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Libraries Spared but Rikers Suffers in $107 Billion N.Y.C. Budget Deal
Mayor Eric Adams and the City Council speaker, Adrienne Adams, said on Thursday that they had reached agreement on a $107 billion budget for New York City that would restore funding to several Council priorities that the mayor had initially sought to cut.
The budget negotiations were particularly fraught this year, with City Councilmembers running for re-election while they were pushing the mayor to reverse cuts to libraries, schools and education services at Rikers Island, the city’s main jail.
“We can talk for hours about the things that were not accomplished in this budget,” Ms. Adams said. “This is a bittersweet moment for this Council.”
The mayor praised the budget for fiscal year 2024 as a “strong and fiscally responsible” agreement that was on time and prioritized the city’s most pressing issues.
Library leaders had warned that the mayor’s $36 million in proposed cuts would force them to close many branches on weekends, but the City Council pressured him to restore the funding.
Leaders of organizations that help detainees at Rikers warned that the mayor’s desire to eliminate their programs, some decades old, would make it harder for those who leave Rikers to successfully reintegrate into society. Though the mayor and City Council have yet to release formal budget documents, the mayor confirmed on Thursday that those cuts stand.
“All of those services we can do internally,” said Mayor Adams, speaking to reporters on Thursday at City Hall. He called it “an insult” to Correction Department staff to suggest otherwise.
Mr. Adams, a Democrat in his second year in office, argued that broad spending cuts were necessary because the city is facing major financial challenges, including the migrant crisis, costs for labor deals with city employees and concerns about the vibrancy of commercial real estate. The city’s revenue for the 2023 fiscal year was roughly $2 billion higher than expected, which helped fend off some of the deeper cuts.
Still, a budget deficit of $5 billion is expected in the 2025 fiscal year, growing to nearly $7 billion and nearly $8 billion in the two years after, and budget watchdogs warned that the mayor and City Council had not done enough to prepare for uncertain times ahead.
“It is essentially a one-year budget that again unfortunately delays the wise but hard choices needed to stabilize the city’s fiscal future,” said Andrew Rein, president of the Citizens Budget Commission.
City Council leaders had pushed for more funding for affordable housing, universal prekindergarten, the City University of New York, parks, discount MetroCards for low-income New Yorkers, free legal services and home delivery meals for seniors, along with a restoration of the programming cuts at Rikers. They were successful on many fronts, though in some cases won less funding than they had requested.
Ms. Adams, the City Council speaker, highlighted the tense tone of the budget negotiations, calling it a “difficult process” and saying that the talks were “uniquely challenging because of how much they focused on restoring cuts to so many important programs.”
A Democrat from Queens who was not the mayor’s first choice for speaker, Ms. Adams has taken an increasingly combative stance toward him, calling forcefully this year for closing the Rikers Island jail complex by 2027, as required by law, after Mr. Adams raised doubts about that timeline. On Thursday, Ms. Adams said she was disappointed that the Council was not able to restore some cuts, including to homeless services.
“We got some fantastic wins for the people of the city, but some were left out,” she said.
Nonprofits have for decades provided services at Rikers. The Fortune Society, for example, has worked with detainees on nonviolent conflict resolution and employment skills training; the bulk of its programs at city jails have now been eliminated, the society said.
The Department of Correction has argued that it will continue to provide those services using its own staff. Stanley Richards, formerly a commissioner in the department and now deputy chief executive at the Fortune Society, said that was impractical.
“There’s a role for the department; this just happens not to be their role,” said Mr. Richards.
“We come in there, and we provide a bit of light in a very dark place,” Mr. Richards added.
Nonprofits will no longer be funded to provide services to detainees on Rikers Island.Uli Seit for The New York Times
The cuts reinforce the impression that the mayor and his Correction Department would like to avoid outside scrutiny of Rikers, according to Carlina Rivera, who chairs the City Council’s Committee on Criminal Justice. In recent months, the administration has eliminated an oversight board’s unfettered access to video camera footage on Rikers and stopped alerting reporters when detainees die.
“This administration is trying to eliminate eyes and ears from the jails,” Ms. Rivera said.
Public schools have also faced painful budget cuts under Mr. Adams after enrollment dropped during the pandemic. But roughly $20 million was included in this year’s budget for a plan, announced by the schools chancellor in May, to keep individual school budgets flat next school year, even if enrollment drops.
The Council pushed for $60 million to expand the popular Fair Fares NYC program, which provides half-price MetroCards for low-income New Yorkers; the budget included an additional $20 million for the program, which has already enrolled more than 290,000 New Yorkers.
The mayor and the City Council have disagreed about how best to address the city’s housing crisis. Mr. Adams has faced criticism for not moving quickly enough to create affordable housing and for supporting rent increases for the roughly two million people who live in rent-stabilized apartments. Under pressure from the Council, he recently removed a requirement that homeless people stay in shelters for 90 days before they can move into permanent housing.
But in the final weeks of negotiations, Mr. Adams vetoed a package of bills that would have expanded the city’s rental housing voucher program, a move that contributed to tension with the Council. Ms. Adams called his veto a “harmful act of useless political theater” and said that the Council was prepared to override it.
On Thursday, Mr. Adams lamented the fact that providing services to more than 80,000 migrants took such a large chunk of the city’s budget; he estimated the cost at $1.4 billion this year.
“I just think it’s unfair — $1.4 billion that could have gone into some of the priorities that we all share,” he said.
Dana Rubinstein is a reporter on the Metro desk covering New York City politics. Before joining The Times in 2020, she spent nine years at the publication now known as Politico New York. @danarubinstein
Emma G. Fitzsimmons is the City Hall bureau chief, covering politics in New York City. She previously covered the transit beat and breaking news. @emmagf
A version of this article appears in print on June 30, 2023, Section A, Page 20 of the New York edition with the headline: Mayor and Council Reach Budget Deal That Spares City Libraries, but Not Rikers Island.