Mayor Adams defends his latest NYC agency budget cuts as ‘smart’ amid mounting criticism

Mayor Adams argued Wednesday that his latest round of proposed budget cuts are “smart” at a time of fiscal uncertainty in the city — even as some municipal entities warned that his austerity measure could threaten their ability to operate.

The latest belt-tightening demand from Adams, known as a Program to Eliminate the Gap, or PEG, directs nearly all city agencies to trim their budgets by 4% in the next fiscal year, which starts July 1.

After the order was first reported by the Daily News on Tuesday, Democratic members of the City Council lambasted Adams, arguing his proposal would devastate agencies like the city’s public library systems, which they said are already reeling from two rounds of 3% PEGs he instituted last year.

In a press conference at City Hall on Wednesday morning, Adams acknowledged his proposed budget shaves are unpopular.

But pointing to what he described as a “$4.2 billion hole” in the city’s budget created by the local migrant crisis, Adams said the cutbacks are justified and compared himself to the chief executive of a struggling company.

“We’re making the right decision, the smart decision, sometimes it’s not the popular decision, but if you’re going to be the CEO of this corporation, you have to be willing to make these tough decisions,” Adams told reporters.

“No one likes cutting anywhere or telling people that you have to find a more efficient way of doing something with less dollars, we don’t enjoy that,” he added, “but the reality is that the money that comes in must match the money that comes out.”

Shortly after Adams’ press conference, the heads of the city’s three public library systems issued a statement saying his PEG would make a “bad situation even worse.”

The trio, New York Public Library President Anthony Marx, Brooklyn Public Library President Linda Johnson and Queens Public Library President Dennis Walcott, noted that they testified before the Council last month they’d be forced to restrict open hours and cancel social service programs if Adams’ proposed $36.2 million cut for their operations — contained in his preliminary budget bid — is enacted.

If the PEG is placed on top of the cut, the library honchos said they had calculated their total new budget drop would clock in at $52.7 million.

“This is a devastating development to our already strained operations,” their statement said. “Libraries are for everyone and make New York City stronger. Cutting library funding hurts all communities, particularly those who we know rely on us and have nowhere else to turn for the services and programs we provide.”

The latest PEG can’t be based on layoffs, and Adams stressed that he conceives of it as a quest for “efficiency,” not cuts.

However, unlike Adams’ first two PEGs, Jacques Jiha, the mayor’s budget director, wrote in a Tuesday letter to agency heads that achieving the latest savings targets can be based on reducing services, though they were told to “avoid” such moves “where possible.”

Asked what type of service reductions New Yorkers might expect to see as a result of the latest PEG, Adams demurred.

“The goal is not to go in and say, ‘Oh, I want to cut services,’” he said.

But he also acknowledged that public services at large will inevitably be impacted by the high cost the city has incurred by caring for the more than 50,000 mostly Latin American migrants who have arrived since last spring. He also pointed to a lapse of pandemic-related federal funding streams, pending municipal labor contracts and state budget cuts as reasons for fiscal alarm.

“Every service that we have will be impacted,” he said. “We reached the point where we’re at a cliff, and so the money has to come from somewhere.”

Council Speaker Adrienne Adams and Council Finance Committee Chairman Justin Brannan have cast doubt over the mayor’s projected price tag for the migrant crisis, and say his administration may be wasting money on housing asylum seekers in costly, newly-built mega shelters.

Brooklyn state Sen. Jabari Brisport, a democratic socialist, said Wednesday that the mayor could offset the new PEG by supporting measures floated in the state Legislature to raise taxes on the rich.

“But they’re his donors, and he cannot upset them,” Brisport tweeted. “So instead of blaming the rich, he blames migrants.”

After his City Hall news conference, Adams headed to a municipal government job fair event in Brooklyn, where 15 agencies, including the Departments of Education, Social Services and Housing Preservation and Development, were looking for applicants to fill various jobs.

After the event, Adams noted in a brief interview with The News that, in spite of his new PEG, the city government has thousands of budgeted vacant positions. He said hiring for those posts is a top priority for him and something that could help agencies maintain operations.

“We have to go out and hire, and not what we were doing in the past. In the past, we were sitting back waiting. Those days are over, we’re in the streets every day,” he said. “People are ready to work and we are going to meet them where they are.”