NYC’s De Blasio Reaches $88.1 Billion Budget With Council

(Bloomberg) -- New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and the City Council agreed to an $88.1 billion budget on the final day of the city's fiscal year, hammering out a deal after weeks of discord as the fallout of the coronavirus pandemic sent tax revenues into free fall.

Drafting a budget would have been difficult enough as revenue plunged $9 billion since January. The challenge was heightened by demands for change in police practices and spending in response to the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Although the mayor said the plan would cut about $1 billion from the NYPD, it didn't satisfy protesters outside City Hall, who said the cuts didn't all come from department's $5.9 billion operating budget and didn't reduce the department's 36,000-officer headcount enough.

“This has been the toughest budget challenge this city has seen in a long long time” de Blasio said. The city will spend $450 million next year for food relief. “It helps us become a fairer city,” he said.

The most populous U.S. city, which attracted more than 60 million visitors and posted record-high employment last year, has been hit hard economically by the coronavirus outbreak. Its monthslong lockdown shuttered businesses and restaurants, darkened Broadway theaters and left its streets empty and devoid of tourists. Covid-19 has killed more than 23,000 in New York, while leaving millions out of work and hungry.

No agency was spared as de Blasio confronted the task of paring down a proposed budget totaling $95 billion in January. That includes the city's $28 billion school system, which serves 1.1 million students. The cuts to education come even as schools across the city face the added costs of disinfection and social distancing needed to reopen safely.

Even with all of the cutbacks, de Blasio has said he may have to dismiss 22,000 city workers in October if the U.S. Senate refuses to approve a $3 trillion package of fiscal aid to the nation's cities and states. The mayor has also appealed for state authorization to borrow $5 billion if necessary to pay operating expenses over the next two years -- a proposal that's been meet with skepticism by Governor Andrew Cuomo and state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, who each say they want more details on how the money would be spent and how the debt would be repaid.

The police cutbacks included cancellation of a July class of 1,163 recruits. The mayor and council also planned to shift responsibility for unarmed school safety personnel to the city's Education Department, which drew opposition from activist groups who said it would lower the NYPD budget line without substantively changing tough disciplinary policies they say undermine schools' teaching function.

The plan also called for the ambitious goal of reducing police overtime costs. The mayor had already budgeted just $523 million in police overtime for 2021, an 18% reduction from the current year. The new plan cuts overtime by more than half, to $227 million, even after the department spent about $115 million for such costs during just four weeks of “Black Lives Matter” demonstrations. De Blasio insisted it's achievable.

The City Council will work to track overtime spending in an effort to rein it in, said council Speaker Corey Johnson during a news briefing Tuesday afternoon.

Reducing police extra-hour pay has been a difficult goal for decades, and last year it accounted for about 44% of all overtime costs, according to the Citizens Budget Commission, a business-funded fiscal watchdog. The group also had advised the mayor to reduce the city's total headcount through attrition by about 9,000 from its current 327,000, bringing it to where it was in 2016. That would save about $1.7 billion a year. De Blasio rejected the recommendation, saying it was too austere.

“Good management finds ways to use overtime when absolutely needed but not overuse it,” de Blasio said during a briefing. “I'm convinced it can be done.”

The mayor said NYPD funds would be diverted for youth employment and recreation, serving 100,000, costing $115 million.

“This is real redistribution,” he said.

The city has been roiled by weeks of protests over the Floyd killing, as well as a spate of lawlessness, with more shootings and homicides than the city has experienced in decades. While the mayor resisted the $1 billion in police spending cuts for weeks, the city spends almost $11 billion on the department when fringe benefits and other costs outside the department's budget are factored in, easing the task of reduced spending.

“This is not a moment for carefully considered budget planning,” said David Kennedy, a specialist in tactics of violence reduction and community policing at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The impact of a $1 billion cut in police spending on fighting violent crime would be minimal, he said.

“Most of what the department does is not violence prevention,” he said. “It's not associated with crime. It covers a wide range: domestic disturbances, traffic control, paperwork for after-the-fact crimes such as burglary or theft, parades, mental health calls and homelessness, animal control and the like.”

Yet, the cuts have unsettled many officers within the department, according to Stephen Nasta, a colleague of Kennedy's on the John Jay faculty. Nasta, a 30-year veteran of the department who served as a precinct commander in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan, and later, as chief of investigations for the district attorney's office in the Bronx, agreed with Kennedy that the department, which employs more than 50,000 including civilians, has “plenty of room to make budget cuts.”

At the same time, he said, “you can't just cut police from face-to-face contact patrolling the streets. The cuts have to be done in a smart, strategic way.”

The protesters in front of City Hall reject this view, demanding sweeping changes in the way the department polices the city, including steep cutbacks in personnel. A coalition supporting them said the deal between the mayor and the council included fringe benefit and pension savings that have nothing to do with police practices, and aren't even within the department's operating budget. They demand a full hiring freeze.

De Blasio and Council Speaker Corey Johnson “were using funny math and budget tricks to try to mislead New Yorkers into thinking that they plan to meet the movement's demands for at least $1 billion in direct cuts,” said Anthonine Pierre, a spokesperson for Communities United for Police Reform.

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