Gov. Hochul was expected to release a state budget Thursday, her office announced, coming after over a month’s delay.
It’s not yet clear how much more cash the governor has carved out of the roughly $260 billion state budget for New York City. Mayor Mamdani has lobbied the state for months for helping closing the city’s estimated $5.4 billion budget gap.
The governor is expected to deliver some financial help or delay the class size mandate for schools, a rule that budget experts have said costs the city at least hundreds of millions of dollars.
Mamdani has made a strong push to squeeze more money from the state, including calling for a fiscal crisis to be declared and attempting to raise property taxes.
Mamdani, a democratic socialist, campaigned on raising taxes on the city’s millionaires and billionaires as well as some corporations — but Hochul viewed those ideas as a nonstarter and insisted the city find savings in its $127 billion budget.
Among the lingering questions in budget negotiations was the governor’s pied-à-terre tax, which would place a surcharge on the most expensive second homes in New York City. While the governor said it would rake in $500 million for the city, the city’s comptroller, Mark Levine, raised questions about how the tax will function and said it could rake in over $100 million less than those projections.