What's in the City's Budget?

**Bridget Bergen** (0:09)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Bridget Bergen, senior reporter in the WNYC and Gothamist newsroom sitting in for Brian today. And now we're going to unpack Mayor Mamdani's first budget since taking office. Yesterday, he and the City Council struck a deal hours before the legally mandated deadline for the new fiscal year. The $126 billion budget covers funding for housing vouchers, half-price transit fares, free childcare, parks, libraries and more.
It closes a projected deficit without the deep cuts some feared. And in a late surprise, it keeps the NYPD's headcount flat. Here's how the mayor framed it at yesterday's press conference.

**Zohran Kwame Mamdani** (0:52)
Throughout this process, I have been reminded of the words of the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek. If socialists understood economics, they wouldn't be socialists. These past months have shown us anything. It is that socialists not only understand economics, just as well as the capitalists who came before, but that we can solve their years of mismanagement through an embrace of our principles.
There is nothing fiscally responsible about balancing the budget on the backs of working people.

**Bridget Bergen** (1:17)
Joining me now to talk through the details and what it says about the kind of mayor Mamdani is going to be is WNYC's mayoral power reporter Elizabeth Kim, who covers it for the Gothamist and WNYC newsroom. Liz, welcome back. Good to see you not over in our little corner of the world.

**Elizabeth Kim** (1:34)
That's right, Bridget. Good morning.

**Bridget Bergen** (1:37)
So, you heard the mayor there quoting Hayek, casting himself as the socialist who balanced the books. Before we get into some of the fights in this budget, does the budget back up the boldness of that statement? What did he and the council actually agree to?

**Elizabeth Kim** (1:56)
Well, I think it's important to take a step back because you know as well as I do, that there have been sort of these chapters and mini-sagas right around this budget, right? Think about you know the ask to Albany, like how much money were we going to get for universal child care? Was you know, was the governor going to tax the rich? You know, we had all of these dramas that preceded the actual passing of the city budget.
So, broad strokes, it's $126 billion, and I view the budget as having sort of two hallmark policies. One is from Mamdani and one is from the council. I would say that the one from the mayor is, as I just mentioned, the introduction of 2K.
This is a pilot program which he got money from the state to do, which will be the foundation or jumping off point for that universal child care policy goal, which he promised on the campaign trail.
And then the second, I think you can argue, is rental vouchers. Now, this was actually an issue. It had loomed over the budget since the beginning because...

**Bridget Bergen** (3:15)
Yeah, this was a sticking point, right?

**Elizabeth Kim** (3:16)
Exactly, but it was like it began...
It predates Mamdani because this was a legal battle between the Council and the administration that started under the previous administration under Mayor Eric Adams, right? But you're right. What happened was this ultimately became the sticking point. Now, the result is we now have, or the city now has a new program for vouchers. And these essentially operate like a local form of Section 8

**Bridget Bergen** (3:49)
So then the concern and the reason that this became the sticking point, Liz, was because the Council really wanted to go even further than where they landed for this final budget agreement, right? And that was part of the Mamdani administration's kind of reigning back in and, you know, in some ways not necessarily adopting the sort of Hayek position or I guess not so much the socialist position of extending these vouchers sort of as broadly as the Council wanted to.

**Elizabeth Kim** (4:19)
Exactly. And that was something that was fascinating about these late stage budget negotiations was you saw what kind of seemed like a role reversal between Menin and Mamdani. Mamdani, the Democratic Socialist, is all of a sudden the mayor trying to exercise fiscal constraint.
And then on the flip side, you had Menin, who is viewed as a moderate, who cares about fiscal constraint, all of a sudden arguing for a significant expansion of the city's social safety net, talking about how we needed it to protect vulnerable New Yorkers, this was about the mayor's central campaign promise of affordability. So that was a very interesting dynamic to see. But that really goes to really the politics of it all, right?

**Bridget Bergen** (5:11)