“The new resources, especially the federal aid and higher tax revenue forecast, provide the City with the runway needed to restructure its spending while preserving critical services and supporting pandemic hardship and recovery needs,” said Andrew Rein, the president of the Citizens Budget Commission.

“This Executive Budget does not do this … Instead, it needlessly leaves the next Mayor to solve significant fiscal problems tomorrow that this budget should have started to address today.”

At the same time, the city’s tax revenues are in a precarious state. Projections for property taxes, traditionally the largest and most stable source of revenue, have fallen by $2.5 billion since the start of the pandemic. And while that decrease was offset by increased corporate and personal income taxes this year — the result of unemployment insurance, federal aid and a blockbuster year for Wall Street — those sources of cash are more volatile, rising and falling with the broader economy.

“You’ll see a lot of good money funding these programs, but virtually no steps taken to address the long-term budget problem,” said Andrew Rein, executive director of the Citizens Budget Commission. “All this federal money gave us the runway to do things smartly. Instead, the next mayor is going to have to deal with it.”

At the Citizens Budget Commission, a non-profit fiscal monitoring group, President Andrew Rein said the city should spend its windfall of federal and state aid over several years. He warned against spending on new programs the city must pay for in the future without federal aid. Agencies should look for savings, such as consolidating sanitation truck routes and union pension funds, he said.

“Federal aid has given the city a runway to sustain our governing costs, and we should not waste the opportunity,” Rein said. “We’re out of the crisis and have time to plan on ways to avoid giving the next mayor a fiscal crisis.”

Some budget watchdogs have highlighted retiree health care savings as necessary to bring $2.2 billion in annual city benefits spending under control.

“Health care savings are important. They’re essential to getting the city on solid fiscal footing, due to the rate at which these costs grow,” said Ana Champeny, director of city studies at the fiscally conservative Citizens Budget Commission. “It’s important to come to a consensus about how to control the costs, and how to possibly reduce the retiree health costs too.”

In the last decade, New York has trailed behind 17 other major U.S. cities in terms of housing units permitted per resident (25.3 units per 1,000 residents), according to an analysis from Citizens Budget Commission. The city added 206,000 units to the housing stock in the last decade, just over 20,000 per year. In this year’s mayoral election, former federal and city housing secretary Shaun Donovan, has said the city should be building about 50,000 units of housing per year, the largest number cited by any candidate.

Andrew Rein, president of the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonpartisan fiscal watchdog group, applauded DiNapoli's report for bringing attention to the MTA's debt problem, which he said could be worsened by the $14.5 billion in federal COVID-19 stimulus funds the agency has received.

Because the money is expected to fill the MTA's operating budget deficits for the next couple years, it could lead to the MTA putting off "hard choices" that reduce the need for borrowing, like shrinking the size of its capital budget, and adjusting service levels to reduced ridership demand.

"The MTA has the runway right now, with the federal aid, to take a little bit of time to reduce its recurring expenses. But if it doesn’t do that, it’s not sustainable," Rein said. "The federal money could either be a blessing, or a curse that takes their foot off the gas. And that shouldn’t happen."

The budget hawks at the Citizens Budget Commission called the cap on overtime “unrealistic” and pointed out that it was only budgeted for one year.

The NYPD’s inability to stay under its overtime cap is not a new issue, but it’s one with increased salience in an era of heightened attention to the costs of policing. “It’s a perennial problem,” said Ana Champeny, director of city studies at Citizens Budget Commission. Champeny, who previously worked in the city’s Department of Finance, said the NYPD has blown past its cap every year since at least 2007.

Why is it so hard to control police overtime? Experts who spoke to City & State differed in their explanations, which included the agency’s unique and broad mandate, the unpredictability of the job as well as the political nature of the NYPD and its unions.

How do we recalibrate reality to create a better, brighter future for New York? Scott Rechler, chair of the Regional Plan Association and CEO of RXR Realty, hosts a conversation series with leading thinkers and decision-makers to tackle this crucial question.

The nonpartisan Citizens Budget Commission estimated in 2019 that the program was costing the state and city up to $63 million and $31 million a year, respectively.

Gianaris’ bill, sponsored in the Assembly by Jeffrey Dinowitz (D-Bronx), had the support of a wide range of labor and advocacy groups.

State leaders have come to an agreement on a new budget for the fiscal year that began this month. The $212 billion dollar budget includes record funding for education, and also increases taxes on the state’s highest earners. Two financial experts are warning that the tax increase on the richest New Yorkers could have unintended consequences that could harm the state in the long run.

Andrew Rein, the president of the fiscal watchdog group Citizens Budget Commission, told the Daily News that ‘the tax increases simply are unnecessary and economically risky.’

‘Additionally, the tax increases both provide incentive for highly taxed New Yorkers to leave or not return to the state, and increase the cost of doing business here,’ Rein said.

Rein told the New York Post that President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package set aside $12.6 billion to bail out the state but lawmakers failed to ‘appropriately leverage the opportunity provided by the infusion of funds.’

Andrew Rein, president of the fiscal watchdog group Citizens Budget Commission, said, in a statement, that “the tax increases simply are unnecessary and economically risky” and provide incentives for wealthy New Yorkers to leave the state.

The state received $12.5 billion from the recently enacted federal stimulus package, and $10 billion more in federal dollars is going directly to local governments. Rein says the federal aid should have been sufficient for the state to balance its budget and plan its spending going forward to avoid future deficits.