Dear New Yorkers,
I hope you enjoyed the last gasps of summer and getting back into the school year/fall swing-of-things.
One of the late-summer traditions of the Comptroller’s Office is presenting our comprehensive analysis on New York City’s Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 adopted budget at the annual meeting of the New York State Financial Control Board. OK, maybe not as fun as a trip to Coney Island, but it is required by law!
We raised three key points in our report. First, while NYC’s low unemployment rate is encouraging, significant challenges to the city’s economy remain. Job creation has been over-concentrated in health care and social insurance, while other important sectors, including financial services and information services, posted year-over-year job losses.
Second, NYC’s fiscal outlook is muddied by chronic “underbudgeting” by City Hall (i.e. presenting low numbers for expenses like homeless services and uniformed overtime, when everyone knows they will be higher). While our report estimates a manageable gap of $1.59 billion in FY 2025, much larger gaps—of $9.18 billion in FY 2026, $10.49 billion in FY 2027, and $12.70 billion in FY 2028—are on the horizon.
Finally, I repeated my call for the City to confront these challenges by adopting a stronger fiscal framework. You can learn more about the solutions we propose here. Although the Mayor’s Charter Revision Commission refused to adopt them, they could still be implemented by local law and executive order.
Speaking of confronting fiscal challenges: every family with kids in New York City knows child care can be a financially crushing but essential obligation for parents. So this month’s Spotlight provides a numbers-oriented view of NYC’s publicly-supported child care programs. We examine the budget, funding, and enrollment impacts of the City’s administrative changes, the expansion of 3-K, the pandemic (and post-pandemic recovery), and recent budget maneuvering on the provision of publicly subsidized child care.
Providing affordable, accessible, high-quality child care is a critical issue for NYC families and our economy as a whole—and one place we’ll continue to watch the numbers.
