This column, from the weekly opinion piece MATTER OF FACT, first appeared on BrooklynReporter.com, the Home Reporter and Spectator dated February 2, 2024
Mayor Adams held his state of the city address at Hostos Community College on Wednesday, January 24. As an invited attendee, the first thing I encountered when I walked up to the entrance area on Grand Concourse in the Bronx was student protesters who had a great point of contention, as Adams’ extreme budget cuts have negatively impacted the city’s allocations to CUNY schools like the very one he was using to tout what a great job he has done for all New Yorkers, including CUNY students.
Last week in this space, I opened my column discussing how again, a pedestrian who was simply attempting to cross a southern Brooklyn street while in the crosswalk was struck and killed by the driver of a truck making a turn. But the very weekend that column was published, where I talked about the tragic and totally preventable death of Xiaohong Chen in Dyker Heights, it happened again. Chuyan Chen, 62, was killed in Sheepshead Bay after also being struck by the driver of a turning pickup truck while attempting to cross the street.
In the mayor’s annual address to the city, he did have a section where he discussed traffic safety. However, he made no mention of the city’s Vision Zero initiative to make roadways safer for all who use them and his remarks on the subject were limited to dangerous moped and e-bike operators, and fires caused by lithium ion batteries. No doubt, those are serious matters that require attention, but if you had no familiarity with issues facing New York City other than Adams’ speech, you would think that there is no crisis of traffic violence on our streets that keeps taking the lives of pedestrians.
Mayor Adams highlighted the successes in job growth and small business creation during his two years in office. After record job losses and small business closings during the pandemic, the fact that the city has now replaced all the private sector jobs lost during that time and that one in six of all small businesses in New York City have opened since Adams took office is definitely a positive. However, when statistics show us that historically 20 percent of small businesses close within one year of opening and 50 percent within five years, it is hard to gauge the true success related to small businesses without having both sides of the equation.
Adams, to nobody’s surprise, spoke extensively about the migrant crisis. While he focused almost entirely on asking the federal government for more financial assistance, which they should provide, he made no mention of his policy decisions around this issue that have received criticism, like the 60-day limit on shelter stays he has imposed.
Several topics he discussed, from law enforcement to sanitation to our public schools steered clear of any of the divisive decisions he has made within those areas and they included nothing related to budget cuts he has made to those respective departments.
“All of a sudden, the mayor has found money, with irrationally shifting explanations and numbers, cutting into the credibility of his narrative that the city has an insurmountable budget gap that demands overly broad cuts.”
Counciman Justin Brannan
Though he has recently announced the reversal of many of the cuts to the DSNY and NYPD budgets, the restorations he has touted for the DOE have been much smaller. It was very important that Adams restored funding for community schools and the Summer Rising program, but the less than $100 million reallocated to those programs is a drop in the bucket for a department that has been seeing 5 percent cuts every few months to their $37.5 billion budget.
The previous few months have seen Adams announce rolling cuts to every sector of city government, and then recently begin making what he touts as “major announcements,” where he restores funding he just cut a few months before. It is hard to view this as anything else but Adams manufacturing a crisis that he can later claim he solved.
As Councilman Brannan said in a statement two weeks ago, “The mayor is doing a budget dance with himself, and his rhetoric is out of step with the math.” Brannan added, “All of a sudden, the mayor has found money, with irrationally shifting explanations and numbers, cutting into the credibility of his narrative that the city has an insurmountable budget gap that demands overly broad cuts.”
New Yorkers should not accept their Mayor cutting services across the board, when many other elected leaders are countering his doom-and-gloom claims about the city’s projected revenue, only to soon after expect to be patted on the back for saying projections are better than expected and he has found the money to refund the services he slashed. The state of the city is strong, but what Mayor Adams has stated about the city only tells a small part of the story.
