“With budget gaps widening despite billions of dollars of additional revenues, the City should immediately start to prioritize essential programs, increase its operational efficiency, speed up critical hiring, and shrink lower impact programs,” Rein said in a press release.

But city taxpayers have historically covered a large majority of the MTA’s budget, according to a Citizens Budget Commission analysis.

Governor Kathy Hochul initially proposed a more aggressive plan, which was rejected by both the Senate and Assembly. However, the three-year phase-in period is seen as a compromise by Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins. Despite this, the nonpartisan Citizens Budget Commission estimates that the change could increase property taxes between 7% and 14%.

“Overall, the budget weakens the State’s financial footing and does not include the governor’s bold, beneficial proposals to address the housing production and affordability crises,” Citizens Budget Commission President Andrew Rein said in a statement to Spectrum News. “New York needs to be both affordable and stable; this budget does not take the steps needed to get there.”

Well, last month, the Citizens Budget Commission reported that New York City’s public schools will spend $38,000 per student next year. And yet there’s little evidence that parents or teachers think the Big Apple’s schools are delivering that bells-and-whistles education.

"The state doesn't have a huge bevy of savings initiatives within the budget," Patrick Orecki, State Policy Director at Citizens Budget Commission, says. "This is one of the few areas the state is sort of cutting its own costs, but only doing so by shifting the costs to local governments instead."

Still, fiscal watchdogs like Citizens Budget Commission (CBC) President Andrew Rein criticized the plan for widening the state’s budget gap for the next fiscal year far past the $5.7 billion proposed in Hochul’s executive budget, while not including measures like her housing plan. Overall, Rein said, “this budget was not worth the wait.”

“This is a failure in transparency,” the Citizens Budget Commission wrote in a December report focused on improvements to the state budget process. “Budget bills should be required to properly age so they may be reviewed before a vote is held.” The report noted that lawmakers approved at least one piece of budget legislation with a message of necessity in each of the last nine budgets.

We also echo the concern of the Citizens Budget Commission that the voluminous spending bills were published without basic financial plan tables. Come on. Showing your work is in Accounting 101, a high school level class.

“We would have a significant budget problem to solve even if we weren’t facing the migrant crisis,” said Andrew Rein, president of the nonpartisan Citizens Budget Commission. “We can’t solve the city’s fiscal crisis by only focusing on one part of it.”

Gotham schools, which spent about $25,000 per pupil in 2016, expended $37,136 per student last year—a 47 percent increase in just six years, according to a study by the Citizens Budget Commission.

Citizens Budget Commission President Andrew Rein in a statement criticized the acceleration of state spending in the budget and a projected $5 billion budget gap next year.