The report says projects to improve the aging infrastructure might either not be done in time or could be too expensive.

“Even with improvements in contracting speed, the MTA is highly unlikely to complete its planned projects in a timely fashion, and there is a risk that the system will not be brought to a state of good repair in the foreseeable future,” the report reads.

“You can start to see breakdowns, you can start to see delays in service, and that affects all the riders,” said CBC President Andrew Rein. “So it’s both an economic issue and a quality-of-life issue..

Before the MTA spends further, the CBC recommended that the agency publish a “priority list” of about $23 billion in projects that it will take on by 2024.

“Providing these services will clearly be a significant costs that will require city officials to either shift funding from other programs or identify savings,” said Ana Champeny, the top researcher at the Citizens Budget Commission.

“The risk is the right projects aren’t prioritized and the system could fall into a state of disrepair again,” said CBC president Andrew Rein.

New York City’s residential development has failed to keep pace with population growth over the past two decades, with just 0.19 units added to the city’s housing stock for every new job created between 2010 and 2018, according to the Citizens Budget Commission.

Patrick Orecki with the fiscal watchdog group Citizens Budget Commission said it’s one of the most rapid reversals he’s seen. “What we saw, in the first-quarter update, was a change of the script going forward,” he said.

Despite reaching a near-record high, unplanned overtime costs at the police department are not exactly a surprise. Overtime spending at the NYPD consistently exceeds its annual allotment. “These are ongoing challenges of managing overtime at the uniformed agencies that in many ways have been exacerbated by the pandemic,” said Ana Champeny, vice president for research at the Citizens Budget Commission, who also noted that the police department’s overtime costs could be exacerbated by the level of crime in the city.

While developers wanted to qualify for the tax break before its expiration both in 2015 and this year, two fundamental factors drove the surge in 2015. The economy had finally begun to gain momentum following the Great Recession, and the Bloomberg administration had pushed through a significant number of major rezonings, providing an abundance of new sites for development, noted Sean Campion, housing expert at the Citizens Budget Commission.

“Given other fiscal risks facing the city, this reinforces the need for the city to take swift and prudent actions to align recurring spending and revenues,” said Ana Champeny, vice president for research at the Citizens Budget Commission.

Making serious inroads with the problem in New York City is going to require significant federal resources, said Sean Campion, the director of housing and economic development studies at the Citizens Budget Commission. He pointed to the New York City Housing Authority, which Politico reported in 2018 needed nearly $32B in repairs.

“Now it's probably closer to $45B once you factor in inflation, conditions that are worse than they expected, need to electrify, make these buildings greener and healthier and to deal with lead and mold,” he said. “The city definitely can't subsidize its way out of this problem, the state can’t subsidy its way out … It has to come from additional federal resources to really make these deals work.”