#NYC’s new budget punts instead of facing reality

All the battling over cuts to the NYPD obscured the fact that Mayor de Blasio’s just-passed $88.2 billion budget is a charade.

Despite the pandemic’s hit on the local economy and city finances, the scheme (after adjusting for prepayments) only cuts city-funded spending less than 1 percent, leaving it 29 percent more than when de Blasio took office and Gotham was flush with cash. By putting off any real pain, it guarantees bigger trouble by next year.

Indeed, the city won’t even hit this year’s targets: Hizzoner, for instance, counts on $1 bill­ion in “labor savings” to be worked out with city unions, but why will they agree? He says NYPD overtime will fall by $350 million — directly contradicting the long-term trend, and now he’s also cutting the size of the force. If crime keeps surging, OT’s more likely to rise.

Even if the plan holds up, it leaves the city facing a $4.2 billion gap next year, with more huge shortfalls in the years to come. City leaders simply failed to make “sufficient hard choices” to put New York on “a firmer fiscal foundation,” rails Citizens Budget Commission chief Andrew Rein.

Heck, de Blasio is so feckless that he bungled his best (if irresponsible) Hail Mary hope: For weeks, he asked Albany to let him borrow billions to plug holes — so future taxpayers, rather than those today, would bear the pain.

It was a bad idea: Similar borrowing helped spark the city’s near-bankruptcy in the ’70s. But the mayor barely tried.

“He did not even attempt” to address “legitimate” concerns until “the last few days, and many of those concerns still remain,” fumed state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins (D-W’chester). “It wasn’t a plan but merely an ask that wasn’t backed by sound rationale,” added Sen. John Liu (D-Queens).

Similarly, he failed, until the very end, to even reply to a Municipal Labor Council plan for buyouts to lower the city headcount, notes NY1’s Errol Louis.

New Yorkers are stuck with such fecklessness for 18 more months — but they’ll be paying the price for it far longer.