City taxpayers aren't just footing the bill for first lady Chirlane McCray's out of town travel — as she eyes a run for public office, the city is now paying someone to lobby on her behalf in the nation's capital.

But the latest hire comes at a time when the de Blasio administration has staffed up considerably.

"A little bit of hiring here and little bit of hiring there has added up to more than 30,000 new employees since the mayor's been in office," Maria Doulis, vice president at the Citizens Budget Commission told POLITICO.

A reprise of a familiar ritual just took place, with the Citizens Budget Commission advancing its evergreen argument that firehouses should be closed to save money and the fire unions parrying with a list of reasons why that’s a bad idea.

That doesn’t mean the CBC report is just another exercise in preaching impractical changes. It points out a continuing trend in which the Fire Department is responding to far more medical calls than to fires. A bit more than 80 percent of FDNY responses during 2017 were to medical calls; less than three percent were to fires.

City fire unions sharply criticized a conservative think tank’s claim that the city should close firehouses and use the savings to upgrade ambulance services, saying such a move would cost lives.

The Emergency Medical Service is inefficient and shortchanges responses to life-threatening calls because it dedicates an “excessive share of resources” responding “to noncritical incidents,” according to a recent report from the Citizens Budget Commission, a business-funded fiscal watchdog.

The CBC was particularly critical of the Fire Department's current protocol of sending a crew of firefighters and an EMS unit to the scene of some calls for medical aid, which the department maintains ensures the fastest response times.

Public-sector unions are definitely off the bandwagon for single-payer health insurance in New York, because it’s a bad deal for them. Of course, that’s true for most New Yorkers.

The Municipal Labor Committee, an umbrella group representing city unions, met last week with Assemblyman Richard Gottfried and state Sen. Gustavo Rivera, the sponsors of the single-payer bill, Politico reports. Their demand: a carve-out so they can keep their current health-insurance arrangements.

(By the way: Unions often don’t pay as much for their benefits as they pretend. As the Citizens Budget Commission noted last week, Team de Blasio is yet again playing accounting games to credit the municipal labor force with millions in imaginary health-care savings, which “funds” very real pay hikes.)

Taxpayers deserve to know if there are real public benefits in this.

You can't really blame Uri Kaufman for trying to nab a half-million-dollar tax break for his Harmony Mills apartments from the city of Cohoes in exchange for putting an upscale eatery in the Cohoes Music Hall. Let's face it: these sorts of so-called incentives have become a virtual entitlement program in New York state.

The Citizens Budget Commission in New York City calculates the cost of all these local deals statewide at $4.6 billion annually. The state's own economic development programs add another $4 billion. That doesn't include the just-announced $2.2 billion deal for Amazon to build a second headquarters in Queens.

On Tuesday, Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen appeared on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” to push back against the Amazon backlash. “New York City is a notorious city of people with a lot of opinions,” Glen said, stressing that while there would be more “community engagement,” the City and the State were moving forward with their plan to give one of the world’s most powerful corporations around $3 billion in tax breaks to bring as many as 40,000 jobs to Long Island City. "I can guarantee you five years from now all New Yorkers will be thanking us for having brought them," Glen said. “This deal is not gonna get stopped.”

However, David Friedfel, the director of state studies at the Citizens Budget Commission says that too is up to the PACB. “They can decide to take things up individually.”

The Citizens Budget Commission noted in a blog post this week that Amazon’s projected tax credits would exceed the amount currently allowed under the law: “Assuming Amazon meets its job targets, the State Legislature would need to approve an extension of Excelsior that increases the caps.” The ESD has not disputed this.

Friedfel adds that the Excelsior tax credits would not be under the purview of the PACB.

Amazon’s decision to put a corporate campus in Long Island City after a year-long, somewhat-public search for a host city and a series of incentives from New York City and State has drawn skepticism and outrage in Queens and beyond for a number of reasons.

Some activists and elected officials oppose the secretive process by which Amazon got its land, tax breaks and grant, others feel like the company isn’t a corporate entity the city and state should be welcoming because of labor, political and other practices. But all of the opponents to the Amazon deal seem to agree that that package of roughly $3 billion in incentives the trillion-dollar corporation is getting from New York is out of bounds, an inappropriate giveaway based on old economics, in the midst of both a strong overall city economy with low unemployment on one hand and affordable housing, public housing, and transportation crises on the other.

The Citizens Budget Commission was measured in its critique of the grant, comparing the reimbursement-style payments as better than upfront costs the state has taken on with, for instance, the $750 million solar panel plant it built in Buffalo. But CBC still criticized the ongoing lack of oversight for where the money would come from. The grant has also been criticized in multiple corners as a sop to Cuomo-friendly construction unions, with critics charging the state is essentially paying Amazon to use union labor.

Owners of one-, two- and three-family homes—including co-ops and condos—stand to benefit if New York City adopts recommendations from an independent fiscal monitor on its effort to overhaul the property tax system for the first time since 1996.

The Nov. 27 plan formulated by the nonpartisan Citizens Budget Commission feeds into the deliberations of a city advisory panel looking into ways to fix the much-criticized system’s shortcomings in fairness and transparency. The panel is developing its preliminary reform proposal, having collected public testimony across the city’s five boroughs over the past two months. A hearing for expert testimony is set for Dec. 13.

The CBC plan would change how the property tax burden is spread across small residential properties, bigger rental buildings, expensive co-ops and condos, and commercial real estate.

For the fourth time in the last few years, a bill that would provide an enhanced disability pension to uniformed Court and Peace Officers in the Unified Court System has been sent to Governor Cuomo for approval.

But Carol Kellermann, the president of the Citizens Budget Commission, urged the Governor to veto the bill as well as a package of other, similar legislation, calling their justification “weak or unclear.”

“These bills, along with seven other bills passed by the Legislature that will be sent to you over the coming weeks, are costly and unwarranted expansions of government employee and retiree benefits that should be vetoed to preserve the fiscal restraint you have strived to maintain over the last eight years,” she wrote in a Nov. 27 letter to Mr. Cuomo.

The bill’s fiscal note stated that while the exact number of people who would be benefit from the legislation could not be known, “In all likelihood, very few members would be affected.”

The city is again using fuzzy math to give municipal unions credit for health-care savings that are largely created by inflating projected costs, budget watchdogs said Thursday.

Between 2019 and 2021, city officials estimated health-care cost increases of 6 to 7 percent each year.

But the Citizens Budget Commission pointed out that the city has already reached deals capping costs for one of its health-care providers at 3.5 percent in 2020 and 3 percent in 2021.

Without lifting a finger, the unions are being credited for the difference between the projected increases and the actual ones.

That tactic gives them $658 million of the $1.1 billion in savings they’re supposed to achieve over the next three years, according to the government watchdog.

A fiscal watchdog is urging Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to veto a dozen bills that were delivered to his desk this week.

The Citizens Budget Commission wrote to the governor on Tuesday that they are opposing bills they believe “are costly and unwarranted expansions of government employee and retiree benefits,” which run contrary to the fiscal restraint the state has tried to exercise the last eight years.

A copy of the letter outlining the legislation and the group’s opposition is available below.

“The proposed benefit expansions improve death and disability benefits, enrich retirement benefits, and enhance retiree health insurance benefits; the justification for many of these bills is weak or unclear. In addition several were passed without a fiscal note which makes their approval particularly ill advised,” CBC President Carol Kellermann wrote.

“Adopting these bills would erode the savings New York State and its localities are realizing from the implementation of Tier 6 pension benefits,” she added. “You should affirm your commitment to fiscal prudence by vetoing them.

A dozen “pension-sweetener” bills are on or headed for Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s desk — and every one of them deserves a veto.

Some actually increase pensions for members of certain public-employee unions; others boost other benefits. But each bill is a giveaway to some special interest, a grant that should be offset by union concessions on some other front.

But unions get friendly state lawmakers to pass sweeteners every year, in hopes the governor will go along. Often, as it did with several of these 12, the Legislature doesn’t even bother to include the required fiscal notes assessing the costs to taxpayers.

Even so, it’s clear the immediate cost would be in the millions, and higher down the line.

The various bills expand death and disability benefits, enhance retiree health insurance or other retirement payments and so on for park police, forest rangers, court officers and other select public employees.

It’s no slur on these workers’ service to reject backroom deals cut in their names.

Carol Kellerman, president of the budget-watchdog Citizens Budget Commission, warns, “Adopting these bills would erode the savings New York state and its localities are realizing” from the limited pension reform passed earlier this decade.

If Cuomo intends to live up to his “fiscal conservative” talk, it’s time to put his veto pen to work.