The bill for the city’s unassigned teacher pool ballooned to $136 million at the beginning of the year, according to a new report from the Citizens Budget Commission.

Citing runaway costs, the watchdog urged the city to either abolish the Absent Teacher Reserve or limit enrollment to six months.

Teachers are placed in the pool due to incompetence, disciplinary issues or school closures. They are cycled through temporary positions at various schools while drawing their regular ¬salaries.

The controversial Absent Teacher Reserve is set to become even more expensive for New York City as educators in the pool build years of experience and earn bonuses.
That’s according to a report released Thursday by the nonpartisan Citizens Budget Commission, which estimates the reserve will cost $136 million this school year.

The reserve is comprised of teachers who don’t have a permanent position because their schools were closed, or because they face legal or disciplinary problems. Many serve as roving substitute but others do deskwork or administrative tasks — or, critics say, nothing at all — while collecting a full salary.

Those teachers lack permanent classroom assignments and work as roving substitutes but still get full pay. The arrangement has drawn criticism because the unassigned teachers usually earn far more than typical substitutes.

In her report, "Absent Teacher Reserve costs $136 million and Needs Reform," Citizens Budget Commission researcher Ana Champeny calls on the mayor to address the matter in a new teachers union contract to replace the one that expires in November.

Mayor Bill de Blasio and the New York City Council face several uncertainties about the new city budget, including strains on the city’s already spiraling capital budget, a new round of labor talks and a possible recession.

According to the brief statement de Blasio released Monday without documents, he and the council agreed to add $125 million to the $1 billion allocation the general reserve, and $100 million to the Retiree Health Benefits Trust Fund, raising the balance for the latter to $4.35 billion.

The cushion could be counterproductive, according to Maria Doulis, a vice president at the watchdog Citizens Budget Commission.

“Neither the City Council nor the mayor have been forced to make tough decisions,” she said.

The spending plan, should it clear the council, would mark a 19% rise in spending from de Blasio’s first budget in June 2014, at $75 million.

“In many ways, it’s like the previous de Blasio budgets. It makes modest additions to reserves while continues to increase spending in the operating and capital budgets,” Doulis added. “Capital has really ballooned.”

According to Doulis, the health benefits fund really isn’t a reserve, leaving the city only $1.3 billion for a rainy day. That, she said, would be insufficient to cover a recession.

The New York City Council convinced Mayor Bill de Blasio to save more money in backup reserves than he had proposed in this year’s budget, but a budget watchdog says she would like to see even more saving. “Making an additional deposit is a positive step,” Citizens Budget Commission Vice President Maria Doulis told City & State. “But there’s definitely still more spending going on than there is saving.”

De Blasio and the City Council announced an agreement on an $89.15 billion expense budget on Monday evening. The deal included adding an additional $125 million to the city’s general reserve fund, raising it to a total of $1.125 billion. The city will also add $100 million to the Retiree Health Benefit Trust Fund, increasing it to a total of $4.35 billion. The city’s third line for savings in the budget, the Capital Stabilization Reserve, will remain at $250 million.

That may sound like a lot of savings, but Doulis said that might not be enough to cover the city’s needs in an economic downturn. “You will not know, and you cannot know until you get there,” she said.

The New York City Housing Authority has misled the federal government and public about the scope of lead paint in its portfolio, the number of children with concerning blood lead levels and how violations of housing regulations have contributed to the crisis, according to court documents filed by federal prosecutors.


Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said his team filed a civil complaint and proposed Monday with the goal of reforming a host of NYCHA practices. The 80-page complaint accuses NYCHA of deceiving inspectors about lead paint hazards and working to mask leaks, broken elevators and other dilapidated conditions the authority has failed to root out since 2010.

“However, given the enormity of NYCHA’s capital needs — projected to be at least $25 billion — the funding will have an important but modest overall impact and will not make up for more than a decade of underinvestment,” Maria Doulis, vice president of the Citizens Budget Commission, wrote in an email. “The decree acknowledges that in order to effectively address the serious issues it identifies, substantial changes are needed in NYCHA’s organization and management; in its regulatory burdens and procurement and construction restrictions; and in its union workrules and staffing structure.”

2018

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and the City Council struck a deal Monday evening, raising the city's annual operating budget by nearly 5 percent.

The Council's biggest win was $106 million to begin the Fair Fares program, which aims to fund half-priced MetroCards to the poorest 800,000 New Yorkers who live at or below the federal poverty line ($25,000 a year for a family of four). The program will begin rolling out next January.

Budget watchdogs at the Citizens Budget Commission feared that increased spending levels, about $4 billion above last year, are increasing at a greater rate than the funds being squirreled away in reserves.

"The budget is really ballooning to a tremendously large amount and all of that spending is backed by city debt," said CBC Vice President Maria Doulis. "In the long term indebting future New Yorkers for political priorities today."

The New York City Council and Mayor Bill de Blasio agreed Monday to an $89.15 billion budget, the largest in the city’s history, with increased spending planned on a range of programs to help the youngest and the neediest.

The budget for the next fiscal year includes additional funding for early childhood education and an acceleration of building affordable housing, as well as more than $100 million for reduced-price MetroCards for the poorest New Yorkers. It also includes more than $200 million to upgrade heating systems at New York City Housing Authority developments.

“This budget is profoundly responsible, balanced, progressive, and it’s early,” Mr. de Blasio said Monday evening inside City Hall.
But at least one advocacy group said the mayor isn’t saving enough money, which could hurt the city during future economic downturns.

“He benefits from a really hot real estate market, so that property-tax revenue has been extremely strong and growing steadily,” said Maria Doulis, vice president of Citizens Budget Commission, an independent watchdog. “Fundamentally, what they’re doing is spending most of it.”

The city's generous payroll and benefits system continues to draw fire for exorbitant overtime and often unchecked disability pensions.

In 2016, 76,166 rank-and-file city employees pocketed more than $100,000 mostly thanks to $1.3 billion in overtime charges, according to payroll data analyzed by OpenTheBooks.com.

With pensions costs slated to reach $10 billion annually, an expense that represents about 11 percent of the city's total budget and about 35 percent of the city's payroll, according to a report from the Manhattan Institute -- what kind of checks and balances does the city have in place to ensure city employees are not abusing overtime and pension payouts?

The sheer number of the city's employees, coupled with generous pension benefits, especially for those in the uniformed services, and the fact that overtime pay can be included in the calculation of an employee's final average salary, are some of the main factors driving up the cost of the pension system, said Maria Doulis, the vice president of the nonpartisan Citizens Budget Commission.

In the wake of the massive corruption scandals in Gov. Cuomo’s economic-development programs, state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli asked the Legislature to help prevent it from happening again. The state Senate passed the two resulting bills — but the Assembly is sitting on them.

The Senate passed the database bill unanimously and the Procurement Integrity Act by 60-2. And more than a dozen diverse voices — building-workers union 32BJ SEIU, the Citizens Budget Commission, the NYS Council of Churches, the League of Women Voters, Reinvent Albany, Make the Road NY — demand that Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie at least let members vote on the bills before the June 20 end of the legislative season.

State Sen. Marty Golden receives an NYPD disability pension on the taxpayers' dime — but that didn't stop him from skydiving last weekend.

Golden has been paid over $1 million in tax-free pension money since 1983 — the year a car struck the ex-cop while making a narcotics arrest, severely injuring his knee.

He's paid a monthly allowance of $2,777, according to the New York City Police Pension Fund. That money comes on top of his base salary of $79,500 as a state senator.
Golden is one of the main politicians in the state senate proposing legislation to expand pension benefits, said Maria Doulis, vice president of the Citizens Budget Commission.

"He is one of the sponsors of bills we see annually to enhance pensions for all employees, but also in particular police and firefighters," she said, noting that many of the bills "don't take the cost to taxpayers into consideration."

She declined to comment specifically about Golden's disability pension, but said The News' articles on questionable cases are "emblematic of the problems with the pension system."

Press releases and speeches from the governor and state legislators are again claiming that state spending in the budget was capped at two percent, but a fiscal watchdog says the numbers don’t add up.

David Friedfel, director of state studies for the Citizens Budget Commission, joined the podcast to talk about the state’s 4.5 percent increase in spending, future budget deficits, economic development programs and the failing New York Mets.