De Blasio has stood firm. “I do not believe it is a good idea to reduce the budget of the agency that is here to keep us safe,” he said during a briefing June 5. “The bigger problem is we may not have a choice. We may be defunding all city agencies if things don’t go right.”
That bigger problem is a spending gap of at least $1.6 billion that’s opened since April, when de Blasio last presented an already pared down spending plan. If that’s not daunting enough, the city must adjust for a $7 billion deficit in fiscal 2022.
Aid Unknown
Two uncertainties complicate the task: How much Governor Andrew Cuomo will cut state aid to the city as he grapples with his own $8 billion deficit; and how much the federal government will reimburse the city for its lost revenue and costs incurred while at the pandemic’s epicenter. De Blasio won’t get the answers before his June 30 deadline.
In resisting deep NYPD budget cuts, de Blasio isn’t just defying the Council’s progressive Democrats. City Comptroller Scott Stringer has said the department could sustain a $1.1 billion cut over the next four years without jeopardizing public safety.
“For too long the NYPD has been held harmless when time comes to make efficiencies and cuts,” said Stringer, a 2021 mayoral candidate.
At least $154 million could be saved just by postponing two cadet classes to allow the force to reduce by 1,200 officers through attrition, the Citizens Budget Commission said in a report last week.
Jobs Unfilled
The city could save more than $1 billion through 2022 if it reduced headcount through attrition beyond the police to other parts of the 326,000-worker bureaucracy -- by letting a third of the 22,000 positions that turn over each year go unfilled, said Andrew Rein, president of the budget commission.
In a separate report, Rein’s organization calculated that the city could save about $5.7 billion in the next two years with practices such as reducing headcount, centralizing procurement and union health fund management, vehicle fleet reduction, and redrawing sanitation routes more efficiently. If each agency reduced spending by just 1%, the city could save about $1.4 billion over the next two years, it said.
CBC recommendations also included workers and retirees paying a share for health insurance they now get for free. A temporary 2% property-tax increase could bring in $1.4 billion to help cover deficits in 2022 and 2023, while costing the average homeowner $143 a year, according to the CBC analysis.
Before the virus hit New York, de Blasio enjoyed six years of economic growth that allowed him to increase spending about 20%. De Blasio reserved $5 billion that will help ease the burden in this downturn, but he ignored warnings from the Council and the CBC to salt away more.