Libraries spared, but Rikers suffers from $107 billion NYC budget deal

Mayor Eric Adams and city council speaker Adrienne Adams said Thursday they had agreed on a $107 billion budget for New York City that would restore funding to several council priorities that the mayor had initially tried to cut .

Budget negotiations have been particularly fraught this year, with city councilors running for re-election as they pressure the mayor to reverse cuts to libraries, schools and education services at Rikers Island, the city’s main prison.

“We can talk for hours about the things that didn’t get done within this budget,” Ms Adams said. “This is a bittersweet moment for this Council.”

The mayor praised the fiscal year 2024 budget as a “strong and fiscally responsible” agreement that was timely and prioritized the city’s most pressing issues.

Library leaders had warned that the mayor’s proposed $36 million budget cuts would force them to close many branches on weekends, but the city council pressured him to restore funding.

Leaders of organizations that help inmates at Rikers warned that the mayor’s desire to end their programs, several decades old, would make it more difficult for those who leave Rikers to successfully reintegrate into society. While the mayor and city council have yet to release formal budget documents, the mayor confirmed on Thursday that those cuts will hold.

“We can do all those services internally,” Mayor Adams told reporters at City Hall on Thursday. He called it “an insult” to Correctional Department staff to suggest otherwise.

Mr Adams, a Democrat in his second year in office, argued that wide-ranging cuts were needed because the city faces major financial challenges, including the migrant crisis, costs for city-employee contracts and concerns about the vibrancy of commercial real estate. The city’s revenue for fiscal year 2023 was about $2 billion higher than expected, helping to fend off some of the deeper cuts.

Still, a budget deficit of $5 billion is projected in fiscal year 2025, which will grow to nearly $7 billion and nearly $8 billion in the next two years, and budget watchdogs warned that the mayor and city council had not done enough to prepare for uncertain times ahead.

“It’s essentially a one-year budget that unfortunately once again delays the wise but tough choices needed to stabilize the city’s fiscal future,” said Andrew Rein, chairman of the Citizens Budget Commission.

City council leaders had pushed for more funding for affordable housing, universal kindergarten, the City University of New York, parks, discounted MetroCards for low-income New Yorkers, free legal services, and home delivery meals for seniors, along with a recovery of the programming cuts at Rikers. They were successful on many fronts, although in some cases they brought in less money than they asked for.

Ms Adams, City Council speaker, highlighted the tense tone of the budget negotiations, calling it a “difficult process” and saying the talks were “eminently challenging due to the extent to which they focused on reinstating cuts on so many key programmes” .

Ms. Adams, a Democrat from Queens who was not the mayor’s first choice as speaker, has taken an increasingly belligerent stance towards him and this year has strongly called for the Rikers Island prison complex to be closed by 2027, as required by law, after Mr. Adams questions that timeline. On Thursday Ms Adams said she was disappointed the Council was unable to reinstate a number of cuts, including on homeless services.

“We got some great victories for the people of the city, but some were left out,” she said.

Non-profit organizations have provided services to Rikers for decades. For example, the Fortune Society has worked with inmates on nonviolent conflict resolution and job skills training; most of its programs in city jails have now been eliminated, the association said.

The Department of Correction has argued that it will continue to provide these services with its own staff. Stanley Richards, formerly a department commissioner and now deputy director at the Fortune Society, said that was impractical.

“There is a role for the department; this is just not their role,” said Mr. Richards.

“We get in there and we provide a little bit of light in a very dark place,” Mr Richards added.

The cuts reinforce the impression that the mayor and his correctional department want to avoid outside scrutiny of Rikers, said Carlina Rivera, chair of the city council’s criminal justice committee. In recent months, the administration has allowed a board of trustees unfettered access to video camera footage on Rikers and stopped alert reporters when inmates die.

“This administration is trying to remove eyes and ears from prisons,” Ms Rivera said.

Public schools have also faced painful budget cuts under Mr Adams after enrollments fell during the pandemic. But this year’s budget included about $20 million for a plan, announced by the school chancellor in Mayto keep the individual school budget the same next school year, even if the number of enrollments falls.

The Council pushed for $60 million to expand the popular Fair Fares NYC Program, which offers half-price MetroCards for low-income New Yorkers; the budget included an additional $20 million for the program, which has already enrolled more than 290,000 New Yorkers.

The mayor and city council disagree on the best way to handle the city’s housing crisis. Mr Adams has been criticized for not moving fast enough to create affordable housing and for supporting rent increases for the approximately two million people who live in rent stabilized apartments. Under pressure from the Council, he recently scrapped the requirement that homeless people must stay in shelters for 90 days before they can move into permanent housing.

But in the final weeks of negotiations, Mr Adams vetoed a package of bills that would have expanded the city’s rental housing voucher scheme, a move that added to tensions with the Council. Ms Adams called his veto a “damaging act of futile political theatre” and said the Council was prepared to override it.

On Thursday, Mr. Adams about the fact that providing services to more than 80,000 migrants consumed such a large chunk of the city’s budget; he estimated the cost this year at $1.4 billion.

“I just think it’s unfair — $1.4 billion that could have gone to some of the priorities we all share,” he said.