NYC Council passes $112.4 billion budget in down-to-the-wire vote

With just hours left on the deadline clock, the New York City Council on Sunday voted to approve a $112.4 billion budget that restores almost all of the cuts proposed by Mayor Adams and adds about $1 billion to what he proposed in April.

The budget vote, which is legally required to be finalized by June 30, came after months of bitter negotiations between the mayor and the Council, with a final tally of 46 for and 3 against.

On Friday, Adams and the Council struck a deal that makes whole the city’s public library system budget, reversing $58 million in cuts and enabling it to resume seven-day-a-week service. Some of Adams’ cuts forced the library system to close dozens of branches on Sundays.

The city will allocate an additional $2 billion in spending on affordable and public housing, a development first reported in the Daily News, and will restore $20 million to early childhood programs and includes provisions to more rationally fund the city’s pre-K and 3-K initiatives moving forward.

“Reports of New York City’s demise have been greatly exaggerated,” Council Finance Committee Chairman Justin Brannan told reporters Sunday.

In the runup to the budget deal, which was hammered out on Friday, Council Speaker Adrienne Adams held rallies and applied public pressure to restore the cuts.

Even after the deal, though, the mayor took heat for holding fast on his cuts for so long. The Council insisted that its projections showed most of the cuts, including the library cutbacks, weren’t necessary in the end.

Several Council members blasted the mayor before making their votes.

“By forcing New Yorkers to fight and scrounge for the bare minimums, he continues to show his inability to properly manage the city,” Councilwoman Sandy Nurse (D-Brooklyn), said before her “aye” vote.

On Sunday, the speaker announced the pending vote to cheers and fanfare, but added, “We have to shift from the focus on restoring to one of strengthening programs and services that we know New Yorkers need and deserve.”

Since last year, Mayor Adams argued the cuts were needed to offset the city’s heavy spending on housing and caring for newly arrived migrants. On Sunday, he lauded the passage of a “collaborative budget ” even as the city still faces major issues.

“Despite facing unprecedented challenges — including a $7.1 billion budget gap, a $4.9 billion international humanitarian crisis, and hundreds of millions of short-term stimulus dollars used to fund crucial long-term programs — we still passed a collaborative budget that addresses the three things that cost New Yorkers the most: housing, childcare, and health care,” the mayor said in a statement.

The no votes included New York City Democratic Socialists members Tiffany Caban, Alexa Aviles, and Shahana Hanif, who called the spending plan “Eric Adams’ Austerity Budget,” and criticized him for keeping the NYPD’s $11 billion-plus budget “completely untouched.”

“Despite our city’s nearly $4 billion surplus, the FY25 budget is a patchwork of partial restorations paired with hundreds of millions in new and returning cuts to vital city agencies and services including parks, early childhood education, and CUNY,” the trio said in a statement sent out to reporters in advance of Sunday’s vote.

Caban (D-Queens) criticized the NYPD’s “ever-bloated budget,” and said, “This no vote will certainly not grow my popularity with the powers that be, but my constituents did not put me in this room to be a rubber stamp for another Eric Adams budget.”

Still, the mayor won plaudits from Councilwoman Vickie Paladino (R-Queens), who chided the budget’s critics. “The select few here that can never be satisfied will push us deeper and deeper into debt if they have their way.”