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Dear New Yorkers,
With the publication of the Mayor’s Executive Budget (and the adoption, a month late, of the New York State Budget), we are now fully in the throes of City budget negotiations, as the Mayor and the City Council work to adopt the City’s Fiscal Year 2024 budget by June 30.
The arrival of asylum seekers has been a main storyline in the conversation about the City’s budget this year. In that context, it is important to separate the challenge of providing shelter from the facts of migration. This is the first time that large numbers of international immigrants have sought shelter under New York’s “right to shelter” (there are currently over 37,000 new arrivals in the shelter system), creating significant new logistics and costs for the City, which Washington has so far failed to help bear.
But new data from the Census Bureau remind us of the important role that immigration has long played in New York City. After dipping to lows of around 20,000 during the pandemic, international immigration from July 2021 to July 2022 (i.e. prior to the arrival of buses from the southern border) returned to 54,300, a level that was common as recently as 2011 – 2016. These numbers helped to offset domestic outmigration (which skyrocketed during the pandemic to above 300,000), and they help put in context the more than 60,000 people who have arrived in the city over the past year. New arrivals can be a boon to NYC’s economy and civic life in the years to come, if we work together now to help them establish new lives here.
Our Spotlight this month is also budget-related: it provides an explainer of the complex process of distributing funding to New York City’s public schools (largely through the “Fair Student Funding” formula). Last year, individual school allocations were not made public until after the budget handshake, causing substantial frustration. I’ve asked the Mayor and the NYC Department of Education to release them earlier this year, to allow for a better-informed budget debate.
Finally, we’re keeping a close eye on the banking situation, in light of the recent failures of Silicon Valley, Signature, and First Republic Banks. The City’s five pension funds were slightly underweight in regional banks during this period, which helpfully served to moderate our modest losses there. And Signature Bank was a City government depository bank, but since we require our deposits to be fully collateralized, we would have been protected even if the FDIC had not fully covered depositors.
On May 25, 2023, the New York City Banking Commission, to which the Comptroller appoints 1 of the 3 members, will hold a public hearing (you can submit testimony in advance or at the meeting). The Banking Commission will then vote on the designation of banks eligible to hold deposits of City funds. In light of recent bank failures, as well as recent measures advocated by my office to ensure that the City’s designated banks are more accountable to the public, we are giving increased scrutiny to the designation process this year.
Enjoy the May sunshine! We’ll keep watching the numbers.
Sincerely,
Brad Lander
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