CM Morano questions Comptroller on whether budget is truly balanced without cuts

And finally, if I may, Chair, OMBT.

Testified earlier that the administration closed what it described as a $12 billion budget challenge without raising property taxes, drawing down reserves, or cutting services.

Do you agree with that characterization, or do you believe taxpayers should understand this budget differently?

Well, the mayor presented a balanced budget, as the charter requires.

I think it's fair to ask what's happened in the last five months to make that possible.

And the most important contribution to our progress has been Wall Street has had a very, very strong run.

And so we have all revised our tax estimates up.

We have, the mayor has, we had a very good bonus season on Wall Street.

Secondly, we got about $4 billion in additional support from Albany, credit to the governor and the state legislature on that.

Then there were some savings and efficiencies that the mayor identified, credit to him on that.

But as I mentioned, that was not enough.

And that still left us with the need to use some one-shot measures that are going to get us through another 12 months, but they're not going to be there for the year after.

And the proof of this dynamic is that the out-year gap, the FY28 gap, which we're going to start talking about in like six months, is $8.8 billion.

And that's a big number.

It's a very big number.

We're not used to seeing a number that big.

And to confront that where re-amortization is off.

the table.

I don't think we're going to delay class size again.

There's other things that I don't think we'll count on for yet another year.

I think that should give us a little bit of concern, and it's why I think we should do everything we can in this budget to solve some of these structural problems.

Thank you.

Thank you, Councilmember.

Thank you.

Great.

And next we have Councilmember Maloney, followed by Councilmember Aviles.