As City Hall trumpets the restoration of some of the mid-year budget cuts the mayor announced in November, I’ll repeat what I wrote at the time:
“Almost nothing Eric Adams is doing now feels right, and none of it can be taken at face value.”
The mayor insisted two months ago that he had no choice but to make $547 million in painful and across-the-board cuts, with no time to waste and no agency spared, because the cost of providing for migrants arriving here was going to be billions of dollars more than he’d projected.
That was then. Now, he’s made three different announcements over the last week trumpeting the rollback of some of his most unpopular cuts, each with a subject line about how his “Administration’s Measured, Responsible Fiscal Management Has Reduced Migrant Costs.”
On Wednesday, it was “saving” the Police Academy classes he’d sliced out of the budget and reversing cuts to the Fire Department budget that would have decreased the size of some companies and forced injured firefighters off of the job.
On Thursday, it was “saving” both thousands of garbage bins City Hall had said would be removed and a job-training program that a powerful labor ally had taken the administration to court to try and keep.
And on Friday, it was undoing a cut to community schools and putting some new city money into the still shrinking Summer Rising program.
All this, says Adams, is using a scalpel in January in place of November’s butcher’s knife.
That’s an elegant way to re-package his own canceled cuts as new investments.
Like the old joke about a son whose father knew nothing when he was 15 but was wise by the time the son turned 25, Eric Adams sure has learned a lot in just two months about “measured, responsible fiscal management.”
Having squeezed all the news value he can out of those back-to-back-to-back announcements, the mayor will play cut-rate Santa to his own Grinch again on Tuesday, when the city puts out its full budget proposal for the coming fiscal year and finally reveals the new projections it says allows for these reversals and restorations.
Adams, who started boasting after winning that office that God had chosen him decades earlier for it, is flipping scripture on its head:
The mayor taketh away, and then the mayor giveth some of it back.
It’s a job.
Slow that down: The original quote is from the Book of Job, of course, but Adams is doing a job in its pro wrestling meaning of someone performing a loss in a scripted fight — against himself, in this case.
And, in the plain meaning of the word, a guy who won his job by positioning himself on both sides of lots of issues is trying to govern the same way — never mind the pesky 28% approval rating stunts like that have helped earn him.
Sharing the pain when your budget projections go down and then picking winners when they go back up is shoddy and sloppy, whether or not the mayor’s budget proposal on Tuesday mercifully restores for instance the $23 million for libraries he cut that ended Sunday service citywide to save something like 15% of what the NYPD spent last year on overtime for subway patrols.
There are tough choices coming as the last of the COVID money Mayor Bill de Blasio irresponsibly sunk into recurring costs gets spent, with little help coming from Washington or Albany to cover the bill for housing and caring for newly arrived migrants.
That said, citing your own “measured, responsible fiscal management” to undo supposedly urgent cuts just 50 days after they were announced is a jumbo-shrimp-sized oxymoron.
As Justin Brannan, the City Council Finance Chair, quipped, “someone… must be a Billy Idol fan because it seems they’re budget dancing with themselves.”
Or, as the Daily News Editorial Board put it, “The mayor earlier had said… that the only fair way to do things is across-the-board cuts, as obviously no agency has volunteered. Setting aside the wisdom of that approach, this premise kind of falls apart when, having found some extra cash, the mayor comes out and undoes the cuts for a few departments while leaving everything else untouched.
“Obviously, cops and fire are essential lifesaving services, and, as the mayor is fond of pointing out, public safety is something of a prerequisite for any other city function. Nonetheless, it’s the same medicine (and reprieve) for everyone or it isn’t. We guess it isn’t.”
Buckle up. This is no way to run a city.
Siegel (harry@thecity.nyc) is an editor at The City, a host of the FAQ NYC podcast and a columnist for the Daily News.
Harry Siegel: Mayor’s sloppy one-man budget dance falls flat
8
30
14.01.2024
As City Hall trumpets the restoration of some of the mid-year budget cuts the mayor announced in November, I’ll repeat what I wrote at the time:
“Almost nothing Eric Adams is doing now feels right, and none of it can be taken at face value.”
The mayor insisted two months ago that he had no choice but to make $547 million in painful and across-the-board cuts, with no time to waste and no agency spared, because the cost of providing for migrants arriving here was going to be billions of dollars more than he’d projected.
That was then. Now, he’s made three different announcements over the last week trumpeting the rollback of some of his most unpopular cuts, each with a subject line about how his “Administration’s Measured, Responsible Fiscal Management Has Reduced Migrant Costs.”
On Wednesday, it was “saving” the Police Academy classes he’d sliced out of the budget and reversing cuts to the Fire Department budget that would have decreased the size of some companies and forced injured firefighters off of the job.
On Thursday, it was “saving” both thousands of garbage bins City Hall had said would be........
© NY Daily News
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Nikkei Editorial
Rami G Khouri
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
