Adams' NYC budget: Same cop count, but more out on patrol

New York City Mayor Eric Adams said Wednesday he would keep the NYPD’s head count at roughly 35,000 cops, under a plan to redeploy some of those from clerical jobs back into patrol and other enforcement duties amid an ongoing crime surge.

Speaking from City Hall, Adams released a $98.5 billion preliminary budget for New York City that provides no new money to the NYPD as the city struggles to contain increasing crime and recover from the coronavirus pandemic's toll on city coffers.

"You can’t have hundreds of police officers doing clerical duties when … shootings are up," the mayor said, adding, "Every man and woman must be on deck with the mission of the police department. I’m not going to taxpayers and say, ‘let’s spend more of your money when I’m not doing a good job in the agency with what they gave us already.’ We’re going to redeploy our manpower. We’re gonna make sure that everyone who is supposed to be on the streets doing their job, they’re doing their job. Then we will make the analysis if we have to put more money into it."

Agencies are subject to cuts under what is known in municipal budgeting as a "program to eliminate the gap."

The NYPD’s budget for the upcoming fiscal year is proposed to be about $5.1 billion, excluding certain costs like pensions and fringe benefits. It is currently $5.3 billion. Mayor Bill de Blasio raised the NYPD’s budget every year he was in office — which started at $4.7 billion in 2014 — except for one year at the start of the pandemic, when it went down year over year, according to Andrew Rein, president of the business-backed Citizens Budget Commission.

"He’s keeping it relatively flat," Rein said, cautioning that overtime costs typically exceed what’s planned.

"Often the PD blows its overtime budget," he said.

The mayor said he’s worried about the city’s sluggish economy, which had begun to rebound, but has been stymied by the omicron-fueled surge in coronavirus cases beginning late last year. He said white collar offices should require office workers to return in person. Having office workers again would help local businesses in the city and keep people employed, Adams said.

"The best thing we can do to deal with COVID is get back to work! People have to get back to work! You know, we have to see this as, ‘we’re in this together.’ Yes, if you are an accountant, a CPA, yes, you can work from home. But what happens if we lose the low-wage employees? That’s gonna impact your business."

To curb costs, Adams is also proposing to eliminate 7,000 vacant positions under the preliminary budget plan out of over 330,000, Rein said.

The budget Adams proposed on Wednesday is an opening salvo of sorts in the annual negotiations between the mayor and the City Council. Those talks are ongoing until at the latest, the end of June, when the budget needs to be finalized, balanced and adopted by July 1 under fiscal control rules put into place during the city’s fiscal crisis of the 1970s.

When Adams’ immediate predecessor, de Blasio, came into office in 2014, the budget was proposed at $73.7 billion. It ballooned to $102.8 billion at the end of de Blasio's last term.

Still, Rein said, Adams' budget proposal could rise, by hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars, for employee raises that are expired and expiring and need to be negotiated, with almost certain raises.

By Matthew Chayes

matthew.chayes@newsday.comchayesmatthew

Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.