Mayor Eric Adams Presents Fiscal Year 2023 Preliminary Budget
NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- Mayor Eric Adams released his preliminary budget for 2023 Wednesday.
The $98.5 billion proposal is $200 million smaller than former-Mayor Bill De Blasio’s 2022 budget and promises to prioritize public safety, young people and families.
“After two years of struggle, we are on the brink of a recovery that offers us a once-in-a-generation opportunity to make real change on a grand scale,” said Adams. “We are cutting spending, making government run more efficiently, investing in public safety, and providing much-needed help to working families across our city.”
Adams wants to reduce the current budget deficit that ballooned to almost $3 billion during the pandemic by $2.3 billion.
He plans to do this through a combination of austerity measures, like the 3% spending cut to almost every municipal agency he ordered last month, and by exceeding estimated tax revenue for 2021 by a whopping $1.6 billion.
Adams claims this tax windfall will be “driven by better-than-expected personal and business income taxes, sales taxes and transaction taxes.”
The mayor also promised to lower the city worker headcount by 10,200 without laying off a single employee.
He’d do this by eliminating vacancies. In other words: allowing agencies to lose positions as employees left instead of firing someone to achieve the same effect. Regardless of the method, this approach would squeeze city staff.
Adams, who was an NYPD captain, promised to address public safety concerns without increasing the police budget. Instead, he wants to hammer out inefficiencies in the department and shift NYPD resources.
In his budget announcement, he proposed moving officers to increase presence in subways and reviving a controversial plainclothes anti-gun unit that was a notorious hallmark of the stop-and-frisk era.
The unit was disbanded in 2020 among calls for police reform during the nationwide Georg Floyd protests, and its revival was one of Adams’ campaign promises.
The mayor also plans to add 30,000 Summer Youth Employment Program job opportunities, bringing the total to 100,000. He hopes the increase will help address gang violence.
Other initiatives allocated for in the budget include a MetroCard discount program, health services for first-time mothers and tax credits for businesses that subsidize child care.
Now that the preliminary budget is submitted, negotiations with the City Council will play out over the next few months.
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