CM Morano questions OMB on inherited budget gap components and transparency

Councilmember Morano followed by Epstein.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you for your leadership and endurance during these hearings as well.

It's greatly appreciated by all of us.

Thank you for your testimony, Director Solomon.

Your testimony stated that this administration inherited a $2.2 billion budget gap in fiscal year 26 and a $10.4 billion budget gap in 27, right?

We talked about a $12 billion gap that we inherited, yeah.

So for the benefit of the committee and the public, can you identify the five largest components of that fiscal year 27 gap?

More importantly, what I'm trying to get at, were those costs genuinely unforeseeable, or were they known obligations that simply hadn't been fully budgeted?

So we talked about the six.

big unbudgeted or under budgeted areas.

We talked about cash assistance, shelter.

We talked about city FEPS, it's in the social services bucket.

We talked about due process cases, judgments and claims, and the city's MTA subsidy.

Those six account for, account it, because we added the funding, $7.5 billion that were unbudgeted.

So the administration came in.

We said we need to be transparent.

We need to level with New Yorkers.

We need to be able to budget what are known.

expenses, known trajectories in programs that we've observed and that when I came in to speak to all these talented professionals told me these are the actual costs and we assessed it.

So it wasn't a forecasting problem, it was a transparency problem.

In our front.

Yes, it wasn't put forward.

So I definitely think New Yorkers are eager to know not only what was inherited, but what happened afterwards.