NYC Council passes budget in late-night vote; Speaker Adrienne Adams cuts discretionary spending for naysayers

The City Council passed Mayor Adams’ first municipal government budget in a late-night vote Monday — and a half dozen members who didn’t support the behemoth spending plan got financially punished for bucking the line.

The record $101.1 billion budget — which was agreed to by the mayor and the Council on Friday — passed in a 44-6 vote shortly after 11 p.m. All six nay votes were cast by progressive Democratic members who lamented what they characterized as the budget’s bloated police spending and lacking investment in housing, education and social programs.

In a blistering rebuke, Council Speaker Adrienne Adams (D-Queens) excluded the six naysayers from a special initiative she baked into the budget that was designed to award upward of $100,000 in discretionary funds for each member to spend as they see fit on public safety efforts in their districts.

Speaking to reporters in the City Hall Rotunda before the vote, Adams would not explain why the no voters got cut from the discretionary initiative.

But a Council member directly familiar with the matter told the Daily News that the speaker’s effort was deliberate.

“The no votes are getting speaker initiative money cut,” the member said. “You can’t vote no and take the dough.”

The six left-wing members — Tiffany Cabán of Queens, Charles Barron of Brooklyn, Chi Ossé of Brooklyn, Kristin Richardson Jordan of Harlem, Sandy Nurse of Brooklyn and Alexa Avilés of Brooklyn — could not immediately be reached for comment Tuesday morning.

Late Monday, Barron told City & State that the speaker ultimately wasn’t punishing him and the other members.

“All of us, we represent hundreds of thousands of people. She’s not punishing us, she’s punishing the people,” Barron told the outlet, which first reported the discretionary discrepancy.

A seventh member, conservative Democrat Kalman Yeger of Brooklyn, was also not given any public safety discretionary funds from the speaker, though he voted for the budget. He could not immediately be reached for comment Tuesday, either.

The speaker’s special public safety initiative is separate from the $400,000 each Council member is allocated for general discretionary spending in their district.

The $101.1 billion budget, which clocked in as the largest in city history, doesn’t take effect until the July 1 start of the next fiscal year.

Nonetheless, Speaker Adams argued it was necessary to adopt it in the dead of night to make “a statement.”

“We knew what we were up against in trying to come out of this pandemic, keeping our promise to the recovery of the city of New York, and there was no reason to wait anymore and have New Yorkers waiting any longer,” Adams told reporters in the Rotunda.

Mayor Adams, who agreed to drop some of his priorities from the budget during negotiations with the Council, including a push to hire nearly 600 new Department of Correction officers, lauded the late-night passage of the spending plan as a product of collegiality with Council leaders.

“We were able to achieve an early adopted budget because we leaned into areas of agreement, rather than disagreement,” the mayor said in a statement.