Mamdani Goes From a Winter Storm to a Fiscal One

The honeymoon is officially over.

That was the deeper meaning of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s somber news conference Wednesday morning at City Hall, revealing the not exactly shocking news that New York faces a $12 billion hole in the city’s finances over the next two fiscal years. The budget gap itself was old news, first revealed by Comptroller Mark Levine nearly two weeks ago, in an announcement whose details owed much to the final report of his predecessor, former Comptroller Brad Lander, who projected “a $2.18 billion gap for fiscal year 2026…a $10.41 billion gap.” [in FY 2027]$13.24 billion for fiscal year 2028 and $12.36 billion for fiscal year 2029.”

Lander’s mid-December warning garnered little media coverage, except for one New York Post The editorial board says looming deficits “will surely dent Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s gift-filled socialist agenda.” But the mayor’s dramatic account of his predecessor’s tax manipulations was crafted with a clear political agenda in mind: to both highlight the scale of the problem and identify the bad guys responsible for this perfidy. “In the words of the Jackson 5, ‘it’s as simple as ABC,'” the mayor said, reprising a tune from his interview earlier in the week with ABC’s Jonathan Karl. “It’s a budget crisis Adams.”

I’ll leave that to the youngest Nation readers to decide whether our mayor’s code-switching allusion was intended, as Gothamist ” suggested, to attract aging baby boomers “most likely to care deeply about the details behind a major financial problem” or a call to the TV network for early insight into its next moves. Regardless, as Mamdani stood in the Blue Room Wednesday — his third official news conference in as many days — flanked by First Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan and Budget Director Sherif Soliman, the scale of the problem was abundantly clear. Accusing Eric Adams of having “underestimated known expenses” to claim that the city’s budget would balance, as the law requires, the mayor explained that “these are not differences of opinion between accountants. They amount to more than $7 billion beyond what he published.”

“It’s not just about bad governance,” Mamdani continued. “It’s negligence,” adding that “once we looked under the hood [of the city’s finances]the whole picture was astonishing.

Adams wasn’t the only culprit, either. Using charts and graphs to detail what he called a 10-year period in which the state “extracted resources from our city,” Mamdani broke his self-imposed ban on uttering Andrew Cuomo’s name. “In fiscal year 2022 alone, the city sent $68.8 billion to Albany and got $47.6 billion back,” Mamdani said. Blaming his former rival for the “$21 billion chasm” that restricts what New York City can spend on services to its citizens, the mayor called Albany’s approach a “punishment.”

“New York City is facing a massive budget crisis,” the mayor said. To remedy this, we would need to “recalibrate the broken financial relationship between the state and the city.”

But when asked by reporters for details on what that recalibration might look like — or, given Gov. Kathy Hochul’s stated opposition to raising taxes (especially while she’s running for re-election), whether he had a plan B — the mayor refused to go beyond citing what he described as “encouraging” conversations with the governor and Albany’s legislative leaders.

The mayor also hasn’t given details about which city programs he’s willing to sacrifice — even grudgingly — although some of those potential cuts will no doubt be disclosed by Feb. 17, when the city releases its preliminary budget.

Still, for a mayor and administration that spent the first half of this week celebrating their largely successful navigation through the worst snowstorm and cold snap the city has seen in years, it was a stark change in tone. Keeping the streets clear of snow isn’t really complicated. But it’s a challenge that some of Mamdani’s predecessors failed to meet – and publicly. And as political scientist Christina Greer recently pointed out, “if you can’t cross the bar that is the baseline, then I think we know where we are.”

By the time Eric Adams was indicted, New Yorkers had learned not to expect much from his administration. And while Andrew Cuomo has been more successful in maintaining the illusion of competence, he has also offered little hope of resolving the long-standing crises of affordability, inequality, and decades of declining quality of municipal services.

Mamdani promised an urban renaissance. And while the extent of the city’s financial woes may have surprised him, it shouldn’t have. Because Andrew Cuomo wasn’t the only governor to bleed the city to fund Albany’s priorities. It was Kathy Hochul who decided to retain the Federal Enhanced Medical Assistance Percentage funds that the city uses to offset its share of Medicaid costs. It also increased the city’s contribution to transit costs by more than half a billion dollars a year and withheld—one might even say “extracted”—a significant percentage of the city’s share of education funding, while leaving New Yorkers on the hook for more charter schools. Yet Hochul’s name never appeared in Mamdani’s indictment.

But they say you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, and if Mamdani has any hope of convincing the governor to let him raise the billions needed to close the budget deficit by fulfilling his campaign promise to raise taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers, he’ll have to deploy all of his considerable reserves of charm. Asked several times on Wednesday what would happen if he was unable to obtain this authorization, the mayor repeatedly did not respond.

It was also smart policy. Taking a small victory lap Monday, Mamdani said “our city is up and running, thanks to the plans we have in place and the countless city employees who have implemented them.” Like this week’s big snowfall, the big hole in the city’s budget came with plenty of warnings. In the coming weeks, we will see if, here too, the town hall has put in place a plan to weather the storm.