You can’t say he didn’t warn people. Mayor Adams has been complaining for months that the influx of asylum seekers was costing the city hundreds of millions of dollars and would likely necessitate future budget cuts. Not only has he been saying it but he made a lot of news saying it. Remember this from two months ago? “This issue will destroy New York City,” he said.
BREAKING: Mayor Adams basically conceding New York City is done because of illegal immigration and warns New Yorkers illegals will flood ALL neighborhoods. pic.twitter.com/Lj5E3BSvDX
— nycphotog (@nycphotog) September 7, 2023
If you watched the full clip, you’ll see he was talking about the budget. “Every service in this city is going to be impacted. All of us,” he said. Well, the time has arrived and Mayor Adams just announced across the board cuts to all kinds of services, from libraries to police.
Mayor Eric Adams announced painful budget cuts to New York City services on Thursday that would freeze police hiring and close libraries on Sunday and warned that more cuts would be necessary without additional federal funding to manage the migrant crisis.
The budget cuts would bring the number of Police Department officers below 30,000, slash the Education Department budget by $1 billion over two years and delay the rollout of composting in the Bronx and Staten Island — one of the mayor’s signature initiatives to address rats and climate change. The cuts would also weaken two popular programs: summer school and universal prekindergarten.
Mr. Adams said in a statement that he had to make cuts across city agencies in response to the rising costs of the migrant crisis, slowing tax revenues and the ending of federal pandemic aid.
The NY Post has more on what this means for the NYPD:
Under City Hall’s newly unveiled updated 2024 financial plan, the next five police academy classes will be axed — essentially decimating an already strained department as roughly 4,500 officers are expected to leave their ranks within the next 18 months.
Firefighters are also in the firing line with FDNY members who are on “long-term light duties” — meaning they’ve been injured on the job or are out sick — being forced into early retirement or fired under the plan.
“The defund the police crowd’s woke dream has come true. We were fed a line of BS that the wave of migrants would be a benefit to the city. Now we are defunding the police to pay for their beds,” Council Republican Minority Leader, Joe Borelli, raged.
The irony here is that Adams arguably won election over several more progressive opponents on a promise to support police and restore order in the city. Now he’s being forced to cut money from the police budget. Naturally, progressives are already attacking the cuts and the mayor’s blaming migrants as the reason the cuts are necessary.
Some officials, like City Comptroller Brad Lander says that budget gaps already existed before the migrant crisis.
“City Hall should stop suggesting that asylum seekers are the reason for imposing severe cuts when they are only contributing to a portion of these budget gaps, much of which already existed,” Lander said.
A statement from the City Council says the asylum crisis is “not the only factor contributing to our fiscal reality.”
The budget crisis did exist prior to the influx of migrants but adding another billion in spending on top of the crisis certainly didn’t help. Here’s Mayor Adams warning that this is just round one. There will have to be more cuts in the next six months unless something changes.
For months, we have warned New Yorkers about the challenging fiscal situation our city faces.
Read about our November 2023 Financial Plan Update now: https://t.co/aggeuEVoli pic.twitter.com/Pv5EbDotp4
— Mayor Eric Adams (@NYCMayor) November 16, 2023
Read the full article here