Citizens Budget Commission (CBC) President Andrew S. Rein released this statement on behalf of CBC:

"CBC has implored our State’s leaders to craft a budget that ensures fiscal stability and protects New Yorkers—by saving for a rainy day, restraining spending to stave off massive future cuts, promoting economic and tax competitiveness, and providing essential budget transparency.

Unfortunately, the one-house budget proposals released today mostly miss the mark on these four priorities.

Both proposals add approximately $2 billion in additional annual taxes—on personal income taxes through 2027 and on business taxes permanently to support transit—on top of the roughly $1 billion business tax surcharge extension proposed by the Governor. Nearly $5 billion in new spending is added, most of which is likely to be recurring. To support this spending, the Assembly plans to reduce deposits to reserves, decreasing the State’s ability to weather an economic storm; the Senate does not provide the information needed to determine if it does the same, though it may be likely.

Finally, neither budget proposal is accompanied by the essential basic financial plan tables that would allow the public to better understand their size and how much they widen the State’s already significant future budget gaps.

One important bright spot is that the houses both propose to strengthen the structure of the Rainy Day Fund, as did the Governor. We hope that the final budget adopts or even improves upon the Governor's version.

As CBC starts to wade into the proposals’ policy details, it appears that both houses will support dubious economic development subsidies, eschew the Governor’s housing production plans, and fail to push for a performance measurement and management system to improve service delivery.

CBC continues to review the bills and will release findings of our analysis and budget developments over the coming weeks. Unfortunately, it is already clear that they exacerbate, rather than reduce, the State’s competitiveness problems.

CBC urges the State’s elected leaders instead to craft a final budget that ensures New York continues to be an attractive place to live and work, not only by focusing on the quality of core services, but, critically, also paving the path to reasonably competitive taxes that ensure New York’s value proposition is compelling."