Mayor Eric Adams and New York City Council speaker, Adrienne Adams, said Friday they had reached an agreement on a $101 billion city budget that, among other things, rules out proposals. Adams’ initiative is intended to significantly increase staffing levels at the city’s prisons and slightly increase the Department’s Budget.
The spending plan, announced by Mr. Adams and Ms. Adams, is the product of a struggle between the first-year mayor and the council over how best to deal with rising concerns about crime.
Mr. Adams, who won the election on a promise to reduce the rise of certain types of crime started early in the pandemic, already Proposal to increase police spending close to $200 million — a fraction of the department’s nearly $6 billion budget but nonetheless a controversial suggestion following protests over discriminatory policies and the murder of George Floyd.
Most of the money added will go to Compulsory salary increase according to the contract, overtime pay and a new anti-gun unit. Officials said money could still be found to pay for those items without providing details.
Ms. Adams, a moderate Democrat like Mr. Adams, leads a City Council that is generally more progressive than she is and she has called for more investment in housing and social services as a way. address the root causes of crime.
According to the mayor’s office, the final police budget is about $60 million less than the mayor initially proposed and about $350 million less than the department collected last year.
In a major concession to City Council, Mr. Adams abandoned his bid to significantly expand the Regulatory Chamber’s spending. While the department is not short of staff, the frequent absences of corrections officers and mismanagement have contributed to what a federal watchdog has called chaotic and dangerous conditions at the Rikers Island prison complex.
The mayor initially sought to hire an additional 578 officers, a large increase but also a fraction of the figure for the Benevolent Association of Corrections Officers, with which Mr. Adams had formed an alliance.
“Council has been very vocal about our concerns with that,” Ms. Adams said at the buzzing event at City Hall, where she and the mayor announced the budget agreement.
Benny Boscio, president of the correctional officers’ association, criticized the decision in a statement.
“The city council has now ensured that response times to inmate attacks will be longer, it will be more difficult to provide inmates authorized services, and the new system will replace the punitive distinction will take much longer to materialize,” he said.
Mr. Adams and Mrs. Adams, who share the same last name and alma mater, are not related. But they share politically moderate roots in southeast Queens and, as Ms. Adams noted on Friday, they represent the first all-black management team in the city’s history.
The budget deal came at the start of the year in an unusual way and Mr Adams argued it was unusual in other ways as well. It includes an additional $79 million per year for 100,000 youth summer jobs; $90 million for tax refunds for approximately 600,000 small property owners and $1.5 million for dyslexia screening for incarcerated people (later a pet project to the mayor, who discovered he had dyslexia in college). There is also $22 million available to raise trash bin collections above their pre-pandemic levels amid concerns that the city’s streets are growing increasingly filthy.
The deal was reached at the start of the year in part due to larger-than-expected personal income tax and Wall Street income, which also put about $750 million into the city’s rainy day fund.
“We learned from Covid that unexpected things happen,” Mr. Adams said during his speech at the City Hall event.
City budget experts have criticized the deal for not setting aside more money.
“We think it’s a huge missed opportunity considering how much money they have,” said Andrew Rein, chair of the nonpartisan Citizens Budget Committee. The group argued that the city should have set aside $2.3 billion — half of the surprise revenue.
In addition to prioritizing fighting crime, Mr. Adams’ mayoral platform calls for improved government efficiency. But his first budget was the largest in the city’s history. Mayor Bill de Blasio’s The final budget is approved is $99 billion, and is supported by $14 billion in federal pandemic aid. Mr. Rein said the budget announced on Friday was still too dependent on federal aid.
“What we have to remember is that Covid’s aid will run out,” Rein said. “Some of that aid is being used for continuation programs or they want to continue.”
According to Jacques Jiha, the budget director, inflation factored into the final budget, with the city paying more for energy and “everything that we buy.” The annual inflation rate for the metropolitan area was 6.3 percent in May, lower than the national average, but still high. The last time the region’s inflation rate was higher than it is now was October 1990.
Mr. Adams has struggled so far to stay calm public fear of crime. Although shootings and homicides decreased slightly in the first five months of this year compared with the same period in 2021, they were significantly higher than two years ago.
There have also been a number of famous shootings, including on the subway in April in which at least 29 people were injured, the accidental fatal shooting of a subway passenger last month and several cases of children trapped, and in at least two cases, deaths from stray bullets.
Mr. Adams’ response was to flood the subways with police officers to show “almighty” and to encourage officers to actively tackle so-called quality of life violations by clean up homeless campscatch evaders and remove unlicensed providerswhom the mayor believes contributed to the disorder.
However, five months into Mr. Adams’ term, crime has increased by at least 15% in every major category except homicide as of June 5 compared with the same period last year, according to Police Department data.
Police budgets can still grow. John Driscoll, a retired captain and professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said while most of the department’s spending is on personnel, how much is the overtime pay.
Mr. Driscoll said: “You have the unknowns, when you do murder investigations, or complex shooting investigations, they have to work overtime and you can’t really explain it.
That was demonstrated when the City Council and Mr. Adams’ predecessor, Bill de Blasio, commit transfer 1 billion dollars from the Police Department’s budget following the protests over the killing of Mr. Floyd. Most of the cuts did not materialize.
To address concerns about transparency and potential wasteful spending by police, council officials said Friday that they have negotiated new items in the department’s budget. The move is intended to make it easier to determine how police use taxpayer money.
Crystal Hudson, a councilwoman from Brooklyn and a member of the budget negotiating team, said in a statement that by including aid for undocumented immigrant families, restoring the epidemic cuts cleaning service and resisting the addition of repair workers, officials have shown that the city can “take steps to break free from the state of disregard for the health of some vulnerable New Yorkers.” our most hurt. “
To celebrate his first budget deal, Mr. Adams wore a guayabera shirt instead of his typical suit and tie. His budget is relatively modest, but he said his choice symbolizes his desire to do away with traditional approaches to city management and he promises more fashion statements in the future. future.
“I will be standing on this podium in a few days in my Pakistani clothes,” he said. “I’ll stand here wearing my Egyptian clothes.”
“I will be standing here wearing my AAPI,” he added, referring to clothing favored by the heritage of Asia and the Pacific islands. “People need to know that this is not a city of just a suit and tie.”
Jonah E. Bromwich, Patrick McGeehan and Ali Watkins contribution report.
