When Bill de Blasio campaigned for mayor in 2013, he spoke often of his desire to focus on the most needy New Yorkers and issues like affordability.

Five years later, he has the perfect opportunity to put money where his progressive mouth has always been. The City Council’s budget includes a “fair fares” proposal that would provide half-price MetroCards for 800,000 city residents who live at or below the federal poverty line — $25,100 for a family of four — and for veterans enrolled in NYC colleges. The nonpartisan Citizens Budget Commission backs the idea, saying it can be responsibly funded.

— The Citizens Budget Commission says the city must act on imposing a plastic bag fee, adding that Cuomo’s task force has yet to put forth a promised recommendation on the issue.

Last week, when New York Governor Andrew Cuomo declared a state of emergency at the New York City Housing Authority, or NYCHA, announcing an additional $250 million in funding to address its tenants’ needs, he also granted the agency to the authorization to use design-build

Maria Doulis, vice president of the Citizens Budget Commission, recognizes design-build as an important ability for NYCHA to have, but warns of its limits in light of NYCHA’s capital needs. “You’re not going to allow NYCHA to do design-build and then suddenly they’re able to fix everything with the money they have,” Doulis says.

Design-build can allow construction to begin earlier than in a traditional process, called design-bid-build, because the design and construction phases occur simultaneously.

“The benefit of design-build is that it can dramatically decrease change-orders because the architects, the engineers and the contractors who are going to build it are all kind of working together very early on,” Doulis explains.

Months before Cynthia Nixon, the actor and education activist, announced her candidacy for governor on Twitter, Gov. Andrew Cuomo was passionately making a case for educational equity.

“We must address education funding inequities and dedicate more of our state school aid to poorer districts,” he demanded during his State of the State address to the applause of lawmakers.

Budget watchdogs gave the new mandate mixed reviews.

“More disclosure? There’s nothing wrong with that,” said David Friedfel, director of state studies with the Citizens Budget Commission. But, he added after a moment, “We should probably deal with the problems we know about first.”

These are strange days indeed, when a just and sound proposal to slash subway and bus fares for New York City’s poor, known as Fair Fares, gets the support not only of the City Council but the fiscally upright Citizens Budget Commission — yet progressive parade-leader Mayor de Blasio shrugs and says the city can’t afford the load.

After decades of relative peace, a labor war between New York’s construction unions and real estate developers has broken out.
There are daily picket lines in front of a site at Hudson Yards on the Far West Side of Manhattan, where construction of a $4 billion office tower is just getting underway. Anti-union ads are showing up in the subways and in the newspapers targeting “union boss Gary LaBarbera.” In the courts, the two sides have traded lawsuits and complaints claiming corruption and unfair labor practices.

More recently, construction unions have come under attack more broadly, with critics like the Regional Plan Association and Citizens Budget Commission criticizing union agreements in the public sector for driving up the cost of subway construction and work at the city’s housing authority. Union leaders say the criticism is unfair and blame poor decision-making by management and an unwieldy bureaucracy.

New York has become the first state to respond to the federal government's new tax code with mechanisms intended to shield its treasury from an estimated $14 billion hit.

The "overwhelming majority" of the 7.9 million New Yorkers with adjusted gross incomes of less than $100,000 annually — about 82 percent of all state taxpayers — will see a cut in their federal tax obligation under the new code, according to an analysis by the Citizens Budget Commission, a fiscal watchdog group.

The state Legislature should alter the way it administers the Medicaid Disproportionate Share Hospital program to better serve the neediest facilities, including NYC Health + Hospitals, the Citizens Budget Commission wrote in a blog post.

In February Congress delayed cuts to the DSH program, which offsets financial losses hospitals incur while caring for Medicaid and uninsured patients, until fiscal year 2020. It was the fourth time they were postponed, but each time they have grown in magnitude. Once they do take effect, hospitals face a $4 billion cut nationwide. New York would face a $724 million one in that first year, which begins Oct. 1, 2019.

As was the case last year, before funding was restored, NYC Health + Hospitals would bear the brunt based on the state's current funding formula. DSH payments cover a smaller portion of Health + Hospitals' losses than they do at other health systems, the CBC wrote.

"The possibility of additional future delays in federal cuts should not be taken as an excuse to postpone reform; existing inequities are already serious, and state leaders should act based on the assumption that current law provisions for cuts will be implemented," wrote CBC research associate Patrick Orecki.

Orecki wrote that the state should change its distribution formula to reflect need, ensure H+H alone doesn't feel the impact and make payments in a timely fashion.

"Continued inaction will compound the financial risk to the state's most significant safety-net health system," he wrote. —J.L.

New York blazed a trail when its Legislature became the first to revamp its tax code in response to the new federal tax law.

When actor and activist Cynthia Nixon held her first news conference as a gubernatorial candidate, at a Pentecostal church in Brownsville, Brooklyn, she was introduced by Zakiyah Ansari, an education activist and longtime ally.

In New York’s advocacy ecosystem, Ansari and her organization, the Alliance for Quality Education, have long held prominence in outspoken fashion. The group, a nonprofit advocacy organization formed in 2001 and historically funded by teachers unions, has long offered itself as a voice for parents and communities of color and, as such, has also been a thorn in the side of successive state and city governments, consistently pushing for more funding in the state budget to meet the needs of underserved schools and fighting against school closures and charter schools.

Despite the added attention, the state budget did not meet AQE’s goal of a $4.2 billion increase in school aid, 74 percent of which they say is owed to schools with predominantly black and brown students. In the end, the $168.3 billion state budget included about $1 billion in increased school funding from last year, for a total education budget of $26.7 billion, which Cuomo called “a record” level of funding. AQE called it “entrenching educational racism.”

No changes were made in the budget to how education aid is divvied up to school districts, something even fiscal watchdogs like Citizens Budget Commission have called for, so that state money is going where it is needed most, not to wealthy districts as much as poorer districts. The governor did push through a requirement whereby the state’s biggest school systems will have to report how much funding it is providing to each individual school.

How should New York State respond to the federal tax overhaul? The Citizens Budget Commission released a report looking at that question. Dave Friedfel, Director of State Studies joined us.

When officials in late fall started to put all the pieces of a new state budget together for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to present in January, the gloomy talk started coming out of the Capitol’s first floor where his budget staff is based.

The state, officials warned, faced a looming $4.4 billion deficit. Put in perspective, that’s almost what is spent each year on New York’s sprawling judiciary and prisons systems.

In the final budget enacted March 31, officials say the deficit was completely wiped out.

David Friedfel, director of state studies at the Citizens Budget Commission, a private group that monitors state financial matters, noted the see-saw effect on the deficit number as various spending and revenue-raising actions took place during budget talks.

The deficit was reduced, he noted, also by the state banking on $577 million in legal monetary settlements with companies on various matters. Some of that went to the general fund, some went to New York City to help with its declining subway system.