The New York City Council is ducking a vote on a budget for the new fiscal year until after the June 27 primary elections in order to protect incumbents, sources told The Post.
Council Speaker Adrienne Adams doesn’t want a situation where incumbents in competitive primaries have a budget vote used against them by an opponent, the sources said.
The Council leaders also want to avoid an embarrassing spectacle of having a substantial number of rank-and-file members voting against a budget they negotiated with Mayor Eric Adams, sources added.
Speaker Adams told the mayor directly there wouldn’t be any votes on a new city budget before the June 27 primary, a source close to the deliberations said.
Early voting for the primary begins on Saturday.
“The context of the conversation from the speaker’s perspective was telling the mayor: `don’t politicize or use the primary date as a pawn or a source of negotiation in the budget,’” an insider familiar with the conversation between the two said.
Asked Wednesday if a budget deal will be reached before June 27, Councilwoman Gale Brewer, who is on the Council’s budget negotiating team, said, “I don’t think so.”
Brewer said budget negotiations are more challenging this year, noting that federal funding available during COVID-19 pandemic funding has dried up.
“When you have less money the decisions are harder,” Brewer said.
But she did say negotiating a budget in the heat of primary elections presents a challenge.
“It’s about both,” Brewer said.
Last year, a handshake agreement on a $101 billion budget deal was announced on June 10 and approved by the Council on June 13. The new budget must be approved for the new fiscal year beginning July 1.
The mayor in April proposed a $106.7 billion executive budget plan, but said the city had to account for $4.3 billion in costs to shelter tens of thousands of migrants arriving from the southern border over the next few years. The state and federal government have provided some relief, not nearly enough to cover the city’s emergency migrant costs.
Adams also asked city agencies to curb spending over the next few years, including the Department of Homeless Services, despite a shelter system put to the breaking point by the surge of migrants.
“That was never a conversation from the City Council Speaker,” Adams said to The Post after a Harlem-based event where he endorsed Assemblywoman Inez Dickens in her city council bid on Thursday.