Citizens Budget Commission President Andrew Rein applauded Adams’ call for cuts. He said it was prudent and a fiscal necessity.

“This is a timely call that rightly focuses on increasing productivity to reduce recurring costs while preserving services that New Yorkers rely on,” Rein said. “The directive to identify savings of 3 percent this year, growing to 4.75 percent in future years, is reasonable and provides agencies runway to restructure programs and operations to achieve the PEG targets.”

One reason for the price spikes is the time-consuming expense of securing the zoning changes needed to build or expand apartment buildings in New York. A recent report by the Citizens Budget Commission notes that a paltry 107 requests for zoning changes went to the Department of City Planning in the four years between 2014 and 2017, and 40 percent of them were not approved. The plans that did advance took, on average, two and a half years to get approval — delays that add an estimated 11 to 16 percent to the cost of building.

One main reason housing is so expensive in this town is that state and city laws make it so expensive to put up new buildings. Kudos to the Citizens Budget Commission for flagging some of the worst in a new report.

As CBC head Andrew Rein told The Post, “The status quo risks New York’s ability to create the jobs that we need and the housing that we need.”

Sean Campion, a researcher with the Citizens Budget Commission, a government watchdog, said he doubts the effort will lead to more than “marginal changes” for the nautical network.

“I don’t expect that the new RFP will significantly change how the system operates,” Campion said. “The RFP is much more about having a funding and operating model that is more appropriate for the current state of NYC Ferry, in which the city owns all of the assets.”

CBC President Andrew Rein has also championed the push for greater reserves.

In June, Rein and Lander wrote in op-ed piece in Crain's New York Business urging the city to add at least $2.5 billion to its rainy day fund this year and adopt a formula for future deposits.

"Too often the political winds of the moment shape our city's budget, with savings for the future left as an afterthought," they wrote. "Still, a 'one-and-done' deposit this year will not be sufficient to protect New Yorkers when they will be their most vulnerable. We both support adopting an annual deposit structure that would set aside a portion of the city's revenue growth toward long-term reserves in years when the economy is growing. While our proposed formulas differ slightly, their spirit aligns. The city should set a target size, mandate deposits and specify criteria for when these funds can be withdrawn."

Ana Champeny, vice president of the Citizens Budget Commission, argues that the city needs to reform its hiring process, which has long been viewed as cumbersome and opaque due to bureaucratic red tape and civil service rules.

Champeny said she has not seen any documentation of minimum pay rules for new hires but described them as ill-advised given the current circumstances.

“In a tight labor market, that would be an impediment to hiring,” she said.

Adams has resisted calls to allow hybrid work for city workers. He has touted the shrinking municipal workforce as the intended effect of a more fiscally responsible approach to managing the city.

During his testimony before the New York State Financial Control Board this week, Adams said the municipal employee head count was just under 304,000. That represents the city’s smallest workforce since 2010, when there were roughly 302,000 city workers, according to the Citizens Budget Commission.

Potential new sources of revenue include film shoots and private events, according to the request for proposals, which does not require any cost-savings from ferry operations.

City officials and outside experts have warned that too-high fares could discourage ridership and reduce revenue.

“Operationally, it doesn’t seem like much is going to change,” said Sean Campion of the Citizens Budget Commission. “They want to operate a more financially sustainable ferry system. They’ve addressed one piece of that by increasing the fares — and now they’re hoping to come up with new revenue ideas and a new private operating model that’s more cost-effective.”

Sean Campion, a senior research associate for the budget watchdog group Citizens Budget Commission, said the day-to-day operations of the ferry shouldn’t change much for passengers if a new operator is selected.

“The original contract anticipated that Hornblower would own everything and run a turnkey system; now the city owns everything instead,” Campion wrote in an email to THE CITY.

He was doubtful, though, that a new operator could significantly boost revenue.

“It’s certainly possible that the operator comes up with new revenue sources or ideas to operate more efficiently or boost marginal ridership but I’m not sure how much juice there is to squeeze,” Campion said.

Citizens Budget Commission, a nonprofit fiscal watchdog, has advocated that city workers should pay some portion of their health insurance premium, a non-starter for city unions.

“This (is) always quite a challenge because the city has a long-term structural problem in its budget and any money that we spend in raises for workers that’s certainly deserved by many is not in the current budget that has out-year gaps,” said Andrew Rein, the group’s president. “We really need to change the nature of the labor-management compact because city employment has been structured to guarantee job security, not necessarily to be flexible, innovative and nimble.”

Rezoning in New York City will cost you — adding as much as $45 million to a high-rise apartment project.

That is according to a new report by the Citizens Budget Commission, which recommends changing the city’s review process to cut down on time and money spent by developers and reduce the cost of housing.

The report, which examined 171 private zoning applications filed between 2014 and 2017, found that the median time for a land use application to finish the city’s approval process was two and a half years. Some 80 percent of that was spent on pre-certification and environmental review.

A process of this length can increase development costs by 11 to 16 percent — $63,000 per unit in a low-rise multifamily project and $76,000 per unit in a high-rise. That’s $45 million on larger projects, when accounting for inflation, according to the watchdog group.

Its report recommends several changes to the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, or Ulurp, and the lengthy pre-certification process.

But the message from both the city and state comptrollers and other budget experts is clear cut: While the $101 billion city budget for this fiscal year ending next June 30 is in good shape, the future looks much worse than it did even two months ago.

“The city starts the fiscal year in a strong position but faces budget gaps and significant risks that could widen those gaps by billions of dollars,” said Ana Champeny, research director of the nonpartisan Citizens Budget Commission (CBC).

In the 18th century, the scarcity of land around here allowed John Jacob Astor to turn beaver pelts peddling into a New York real estate fortune, making him the richest man in the young United States. Land is still scarce and building on it is still expensive, but the city’s far too restrictive ability to allow for even simple and modest flexibility on zoning rules is choking housing production at a time when affordable places to live are devilishly hard to come by. That’s got to change.

So argues the Citizens Budget Commission in an important and compelling new report. The study outlines a thoughtful, detailed approach to unsticking the process. We give it an A, but being realists, close to a zero percent chance of adoption by the elected officials who have won their posts under the existing system and see no reason to change.