It was not an April Fool’s Day joke.
On the morning of Wednesday, April 1, New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin, the most powerful member of the fifty-one-person legislative body, made an announcement regarding the contentious city budget. Rather than work with the mayor to find new revenues, Menin has continued to dig in her heels in opposition to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s progressive budget priorities.
Menin is promising to balance the city’s budget by revising estimates of revenue from existing sources and achieving savings through cuts (“right-sizing”), but she continues to oppose taxing the rich and refuses to join forces with the mayor to pressure Governor Kathy Hochul on the issue.
New York State is currently in budget season, with the state budget constitutionally mandated to be passed by April 1 and the New York City budget due by the end of the fiscal year. But this year, the state budget will be late, due to the ongoing battle between Governor Hochul’s defense of the fiscal status quo and the growing statewide movement to tax the rich. The majority of New Yorkers, including 72 percent of New York state Democrats, support raising taxes on the rich, but Governor Hochul remains steadfast in her refusal to seek new revenue sources among the growing ranks of ultrawealthy New Yorkers.
The stakes are high. Even setting aside the devastation Donald Trump’s federal budget cuts will impose on the most vulnerable New Yorkers, Mayor Mamdani has inherited an estimated $5.4 billion deficit due to the mismanagement of the previous administration. Comptroller Mark Levine has called it the “biggest budget deficit since the Great Recession.”
Mamdani has already found some savings within the budget, which Menin’s counter-budget doesn’t acknowledge. But together with the Trump cuts that will impact almost half of New York City residents, who rely on some version of Medicaid, Hochul’s refusal to tax the rich — and Menin’s support for the…
Auteur: Susan Kang
