New Yorkers are particularly concerned with Eric Adams’ fifth round of cuts, in the form of 5% mid-year budget cuts to agencies, with another 10% cuts to come by April 2024. The Mayor has unilaterally made these unpopular, devastating cuts to libraries, composting, public schools, CUNY programs and a long list of essential services. These cuts are bad for New Yorkers struggling to afford the basics, bad for a functioning city government and bad for local democracy that excludes working-class and poor New Yorkers from decisions that impact them. But thankfully, the Council has a role to play, and the tools to stop the devastation — if only members have the guts to use them against the mayor’s unnecessary and deeply unpopular austerity agenda.

Without getting too far into the weeds, what you need to know is that the fiscal year begins on July 1, and what we are experiencing now are budget modifications or “mods.” The budget approved in June is the “adopted budget,” but that can be altered and be modified on an ongoing basis over the fiscal year as budgetary needs and conditions change. There are quarterly “financial plans,” where many of these mods happen. Changes in revenue projections, agencies needing to move money around or “new needs” popping up can warrant Mods. Modifications require less process and less transparency, so sometimes it’s where the mayor can push through increased NYPD spending or other mayoral budget priorities without much input from the public or the City Council.

The mayor is seeking severe across-the-board cuts through this budget modification. Mayor Adams is slashing $1.4 billion from essential and care-based services, which means cutting over 2,000 city jobs. The impacts of these cuts are immediate, and New Yorkers are already feeling their city services shrink. Composting organizations are shuttering their doors, and 120 people with green and clean jobs will be out of work by the new year. Libraries are closing on Sundays. Almost 500 Fire Department jobs will disappear. There will be over $500 million cut from the Department of Education, not including pre-school and 3K cuts.

But the mayor, a retired police captain, did leave two agencies largely unscathed: the NYPD and Department of Corrections (DOC). So, why 15% cuts? There are no projected deficits in the current fiscal year; all of these cuts are to address claims of out-year gaps between revenue and expenses. We are looking at potential 6% gaps for next year, and 8% in 2025 that we would need to fill. But it’s already been proven that it is possible to recover from out-year gaps, as the City did not once, but twice in the 2000s.

Out-year gaps and how we deal with them is normally what we do in the traditional budget process that takes place, instead of pushing cuts through the shorter, less-transparent budget modification process. In January, the mayor normally presents a preliminary budget that the Council debates and researches so that in June we finalize it before the new fiscal year. What is happening now is the Mayor is asking to make big changes without the time, information, insight or transparency of a hearing process or cycle. This is unprecedented.

The sensible thing is for City Council to put Mayor Adams’ budget modification to a vote, and vote it down, unless the Mayor agrees to halt cuts until the regular FY25 budget process begins, or rolls back cuts to composting, libraries, schools, CUNY, childcare, and essential services and finds further savings in the NYPD and DOC’s bloated budgets. City Council can also reject budget modifications if they are of a significant size.

This hasn’t happened in a long time — and the Council is not required to vote on a modification; it can pass without action. But if the Council votes down a mod, the mayor can still cut or underspend, like they would in a hiring freeze, but not move money around as easily. This may seem like the Council can’t do much. But it can curtail some of the mayor’s power as a consequence of him misusing the budget modification process. At the very least, by voting on the budget modification, the Council can demonstrate their co-equal power in the budget process, instead of timidly letting the modification pass without action.

What the City Council shouldn’t do is do nothing. The mayor is creating a fiscal crisis and a “migrant crisis” when there is none. Eric Adams is exaggerating the influx of immigration and immigrant-support costs for political gain. The Independent Budget Office reported that the administration had overstated asylum-seeker costs by up to $1.6 billion dollars, and the Fiscal Policy Institute has stated that the Mayo “significantly overstates the fiscal impact of migrant arrivals,” naming that proposed budget cuts of $10 billion per year are “billions of dollars higher than the increased cost estimates for asylum seekers.”

Yes, the city has gaps in future fiscal years. But there are several contributing factors to the outyear gaps — which the Citizens Budget Commission points out as uniformed overtime, city lawsuits, and new union contracts — ones that the city can overcome like in years past without drastic budget cuts to essential services.

There are a few other things we can do to fill the gaps without gutting city services. First, we can get people out of temporary shelter and into safe and stable homes. Fixing the city’s shelter system and housing New Yorkers and immigrants more humanely will actually save money in the long run — instead of the mayor’s continued over-reliance on questionable emergency contracts. The mayor has refused to enact the voucher package the City Council passed in July 2023, which would address the bottleneck of moving people out of more costly temporary shelter into cost-effective affordable housing through vouchers. Also, we can undo the hiring freeze at revenue generating agencies, and use some of the city’s $8 billion in reserves. We could also ban broker fees and stop paying charter schools’ rent, along with a host of other ideas from the Independent Budget Office which can help fill this gap.

The mayor is using a manageable budget deficit as a distraction to his many scandals and to carry out an ideological agenda that translates into favors for rich friends and less than scraps for working-class and poor New Yorkers. The New York City Council can stand with New Yorkers and reject this attempt to force these changes through the mods process and stand up for a city whose services are on the ropes. In a city with the most billionaires in the world, there is no reason we cannot afford world-class schools, abundant libraries, fully-funded CUNY and universal childcare. The mods are no time for far-reaching policy in the form of austerity, and the Council needs to vote it down if they don’t get movement on keeping funding for central services that the working class of this city need and rely on.

Brandon West previously worked at the NYC Office of Management and Budget and as a City Council budget analyst. He was an organizer with Occupy City Hall in 2020, ran as a DSA-endorsed City Council candidate in 2021, and currently is on NYC-DSA’s Steering Committee .

The Indypendent is a New York City-based newspaper, website and weekly radio show. All of our work is made possible by readers like you. During this holiday season, please consider making a recurring or one-time donation today or subscribe to our monthly print edition and get every copy sent straight to your home.