Clarification: Two days after publication of this story, the speaker’s office provided the Daily News with documentation showing that the six no-voting Council members were not outright excluded from the special discretionary spending program. Rather, the funding they requested from the program was at least partially allocated under the names of other members, caucuses or entities. Read more about the speaker’s decision to strip the no-voters’ names from the allocations here.
The City Council passed Mayor Adams’ first municipal government budget in a late-night vote Monday — and a half-dozen members who didn’t support the behemoth spending plan got financially punished for bucking the line.
The record $101.1 billion budget — agreed to by the mayor and the Council on Friday — passed in a 44-to-6 vote shortly after 11 p.m. All six nay votes were cast by progressive Democratic members who lamented what they characterized as the budget’s bloated police spending and insufficient investment in housing, education and social programs.
In a blistering rebuke, Council Speaker Adrienne Adams (D-Queens) excluded the six naysayers from accessing any cash from a special $41.6 million fund she controls that bankrolls pet projects in members’ districts that can include anything from food pantries to youth recreational programs.
Speaking to reporters in the City Hall Rotunda before the vote, Adams would not explain why the no voters got cut from the discretionary program.
But a Council member directly familiar with the matter told the Daily News that the speaker’s effort was deliberate.
“The no votes are getting speaker initiative money cut,” the member said. “You can’t vote no and take the dough.”
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Four of the left-wing members — Chi Osse of Brooklyn, Kristin Richardson Jordan of Harlem, Sandy Nurse of Brooklyn and Alexa Aviles of Brooklyn — either declined to comment or could not be reached Tuesday.
Brooklyn Councilman Charles Barron, one of the other progressives targeted by Adams, told City & State late Monday that the speaker ultimately wasn’t punishing him and the other members.
“We represent hundreds of thousands of people. She’s not punishing us, she’s punishing the people,” Barron told the outlet, which first reported the discretionary discrepancy.
The sixth progressive excluded from the fund, Tiffany Caban of Queens, claimed a Variety Boys & Girls Club in her district was in jeopardy of not receiving an expected $150,000 allocation as a result of the speaker’s move.
“I look forward to working with Council leadership to reverse these cuts to critical services and pillars of our community, so that we can make our city safer and healthier for all New Yorkers,” Caban said.
A seventh member, conservative Democrat Kalman Yeger of Brooklyn, was also left out of the speaker’s special discretionary fund, though he voted for the budget. He could not be reached for comment Tuesday.
The Council’s other 44 members received at least some funds from the $41.6 million pot for projects in their districts.
The speaker’s special fund is separate from the $400,000 each Council member is allocated annually for general discretionary spending in their district.
The $101.1 billion budget, which clocked in as the largest in city history, is the product of months of negotiations between the mayor’s team and the Council, and the six nay-voting members acknowledged they supported many components of the plan.
However, they blasted the decision to keep the NYPD budget effectively flat as compared to last year, noting that they all campaigned on a promise to push for a reduction in police spending.
“Voting ‘no’ on a budget that has some crucial, good things in it isn’t easy,” Osse wrote on Twitter. “However, I ran for office to not backtrack on my promises and vote for a record high NYPD budget.”
The new budget doesn’t take effect until July 1.
Nonetheless, Speaker Adams argued it was necessary to adopt it in the dead of night to make “a statement.”
“We knew what we were up against in trying to come out of this pandemic, keeping our promise to the recovery of the City of New York, and there was no reason to wait anymore and have New Yorkers waiting any longer,” Adams told reporters in the Rotunda.
Mayor Adams, who agreed to drop some of his priorities from the budget during negotiations with the Council, including a push to hire nearly 600 new Department of Correction officers, lauded the late-night passage of the spending plan as a product of collegiality with Council leaders.
“We were able to achieve an early adopted budget because we leaned into areas of agreement, rather than disagreement,” the mayor said in a statement.
