Future renovations to Belmont Park could be financed with the help of the state Dormitory Authority.

During the final days of session last month, the state Legislature approved a bill that would allow the New York Racing Association to tap into DASNY for financing and construction services. The legislation memorandum says the new authority is designed to help NYRA “renovate Belmont Park with 21st Century amenities and, once again, transform the property into the world-class racing facility it has been in the past,” but it could also be used to access capital for work at the Saratoga Race Course and Aqueduct Racetrack.

The Dormitory Authority is a public authority that helps hundreds of entities in New York access the best possible financing rates, according to the Citizens Budget Commission’s David Friedfel. The authority describes itself as a coduit to the low-cost bond market.

Friedfel said the only concern with the legislation is NYRA’s credit worthiness, considering their past financial woes, and the possibility of taxpayers left with the bill if state control is asserted again.

“However, having DASNY involved will actually provide additional professionalism to the financing [and] building process and decrease the likelihood that NYRA will get in over their head,” he said.

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s 2015 claim that a deal with construction unions would shave hundreds of millions from $8 billion worth of city project costs was always dubious. But now he’s being called on it.

With the deal expiring, Citizens Budget Commission President Carol Kellerman last week wrote de Blasio to request a review of whether the savings ever materialized.

“It’s a mess up in here,” teaching assistant Dawn Massy said last week, as she carried groceries home to her New York City Housing Authority apartment in Brooklyn. Let her count the ways: there are problems with mold and mildew. Leaks sometimes get the hallway closets wet. And then there was the fear of lead paint.

Fixing the underlying disrepair might be even harder, symbolized by the $32 billion in capital needs estimated by the Citizens Budget Commission. The commission has suggested public-private initiatives to help NYCHA turn the corner, some of which de Blasio has embraced.

The New York City Housing Authority’s lead paint scandal, serious as it is, merely scratches the surface on bone-deep rot. NYCHA newly estimates that its nearly 178,000 apartments need $31.8 billion in repairs, up from $17 billion just six years earlier.

The kitchen sink is just the start. Elevators, heating systems, bricks, cabinets, roofs; you name it, it needs replacing hundreds or thousands of times over, and meanwhile their decrepitude dooms tenants to day-and-night misery.

While speaking of urgency, while slapping his own back as the first city leader in eons to take responsibility for NYCHA’s decline amid dwindling federal funding, Mayor de Blasio has presided over most of this stomach-wrenching pile-up of deferred maintenance, conditions he would never countenance in the Park Slope residences he privately rents out to tenants.

Public housing residents froze as heat went out hundreds of times over this frigid winter, but not before the mayor burned precious time on measures that too timidly nipped around the edges of NYCHA’s existential crisis. He instinctively defers to advocacy and labor groups that shriek “privatization” at tenants’ expense at any hint of supplanting broken bureaucracy, instead of leading the way out of hell.

Enough is enough is enough. The Citizens Budget Commission urges swift, decisive and large-scale transformation along paths de Blasio has so far only tiptoed down.

It urges billions in money-making from NYCHA’s wildly valuable 58 million square feet of fallow land, including sales of air rights; maxing out opportunities to borrow funds for renovations, building on funds from the mayor’s housing plan; revamping and in many cases replacing a management bureaucracy that costs an arm and a leg more than private landlords spend only to run substandard buildings.

A mayor understandably committed to the New Deal ideals on which his idol Fiorello LaGuardia founded the Housing Authority has so far balked at such bold change — but the alternative to prompt, decisive and authority-wide action, in whatever form he sees fit, will be continued collapse and all its human consequences.

The price tag for jobs promised in projects receiving tax breaks from local development agencies averaged $10,259 last year, according to a report from the state Authorities Budget Office.

That cost was four times what it was in 2016 and five times more than in 2015. The ABO's calculation was based on $62 million in tax exemptions granted for 6,057 jobs in 256 projects statewide.

Riley Edwards, a research associate with the Citizens Budget Commission, a fiscal watchdog, described the statewide job creation costs as a "concern," but said it was difficult to glean the effectiveness of the expenses without better data.

"Everything in the report should be taken with a big grain of salt," she said.

“NYCHA’s needs are staggering,” warns the Citizens Budget Commission in its latest report on the challenges facing the city Public Housing Authority.

With the daunting monetary needs of the New York City Housing Authority laid bare in an assessment released this week, calls for more market-rate development on the agency's underused land are increasing.

The new interim chairman of the authority, government veteran Stan Brezenoff, the Citizens Budget Commission and a City Council member each acknowledged the potential of NYCHA's underused land to generate revenue for the authority.

An assessment the housing authority hired two consulting firms to conduct — for a cost of $23 million — concluded that fixing all public housing capital repairs would cost $31.8 billion over five years. A summary of the report was released this week and the full study, delineating every need in each of the 2,413 buildings, is expected to be made public in the coming days.

A spiraling repair bill and a widening lead-paint scandal at the New York City Housing Authority have prompted investigations and calls for an overhaul of the agency.

The watchdog Citizens Budget Commission on Tuesday, one day after NYCHA estimated its five-year capital-needs backlog at $31.8 billion, said that without dramatic change, 90% of NYCHA units by 2027 could be too cost-ineffective to repair.

After a federal investigation recently revealed systemic neglect and misconduct in New York City's Housing Authority, the City agreed to pay an additional $2 billion over the next decade to help make things right. But that number is just a drop in the bucket of what NYCHA actually needs. A new capital assessment report from the City shows that the authority requires $32 billion in repairs and replacements over the next five years.

The report describes the challenges ahead as "staggering"—70% of NYCHA's buildings were constructed before 1969, and they house close to 5% of the City's population. More than 744 boilers have five years or less of usefulness. "Leaks and the resulting damage to walls and ceilings and, increasingly, the presence of mold are recognized by NYCHA management and maintenance personnel as very serious and pressing issues," the report states. Lead paint in NYCHA buildings has poisoned hundreds of children over the past six years.

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s 44-month, $1 billion tentative contract agreement with New York City’s largest municipal union is expected to set up a framework for the 2017 to 2021 round of bargaining.

It has also generated second-guessing over workforce expansion under his tenure, how his administration defines savings, and whether tradeoffs should include productivity measures.

The latter, said the mayor, will soften the impact of the Supreme Court’s Janus v. AFSCME ruling last week, which invalidated union agency, or “fair share” fees non-union members pay to their bargaining units.

Ana Champeny, director of city studies for the watchdog Citizens Budget Commission, said the city should fund any raises beyond the city's budgeted 1% through concessions or productivity increases. She also urged the city to develop a policy to increase the size of the retiree health benefits trust.

The New York City Housing Authority is responsible for maintaining tens of thousands of apartments, which house one in 14 New Yorkers. But its 2,413 buildings are on average more than 60 years old, and they are plagued with leaky roofs, mold, broken elevators and faulty heating systems.

On Monday, housing officials unveiled the staggering price tag to remedy the conditions and restore Nycha’s infrastructure to good working order: $31.8 billion over the next five years, almost double the last estimate seven years ago, according to a report released by Nycha, as the housing authority is known.

“Without dramatic change, by 2027 90 percent of Nycha’s housing units will have declined to the point at which they are at risk of no longer being cost-effective to repair,” Carol Kellermann, the president of the Citizens Budget Commission, a city budget watchdog, said in a statement.

Metropolitan Hospital Center in East Harlem is the go-to center for many neighborhood residents seeking affordable health care. Alina Moran said it’s always been that way. “My parents migrated here from Puerto Rico. They chose to come and use a safety net hospital because they didn’t have access to insurance,” she said. Moran was born at Metropolitan and now, as the hospital's CEO, she manages a wide range of services from births to geriatric care. “We are here to serve all patients regardless of their ability to pay.”

"New York City Health and Hospitals would be in the position to bare the vast majority if not the entirety of the DSH cuts," said Patrick Orecki, who focuses on health policy at the Citizens Budget Commission. Congress has postponed these cuts three times. Now, they’re scheduled to go into effect in Fiscal Year 2020. The CBC, the Community Service Society and other groups have called on the state to find a new way to distribute its dollars. Governor Cuomo recently announced a working group to study the issue.