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The People’s Plan and steering committee organizations release the following statements regarding Mayor Adams’ FY25 executive budget (based on available information.)
Mayor Adams’ executive budget proposal for FY25 is still full of cuts and lacks major investments in essential services, but the Mayor’s latest partial budget cut reversals indicate that Mayor Adams is feeling the pressure from the outcry and mobilizing of New Yorkers for “care, not cuts.”
Mayor Adams’ plummeting poll numbers and rising unpopularity show New Yorkers see that the Mayor’s cuts were always heavy-handed, unnecessary, and unpopular. But we still have a ways to before to go before the City’s budget reflects a people’s budget that funds $2 billion for “Homes Now, Homes for Generations,” $1 billion for education and schools, $94 million for CUNY, $400 million for childcare, and $58.3 million for libraries, while divesting from police and corrections bloat.
By the time the City Council votes on the next fiscal year budget, we call on Mayor Adams and the City Council to deliver a people’s budget. If not, we need Council to use every tool and power at their disposal, including setting terms and conditions and amending the budget, to make sure restorations to essential services and investments in housing are in the final budget.
“Mayor Adams is playing games with New Yorkers, their services, and their livelihoods, and we are sick of it,” said Zara Nasir, Executive Director of the People’s Plan and People’s Budget campaign. “The Mayor’s haphazard and partial restorations show that the Mayor’s budget cuts were always cruel, unnecessary, and now deeply unpopular. Mayor Adams may be catching wise to how his actions are impacting his approval rating, but New Yorkers won’t stop fighting for a people’s budget, and care, not cuts or criminalization, until Mayor Adams restores all our essential services. If Mayor Adams does not change his chaotic budgeting approach, we look to the City Council to use all their budget powers to ensure that any budget passed in June reflects their constituents key priorities.”
Jose Lopez, Co-Executive Director of Make the Road NY: “Mayor Adams continues to play politics with people’s lives, threatening cuts to vital services only to about-face and claim victory once his financial mismanagement is exposed. The mayor sees our new neighbors and immigrant communities as a burden. He believes that he can blame the most vulnerable among us for his own budgetary failures, using them to justify crushing budget cuts that would take away essential services from our communities. But this thinking is cynical and self-defeating. Because whether your family arrived last week or decades ago, our students are worthy of a well-funded education, our communities need permanent and affordable homes, our families should have access to high-quality healthcare, and all of us deserve the freedom to stay and the freedom to thrive in New York.”
