New York City Comptroller Brad Lander delivered remarks during the New York State Financial Control Board’s annual meeting. Full text of Comptroller Lander’s remarks, as prepared for delivery, is available below.
Remarks as prepared for delivery:
Good afternoon. I’m honored to join Governor Hochul, Mayor Adams, Comptroller DiNapoli, and the other esteemed members of the Financial Control Board, Bill Thompson, Rossana Rosado, and Steve Cohen.
A lot has changed since last year’s meeting of this board. While the city continues to face meaningful long-term fiscal challenges that we must thoughtfully address, we are now on stronger economic footing to do so. Rumors of New York City’s demise, of a “doom loop,” are greatly exaggerated.
Private sector employment is back to pre-COVID levels, though job growth remains below the extraordinary trend seen in the decade prior to the pandemic. Overall office occupancy is, of course, at a lower level as a result of the shift to remote and hybrid work. But the number of office-using jobs is at an all-time high, the city’s regional share of them is increasing, and new data indicate that office attendance is recovering better than in most U.S. cities.
The near-term state of City finances contains meaningful good news as well. Personal income tax revenues are well above 2019 levels, property tax collections in the past fiscal year were up 6.7 percent versus the prior year, and non-property tax collections were up 3.9 percent. Strong pension returns of 8.0 percent for the past fiscal year will enable the City to reduce its contributions by $330 million through FY 2027.
Still, there are serious fiscal pressures: long-awaited wage increases for the City’s essential workforce, the end of COVID-19 federal stimulus funding, and especially the growing costs of shelter for people seeking asylum without adequate state and especially federal support. Because of these and other factors, we project an FY 2027 budget gap nearing $14 billion.
We need strong fiscal stewardship to address these gaps. We should transform the City’s Programs to Eliminate the Gap from short-term, ad hoc exercises into a regular feature of our budgeting process, like other elements that we adopted following the Financial Emergency Act that created this board. Such an approach would better identify long-term efficiencies including staff management strategies and attrition planning that prevent overreliance on unsustainable vacancies and overtime, while preserving and strengthening capacity to meet critical needs.
We continue to urge the adoption of a standardized framework for the City’s rainy-day fund, to protect it from the vicissitudes of the annual budget process. While the City made significant deposits into the City’s long-term reserves in FY 2022, no deposits were made in FY 2023 – nor was progress made towards establishing deposit and withdrawal rules.
We also continue to support state legislation to make the General Debt Service Fund a permanent feature of the City’s financial and budgetary system, like so many of the other important features of the Financial Emergency Act.
Additionally, we continue to advocate for stronger City systems to track grant revenues and expenses, modernize our payroll operations, and hold City agencies accountable for claim settlement payouts, which cost the City $1.5 billion in FY 2022.
More broadly, we urge an approach that emphasizes competent, compassionate, and coordinated government in rising to the challenges we face.
We should apply this framework to the dramatic increase of people seeking asylum. The issue is not the arrival of people here – immigrants have long been a driver of New York’s economic growth, and I believe they will continue to be. However, providing so many of them with shelter is operationally demanding and very expensive, likely to cost over $4 billion this fiscal year. This challenge is the intersection of the federal obligation to provide safe haven for those seeking asylum with the obligation, grounded in the New York State Constitution albeit specified through a City-level consent decree, to provide shelter. So we must work more ambitiously, together, across all three levels of government, to rise to it.
Recently, both the City and the State have begun to resource efforts to help people apply for asylum before they hit their one year deadline, and then help them obtain work authorization six months later. While we should certainly continue to pressure the federal government to eliminate the waiting period and provide vastly more funding support for shelter and services, we cannot wait to significantly scale up legal assistance in order to help as many people as possible to file before they hit their one year deadline to apply. This is the fastest path within our power to help new arrivals get on their feet and reduce the shelter census and City costs.
The crisis of affordability, especially housing affordability, facing working families in New York is one of the biggest risks facing the city’s economy. We need an ambitious deal to expand housing supply across all incomes, as both the Governor and the Mayor have admirably advocated, while simultaneously protecting vulnerable tenants from eviction without good cause. Part of this deal should be a new multifamily tax framework like the one our office has put forward, that replaces 421a with something far less wasteful that better enables development while focusing subsidies on truly affordable housing. At the City level, we need to revive HPD’s capacity to get housing deals moving and launch a modern-day version of the Mitchell-Lama program to provide permanently affordable cooperative homeownership opportunities to working class families currently being priced out of the city.
Meeting our expansive transportation and infrastructure needs will also require partnership, as the recent passing of Dick Ravitch reminds us. Congestion pricing is a smart approach both to addressing congestion and raising revenue for the long-term investments we need; I laud the Governor for supporting it, despite the noise from across the Hudson. To get more out of federal infrastructure funds, I urge the State to adopt performance standards that ensure projects meet our state-of-good-repair, climate, and street safety goals. And while we’ve made some progress in improving capital projects management, with 5 of 9 bills passed by the State Legislature, the most impactful bills were not passed this year, and substantial work remains at both the city and state level to make sure we get the most out of every dollar.
Finally, as the Governor and Mayor’s “New” New York Panel argued last year, securing our economic future through inclusive growth that builds on New York’s strengths as a place of density, diversity, and creativity will require new investments in child care, mental health, transit, the public realm, and climate readiness. Even with the approach to savings and efficiencies I’ve outlined, these new investments will require new revenues. These revenues should be both progressive and effective, coming from high-income residents and the owners of high-value real-estate, without further burdening low-income or middle-income New Yorkers.
I hope together we can use this moment to turn our shared priorities into policies that enable a thriving and equitable New York City for decades to come. Thank you.
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