What is needed are thoughtful, strategic spending reductions, not the across-the-board layoffs the mayor is threatening. The Citizens Budget Commission and other experts have come up with a number of valid suggestions including reductions in the cost of fringe benefits and productivity improvements. Public employee unions can be especially helpful in agreeing to compensation and work-rule and staffing changes so that all savings do not result in reductions to services to residents. No ideas should be shelved out of the belief that union opposition would be insurmountable; now is the time for doing what conventional wisdom would say is impossible. A serious, good faith effort by the de Blasio administration, the City Council, and public employee unions, working together to use a scalpel, not a hatchet, can significantly reduce costs and minimize the amount, if any, of borrowing required.

The Citizens Budget Commission said that while it has not “focused extensively on the land use process or specific zoning proposals, CBC recognizes the best land use process and decisions will balance citywide and community needs, is based on solid analysis and some common criteria, is transparent and reasonably fast, and provides the certainty and predictability needed to support activities that catalyze job growth and increase a diverse housing supply.”

“CBC is increasingly concerned that at times the City’s land use process serves as an impediment, rather than as an instrument of improvement, to proposals needed to spur job creation and develop desperately-needed housing,” the group continued, saying they plan to conduct an “in-depth study” of the City’s land use policies and process.

Last September, Menchaca set three conditions which Industry City, the Sunset Park community and the city administration had to meet in order to give his support to the project. His first condition was to remove hotels from Industry City’s application altogether, but also allow for space restricted to industrial use and to restrict the total amount of space for retail use.

The Citizens Budget Commission announced it would launch a review of the city’s land-use procedures in the wake of the controversy.

“Industry City’s plan represents a much-needed investment for Sunset Park and the entire city, creating thousands of new jobs and helping New York City recover from the COVID-19 pandemic,” said New York Building Congress CEO Carlo Scissura, one of the signatories of the letter to Johnson. “This is the type of investment we need right now.”

Maria Doulis, vice president of strategy at the Citizens Budget Commission, said health insurance is the best place for the city to start looking for savings.

“The most fruitful path to achieve labor savings without layoffs would be to require employees to contribute to health insurance premiums,” she said. “Most New Yorkers contribute to their premiums in their private sector jobs. State workers contribute to their premiums. Federal workers contribute to their premiums. New York City is out of line with both the private sector and public sector in this regard.”

There are many ways such a plan could take shape. One model floated by the Citizens Budget Commission would yield an annual savings of $675 million annually through employee contributions to premiums of anywhere between $546 a year to $3,744 a year depending on the worker’s rate of pay and coverage plan.

David Friedfel, director of state studies for the independent Citizens Budget Commission, said the state is facing budget gap of between $8 billion and $9 billion for fiscal 2021 that began April 1 when factoring in spending cuts and aid received under the federal CARES Act this past spring. Friedfel said it is important for the state to take necessary steps now in preparation that additional federal aid may not arrive.

“It’s paramount that the feds provide new aid to New York,” Friedfel said. “But in lieu of that the state needs to make adjustments now.”

Friedfel said before resorting to new tax increases state officials should instead look to freeze planned middle-class tax cuts scheduled to take effect in January as a temporary measure that could generate around $400 million of revenue in fiscal 2022. He also suggests suspending New York’s sales tax exemption on clothing items costing less than $110, which would net around $774 million for fiscal 2021 and $2 billion by 2024.

De Blasio has added more than 33,000 employees to the city payroll since 2013, the Citizens Budget Commission notes. Cutting even half those positions — bringing city employment back to its 2008 peak under Michael Bloomberg — would save well over $1 billion a year in salary and benefits. Seeking better deals on health insurance and requiring city workers to contribute at least minimally to health insurance and Medicare premiums (like virtually everyone paying their salaries) could save roughly $800 million a year, the Independent Budget Office has estimated.

The MTA continues to face a dire financial crisis as it runs out of federal relief funds. With congress on recess, it's unlikely help will come anytime soon.

When ridership fell during the height of the pandemic, the federal government gave the MTA $4 billion. That money ran out last month and the MTA has now requested $12 billion in additional funding from the feds.

Fiscal watchdogs say the MTA needs to take drastic action, and soon.

The Citizens Budget Commission's Denise Richardson says the agency should consider the continued suspension of overnight subway service and charging subway riders higher fees during rush hour.

“Changes have to be made in the way we’re used to seeing the MTA,” she said.

The MTA is holding an emergency board meeting later this month to discuss the agency's financial crisis.

The stakes are significant. If wealthy New Yorkers cut bait and flee, or if corporate titans with global reach drastically diminish their footprints in the financial and cultural capital of the United States, New York City’s tax base could erode, potentially undermining the city’s ability to fund the schools, food pantries and public housing on which so many New Yorkers rely.

The tax base “will shrink and New York’s ability to pay for services will also shrink, which will reduce quality of life and the level of public service and make New York City all around a less attractive place,” said Maria Doulis, vice president of the Citizens Budget Commission.

Recall, too, that Reliant was also the only beneficiary of de Blasio’s $42 million grant to school-bus companies. The money was meant to pay employees, after Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the court demanded reforms that saved the city millions.

In any event, the rationale for taking over any bus company is a mystery. Providing grants and protections to these companies has “undermined the fairness and savings of a competitive procurement, and it’s unclear that public ownership will yield any improvements in service and especially cost,” said Citizens Budget Commission fiscal expert Maria Doulis.

Composting was only offered to certain areas, which “left out a lot of Black and brown communities,” said Ceci Pineda, 30, the executive director of BK ROT, a bike-powered food-waste collection and composting service based in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Skeptics say that mandatory composting could be prohibitively pricey. A 2016 report by the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group, concluded that separate collection of organics would cost New York between $177 million and $251 million annually.

"The recession and uncertain trajectory for the economic recovery mean that collections and delinquency remain ongoing risks," said Ana Champeny, the director of City Studies at the Citizens Budget Commission.

Multifamily landlords have been able to collect from their tenants who have been getting a $600 check, in addition to other unemployment benefits, but that money stopped coming in late July.

“September rent is when we’ll see how bad it will be if there is no new stimulus package in next 30 days,” Gilman said.

While overall city property tax collection was 6% higher this fiscal year than last, there’s still room for further delinquency through the end of the year, city landlord groups say.

“Positive overall collection data does not mean that some property owners and segments of the real estate market are not facing substantial revenue challenges,” Champeny said.

“For 75 years we raised billions and billions of dollars with this tax. It’s the money that funded SUNY. It’s the money that funded CUNY. It’s the money that funded Mitchell-Lama housing,” said Kink. “All the good things that were built in mid-century New York were funded in significant part by this small sales tax on Wall Street stock trades.”
But the tax faces powerful opposition. Wall Street banks and brokers will most certainly lobby against it. Which is nothing to sniff at: Wall Street revenues are responsible for 17 percent of state tax revenue.

And there’s more. Dave Friedfel, the Director of State Studies at the Citizens Budget Commission told Spectrum News that in this era of the mobile office, there’s no reason why trades need to be conducted in New York.

“Trades can be initiated anywhere in the world, they don’t have to be processed in New York. By raising the costs of doing business in New York, it will make New York traders less competitive,” he said. “If a company has traders in New York and other states and can process trades cheaper outside of New York, why would they process those trades in New York?”

Friedfel also says that estimating the value of the tax is difficult because the impact on behavior is unknown. He believes the value of the tax could be less than activists have been estimating.

“According to the most recent report from the State Department of Taxation and Finance, the state ‘collected’ $4 billion in stock transfer tax in FY2020,” he said.

But no one’s really paid attention to the figure, because the state hasn’t collected the tax in decades.

Lastly, Friedfel warns, this tax won’t just impact wealthy stock traders, but everyone with a 401-K or college savings plan.