In an official release and strongly-worded op-ed he co-wrote with Andrew Rein of the Citizens Budget Commission, state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli blared the alarm over impending NYC budget caps, suggesting they could near $14 billion for the 2024-2025 fiscal year and urging the city to rein in costs before there’s a serious impact on service delivery for New Yorkers.
One important thing about this analysis is that, while it certainly discusses migrant-related expenditures at length, it helps dispel the fiction that migrants are single-handedly responsible for any financial pitfalls and budget crunches the city might be staring down.
There’s been a tendency as of late, by commentators and elected officials and even some at City Hall, to discuss asylum seekers as if they came out of nowhere to drag the budget down, and in their absence the city would be flying high and unburdened.
That perspective glides over the obvious reality that public conversations about budget risks and the decisions that create them long predate the current influx of asylum seekers. City spending has been on an upward trajectory without a commensurate increase in revenues for years, and eventually the bill comes due.
Any regular reader of these pages knows well that NYCHA, for example, has long been a sinkhole for public funds that only gets deeper as we fail to address capital needs and broken procurement structures, among other issues. In addition to those long-standing problems, DiNapoli points out that NYCHA rent collections have cratered, blowing another hole in the system’s funding panorama.
If anything, situations like the COVID pandemic and migrant arrivals have only worsened existing issues. At Health + Hospitals, staffing issues and slowness in disbursing federal funds has collided with the system’s frontline role in contending with the public health emergency and providing assistance to the almost uniformly uninsured migrants, as well as managing the migrant intake center and emergency shelter contracting.
The NYPD has gotten used to thinking of its overtime budget as less than even a suggestion, and the Department of Correction often has a staff headcount roughly equivalent to the total number of people in custody, yet can’t manage to control any of the violence and mismanagement that has plagued Rikers Island.
Many of these are management issues, which means they require policy and management solutions at the state and city levels that go beyond just ordering agencies to cut their budgets, even if that can provide some relief in the short term.
There have been some positive examples of restructuring that can really move the needle, like the creation of the Public Housing Preservation Trust at the state level. There have also been counter-examples of policymakers hamstringing progress with unfunded mandates, like the head-scratching new class size mandate that will cost some $1.3 billion in additional annual costs with dubious return on investment.
Then there are the things left to do, some of which can be done quickly, like more aggressively going after unpaid NYCHA rent and finding ways to cut down on migrant housing costs, which are high in part due to the city’s reliance on pricey hotels.
All together, none of these are insurmountable challenges, but they require sustained focus and a desire to take responsibility instead of completely deflecting to outside circumstances like migrant arrivals. The future of the city depends on it.
