Mayor Eric Adams offers no answers as state spending plan may leave $1B hole in NYC budget
Published in News & Features
NEW YORK — Mayor Eric Adams declined to say Tuesday how he plans to address a potential billion-dollar budget hole in the upcoming fiscal year as Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office again made clear the city would not be getting migrant funding that it’s seeking.
Hochul, now in the final stages of negotiating a state budget in Albany, has repeatedly shot down the mayor’s request for more funds to support asylum seekers, which poses a $1 billion problem for the city as Adams has counted on those funds to balance the budget in earlier projections for the coming fiscal year.
“Gov. Hochul is committed to working collaboratively with Mayor Adams on their shared goals of making New York safer and more affordable,” Hochul spokesman Avi Small said Tuesday. “The FY26 Executive Budget does not include any new funding for the migrant crisis, and our position has not changed.”
Asked Tuesday at City Hall about the potential impact on the city budget, Adams offered no specifics.
“We’re still in negotiation, and as I’ve said over and over again, we’re going to land the plane,” he said.
Adams also advocated for changes to be made to the state’s discovery laws that require prosecutors to turn over evidence to the defendants soon after their arrest to allow them to begin mounting a defense.
The issue has become one of the most contentious elements of the 2025 budget process. While the governor, the mayor and the city’s district attorneys are behind the revision, other Albany lawmakers are not as hot on the idea.
Adams said he was hopeful that he’d get the reforms rolled back this year after failing three budget cycles in a row to get Albany to act on that front.
“I definitely believe we’re going to get it done now — April fools,” the mayor joked.
Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who appeared alongside the mayor’s other top officials at the Tuesday news conference, said that the current laws promote recidivism by allowing accused offenders out of jail if prosecutors don’t meet the discovery requirements.
“The reforms that we put forward, I think, are surgical,” she said. “They’re a scalpel approach. They do not upend the spirit of the criminal justice reforms of 2019. They’re very specifically tailored to close loopholes.”
In a statement issued after the news conference, the Legal Aid Society slammed the mayor and Tisch’s comments as “misleading” and countered that the discovery proposal was a “wholesale repeal of the current statute.”
“Her comments reveal a complete misunderstanding of both the statute and discovery practices in general,” the organization said of Tisch. “It is dangerous that leaders who are so misinformed are advocating drastic changes to fundamental due process rights.”
The mayor is also pushing for tax cuts for some working-class families and Administration for Children’s Services child-care vouchers to be included in the state budget.
The budget was originally due Tuesday, but it was expected to come in late.
On “Tin Cup Day,” when state leaders convene in Albany to ask for funding in the next year’s budget, Adams again asked the state for more funds, saying that, while the crisis has subsided, the city is still providing beds and other resources for the migrants.
The city has not drawn down all of its $2.4 billion in state funding from the last fiscal year, leaving more than $1 billion on the table as of February, according to mayoral budget director Jacques Jiha.
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