Sucking on his trademark lozenge and sporting a crisp blue suit, Mayor Bill de Blasio spent more than two hours on Monday testifying at a state budget hearing in Albany, warning legislators that Governor Andrew Cuomo's proposed budget would have "a truly negative effect on the people of our city," and urging them to make changes to recently enacted bail reform laws that would give judges more discretion over who they can keep in custody.
The mayor argued that Cuomo's quest to fill a $6 billion state budget gap by shifting even more Medicaid costs to localities will eat a $1.1 billion hole into New York City's budget—more than the cuts of the previous six state budgets combined. This plus additional proposed state budget cuts would mean fewer guidance counselors, shrinking or eliminating anti-poverty and summer employment programs, and most crucially, sizable cuts to healthcare for New Yorkers who need it most.
"Looking at the Medicaid budget situation we're in, it seems like New York City is being dumped on, correct me if I'm wrong," Manhattan State Senator Robert Jackson said. "Am I right or wrong?"
"You are right senator," de Blasio said. "And I just want to add, I have talked to county executives, I have talked to mayors all over the state. Democrats and Republicans alike, feel exactly the same thing. That localities are asked to deal with a cost that they cannot possibly handle—it's either going to bankrupt a lot of localities or they're going to take away healthcare from people who need it."
Medicaid costs have risen for a variety of reasons, but the governor also chose to shift $1.7 billion in Medicaid payments to a new fiscal year, and New York municipalities already pay a larger proportion than any others in the country for the program, which is administered by the state and federal government.
Some of the legislators gently pointed out that unlike many parts of the state, the city could probably take the hit—it has more than a billion dollars in reserves as part of its $95 billion budget.
Still, the room was uniformly with the mayor: the governor probably shouldn't be using municipalities to get the state out of a bind of the state's own making.
"I heard all your comments about the governor's budget proposal. You feel like it’s 'e pluribus unum'?" said Queens Senator John Liu, in a dig at the governor's recent pitch to put the Latin phrase on the state flag.
The mayor suggested that the city would assist Cuomo's special blue ribbon commission tasked with seeking $2.5 billion in Medicaid cost savings (see more on Cuomo's addiction to "independent commissions" here) and that if the state needed more money, they should do what de Blasio has unsuccessfully urged them to do for years.
"Do the thing that most New Yorkers and most Americans think is right, and raise taxes on the wealthy," the mayor said later during a brief press conference, pointing to the Democratic majority in both houses and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie's comments showing an appetite for raising taxes. "I know where the money is... The governor was bragging as recently as last month about cutting taxes. So go raise taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers so people can have healthcare."
"The Mayor’s solution to raise taxes and increase spending without any accountability is a recipe for fiscal instability and inefficiency in a program charged with caring for the most vulnerable among us, and that’s unacceptable," Cuomo's budget director and MTA board appointee Robert Mujica said in a statement. The Cuomo administration has argued that their budget will actually increase funding going to the city, and that the de Blasio administration is using "inflated" numbers, but budget watchdogs have mostly sided with the city's interpretation.
"It’s a funny situation where people state a claim and don’t cite any evidence," de Blasio remarked of the governor's arguments. But the same could be said for the mayor's position on bail reform. For years he has argued that judges should have discretion to jail people they deem "dangerous," and last week he and NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea stated that they believe the recent spike in crime over the first month of the year is caused by the bail reforms that went into effect, but could not offer any proof of this assertion. In Albany, de Blasio asked the legislature for their help in giving judges a "tool," but couldn't specify how it would be much different from the tool of bail, which judges used mainly against poor people of color, beyond that he didn't want to return to a "broken past."
"So, judicial discretion with very clear checks and balances, for example, triggered by a certain number or type of previous offenses for several convictions; triggered by things like a consistent pattern of not following judicial orders, parole, probation, things like that indicate a recklessness," de Blasio said.
Asked if he had extracted any specific things from legislators about what they would do to bail reform, the mayor said it was too early to tell. "It's only February—I think the kind of conversations that are happening now are the kind that yield a positive outcome in either April or June."
(Senator Jackson made a similar point about bail reform itself: "Lets not talk about weeks, lets consider over a period of months...We pass laws, give it a chance to work.")
Colin Schmitt, a Republican Assemblymember from Orange County, used his time during the hearing to ask the mayor about the "attempted assassination over the past few days of our hero NYPD officers."
"I'm getting calls, messages, emails, of distraught family members, and distraught officers, who are disgusted," Schmitt said. "The police commissioner himself stated that rhetoric and words matter and that the anti-police rhetoric that we've seen at protests for the last couple of months, the last couple of years has really contributed to this crisis. They would like an answer, how are we going to combat this?"
De Blasio replied, "Thank you, Assemblymember, I agree with the way you have framed this."
"This is absolutely unacceptable, even in a democratic society where we value the freedom of speech," the mayor said, referring to the recent protests about police brutality in the transit system.
De Blasio suggested that public officials "draw a line and say, 'You have a right to protest, you don't have a right to affront those who are serving us.' It's not gonna help anyone's cause and it's gonna disgust the people of our city." He added, "You know those recent protests where they called everyone to come out? No one came! It's just a small, horrible group, but a very small group who feel that way."
Asked later about a police union head's comments that cops were "declaring war" on the mayor, de Blasio said it was "absolutely inappropriate" and "dangerous."
"I think there should be consequences for that kind of speech," he said. "I think it's destructive."
What kind of consequences? Should he lose his job?
"I just said what I'm going to say," the mayor said, and moved on.
