The Citizens Budget Commission, a budget watchdog group, has urged Hochul and state lawmakers to hold spending growth to 2% and build up the state's reserve funds to prepare for budget gaps and belt-tightening in coming years. It also warns of steep increases in Medicaid spending and recommends changes to keep the program sustainable.

Costs associated with labor — salaries, overtime, benefits and more — have been on the rise, according to Sean Campion, the director of housing and economic development studies at the Citizens Budget Commission. The group recently found that NYCHA’s operating costs per unit have grown about 50 percent since 2013, exceeding those of other types of affordable housing.

The incentive was used to convert more than 13 million square feet of office space into residential use from 1995 to 2006, according to the Citizens Budget Commission of New York.

“The unsettled nature of the Medicare Advantage program as well as the overall fiscal health of the Health Insurance Stabilization Fund is an impediment to moving forward with regular labor negotiations,” said Ana Champeny, the vice president for research at the nonprofit Citizens Budget Commission.

The city will need to keep moving rapidly in the right direction should it stand a chance of meeting the goal set by de Blasio in 2016 of sending zero waste to landfill by 2030. Recycling is also badly off track — according to the New York Times and statistics from the Citizens Budget Commission, recyclables are currently only diverted from landfill 17 percent of the time in NYC. Seattle, in contrast, diverts 63 percent of its recyclables.

“It just can’t be a taxpayer bailout of a system that we know can provide quality service at a lower cost,” said Andrew Rein, the executive director of the Citizens Budget Commission, one of the most prominent good government groups in the Big Apple.

“Lawmakers should not be writing a blank check,” he added. “They should be insisting that the MTA and its unions come through with more of the solution.”

Of course he will reflect on where the city is now, which is certainly a challenging time economically. On the fiscal side, there is money in the city coffers for the short term, but the economic and fiscal headwinds are not only large but they’re also very clear. He has a budget that has baked-in fiscal cliffs because we have ongoing programs that are funded with federal Covid aid as well as city money that is just put in for one year at a time. The future budget gaps that you can see and the fiscal risks that are not even on the paper are large, so he’s got to start now addressing those.

Which leads to the next part. He has announced many plans and blueprints for housing, for economic development, for the ferries. Many plans. Year 2 should be about organizing and managing to get those done. With the lessons from Year 1, how will he hone his management structure so all these plans actually deliver results? That’s the task for Year 2. I hope he does it all great.

“It does ensure that there is sufficient funding set aside to perform that critical service,” said Ana Champeny, vice president for research at the Citizens Budget Commission.

In a typical year, more than half of the city’s snow-removal costs go toward labor—“the personnel that run the vehicles,” Champeny said. Of the labor costs, more than half is overtime pay.

The city’s progress toward Mr. de Blasio’s goal has been nominal. Its so-called curbside diversion rate for recyclables now stands at a paltry 17 percent. Seattle, by way of comparison, had a nearly 63 percent diversion rate in 2020, according to the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonpartisan watchdog group.

That recession followed a boom in office development, when 62 million square feet of space was built, according to figures from the Citizens Budget Commission. When construction finished in 2006, it was worth $51 million.

According to the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonprofit fiscal watchdog, NYCHA’s operating costs per unit have grown about 50 percent since 2013 and exceed those of other types of affordable housing. The federal agreement and the increasing costs of benefits and overtime are the major reasons for the increase, said Sean Campion, the commission’s director of housing and economic development studies.

This is a predicament so foreseeable that the Citizens Budget Commission was specifically warning about it as far back as 2011.