Mitchell Katz had some good news about the long-troubled New York City Health + Hospitals unit he came from Los Angeles to resuscitate.

Health + Hospitals is on target to close the fiscal year with a balance exceeding $600 million, he told the City Council’s committees on finance and hospitals at a May 24 joint hearing.

“Few people come to New York expecting an easy professional life, and Dr. Katz is a seasoned professional who knows the job will be tough,” said Mariana Alexander, a researcher for the watchdog Citizens Budget Commission.

At the Los Angeles Department of Health Services, which he oversaw before its merger into the county health agency, the largest source of revenue -- payments for services to patients -- rose nearly 40% over five years, to $2.2 billion from $1.6 billion.

“The primary reason for the gain in revenues was an improved payor mix," said Alexander, noting the source of payment for patients shifted to third parties that pay better rates.

Katz’s record in Los Angeles is encouraging in two notable ways, Alexander added. “First, Los Angeles shares many health market features with New York City, and, second, the financial performance of the public hospitals in Los Angeles improved markedly during his tenure.”

The Citizens Budget Commission has analyzed the state's $168.3 billion budget and finds that spending has increased by more than twice the rate that Gov. Andrew Cuomo's office estimated.

The nonpartisan fiscal watchdog has said for several years that the Democratic governor's much-touted restraint on spending growth — the governor says he keeps operating spending increases to 2 percent — is a result of spending shifts. It estimates spending growth of 4.5 percent.

New York City Council members question whether the levels of reserves in Mayor Bill de Blasio's $89.1 billion executive budget – which de Blasio's administration has called "historic" – are really enough.

"The money is there to bolster the city's reserves," council finance committee Chairman Daniel Dromm said at a City Hall hearing Thursday. He cited a $1 billion increase in the estimate of city funds by the Mayor's Office of Management and Budget and a pattern of previous June upticks to the spending plan.

In de Blasio's citywide savings program, said Stringer, only 14% of savings are “truly efficiencies” – the rest are debt service savings, funding shifts or spending re-estimates. “And however you categorize them, agency savings represent less than 1% of agency spending in the out years of the financial plan."

The efficiency savings ratio was roughly 20% under de Blasio's predecessor, Michael Bloomberg, according to Citizens Budget Commission research associate Riley Edwards.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority estimates it will cost $43 billion and take about 15 years to turn around New York City’s struggling subway and bus systems, according to a person familiar with the plan.

That comes in addition to the approximately $50 billion in capital improvements the systems are likely to need over the next 15 years, the person said.

A nonpartisan fiscal watchdog group, the Citizens Budget Commission, estimated in a May 2015 report that city taxpayers provide about two-thirds of the dedicated taxes and subsidies to the MTA versus one-third paid by taxpayers outside the city.

On a recent episode of What’s The [Data] Point?, a podcast from Gotham Gazette and Citizens Budget Commission, guest Anita Laremont, the general counsel and chief data officer at the Department of City Planning, was asked about the lack of a comprehensive city plan. “We are charged by state law that we must have a well-considered land use plan,” Laremont said, “and what we have maintained historically is that the city zoning framework at any given time is the city’s well-considered plan.

The job he held did not exist three years ago. Neither, in fact, did the pension fund that he oversees, at least in its current form. Over the years, the city has managed to set up five separate pension systems that it runs jointly with unions. Each is its own fief. In 2016, Mr. Cassidy, who had been president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association for 14 years, left his union job and rode off into the pleasant sunset of running the newly independent fire pension system.

Worse still is the mischief and venality tucked inside some of the 108 separate benefits accounts into which the city pays more than a billion dollars every year. Multiple unions oversee the administration of benefits like eyeglasses, education or extra health care. Some of those funds can be quite leaky: audits have found that money has been “lent” to employees without documentation, and ordinary measures like timecards are not consistently used. By consolidating the funds, the city could save $164 million, according to the Citizens Budget Commission.

The New York City Council has been pushing for temporary relief for lower- and middle-class homeowners in this year’s budget, calling on Mayor Bill de Blasio to fund a one-time $400 property tax rebate that would cost about $187 million in total. Council Members, some of whom are homeowners themselves and could potentially qualify for the rebate, say it’s a much needed measure that could help thousands of New Yorkers reduce their annual tax burden.

“We’re going to...go at the heart of the property tax problem and have a commission, working closely with the Council to try and reform fundamentally the property tax to be more fair for everyone,” de Blasio told reporters at his executive budget presentation on April 26. “So, I would argue the best way to address the property tax question is the fix the whole system. Everyone loves a rebate, but it doesn’t fix the root cause, and most rebates are pretty small and then you never see them again. We want to get at the root cause.”

Maria Doulis, vice-president of Citizens Budget Commission, an independent fiscal watchdog, echoed that position while also pointing out that the Council’s interim approach may be flawed. “It’s a well-intentioned proposal,” she said of the rebate, “but it’s too broad a measure to address their concerns.” An umbrella threshold, she said, doesn’t capture the differences in households and property values across the city, so those with a high property tax burden would stand to receive the same benefit as those with a negligible one.

The impact of the state budget’s $618 million increase in Foundation Aid varied by school districts, according to analysis from the Citizens Budget Commission.

The fiscal watchdog found that the statewide 3.6 percent increase resulted in an increase for every district. The formula meant a minimum increase of 1.9 percent, which was the case for 148 districts, and a maximum increase of 11.1 percent, which was the case for a district in Nassau County, according to the CBC.

The Republican-led New York State Senate, which for years had a collaborative working relationship with Governor Andrew Cuomo, passed a slew of government transparency and accountability bills on Wednesday that further highlighted the GOP majority’s recent split with the governor.

Most of the bills seem intended to curtail the powers of the executive branch and of state agencies under its control. For instance, a bill sponsored by Senator Joseph Griffo would define how long, and how often, an interim appointee can serve at the head of a state agency or department. Another bill would limit the ability of state agencies to declare a public emergency unless necessary to protect the health and safety of the public.

Only one bill had a Democrat as lead sponsor -- Senator Liz Krueger of Manhattan -- mandating that the state budget division prepare a Unified Economic Development Budget each year showing how much the state has invested in economic development projects and the results of those investments. It is a measure that watchdogs, especially Citizens Budget Commission, have sought in order for the public to have more information about how successful the state’s economic development initiatives are.

A group of government reform advocates and independent fiscal watchdogs including the CBC praised in particular the “database of deals” and the Public Integrity Act, calling on the state Assembly to approve them. That group also includes Citizens Union, Common Cause NY, Fiscal Policy Institute, League of Women Voters, NYPIRG, and Reinvent Albany.

If Mayor Bill de Blasio is right, New York's future is assured for the rest of his tenure and the first year of his successor's. It just might be too good to be true.

In his budget proposal last month, the mayor projected that the city will boast just about 4.7 million jobs in 2022. There are many ways to show how impressive that number is, but think about it this way: New York will have gained exactly 1 million jobs in the economic cycle that I call the Bloomberg–de Blasio boom. It is double the best previous performance in an upcycle and the only expansion in modern New York history to span two mayoralties.

The Citizens Budget Commission is keeping score this legislative session.

The fiscal watchdog is tracking the progress of legislation that creates or expand economic development programs in New York. Every two weeks, until the end of session in June, the CBC will provide status updates on the bills.

In 2017, said a CBC report, LIRR’s operating expenses totaled $1.453 billion, 11% percent more than Metro-North’s $1.310 billion. According to Federal Transit Administration data, LIRR spent 11%, 13% and 7% more per hour of service, mile of service and ride, respectively, than Metro-North.

Aligning LIRR per-mile costs with Metro-North in 2017, said CBC, would have saved $172 million, the equivalent of a 12% reduction in railroad operating expenses in that year.

“A driver of these unit cost differences is the impact of certain legacy costs at the LIRR,” said the CBC’s director of infrastructure studies, Jamison Dague. “Having continually operated since its original charter, the LIRR provides health benefits to a greater number of retirees.”

Additionally, said Dague, LIRR also underwrites a closed and underfunded pension plan that has required significant catch-up payments in recent years. In 2017 its retiree health insurance expense was $60 million compared with $33 million at Metro-North, and payments to cover the unfunded portion of the closed LIRR pension plan exceeded $32 million.

Removing the pension expense related to the LIRR’s closed plan and current retiree health care expenses from unit cost calculations tightens the gap between the two railroads, according to Dague.