City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams accuses AOC of ‘slander’ in escalating feud over NYC budget

City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams accused New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on Thursday of “mudslinging” and “slander” after the progressive congresswoman claimed fellow leftists in the Council got financially punished for voting against this year’s municipal budget.

The unusual war of words between the two Democratic power players erupted after it emerged earlier this week that six left-wing Council members who voted no on the $101 billion budget were excluded from a special discretionary spending program controlled by the speaker.

The program bankrolls a variety of local projects in members’ districts, from after-school programs to food pantries, and Ocasio-Cortez claimed in an Instagram video Tuesday that Adams acted like a “movie villain” by shutting out the six nay-voters and thereby screwing over their constituents.

But, without calling out the Democratic congresswoman by name, Adams said on Thursday afternoon that the congresswoman and others who criticized her over the alleged budgetary retaliation had it all wrong.

“Today, I want to set the record straight because facts still do matter, at least to me, even if they may not to others,” Adams told reporters at City Hall after saying she initially “decided not to engage in the back-and-forth mudslinging and, frankly, slander by some who acted without factual information.”

The six no-voting Council members — Kristin Richardson Jordan of Harlem, Alexa Aviles of Brooklyn, Chi Osse of Brooklyn, Charles Barron of Brooklyn, Tiffany Caban of Queens and Sandy Nurse of Brooklyn — got at least some of the funding that they applied for from the speaker’s discretionary pot, Adams said.

However, unlike Council members who voted for the budget, the naysayers did not get to have their names listed as sponsors of the specific projects they received funding for in their districts, the speaker said.

“It is not a punishment to your community to not have your name attached to an additional allocation of funding that you voted against,” she said. “It is simply a distinguishing indication of your votes against the entire budget.”

A spokeswoman for Ocasio-Cortez did not return a request for comment after the speaker’s remarks.

Adams was first asked about discretionary discrepancies on Monday night after City & State reported on them. However, the speaker would not explain at the time why it appeared the no-voting members had been cut out from the program.

Adams’ office did not return requests for clarification on the issue the next day, and only first set the record straight a few hours before the speaker’s Thursday press conference.

Still, Adams said she wished Ocasio-Cortez would’ve reached out to her before bombarding her on social media over the budget issue.

“I will say this to this audience: If there was ever any misunderstanding, misinformation or anything like that that there would have been enough professional courtesy to pick up a phone and come to the source,” the speaker told reporters.

Taking aim Ocasio-Cortez’s prolific social media presence, Adams said earlier in the press conference: “Some federal elected officials forget that a city is not managed through Twitter or social media. We don’t have that privilege.”

Budget documents that the speaker’s office shared with the Daily News confirm that discretionary cash requested by the six no-voting progressives was allocated under the name of other members who had asked for the same funds, or under the name of caucuses that they’re part of.

The document does not make clear how much money the members initially requested and whether their applications may have been denied in part.

Caban, one of the six no voters, appears to have only received half of the $150,000 she requested for a Variety Boys & Girls Club in her Queens district via an allocation from another member.

But Adams told reporters that was an “oversight” that the Council would rectify. “That will certainly be fixed,” she said.

Despite the speaker’s insistence that she’s not punishing the no-voters, Barron told The News he feels unnecessarily targeted.

“They’re still taking our names off to take away the credit from us,” he said.