Mayor Zohran Mamdani, City Council Speaker Julie Menin and the rest of the council reached an agreement last week on a nearly $126 billion budget for the 2027 fiscal year, coming in just under the wire of their statutory July 1 deadline.
In the end, many of Mamdani’s headier threats — to significantly raise property taxes and raid some of the city’s reserves to plug looming budget holes — did not come to pass, as nobody had really expected him to take these unpopular steps. They were threats intended to extract concessions such as a high-earner tax increase from Gov. Kathy Hochul, and while that also didn’t happen, the city got some significant fiscal commitments from Albany.
As for the negotiations at City Hall, the main sticking point on the budget had been the expansion of the CityFHEPS housing voucher program – our local version of something like the federal Section 8 housing program. CityFHEPS is similarly intended to subsidize rental costs for lower-income New Yorkers. I encourage you to read our earlier coverage for more detail, but it’s been a subject of dispute since the council approved the expansion in 2023 and then-Mayor Eric Adams refused to implement it, saying it cost too much. The council sued, and that litigation continued into Mamdani’s mayoralty after he pivoted away from a campaign promise and continued fighting the expansion…