POLITICS
Budget Divided Mayor and Council, and Its Members
Separate press conferences, split vote emphasized tensions, especially over NYPD funding
BY DUNCAN OSBORNE
Marking the end of
acrimonious city
budget negotiations,
Mayor Bill de Blasio
and the City Council held separate
press conferences that presented
very different views of the city’s
$88.1 billion budget for the fi scal
year that begins on July 1.
“It’s been a challenging, but very
productive process,” the mayor
said during his June 30 press conference.
“I want to thank the City
Council. I want to thank Speaker
Corey Johnson, the members of
the Council, the staff of the Council…
Everyone worked really, really
hard, literally around the clock, to
get this done and to make sure this
was a budget that was, of course,
balanced.”
The budget has “very deep cuts
to city agencies” and $1 billion “in
labor savings” that are to be negotiated
with the unions that represent
city employees, the mayor said. If
those savings are not achieved and
the city does not get help from the
state or the federal government, it
will have to lay off 22,000 city employees
on October 1.
“October 1 looms as the day we
would have to put layoffs into effect,”
the mayor said. “That is a
last resort… We did have to put it
in the budget because we had no
other options.”
The mayor had hoped for a federal
bailout, but that never materialized.
More recently, he sought
authority from the state to borrow
money to fund operations. While
the State Assembly was willing to
approve that, the Senate would not
agree. That left New York City with
no choice but to fi nd cuts to close
gaps totaling $8 billion between
the 2020 and 2021 fi scal years.
“So just in total, across all of the
city agencies, it’s about a 1,600
headcount reduction, which totals
$100 million annually, roughly
from fi scal years ‘21 and out,” said
Melanie Hartzog,the city’s budget
director, when describing some
signifi cant reductions. “The city’s
Department of Education had savings
Mayor Bill de Blasio and City Council Speaker Corey Johnson did not join together in press conferences
June 30 to announce agreement on the city’s 2021 budget.
of $400 million over two fi scal
years. Most of that is tied to remote
learning and also taking a hiring
freeze on central offi ce functions,
and then there are some programmatic
impacts for instance, in the
Department for the Aging.”
The city was also facing demands
from activists that it cut
the NYPD’s budget by $1 billion
following the protests responding
to the killing of George Floyd
by Minneapolis police. Demands
to #DefundNYPD, the hashtag
around which the demands were
focused, were being made prior to
Floyd’s death, but they grew louder
and more widespread during the
protests. As the City Council vote
on the budget was approaching on
June 30, hundreds of people had
effectively seized City Hall Park to
demand the cuts.
The budget eliminates the July
class of new police recruits and
the April class was already cancelled,
producing a 1,163 reduction
in NYPD headcount. Some NYPD
functions, such as school safety
and street vendor enforcement,
will be moved to other agencies.
And the NYPD is expected to reduce
overtime.
“The total uniform overtime
budget for fi scal year 2021 was
$523 million and we’re going down
by $296 million,” Hartzog said.
While the mayor argued that
NEW YORK CITY COUNCIL/ JOHN MCCARTEN
the 2021 budget does make cuts
to the NYPD budget, activists rejected
that in tweets and media interviews,
saying that the city had
merely moved some costs to other
agencies and not cut the police.
The mayor said the 2021 budget
takes more than $500 million from
the NYPD’s capital budget and uses
$450 million to fund youth centers
and programs to serve 100,000
youth this summer. Another $87
million will be spent on broadband
access in NYCHA housing.
“So, this is real redistribution,”
the mayor said. “This is taking resources
and putting them where
they’re needed most with a particular
focus on our young people. And
look, it fi ts what we’ve been trying
to do for years, and it fi ts the fact
that New York City has been leading
the way for years in a vision of
redistribution, a vision of focusing
on young people, a vision of change
and reform.”
A program aimed at providing
training, job placement, and other
workforce development initiatives
for runaway and homeless queer
youth that was slated to offi cially
begin in July, however, was placed
on the backburner due to cuts to
the incoming budget, the mayor’s
offi ce confi rmed to Gay City News
on June 30.
At the City Council’s press conference,
Johnson, who is gay and
represents the West Village, Chelsea,
and Hell’s Kitchen, said that
the youth programs were in the
budget because the Council demanded
it.
“We were very, very far apart,”
Johnson said of the negotiations.
“They had zeroed out the youth
programs… It was an exhausting,
hard, tense negotiation in a way
that I have never experienced before.”
The de Blasio administration’s
fi rst proposal on the NYPD cut was
tiny, at $16 million.
“It is no secret that I was in favor
of at least a $1 billion cut to
the NYPD and this budget does
not include that,” said Johnson.
“The mayor did not want the cuts
we wanted in the NYPD… This is
not a perfect budget, it is a painful
budget.”
Some city councilmembers oppose
cutting the NYPD while others
believe the fi nal cuts are too
small. Some members, including
some whose districts have seen
recent increases in shootings and
murders, saw the matter as more
complex than just reducing the
NYPD’s budget.
“They want to be safe,” Vanessa
Gibson said of the residents of her
western Bronx district. “Many in
my community have supported
police and want police… They just
want to be treated fairly.”
Councilmember Laurie Cumbo,
who represents a Brooklyn district,
agreed and noted that the
NYPD has grown more diverse over
time. Any cuts that might lead to
layoffs would affect the most recent
hires, which would include people
of color, she said.
“We want to change a police department
that sees their role as
protecting white people from Black
people,” Cumbo said. “How do we
fundamentally change a system
that has brutalized Black people
for centuries? That is not about a
dollar fi gure.”
Cumbo and Danny Dromm, who
is gay and represents a Queens district,
were the targets of protests
➤ 2021 BUDGET, continued on p.12
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