This article originally appeared as an op-ed in the New York Daily News on Jan. 22, 2024

You can’t blame New Yorkers for feeling whipsawed. In the last several months the Adams administration has declared a fiscal emergency and dramatic cuts to essential services, then congratulated itself for restoring some — but not all — of those planned reductions.

Did we really need to get ready to have fewer cops, overflowing litter baskets, and reduced spending on pre-K, afterschool, and other children’s services? Was it necessary to have a dramatic overstatement — and then a recalculation — of the costs of serving the asylum seekers?

Unfortunately, these kinds of theatrics are easy to stage under the city’s current budget process. Blaming bad economic conditions or union intransigence, Bill de Blasio threatened to lay off 22,000 public workers in 2020; in 2011, Mike Bloomberg said he would have to fire some 6,000 teachers and close senior centers; in 1994, Rudy Giuliani warned that 18,000 city workers needed to go to balance the budget.

Yet all these crises were resolved, generally without huge disruptions.

The first act in this telenovela is always the same. As the city is putting together a new budget, it routinely lowballs expected revenue and overestimates planned spending — a strategy pointed out by the Fiscal Policy Institute, among other observers. Even the conservative Manhattan Institute has noted that "city officials have a track record of purposely underestimating projected revenues during the budget process."

The result of this kind of budget planning is that every fiscal year begins with a “gap” of billions of dollars. In years with particular fiscal or political challenges, closing the gap that budgeteers have projected inevitably includes proposals to cut back on services, from public safety to health.

In Act Two, as revenue arrives the administration has to figure out what to do with the money it claimed it wouldn’t have. Rather than pay for services this year, the budgeteers use these funds to pay bills that aren’t due for a year or more — usually interest payments on the city’s debt. In the past 11 years, the city has used this tactic to push approximately $50 billion out of one fiscal year and into the future.

In Act Three, as it negotiates the budget with the City Council, the administration grudgingly admits that the projected gap has been closed by unanticipated revenues, supplemented by the heroic measures it has undertaken to cut costs and generate savings. Before June 30 the Council passes the new budget with some small additions it has negotiated. The yawning gap has been transformed into a substantial surplus — more than $5 billion in the last fiscal year — and the curtain comes down on that year’s budget drama.

This is not just a harmless sideshow. It misleads the public, creates distrust, and forces advocates to focus their energies on maintaining current levels of service, bypassing real debates on budget priorities.

While far from the only public service targeted by this manufactured drama, the city’s library systems are a prominent case in point.

Administrations know that libraries are one of the most popular public services and a favorite of Council members. And although everyone admits the importance of the libraries for children and their families, preliminary city budgets routinely freeze or cut support for them as part of “closing the gap.” This year, as part of the mayor’s first gap-closing program, libraries lost Sunday hours; planned future rounds of cuts would also have eliminated Saturday openings.

Every year parents demonstrate, workers organize. Letters pour in from residents who depend on the libraries. The Council spends time and energy negotiating for increased funding — and there is agreement on an amount that the city had always expected to pay. According to the Council’s budget documents, in fiscal 2023, when the budget was finalized, libraries had gained more than $15 million in additional operating funds and $50 million in capital spending; in previous years the annual restorations and additions ranged from $10 million to $33 million.

The central problem is that the current budget process — developed after the city’s fiscal crisis of the 1970s — allows the mayor to set the terms of the debate. The administration unilaterally determines the spending of billions, while local groups and their representatives struggle over the use of millions of dollars.

After nearly 50 years, New York’s budget process badly needs an update to make it more democratic and more responsive to the needs of groups and communities. The mayor recently announced that he has created a panel of outside experts to help guide his administration on budget issues. Their first recommendation should be to ring down the curtain on this annual budget melodrama and insist that the city make honest projections of future revenues and spending.