Despite a $7.1 billion hole, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has pushed back against any serious cutting to his budget and instead wants to delay required payments to city pension funds.
That’s precisely the kind of tactics that brought the city to the brink of bankruptcy in the ’70s.
At the least, it will saddle future taxpayers with unnecessary costs.
For the moment, the city is on-track to meeting its long-term pension-funding obligations by its 2032 deadline.
Yet to help close his budget hole, Mamdani would push $1 billion worth of payments into the 2040s.
That would be both costly and risky.
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It would leave the fund less sound as it strives to cover future pension payments to municipal retirees (which by law are backed by taxpayers).
And it would saddle future city budgets with added costs.
As the Citizens Budget Commission’s Andrew Rein warns, such a move would force “our children [to] pay even more of our bills.”
Meanwhile, Hizzoner’s budget clocks in at a whopping $127 billion. Budget hawks might call that a target-rich environment.
The mayor has promised to find $1.7 billion in savings from his agencies; if Albany allows a delay of its class-size mandate, saving $1.4 billion, and the city is able to spend less on housing vouchers, representing another $1.3 billion, that would cover some of the shortfall.
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Those are big ifs, but it’s a start. And there’s surely plenty more that can and should be cut before resorting to financial gimmicks, like delaying pension payments.
Again, the city used just that kind of move for years — spending more than City Hall raked in revenue — until it nearly went broke, with no one rushing to bail it out.
Mamdani needs to learn from that lesson, play by the rules and stop thinking about how to spend more than he’s got.
For all his socialist dreams, he still needs to deal with reality. Or the city will pay the price.