City Council leaders will push to boost spending on housing, education and parks in the upcoming budget, pointing to billions of dollars in additional money that they say Mayor Eric Adams’ administration overlooked.
The council released its official response on Wednesday to the mayor’s $115 billion budget proposal for the 2026 Fiscal Year, drawing battle lines for negotiations ahead of a June 30 deadline. In what has become a familiar routine, the council’s economists say they uncovered an additional $6.3 billion in available money compared to the mayor’s estimates, thanks to more optimistic tax-revenue forecasts and lower-than-expected spending.
Rather than stash it away for a rainy day, however, lawmakers want to put the money to use by spending $4.4 billion more in the coming year to undo previous cuts and make new investments in city services. That’s despite the increasing likelihood of steep federal spending cuts, and the Trump administration’s tariff and tax-cut policies that “create real uncertainty for the health of the city’s budget,” council economists wrote. (The council did propose leaving untouched $1.9 billion of the newly identified money, to be used for any new needs that arise during budget talks.)
Justin Brannan, chair of the council’s Finance Committee, said the council was doing “doomsday exercise scenarios” to prepare for federal cuts, but that there was “no silver bullet” that would let New York absorb severe aid reductions.
“Anyone that says that they know what’s coming is lying,” Brannan told reporters Wednesday afternoon. “There’s not a city in this country that would survive wholesale federal cuts.”
But fiscal experts are wary about the reluctance among both city and state officials to factor likely federal cuts into their spending plans for this year. Ana Champeny, vice president for research at the Citizens Budget Commission, said the council is likely correct that the city has more money than the mayor estimated, but questioned the choice to immediately spend it.
“The city will likely have to deal with significant federal cuts and the mayor and the council should focus on preparing for those, including by adding $1 billion to the general reserve,” Champeny said in an email. The council’s budget still fails to account for some $2 billion in expected costs in the coming year, Champeny said, such as overtime pay for uniformed agencies like the NYPD.
In addition to the $4 billion in new operational spending, the council wants to add $2.8 billion to the city’s capital budget, which is separate from its year-to-year expense budget. The capital budget covers construction and infrastructure and currently totals $170 billion over the next decade, although the council did not specify over how many years it wanted to spread its $2.8 billion commitment.
Housing is a priority in both the council’s capital and expense plans. Lawmakers want to spend $115 million more in next year’s budget to hire workers at the city’s under-staffed housing department — where a 14% vacancy rate has slowed its efforts to preserve affordable homes — and create a new fund to help landlords pay for costly climate retrofits under Local Law 97. The council also wants to add $1.1 billion in capital funding for housing — responding to calls by industry leaders who say the city will build less in the coming years unless it boosts that budget.
The council’s other expense commitments for the next fiscal year include:
$795 million in new education spending, to undo cuts to the 3-K program and expand efforts to invite adult learners to finish their degrees in the City University of New York system$379 million in health and safety-related spending, including $37 million for “step-down programs” that help people leave care for mental health or addiction issues$63 million for the city’s three library systems starting next year, helping them expand seven-day service to 10 more branches citywide$33 million to the Parks Department to improve staffing levels
Other pledges in the council’s budget plan come in response to pleas from interest groups. Lawmakers would create a $5 million fund to purchase large trash bins for business improvement districts, which have complained about the cost of the Adams administration’s new trash-containerization rules. And in hopes of tackling the city’s chronically late payments to nonprofit vendors, the council wants to add $1.9 million to the Mayor’s Office of Contract Services, which would undo a previous mayoral cut and let MOCS hire 20 new staff.
Mayor Adams’ next revised budget plan will be released in early May. That plan could provide some answers for other questions left unresolved in the mayor’s January preliminary budget — such as how the city will cover a $1 billion hole in its budget for asylum-seeker care, which it expected to receive from the state but looks unlikely to get.
Tensions have steadily risen between Mayor Adams and the council speaker since their respective terms began in 2022, after a series of difficult budget negotiations. The speaker was noncommittal on Wednesday when she was asked whether she had faith that the mayor could be fully devoted to budget talks, given ongoing questions over his relationship with President Donald Trump’s administration.
“It remains to be seen whether or not that will be the case,” she said.
