Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Images
Less than 100 days into their terms, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and leaders of the City Council have turned the city’s budget process into a political street fight in ways that will hurt the everyday New Yorkers they are supposed to be helping. Bloodying up one’s opponents might be an effective way to win elections, but it’s a questionable way to govern.
The latest back-and-forth began when councilmembers, led by Speaker Julie Menin, issued a detailed, 60-page analysis of Mamdani’s preliminary spending plan along with a boatload of suggestions about ways to close the city’s $5.4 billion budget gap. This included fairly dry, noncontroversial stuff, like properly recording the value of PILOTs (Payments in Lieu of Taxes) owed by some property owners, which amounts to $11 million a year, and accounting for the interest accrued on money sitting in the city’s bank accounts, which adds up to $145 million.
But Menin’s plan was silent on the hot-button question of whether the state should raise taxes on wealthy New Yorkers, and its avoidance of the topic set off fireworks.
“Council Speaker Julie Menin just released her budget proposal. Her plan claims to close the city’s $5.4 billion fiscal gap without taxing the rich or cutting services. The problem is that’s not what it would do,” Mamdani said in a prepared video. He also complained in a social-media post that the council plan “refuses to address the deeper structural imbalance between the City and the State, or to increase taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers and most profitable corporations.”
Things spiraled from there. “Speaker Menin’s proposals for alleged cost saving are bogus,” the pro-Mamdani New York Working Families Party tweeted. “Speaker Menin is aligning with the billionaires, while reneging on her commitment to working families.” Other social-media posts focused on the success of Menin’s husband, a real-estate developer, and dismissed the entire council budget proposal as an elaborate effort to protect the rich.
Councilmembers began calling the mayor disingenuous. Councilmember Nantasha Williams of Southeast Queens chided progressives when she said, “If your entire budget analysis is ‘tax the rich,’ you may not actually understand the budget,” which drew a slew of obscene personal slurs. “Some of the attacks we’re seeing right now are among the most grotesque I’ve witnessed,” tweeted Mark Treyger, an ex-councilmember who is now CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council. “This kind of behavior is not just morally wrong, but it’s also counterproductive from an effective governing strategy perspective. It has always backfired, and it will backfire again.”
Councilmember Linda Lee, who chairs the council’s Finance Committee, was surprised things got out of control so quickly. “It seems a bit premature for us to get into this back-and-forth with each other because, as I like to think of it, we’re still at maybe the 25-yard line or even the 15-yard-line, and it’s still early on in the budget negotiation process,” she told me.
The City Charter, like much of American democracy, deliberately sets up a certain amount of healthy checks-and-balances tension between branches of government. But the rollicking, combat-oriented style of modern urban politics — what the political scientist Douglas Yates memorably dubbed “street-fighting pluralism” — made it inevitable that the mayor and council would be tempted to turn “Let’s make a deal” into “Let’s have a showdown.”
“The ethos of this campaign was ‘We’re not gonna be like every other politician who might acknowledge an issue but refuses to name the villains responsible for making this an issue,’” Morris Katz, Mamdani’s campaign strategist, told me shortly after Election Day, reflecting on the battle-oriented messaging that won City Hall. “I think you can’t tell someone ‘You’re being screwed’ without telling them who’s screwing them.”
It was a succinct description of a tactic that the legendary community organizer Saul Alinsky listed as the last of his 13 Rules for Radicals half a century ago: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” (He also observed, famously, “In a fight almost anything goes. It almost reaches the point where you stop to apologize if a chance blow lands above the belt.”)
So even after councilmembers held 32 dreary, hourslong budget hearings about cost estimates and funding formulas across 51 city agencies, Mamdani and his backers distilled (and distorted) a complex technical document into a polarized, yes-or-no question about whether Menin supports taxing the rich.
“For the council Speaker to say, ‘I’m a partner in the affordability agenda fight, I want universal child care, I want to have affordable housing, but I don’t want to raise revenue’ is a false statement,” Jasmine Gripper, executive director of the Working Families Party, told me. “Either you want us to raise revenue to invest in working families, or you’re okay with the status quo. And it sounds like she’s okay with the status quo.”
Couldn’t Menin just have an honest difference of opinion about budget options? I asked. “She can have a different opinion,” Gripper said, “but right when we’re in the middle of a budget fight in Albany and the governor is saying, ‘Find cost savings,’ and you reiterate the governor’s talking points but don’t actually back up your mayor, I think she’s choosing a side.”
All the leaders in City Hall should take a deep breath, get off social media, and get back to the work the public pays them to do. Menin should request a set of closed-door meeting between council staff members and the mayor’s number crunchers with the goal of finding agreement on the many small, noncontroversial items that are easy to reconcile, like the gap between the $79 million in housing fees and fines that the mayor estimates the Department of Housing Preservation and Development will collect in the current fiscal year, which is well short of the $113 million the city has already collected. On big-ticket items like the $13 billion the Department of Education spends annually on more than 6,300 separate contracts, the mayor and council should continue negotiating but commit to a thorough audit before next year.
Above all, the pols should stick to the numbers and resist the urge to go into the personalize-and-polarize routine. In a city where needy people need speedy relief, leaders have an obligation to behave professionally and find consensus for the common good.
