban books and silence diverse voices,” they said, “New York City has sent a clear message about the power of public libraries.” The officials – Linda Johnson, the president of the Brooklyn Public Library; Anthony Marx, the president of the New York Public Library; and Dennis Walcott, the president of the Queens Public Library – also said in a joint statement that they were “extremely grateful” to the mayor.

The Council had pushed for $60 million to expand the Fair Fares NYC program, which offers discounted MetroCards for low-income New Yorkers. The budget deal called for just $20 million more.

Lisa Daglian, the executive director of the MTA’s Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee, said that wasn’t enough. “It’s a drop in the ocean,” she said, adding that her group would continue to push for “too low eligibility criteria to be changed that don’t reflect the cost of living in New York City.”

The mayor had also pushed for cuts in education programs at Rikers — cuts he said Thursday were in the budget deal. “We can do all those services internally,” he told reporters at City Hall. He called it “an insult” to Correction Department employees to suggest otherwise.

Carlina Rivera, chair of the city council’s criminal justice committee, said the cuts reinforced the impression that the mayor and the correctional department wanted to avoid outside scrutiny of Rikers. In recent months, the administration has and has restricted a board of trustees’ access to Rikers video footage stopped alert reporters when inmates have died.

Weather

Now that a statewide health advisory for air quality is back in effect due to smoke from Canadian wildfires, you can expect hazy sunshine, with temperatures hovering around 80 degrees. Chance of rain and thunderstorms late in the evening, with temperatures around 60 degrees.

ALTERNATIVE SIDE PARKING

Suspended today (Eid al-Adha).

The latest Metro news

It’s summer and the ticks are biting. My colleague Joseph Goldstein says hundreds of thousands of us will be bitten by ticks this summer and some experts are preparing for the worst.

The ticks that bite now hatched in 2022, a year after oak trees produced a record crop of acorns, much to the delight of ravenous mice and squirrels whose numbers were increasing. That was good for the larval ticks, which easily found rodents to attach to and enjoyed their first taste of blood — which increased the ticks’ chance of survival, said Dr. Richard Ostfeld, a disease ecologist who studies ticks at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies.

Those are the ticks that gormandize this summer. They want another portion of blood. They’ve parked themselves in grass and on leaves, waiting to hop aboard anyone who passes by.

Some of them are new to New York. Tick ​​researchers periodically drag a tablecloth-sized square of white cloth across the forest floor and count how many ticks hitch a ride. Lately, these drags have found new species of ticks, such as Gulf Coast ticks. Health Department researchers have discovered a growing number of them at Fresh Kills, the former Staten Island landfill which will be transformed into a park.

As the name suggests, Gulf Coast ticks come from the south. Dr. Waheed Bajwa of the city health department said they likely hitch a ride on migratory birds to reach New York.

Their arrival at Fresh Kills isn’t the researchers’ only troubling finding: They brought with them a pathogen that causes a form of spotted fever — milder than Rocky Mountain spotted fever, a sometimes deadly tick-borne illness. So far, the Gulf Coast tick doesn’t appear to have transmitted the milder form to New Yorkers, but Dr. Bajwa expects them to.

The Asian longhorn tick, another species relatively new to New York, has multiplied at an alarming rate in the five years since the first known bite in Yonkers. It has since turned up in “extremely high densities” in the Bronx and Staten Island.

A health department bulletin last year said Asiatic longhorns “appear to be displacing black-legged ticks” — the type that got New Yorkers into trouble when the deer population surged. When the deer population declines, the blackleg population declines as well; Dr. Bajwa said a recent program to give vasectomies to deer on Staten Island appears to be linked to a drop in Lyme disease cases there.

Fortunately, most tick bites do not lead to disease. Less than half of nymph-stage black-legged ticks carry the pathogen that causes Lyme disease.

Still, the state health service has decided that one tick check after a day outdoors is not enough. “Do a full body check several times during the day,” advised a recent health department bulletin. That change of guidance was prompted by an increase in a rare tick-borne disease called Powassan viruswhich can cause permanent neurological damage.

“Powassan is a game changer for us,” said Jennifer White, who heads the state health department’s division that studies tick-borne diseases. She added that the Powassan virus can be transmitted if a tick is attached for just 15 minutes, significantly less time than it takes for other tick-borne diseases, such as Lyme.

METROPOLITAN Diary

Last meal

Dear Diary:

I moved to the Upper West Side in 1995. I had an entry-level advertising job that paid just enough to rent the living room in a shared apartment. (At least it had a door.)

My first night there I ate at a diner around the corner. I was a bit broke and I knew it would be the last time I eat there for a long time, so I ordered a large fried chicken dish, with enough for leftovers.

Years passed. Roommates came and went. In the end I was able to afford the whole house on my own. More time passed and I decided to buy a house in Brooklyn.

On my last night on the Upper West Side, I decided to go back to the restaurant I had gone to that first night.

When I got there I looked at the menu and saw the fried chicken dish. I thought about ordering it for old time’s sake, but decided against it at the last minute.

“Tomorrow I’m moving,” I thought to myself. “And I don’t need the hassle of leftovers in the fridge.”

—Andrew Ettinger

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here And read more Metropolitan Diary here.