Mayor Zohran Mamdani called out his political rivals for gross fiscal mismanagement on Wednesday, saying their decisions have left the city with a $12 billion budget gap that should be addressed by raising taxes on the wealthy.
Mamdani took direct aim at both former Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who he said under-budgeted essential services and exacerbated a widening gap between what the city contributes in state revenue versus what it receives in return.
“This is not just bad governance. It is negligence. And now the responsibility falls upon us to protect working New Yorkers from paying the price,” said Mamdani, who was flanked by his First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan and his Budget Director Sherif Soliman.
“We can not only put our city back on firmer financial footing, but also build a stronger city for everyone, if the top 1% of New Yorkers pay an additional 2% in income taxes,” he said, pitching a hike that would require legislation in Albany.
The mayor’s comments about what he called a “fiscal crisis” represent his first foray into what’s routinely called the city’s budget dance. It’s common for mayors to sound the budget alarm as negotiations with state lawmakers and the City Council begin. Mamdani seized on the grim fiscal forecast as justification for his call to raise taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers and corporations, despite Gov. Kathy Hochul’s objections.
The preliminary budget – which Mamdani plans to deliver on Feb. 17 – will be a test of his ability to make difficult tradeoffs between popular line items like city parks or libraries and important, costly agencies like the NYPD and local schools.
“The budget gaps we are facing today are higher than they were at the height of the Great Recession,” Mamdani said, accusing Adams of a pattern of under-budgeting rental assistance, shelter and special education programs while failing to address glaring projected budget gaps.
Todd Shapiro, a spokesperson for Adams, said Mamdani was “inaccurate and disingenuous” to blame Adams for the long-standing disparities between the city and state.
“Mayor Eric Adams inherited a city facing nearly $10 billion in debt, compounded by the worst public-health and economic crisis in New York City history,” said Shapiro, pointing to how Adams managed the city’s recovery from the pandemic, and later absorbed billions in migrant-related costs.
Mamdani said the city’s finances demand “recalibrating the broken fiscal relationship between the state and the city,” arguing that the city contributes 54.5% of state revenue but receives only 40.5% back.
The mayor’s critique of the financial imbalance between the city and the state focused on the period from 2010-fiscal year 2022, when Cuomo was governor.
Cuomo spokesperson Rich Azzopardi said the former governor, who also ran a losing campaign for mayor, inherited an $11 billion deficit when he first took office and managed to close it through fiscal discipline. He also noted that Cuomo has not been governor in five years and attacked Mamdani for failing to address the fiscal imbalance as a state lawmaker.
“Zohran Mamdani needs to learn that being an executive is more than cosplaying in a custom designer-made windbreaker,” Azzopardi said. “You need a basic command of the facts: Under Governor Cuomo, state aid to New York City schools rose 68%, and the state absorbed billions in New York City Medicaid cost increases.”
James Parrott, a veteran budget expert, said Mamdani was overstating the latest fiscal risks. The $12 billion deficit is based on a city comptroller report from last fall that incorporates the “maximum downside,” he said.
Since that report, the city’s revenues have shown signs of growth. Wall Street has near-record high profits over the last three years. A preliminary estimate of property tax rolls this month showed that citywide property values increased by over 5%.
But there are clear economic headwinds. “The national economy is slowing down and New York City’s job growth has come to a halt,” Parrott said. President Donald Trump’s tariffs and federal cuts to Medicaid and food assistance could also complicate the city’s budget picture.
Mamdani offered few details when pressed on how he would identify budget savings. He said his administration had requested more time to work through a settlement related to the city’s housing voucher program.
But he said he did not anticipate making cuts to specific agencies, including the NYPD.
“We won’t let the failures of the prior administration dull the ambitions of our own,” Mamdani said.
The one example Mamdani cited of the kind of fiscal mismanagement he said plagued the Adams administration was an artificial intelligence chatbot that did not function properly, despite costing the city $500,000.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
