NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted a long Instagram story on Tuesday calling out City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams for cutting discretionary funds from the districts of City Council members who voted against the 2023 budget in what she perceived to be a dirty political ploy.
“Who defunds after-school programming for underprivileged kids in public housing to score a political point?” she said. “That is like movie-villain type of decision-making right there.”
Adams has control of a $41.6 million discretionary fund called the Speaker’s Initiative to Address Citywide Needs that she can allocate as she sees fit.
After the budget she negotiated with Mayor Eric Adams passed 44 to 6 on Monday, she cut all SIACN funding from the six Council members who voted "no" — all of whom are progressive Democrats who criticized the budget for defunding education, housing and social programs.
Tiffany Cabán, Sandy Nurse, Alexa Avilés, Chi Ossé, Charles Barron and Kristin Richardson Jordan, were all left out.
She refused to allocate funds from the SIACN to one other Council member, conservative Democrat Kalman Yeger, but every other Council member, including every Republican, got at least one project funded.
Speaker Adams’ office told The New York Times that some of the Council members who voted against the budget got discretionary funds from other sources. Others got their projects funded, but without their name attached — denying them recognition.
Cabán wanted $150,000 for the Variety Boys and Girls Club of Queens. Instead, the organization got half that amount from a local initiatives fund that is separate from the speaker’s fund. It was also credited to a different councilmember, Shekar Krishnan.
“That is an insecure speaker who is working against the people. Alexa [Avilés], Kristin [Richardson Jordan], all of us, we represent hundreds of thousands of people,” Barron, a socialist council member from East New York, told City & State New York. “She’s not punishing us, she’s punishing the people.”
Ocasio-Cortez held up Speaker Adams’ perceived retaliation as a lesson in dirty politics.
She accused both Speaker Adams and Mayor Adams, who are not related, of fostering “a psychological environment and a political environment that is extremely hostile to dissent” to get Democrats to vote for “massive education budget cuts and housing services that are unpopular.”
“You threaten people politically. You find out what they want, whether it’s to be re-elected, or whether it is a different position or whatever it may be, and you threaten that,” said Ocasio-Cortez. “But then what does the New York City Council Speaker do? She took away funding, the local Boys and Girls Club and their after school programs.”
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