One budget analyst questioned whether the mayor’s goal is already being accomplished by activity in the economy, irrespective of his input.

"The economy's already been creating that on its own, so how's he going to make that happen?" Maria Doulis of the Citizens Budget Commission asked in an interview. "If things continue, then that will happen on its own. What's the baseline he's using to measure for jobs created?"

The CBC has a word for the tweaks in spending and revenue that Gov. Andrew Cuomo used to hold the operating spending increase in his executive budget under 2 percent: “gimmicks.”

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo counts on $1.2 billion in "fiscal gimmicks" to keep spending growth below 2 percent in his proposed 2017 state budget.

The Citizens Budget Commission, an independent nonprofit, released an analysis earlier this month of the Mayor’s Management Report (MMR), a detailed survey of city agencies and their functioning which the Mayor's Office of Operations puts out twice a year. The preliminary version of the report, the PMMR, covering the first four months of the 2017 fiscal year, was released last Monday and will be followed by the full MMR in September.

Expanding design-build's availability to all agencies in the state must be a high priority for Albany in its 2017 session.

CBC describes how school aid proposal extends inequities.

As the role of the New York City firefighter has evolved to include more emergency medical care, budget watchdogs have been calling for a reorganization of the fire department. Union officials, however, argue that the current structure is working fine. After emergency medical services merged with the fire department in 1996, firefighters began responding to the highest-priority medical calls. In those 20 years, medical emergencies have grown to 47% from 31% of the calls that firefighters respond to.

“The cost shifts were really the story for last year’s budget, though it didn't really come to fruition,” said David Friedfel, director of state studies at the Citizen’s Budget Commission. “In comparison, this year, the governor proposed a much more benign executive proposal.”

Rather, this year’s issues for de Blasio are the variety of smaller cuts and cost-shifts, as well as Cuomo’s 421-a proposal, another extension of mayoral control of city schools, which de Blasio hopes will be done this year through the budget, not afterward, and several other items like permission for the city to use design-build contracting.

When New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio testifies about Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s budget proposal Monday, he will likely have much less to complain about than last year, when the city faced nearly $1 billion in new costs under the initial proposal.

But de Blasio may still have a few items to decry.

Cuomo’s budget plan shifts a few relatively minor costs onto the city, including roughly $238 million in education funding and charging $3 million for processing the city’s traffic violations.

New York City residents will have the opportunity to voice their concerns about citywide services, thanks to a new survey being orchestrated by the Citizen Budget Commission, a nonpartisan and nonprofit civic organization.

The survey, which was distributed on Jan. 12, will gather responses from approximately 72,000 randomly selected households. It is a four-page survey that contains questions such as “How would you rate the overall quality of New York City government services?” and more specific questions about how residents feel about safety, traffic, air quality and public education.

Some government watchdog groups say the governor’s proposed revenue actions, aren’t lofty but may make New Yorkers want to leave.

“As costs increase, the benefits of leaving obviously would increase as well, but most of these changes are relatively small in comparison to the overall cost of living in New York state,” David Friedfel, of the Citizens Budget Commission, said.

The proposal includes $1 billion in new spending and has ticked up nearly 15 percent since de Blasio’s first budget in 2014.