Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s first executive budget proposal pulls off what seems to be a fiscal miracle by closing what in December was projected to be a huge $12 billion budget gap without raising property taxes, dipping into reserves or cutting services.

But the budget is hardly a symbol of fiscal rectitude. It relies on billions of dollars in one-shot or short-term money to fund permanent programs, it stretches out pension payments so the next generation will pay for the retirements of present-day workers and it projects a $7 billion deficit for the 2028 fiscal year that will need to be closed just one year from now.

One sign of the problem: The mayor did not mention the deficits in future budgets in his presentation Tuesday of the $124.7 billion budget. Fiscal experts say they do not remember a time when a mayor didn’t acknowledge future year problems.

“Unlike pickles, budget balancing strategies aren’t good when they are half sour,” said Andrew Rein, president of the Citizens Budget Commission.

The executive budget is the penultimate step in the city’s budget process and kicks off negotiations with the City Council with a final budget agreement due by June 30. 

Historically, the Council adds money to the budget, usually about $500 million each year, but the mayor appears to be trying to avoid that by increasing money for parks, libraries and CUNY, which are usually the top of the council’s priority list.

The mayor was able to close the budget deficit because Gov. Kathy Hochul both provided billions of dollars in additional funds — including authorizing a new pied-à-terre tax  on luxury second homes — and delayed a costly mandate for the city to reduce class sizes.

Much of the money is short-term. 

For example, the governor has promised $1.6 billion for only the first two years of the rollout of Pre-K for three-year-olds and expansion of the slots for four-year-olds. There is no money for future years when the program is expected to be growing rapidly.

Other so-called one-shots — meaning revenue for only one year is being used to support spending that is expected to continue in the future — include something called budget accruals.

The administration says it’s found $1.2 billion in money the city had set aside to pay old expenses that it won’t need to use for that purpose. The money will be used in 2027 to balance the budget — but it won’t be available in future years.

One-shots amount to $2.8 billion, Comptroller Mark Levine estimates, one major factor in why the budget deficit for the 2028 fiscal year is still so large.

The savings for delaying pension payments is particularly egregious for people who care about best budget practices. Unlike the state, whose pension system is fully funded because it makes the required payments each year, the city needs to deposit extra money each year to make up for years when it did not fully meet its obligations.

The pension deal agreed to by the mayor and the governor evens out volatile annual payments to allow more predictable budgeting. But it also stretches those extra payments out into the future, saving $2.3 billion in next year’s budget.

“Extending the amortization period for pension payments creates a debt that’s more expensive than muni bonds,” William Glasgall, an expert in public finances at the Volcker Alliance, said, referring to municipal bonds. Taxpayers will be footing the bill for today’s savings well into the 2030s.

What this budget does by relying on short-term fixes is set up yet another push for the mayor’s campaign promises to tax the rich next year, after the mid-term elections. 

Hochul is up for reelection in November, while the local impact of President Donald Trump’s signature tax bill will really start hitting home in 2027.

“We have known ever since the child care funding announcement that we will need future revenues,” said Emily Eisner, interim director of the progressive Fiscal Policy Institute, which has been aggressively supporting tax increases. “The governor is interested in avoiding taxes in a significant way before November but they are more likely after the election, especially since the major strains from the One Big Beautiful Bill don’t hit until next year.”

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Mayor Zohran Mamdani dropped his threat to hike property taxes as a way to close the budget gap after Gov. Kathy Hochul promised additional aid for his $124.5 billion spending plan.

The city budget includes an additional $4 billion in support to close the gap, totaling nearly $8 billion over two years.

That money is through $352 million in direct aid, $3.2 billion from programs that require state authorization and $500 million in new revenue — enough to close the $12 billion budget gap for the next two fiscal years that Mamdani inherited from his predecessor.

“I am proud to announce that we have closed the gap entirely, down to zero,” the mayor said at a press conference Tuesday.

“It hasn’t been easy but we have balanced the budget and we have done so without placing the burden on the backs of working New Yorkers.”

The mayor thanked Hochul, State Senate Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, State Assembly Majority Carl Heastie and Council Speaker Julie Menin for their help and partnership, along with “the movement that carried us to City Hall.”

The budget, he said, “is evidence of a new era of government in our city, one that can balance both ambition and fiscal responsibility.”

The mayor’s budget manages to close a $5.6 billion shortfall for this fiscal year and an estimated $7 billion gap for next year without new income taxes for the wealthy and for corporations that he had demanded from Albany, and without raiding the city’s financial reserves. 

Jabs at the Wealthy

But Mamdani said they are taxing the rich through other changes, like a pied-à-terre tax on luxury second homes that is estimated to bring in $500 million in new revenue. 

There is also a proposal to reduce the Unincorporated Business Tax credit, known as UBT, which he noted mostly benefits millionaires. Reducing the tax credit will bring in an estimated $68 million, according to the mayor. 

“These are common sense measures,” he said. “Working New Yorkers cannot be asked to sacrifice as we sit in the wealthiest city in the wealthiest country in the history of the world.”

Pension Moves

Other revenue and savings comes from the state taking over expenses that shifted to the city years ago, like line of duty death benefits for families of first responders killed on the job, saving the city $202 million. There’s also an additional $600 million in youth programming and $300 million to restore money for sales tax intercepts.

The city will also seek state approval for pension amortization, which could save more than $2 billion by restructuring some payments over the next two years, which Mamdani assured wouldn’t affect benefits for current or retired city workers.

“I think there’s a logic to smoothing out payments,” city Comptroller Mark Levine said Tuesday morning after a budget briefing with the mayor and his team. 

“I think it’s easier to plan for the long term when you have a smooth payment schedule.”

More than $1 billion in savings comes through a delay in the state’s mandated cap on class sizes which would require hiring more teachers and administrators. Last year, the city approved hiring 3,700 more teachers and 100 more assistant principals.

Mamdani added more money to hire 1,000 additional teachers and $1.5 billion to the $7.6 billion existing budget for the School Construction Authority’s five-year capital plan.

The mayor is also working to rein in spending on some students whose private school tuition is paid for by the city when it’s found they can’t receive the same special education services at public schools. 

The cost of what’s known as “Carter” and “Connors” cases – depending on how the money is paid out – has increased 300% over the last decade, according to data obtained by Chalkbeat. Tuition costs can go as high as $144,000 per student.

To address this rising number of students, the Department of Education will invest more money in special education needs, like speech and occupational therapy, the mayor said.

Another major rising cost to the city’s budget is housing vouchers, specifically through the City Fighting Homelessness and Eviction Prevention Supplement, or FHEPS, program. 

The mayor is fighting a legal battle against implementing a package of laws the City Council passed in 2023 to expand eligibility for the vouchers. He promised to put the laws into effect as a candidate, but reversed once he took office due to budget pressures. 

Around 68,000 households rely on CityFHEPS vouchers, while another 47,000 could end up depending on the program if it’s expanded.

Mamdani plans to save $519 million within CityFHEPS, mostly through administrative changes, he said. 

The mayor announced new spending in his budget, including $40 million for the Office of Community Safety and $26 million towards hate crime prevention.

‘Conservative’ on New Spending

Levine, the comptroller, said there was a lot of “good news in this budget” but he was still cautious.

“We are entering into very uncertain economic times because of the threat of a recession and the impact of AI, and I want us to build a very strong fiscal foundation that grows reserves,” he said.

“There still is a reliance on a number of one-shot measures, and those are tools that are then going to be off the table next year. And we are looking at about a $7 billion shortfall for the following fiscal year.”

Levine did praise the mayor for his “pretty modest” additional spending.

Some of the additional money includes $31.7 million to the three library systems, $15 million to the Parks Department, $10 million to cultural organizations and $15 million to the City University of New York.

“It’s been a while since we’ve seen a mayor be this conservative on new spending,” Levine said about the spending. “It reflects why we’re in a better place today than we were in February.”

Mamdani had floated a property tax increase as a last-resort option to raise money to fill the gap, as Gov. Hochul continued to resist raising taxes.

Raising the property tax rate, which has not been done since Mayor Michael Bloomberg, is one of the few levers the mayor has to raise revenue. It was met with immediate backlash and was unlikely to pass in the Council. 

Hochul’s help to the city benefits the whole state, she said at an unrelated event Monday.

“He inherited a pretty significant financial mess,” Hochul said. 

Public Advocate Jumaane Williams took a cautious approach to the promised state aid.

“I think until that budget is passed, you don’t know if all that money is real,” he said following his briefing.

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A month before the first World Cup soccer match takes place at Met Life Stadium across the Hudson River, only 25% of the available rooms in New York City hotels have been booked for the six weeks when matches will be held.

FIFA says demand is unprecedented and that every one of the 104 matches across the country will be sold out, even as it continues to release tickets as match days approach. Meanwhile, resale prices for every match are falling in a sign of weak demand.

The sky high cost of actually getting to Met Life stadium and rapidly rising air fares as a result of the Iran war are two more blows to the event’s prospects.

The result is that an economic boost that FIFA claimed would exceed $3 billion for the New York area is likely to fall well short, leaving the city to spend far more on managing the event than it will receive in tax revenue and economic activity.

“The branding effect of the World Cup was always overstated because New York and New Jersey already have a lot of visibility internationally,” said Danielle Zanzalari, assistant professor of economics at Seton Hall University. “Places like Cincinnati and Kansas City would benefit more from the international exposure.”

No one has a single explanation for the disappointing hotel bookings and weak demand. High prices are one factor. A seat purchased directly from FIFA for the first match on June 13 for the lower bowl — where the views of the field are the best — originally cost $640, when the teams that would be playing had yet to be announced.

In the last two weeks, resale prices for that match between two highly ranked teams, Brazil and Morocco, have fallen by 9%, according to TicketData.com, which tracks that market.

Another complication is the unprecedented plan for the World Cup to hold matches in three countries — the United States, Mexico and Canada — which may be depressing visitors, says Julie Coker, CEO of New York City Tourism + Conventions.

“We can’t ignore the broader environment,” added Virginia Maloney, the chair of the City Council’s economic development committee, which has held hearings on the World Cup. The war with Iran has made international travelers nervous and the Trump administration has made it difficult for visitors from many countries to get visas.

Big events like the World Cup or the Olympics need to generate enough demand that they  overcome the loss of tourists who avoid that city because of high prices or fears of overcrowding. But biggest declines in occupancy compared with 2025 occur on the eight days of matches being held at Met Life, showing that tourists are especially avoiding New York on those days.

According to CoStar, which tracks hotel occupancy and room rates, only a third of New York City rooms are spoken for on June 13 — 12 percentage points below the year ago. Even for the much anticipated World Cup final on July19, only 20% of rooms are taken.

Those vacancies will take a toll on the city budget – which is already in the grip of a $5.6 billion shortfall.

Earlier this spring, city Comptroller Mark Levine estimated that even if FIFA’s prediction that 1.2 million people would visit New York for the event came true, the additional tax revenue would be no more than $55 million, while the city is expected to spend $70 million in additional costs for the NYPD, emergency management, and small business support. 

If the number of visitors falls short, the gap between added tax revenue and costs will widen.

Councilmember Maloney notes that legislation pending in Albany that would allow bars and restaurants to expand outdoor activities during the matches could help increase economic activity. She is also lobbying the Mandani administration to reconsider a policy that will restrict some event permits for city parks during the six weeks of the World Cup, which was instituted to conserve police resources.

“Our neighborhood-level, community-run, often free programming that serves the people who live here has been shut out in the process,” she said in a letter to the mayor and police commissioner. “Give New Yorkers back their summer.”

Some officials like Coker note that New York is actually doing better than other host cities in terms of rooms booked and she says the trend is improving. “In March, we were down 11 percentage points for those weeks compared to 2025. Now we are down only 6 percentage points,” she told THE CITY.

Hotels have begun to reduce rates. The bellwether Midtown Hilton on Sixth Avenue is currently asking $490 a night for its least expensive room for the four days before the first match on June 13, down from $533 a month ago. It is not sold out.

City Hall didn’t return a mesage seeking comment. 

In the meantime, even those who purchased tickets are waiting for FIFA to send them the actual tickets – with their actual seat numbers — and, with no parking at Met Life and a rail ticket to Met Life from Penn Station costing $110 a person, wondering what they are in for and how much it will cost.

“My spouse is going to the June 16 match and he’s not even sure how to get there,” said Zanzalari, who lives in Summit, N.J. — which is only 20 miles from the stadium.

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This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.

As Mayor Zohran Mamdani scrambles to plug a multi-billion dollar budget gap, his administration is looking more closely at the money New York City spends on private school tuition for students with disabilities.

The payments — which topped $723 million last school year, up more than 300% from a decade earlier, according to the Independent Budget Office — have long generated intense debate about which families are benefitting. Now, according to data the Education Department previously declined to share, officials have revealed a staggering inequity: The vast majority of students who have access to that money are white.

Families may receive funding for private school tuition after going through a legal process to show their children can’t be adequately served in the public school system. Nearly 71% of students who won tuition payments last school year were white, a population that makes up 12.5% of students with disabilities in the city’s public schools, according to Education Department data that the City Council pushed the agency to disclose last year.

Black and Latino children, who make up about 75% of students with disabilities, represented just 24% of children receiving tuition reimbursements. (About 1 in 5 families did not disclose their race.) The families who benefit from those tuition payments are also much more likely to live in wealthier zip codes, the data confirms.

The statistics may add fuel to the debate about how to make the special education system fairer and rein in growing costs, an issue that has drawn scrutiny in recent months. Many families say the tuition payments are a lifeline, helping them secure specialized instruction they couldn’t otherwise get in the public system. Last school year, the city made tuition payments on behalf of nearly 7,600 students, which cost roughly $100,000 per child on average, city officials said.

Those students have disabilities that range from dyslexia to more complex challenges. About one-third of students who benefit from tuition payments have autism; their tuition costs are about $144,000 a year on average, officials said.

Families of color and those who live in higher-poverty neighborhoods are often shut out of the reimbursement process. Caregivers may not know they are eligible for private placements funded by the city, have legal help to file the necessary claim, or secure outside evaluations to bolster their case for a private school placement.

“The people who have the resources can afford better representation and have better opportunities to engage the legal system,” said Nelson Mar, an attorney at Bronx Legal Services, which handles special education cases for low-income families. “This is what plays out in the legal system in America.”

Private schools often expect families to pay for some tuition costs up front while their legal claim plays out, a strain even on more affluent households. Those are known as “Carter cases” named for a U.S. Supreme Court decision that affirmed the right to those payments.

Low-income families can request that the payments go directly to the private school without the family paying up front, which are known as “Connors cases.” But those opportunities can be limited because “there’s only a few schools that are willing to really take on that type of risk,” Mar said, noting the family may not end up winning their legal case for payments.

In addition to those tuition cases, state law also requires the city to pay for services such as speech therapy and tutoring for students who attend private schools and never considered a public school. Those families aren’t eligible for tuition payments and are excluded from the racial demographic data in this story.

Including the payments for those services, which officials said costs roughly $400 million, the city now pays well over $1 billion a year on tuition and services for students in private schools — roughly $1 in every $40 of the Education Department’s budget.

The city is attempting to tackle the rising cost of services for students in private schools who aren’t seeking tuition payments in part by instituting “fraud controls” to deal with providers who have reportedly billed for services that were unnecessary or weren’t delivered, said Liz Vladeck, the Education Department’s top lawyer. (Many of those services are provided in neighborhoods with large Orthodox Jewish populations where many students attend yeshivas.)

Budget Crunch

The exponentially rising cost of private school special education has attracted attention from City Hall as Mamdani scrambles to fill a projected $5.4 billion gap in the city’s budget.

In a bid to secure more funding from the state to help ease the deficit, city officials have floated private school payments as a potential area for savings, a spokesperson for Gov. Kathy Hochul confirmed.

Vladeck declined to comment on the specifics of those negotiations in an interview with Chalkbeat, but said she is troubled by the racial inequities and growing costs.

“I see it as an urgent problem,” she said, “that’s very challenging for policymakers to get their arms around because it is complicated.”

City officials say they can save money by educating a greater share of students in private placements in the city’s public schools, a promise officials across multiple administrations have made even as tuition costs have continued to grow.

“It used to be a fair critique that special education programs and services in New York City public schools were spotty,” Vladeck said. But she stressed that the city’s compliance with students’ special education learning plans has improved, and the Education Department has incrementally expanded programs for students with disabilities, including those with autism. The city is also overhauling literacy instruction, including for struggling readers.

Vladeck contends the city’s programs can cost dramatically less than what private programs charge and that private schools generally don’t share achievement data, making it difficult to know if they are more effective.

Will Mamdani Take Action?

It remains to be seen how Mamdani will approach the issue and past mayors have taken radically divergent approaches.

Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg hired an army of lawyers to fight tuition reimbursement requests, which are adjudicated by administrative judges. The goal was to avoid unnecessary placements and plow more money into the public school system as a whole, but the strategy drew criticism from parents and advocates.

His successor, Bill de Blasio, took a less aggressive stance. In response to pressure from lawmakers, he made it easier for parents to seek reimbursement from the city in part by settling cases and not fighting families over the same school placements year after year. He framed the effort as a matter of equity for parents who may not have the resources to repeatedly mount aggressive legal cases.

“That was well intentioned, but it had some pretty damning consequences,” Vladeck said at a City Council hearing in March. In the years that followed, the number of special education complaints seeking payments for tuition, services, and other special education requests grew significantly and costs exploded.

A February report from the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute argued the reimbursement system is “financially unsustainable” and urged rolling back some of the de Blasio-era reforms, among other changes.

But not everyone is convinced that bringing more students with disabilities into the school system would be less expensive without reducing the level of services students get in private programs.

“I really disagree when people say that this is an unreasonable cost for the DOE to bear,” Mar said of the Education Department spending on private school tuition.

His clients who have private tuition paid by the city have generally made “significant growth.” Mar said a more equitable system would be less adversarial, noting the city often fights cases even when it’s clear the student isn’t receiving the help they need.

Brooklyn mom Dolores Swirin-Yao said she would have preferred to keep her son Jeremy, who has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and learning disabilities including dyslexia, in the public school system. When it became clear his public school wasn’t successfully teaching him to read, she felt she had no choice but to consider a private placement and file a legal claim for reimbursement.

“People say that this is a way for people to game the system and get their kids in private school,” Swirin-Yao said. But her son’s public school “seemed to believe that he would never read.” Without that skill, she worried he would end up on public assistance.

Swirin-Yao hired a lawyer and fronted tuition payments, straining to take on $125,000 in debt while waiting for the Education Department to reimburse her. She recognized she still had a leg up: access to credit, the ability to make phone calls during the work day, or take leave to attend a legal hearing. Though her son is Black, Swirin-Yao felt she benefited from being middle class and white.

Jeremy ultimately learned how to read. He graduated from The Aaron School in 2024.

Despite the stress and strain of paying tuition up front, it was “the best investment I ever made,” Swirin-Yao said. “My child was able to graduate from high school, go to culinary school, can work in this field, and has a future.”

Alex Zimmerman is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.

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New York’s first-ever deputy mayor for economic justice says her job is to grow the economy by delivering on Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s agenda for helping those who need it the most.

In: Affordable housing, free childcare and city-owned grocery stores. 

Out: Billions in tax breaks and incentives to big developers and employers, unless they improve the lives of working class New Yorkers.

In a sharp U-turn from policies pursued by mayors for decades, Deputy Mayor Julie Su says priorities that include building 200,000 new apartments and establishing universal child care will create a healthy economy. 

Gone, she says, are the days when city taxpayers helped fund new office developments that sometimes showed little public benefit. 

“Building housing at the scale that we’re talking about is a job creator and an economic engine,” Su said in a wide ranging interview with THE CITY. “Childcare is both an economic generator because when you grow that industry, there’s jobs in that industry and you allow other people to join the workplace.”

The turnabout is clear from the Mamdani administration’s new approach to tax breaks, favoring them only after tougher scrutiny and with provisions for union labor. Su said taxpayer-funded incentives would require “benefits for working class communities,” though she wasn’t more specific on what that might mean.

Mamdani’s agenda is hemmed in by a $5.4 billion budget deficit and Gov. Kathy Hochul’s refusal to go along with his demands for higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations and inflation in New York City outpaces the national rate.

Speaking at City Hall, Su — a former top official in President Joe Biden’s Labor Department — emphasized the need for equity in economic growth. 

“This is a little bit of a crude metaphor, but I think about it as we want everybody to have a real slice of the pie,” she said. “We also want to grow the overall pie, and we want to make sure that the pie is filled with good ingredients that make people healthy and happy.”

That includes possibly implementing the mayor’s campaign pledge to nearly double the minimum wage from its current $17 an hour to $30 over the next several years.

Not on the agenda so far are the kind of direct city investments in industries and neighborhoods that have spurred growth in the past.

In the early 2000s, the Bloomberg administration financed the expansion of the 7 subway to the far west side, provided tax breaks to jumpstart the office and luxury residential district at Hudson Yards, and overhauled the management of the Brooklyn Navy Yard to create a home for light manufacturing. 

Mayor Bill de Blasio offered $5 billion in tax breaks in a failed effort to bring Amazon’s second headquarters to the city and pursued growth outside Manhattan with investments and tax incentives. 

Eric Adams pursued projects like turning the Brooklyn Army Terminal into a center for climate innovation companies, provided millions of dollars to help expand the city’s film studios and relentlessly worked to lure tech companies and universities.

“We believe that all tools should be on the table to attract and retain high-quality, family-supporting jobs in New York City,” Su said. “In the past, tax incentives have enriched those at the top of the economic ladder while depriving the city of critical revenue and often failing to yield tangible benefits for working New Yorkers.”

Of a planned Hudson Yards expansion that relied on another $2 billion in public money, a Mamdani spokesperson said: “We are not actively engaged in negotiations to move this project forward at this time.”

A key indication of Mamdani’s economic policy may be who is named to run the Economic Development Corp., a semi-independent agency that has historically been the spearhead for development efforts. 

Shortly after being appointed, Su wrote a memo that called for the agency to focus on “the quality (not just number) of jobs created for the people who call N.Y.C. home,” The New York Times reported, raising alarm among business leaders. Su declined to say where she stood on filling the job but added that EDC is “firing on all cylinders.”

Business leaders are closely watching who will be appointed.

“Folks are still waiting to see who the administration’s point person on business recruitment and job retention will be,” said James Whelan, the president of the Real Estate Board of New York who worked on economic development in the Bloomberg administration. “If you want a progressive city, you need a prosperous city. Someone needs to pay for the progressivity.”

Ruffled Hedge Fund Feathers

Su, who served as California’s labor secretary before joining the Biden administration, moved to address a growing storm over the mayor’s calling out of billionaire hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin by filming a social media post touting the pied-a-terre tax proposal in front of Griffin’s $238 million Manhattan penthouse.

Griffin’s fund, Citadel, moved hundreds of people to New York from Chicago and is in the process of building a new headquarters on Park Avenue — but a letter to employees last Thursday said it might not move ahead with the plan.

“We are about to commence the redevelopment of 350 Park Avenue, creating 6,000 highly paid construction jobs and supporting the creation of more than 15,000 permanent jobs in mid-town New York,” wrote chief operating officer Gerald Beeson. “The project — if we move forward — will entail more than $6 billion dollars of spending.”

Gov. Hochul announced Tuesday she would meet with Griffin amid continuing media focus on the issue. Su tried to calm the waters in her interview with THE CITY.

“We value Wall Street. We value companies that have made New York City their home,” she said. “We value the job creators who are really fundamental to creating the kind of growth that is required for shared prosperity. And we absolutely welcome the opportunities to work with them to deliver on an economy that works for everybody.”

Su declined to say whether the Administration would support a bill in the City Council to raise the minimum wage, noting uncertainty over whether the city had the power to do that without approval from state legislators.

But she strongly supported the efforts to end what the administration sees as corporate gouging of consumers — especially online. Mamdani has required companies offering online subscriptions provide an easy unsubscribe option, and moved to force hotels to disclose fees more clearly.

Some of Mamdani’s appointees worked for Lina Khan, Biden’s Federal Trade Commission chair, who pursued aggressive regulation of tech companies. Khan has emerged as an important adviser to the mayor, and with the Trump Administration undoing much of their work in Washington, they are attempting to reestablish regulations on the city level.

“If you as a company operate in New York City and your practices, including subscription traps, impact New Yorkers, then we are charged with protecting New York workers and consumers,” Su said. “And we are going to exercise our full authority on that front.”

The mayor has taken two steps to aid small businesses in the city. In January he ordered all city agencies to review regulations affecting small firms that could be reduced or eliminated. He also appointed small business development executive Delia Awusi as his “Mom-and-Pop Czar” to help the smallest of those companies.

Mamdani is far from the first mayor to promise changes.

“I’ve been around for four mayors and all of them promised to reduce fines and fees and didn’t,” said a skeptical Laura Rothrock, president of the Long Island City Partnership.

Su says that the agencies have submitted their list of regulations that could be revised and it is under review. She said she understands the failures that have preceded her but added that this administration will be different — and not just by helping small businesses.

“I have been getting advice that we should tinker at the margins rather than set broad goals that people are going to point at, that you failed at,” she said. “That is not who we are. That is not who this mayor is. We have to prove that government can deliver.”

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Gov. Kathy Hochul on Tuesday shot down a request by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and City Council Speaker Julie Menin to change a tax credit to help fill a $5.4 billion city budget deficit.

Mamdani and Menin had asked state lawmakers to authorize changes to the pass-through entity tax, or PTET, which allows some business people to keep state and local tax deductions that were limited by a 2017 federal tax law. The mayor and speaker said the changes would generate an estimated $1 billion in revenue for the city.

But Hochul said she sees the proposed PTET cut as a personal tax increase. 

“That’s why it’s not happening,” she said at an unrelated event outside Albany. “We’re not changing PTET.”

Menin and Mamdani, appearing in the City Hall rotunda at their the first joint press conference since they began their contentious budget negotiations, also announced an extension of the city budget, which is due May 1, until May 12. The state budget, which was due April 1, is nearly a month late.

“A crisis of this scale cannot be solved without state action,” the mayor said. “Speaker Menin and I have already identified meaningful savings and we will continue that work carefully, deliberately and without cutting the services that New Yorkers rely on. But we cannot do it alone.”

Hochul took issue with that framing.

“What you’re doing is independent of our budget process,” she said. “We don’t have to be done in order for you to do yours. We’re on different timetables.” Cities and towns typically set their budgets after the state budget is completed, so they know how much aid they’ll be getting from Albany. 

“I think it’s crystal clear that we already have helped them,” Hochul said, pointing to $4 billion in assistance the state agreed to provide the city in this budget cycle, as well as the agreement for a new tax on luxury second homes in New York City.

Hochul, who is running for reelection this year, said Mamdani and Menin need “to do what every other city has had to do,” by looking at expenses and identifying the line items growing exponentially. 

To save money, Mamdani has floated holding off on mandates to shrink class sizes and is fighting a lawsuit that would require the city to expand its rental voucher system.

He and Menin also asked the legislature to allow the city to reduce planned payments to the city’s five pension funds that are being made to make up for years of underfunding.

“There is no amount of savings that will absolve Albany from the partnership that’s required to get all of us to a balanced budget by the end of this process,” Mamdani said.

Trump Tax Law Work-Around

The PTET was instituted after the 2017 Trump tax cuts that sharply limited the state and local tax deduction. States like New York allowed people who owned closely held businesses or partnerships to pay state and local income taxes directly from their businesses, preserving the full federal tax deduction.

The state and local income tax payments were the same as if they paid the tax on their personal returns, but their federal taxes would be lower. The Mamdani-Menin plan would amount to a state and local tax increase for those people. The leaders said the proposed PTET change, from a full credit to 75%, would be temporary, though they did not name a timeline.

Mamdani described the PTET as “essentially a loophole that allows high-income earners to reduce their federal tax burden.”

In addition to the PTET changes, Menin and Mamdani also called on Albany to restore state Aid and Incentives to Municipalities funding, which the state stopped during the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009. They said it would amount to about $400 million per year.

Hochul, however, threw cold water on that ask, too, saying the state provides AIM funding for municipalities with property tax caps — and New York City does not have such a cap.

Mayor and Speaker Aligned

Menin and Mamdani’s joint request marks a turning point for the duo, who had been in opposition as city budget negotiations took shape.

The Council slammed the mayor’s last-resort pitch in February to increase property taxes, which would require approval from the 51-member body.  

Mamdani later criticized the Council’s response to his preliminary budget, saying their savings plan – which filled a more than $5 billion deficit without taking from the city’s reserves, finding savings elsewhere – was “unrealistic.”

Still, on Tuesday, the two leaders struck the same note, emphasizing that New York City contributes over 55% of the state’s revenues but gets back 42% in return.

“Despite being the economic engine of the state, the city sends billions of dollars to Albany each year and sends more than it receives in return,” Menin said. “We must finally address this imbalance.”

Greg David and Katie Honan contributed reporting.

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At a recent press conference announcing a sweeping takedown of rival gangs notorious for their wild shootouts across public housing in Brownsville, Brooklyn, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch made a point of praising the NYPD’s controversial gang database.

“Yes we certainly did use the criminal group database as part of this investigation,” Tisch said, using the department’s more ambiguous name for the gang list. Asserting that 60% of all shootings in the city have some nexus to gangs or crews, she said the database “remains a valuable tool in our efforts to keep New Yorkers safe.”

The police commissioner’s enthusiastic support stands in contrast to her boss’s feelings: as a candidate, Mayor Zohran Mamdani repeatedly called for terminating the database entirely, embracing the contention promoted by some criminal justice reform advocates that it targets Black and Hispanic teens and young men.

The mayor recently backed off from his call to pull the plug and now insists the database must be reformed.

While a blueprint for fixing the gang database has been around for years, an analysis by THE CITY found that the NYPD stiff-armed or slow-walked nearly a dozen reforms recommended by the city’s ethics watchdog to address allegations of racial bias.

The database is perhaps the most high profile of several areas where Mamdani and Tisch have dramatically different perspectives. In the past he’s vowed to end a crackdown on lower level quality of life crimes and to eliminate a unit known as the Strategic Response Group that’s been criticized for heavy-handed tactics during protests. Tisch supports both.

In two reports since 2023, the city Department of Investigation suggested 30 reforms aimed at ensuring that people aren’t placed in the gang database without sufficient reason and aren’t kept there when there’s no evidence of continuing gang affiliation.

First DOI recommended that cops provide a clearer explanation of the evidence they use to justify placing someone in the database, a process known as “activation.” And they suggested creating a system to continually review the police justifications and a process for individuals or their parents to appeal inclusion.

While the NYPD adopted some of DOI’s recommendations, with the implementation of several still pending, the department under then-Commissioner Keechant Sewell rejected five outright, including the appeals protocol and changes to how often justifications are reviewed and who gets to review them.

NYPD spokesperson Erika Tannor said the department “continues to work on this and has made very meaningful progress, which DOI itself has unequivocally acknowledged.”

Meanwhile, Tisch has consistently championed the database, calling it a critical weapon to reduce gun crime.

“When we have a shooting in the city, we use the gang database to anticipate where we may see retaliatory violence, and that has helped drive our gun violence down,” she said at a Jan. 6 press conference with Mamdani standing next to her.

A key aspect of that effort is tracking the conversations taking place on social media that document gang beatings and sometimes describe in specific detail a gang’s plan to seek revenge when a member is beaten or shot by a rival.

That was the case with the takedown of two Brownsville gangs Tisch and Brooklyn DA Eric Gonzalez announced April 15, when they unsealed indictments against 36 defendants ranging in age from 16 to 27 alleging felonies from murder to weapons possession.

The Brownsville investigation targeted a gang called WOOO and another called CHOO who for the last three years, prosecutors say, have engaged in a chaotic shooting war around several New York City Housing Authority developments. The grim score to date is 11 victims — including one homicide.

These battles created chaos. 

The DA played security video showing a 69-year-old man taking out his trash who was wounded when gunfire erupted. Another video showed children ducking and running as gang members opened fire across a playground. A cell phone video posted on social media depicted gang members beating up a rival in a plaza near Metrotech Center in downtown Brooklyn.

“This is life,” the poster is heard saying as the video captures his rival beaten and prostrate on the sidewalk.

Tisch noted that, “Of the 36 defendants, every single one of them was entered into that database.”

How It Works

The database consists of people — nearly all of them Black or Hispanic teenagers or young men — identified by law enforcement as gang members. The criteria to justify “activation” includes a subject “self-admitting” gang membership on social media or openly to police. Or, during an investigation, the individual is identified by two independent and reliable sources as a gang member. 

Until recently the department also factored in if the subject frequented “known gang locations,” flashed alleged gang hand signs or displayed gang-affiliated tattoos on social media.

David Sarni, a retired NYPD detective who is now an adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, described the database as a “tool that can help define motivations and relationships.”

The NYPD says monitoring social media chatter is particularly useful in identifying possible planned retaliation and ratcheting up police oversight of gang members making specific threats. 

As Michael Gerber, the deputy commissioner for legal matters, put it during a City Council hearing last year, “If we know from the database that a shooting victim is a gang member, the identities of rival gang members, and where those gangs are based, we can immediately deploy officers in a way that will help prevent retaliatory shootings.”

Sarni noted “activation” required at least two independent sources, and said the activation was supposed to be reviewed regularly to ensure there is evidence of ongoing gang affiliation. Individuals can then either be “renewed” or “deactivated” — that is, taken off the list.

For several years, cops could also see the names of people who had been “de-activated” but, Sarni said, “They stopped that. We don’t keep a person in the system for 50 years.” That modification was in response to DOI’s critiques.

Commissioner Tisch has asserted that information about gang affiliation stored in the database is not used to determine whether there is probable cause to arrest a person. It mainly helps detectives “determine who is involved and where retaliation is most likely to occur,” she has said.

While campaigning last year Mamdani had a very different view, labeling it a “vast dragnet of New Yorkers on the basis of whether they go out late, the photos they put on social media, so much of the facts of life of being a young New Yorker.”

Tattoos and Parades

Last spring the Legal Aid Society and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund filed suit in Brooklyn federal court calling the database racist and alleging it violates free speech, due process and equal protection sections of the Bill of Rights. In December a judge denied the city’s motion to toss the suit but also rejected the plaintiff’s move to declare it a class action on behalf of anyone placed in the database, limiting it to three men named as lead plaintiffs.

The suit alleges that 99% of those placed on the list are Black or Hispanic. And it says that mere placement in the database can be used as justification to stop and question people. 

Reviewing internal documents that detectives must fill out when proposing an individual for inclusion, Legal Aid said that cops have cited everything from “Mexican tattoos” to what they described as “cultural touchstones such as common gestures used by Black athletes” or “being present at the Puerto Rican Day parade.”

In the past, the list has included children as young as 11, the lawsuit says.

“It’s basically youth behaviour,” said Legal Aid staff attorney Rigodis Appling. “Youth culture is youth culture. If this were a white suburb doing these things, they would not be put on a gang database.” Juveniles make up 2.7% of the current database.

The Legal Aid Society, whose union urged Mamdani not to reappoint Tisch, says the database can’t be fixed  and that reforms the NYPD has claimed to have adopted are incremental and meaningless.

The Department of Investigation’s April 2023 and October 2025 reports on the database make clear the NYPD has moved slowly to adopt proposed fixes, rejecting some recommendations outright. 

The 2023 report submitted by NYPD Inspector General Jeanene Barrett to then-Police Commissioner Sewell examined what evidence the NYPD used to justify placing 493 people on the list and found the nature and documentation of individuals “self-admitting” to gang membership “varied widely.”

DOI noted that some social media postings cited to justify “activation” were “cursory, conclusory and failed to include sufficient detail to support” self-admission to a gang. Examples included cops relying on “certain emojis,” or “photos of individuals in the company of known gang members without more detail.” Some cops noted “social media content” with zero information on the nature of the content.

In 136 cases, cops “activated” individuals based on what they described as “two sources” but did not always “document the existence of two independent sources.” The report found cops in some cases simply designated entire Housing Authority developments as a “gang location.”

The NYPD under Commissioner Sewell agreed in principle to accept 11 recommendations, but rejected five outright, including drafting a written policy requiring all “activated” entries be reviewed every 12 months for teens under 18 and every 18 months for adults. The department said a review every two years for teens and every three years for adults was sufficient.

The NYPD also rejected DOI’s suggestion to create a panel to review all activations, and shot down a suggestion to create an appeals process for parents if their teens have no law enforcement contact for a year, contending it could compromise investigations and endanger informants.

The department at first rejected DOI’s request to let individuals file a public records request to see if they’re on the list, but relented after the Legal Aid Society threatened legal action.

In a second review in October, Investigations Commissioner Jocelyn Strauber found the NYPD had “made substantial improvements” but had not fully adopted five recommendations.

DOI noted, for example, that while the NYPD had initiated review of “activation,” there was still no supervisory oversight of renewals and deactivations. Last week the NYPD told THE CITY it is working on fixing this. 

While DOI recommended cops provide a detailed narrative explaining the justification for putting someone in the database, DOI found police continued to use “boilerplate language” to describe the source’s “reasonable belief” that the subject was a gang member. 

Now, NYPD spokesperson Tannor said, “Department policy has been updated to require that an individual’s reasonable belief must be supported by substantive explanations that the individual is a member of a criminal group.” 

“We have previously acknowledged that our process for making juvenile notifications was deficient,” Tannor said. “We are working to fix that.”

DOI also noted that sealed arrests aren’t supposed to be used to justify placement in the database, but found NYPD was still listing the top charge of sealed arrests in complaints to justify “activation.” This policy “is being updated,” the department said.

In its October report, DOI made 13 new recommendations, and in January NYPD agreed to accept all “in principle.” The NYPD said they should be in place by July. 

In February, nearly three years after DOI’s first report, the NYPD issued the biggest change to its gang database, embracing new protocols that eliminated many of the criteria cops had been using to justify “activation.” 

The department says it no longer uses categories such as “frequent presence at a known criminal group location” or “association with known criminal group members.” Scars and tattoos “associated with a particular criminal group” are no longer enough, nor is “frequent wearing of the colors” and “frequent use of hand signs associated with particular criminal groups.”

And they note that the number of people in the database has dropped from 18,000 in 2019 to its current 7,700 — a 58% drop. The number of juveniles fell from 440 to 209.

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Mayor Zohran Mamdani vetoed a controversial bill approved by the City Council last month instructing the police department to establish anti-protest “buffer zones” around schools and educational institutions.

A related bill calling for security perimeters around houses of worship passed by a veto-proof majority.

In a statement Friday, the mayor said he had reviewed both bills but found the one for education institutions “meaningfully different.” 

“The problem is how widely this bill defines an educational institution and the constitutional concerns it raises regarding New Yorkers’ fundamental right to protest,” he said in the statement. “As the bill is written, everywhere from universities to museums to teaching hospitals could face restrictions.”

Mamdani’s statement echoed the concerns of labor groups and other allies who said many buildings could technically be considered an educational facility, further limiting protests.

Speaker Julie Menin, a moderate Democrat, pushed for both bills, saying they were needed to combat rising antisemitism. She and her allies have said the so-called “buffer zone” proposals are meant to provide greater accountability in the NYPD’s protest protocols, and won’t infringe on free speech rights.

In a statement Friday, Menin said the purpose of the bill was safety.

“Ensuring students can enter and exit their schools without fear of harassment or intimidation should not be controversial,” she said. “This bill simply requires the NYPD to clearly outline how it will ensure safe access when there are threats of obstruction or physical injury, while fully protecting First Amendment rights.”

The veto is the latest confrontation between Mamdani and the Council, with the most recent being over the city’s contentious budget negotiations. 

The Council can attempt to override Mamdani’s veto in a new vote, or let it stand.

United Auto Workers Region 9A, which fiercely opposed the bill, sent a message to its members Friday morning taking credit for the veto and said it would begin whipping Council members to make sure any re-vote fails. The union represents thousands of educators and researchers at Columbia University and New York University.

Menin, the memo read, “is potentially going to attempt to override the veto by flipping multiple council votes.”

“We will begin a whipping strategy with Council members in the next week but for now, the most important thing is an overwhelming display of public support for this veto.”

The religious sites bill passed 44 to 5, a veto-proof majority, but the schools buffer-zone bill passed by a 30 to 19 margin.

Despite the overwhelming Council majority that supported the bill affecting places of worship, Mamdani, speaking in a social media video, portrayed his decision not to veto it as a matter of principle, adding that he nevertheless disagreed with “its framing of all protests as a security concern.”

In recent weeks, labor and community groups closely aligned with Mamdani have urged him to veto the bill, known as Intro 175, saying that it threatens free speech and worker rights. Legal groups including the New York Civil Liberties Union also strongly opposed the measure. 

Menin’s bills came as an answer to the widely-criticized police response to protesters who picketed the Park East Synagogue, which had rented space to an organization that helps Jews move to Israel and to settlements on the occupied West Bank, as well as the 2024 pro-Palestine encampments on college campuses.

A consortium of prominent Jewish organizations including the UJA-Federation of New York rebuked Mamdani on Friday, calling the planned veto “a profound failure of City Hall to demonstrate to all New Yorkers that our safety is a priority.”

On April 17, a representative of Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su met with leaders of more than a dozen unions and the New York City Central Labor Council who pushed for a veto.

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City Hall officials met last week with union and labor leaders who are pushing Mayor Zohran Mamdani to veto a controversial City Council bill that would establish anti-protest “buffer zones” around schools and educational facilities.

A representative of Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su met via video call with leaders of more than a half a dozen unions and the New York City Central Labor Council, according to multiple sources who were at the meeting or briefed on the talks. 

Su’s representative gave no indication whether Mamdani would issue a veto, according to multiple sources. Last month the Council approved two bills creating protest “buffer zones,” one affecting houses of worship and the other targeting schools and “educational facilities.” 

“Mayor Mamdani is aware of the concerns raised regarding the potential for 175-B to limit the constitutional and labor rights of New Yorkers,” City Hall press secretary Joe Calvello said in a statement on Thursday, referring to the bill’s formal designation. “The Mayor will weigh these concerns seriously as he makes a final decision on this legislation.” 

The meeting came amid a growing pressure campaign from labor and other allies of Mamdani to veto the bill. Last week, several labor and community groups sent a letter urging him to veto the bill, describing it as a “radical overreach” that limits free speech and endangers New Yorkers.

Mamdani Faces Saturday Deadline

The two so-called “buffer zone” bills passed March 26 with the goal of targeting hate crimes across the city, with one bill related to religious sites and the other for schools and education facilities. The bills require the police department to create security perimeters during protests – instructing the NYPD to establish how far away the buffer zones would place demonstrators. 

Two unions that represent large numbers of college and university teaching staff — United Auto Workers Region 9A and Professional Staff Congress/CUNY — are leading the opposition to the bills, claiming that they would restrict their rights to strike or protest in their workplace.

The religious sites bill passed 44 to 5, a veto-proof majority, but the schools buffer-zone bill passed by a 30 to 19 margin — which the mayor could more likely successfully veto. 

Under the city charter, Mamdani has until Saturday to veto the bill or officially sign it into law. If he does neither, it automatically becomes law. 

A spokesperson, Dora Pekec, said Wednesday there was no update to what the mayor would do. 

Council Speaker Julie Menin, a moderate Democrat, pushed for the legislation as part of her efforts to combat antisemitism. She and her allies have maintained that the so-called “buffer zone” proposals are meant to provide greater accountability to the police department’s protest protocols, not to infringe on free speech rights.

Her proposals came as a response to the police’s widely-criticized response to protesters who picketed the Park East Synagogue, which had rented space to an organization that helps Jews move to Israel and to settlements on the occupied West Bank, as well as the 2024 pro-Palestine encampments on college campuses.

The New York Civil Liberties Union and other legal organizations say the bills are Constitutionally dubious.

Menin, speaking at the 92Y in Manhattan on Wednesday evening at an event on “the future of being Jewish in New York,” defended the bills and warned of a potential mayoral veto, City & State reported.

“I really hope that there is not a veto of that legislation, because I think that will lead to more divisiveness when we need less divisiveness,” Menin said.

Labor and community group leaders told THE CITY they were lobbying Council members who voted for the schools bill to change sides in a future vote to override a veto, sending nearly 11,000 emails to the mayor and Council members.

Representatives from multiple unions who met with Su’s team on April 17 expressed a variety of concerns about the bill, including the vagueness around what could be considered an “educational facility,” sources told THE CITY.

THE CITY reached out to several unions who attended the virtual meeting with the deputy mayor’s team. None agreed to comment on the meeting, citing the confidential nature of the conversations. The New York City Central Labor Council also declined to comment.

But some, in addition to the UAW and PSC-CUNY, have gone public with their opposition.

Representatives from healthcare unions, including the Committee of Interns and Residents-SEIU and 1199 SEIU, are among those calling on the mayor to veto the schools bill. They say many teaching hospitals where their members work could technically fall under the bill’s scope — meaning members would be barred from rallying outside in the case of a strike or other union action.

Teamsters Local 804, which represents UPS and Amazon truck drivers, has also called on a veto.

However there is no consensus among labor. 

Kevin Elkins, political director of the carpenters’ union, told THE CITY that his union does not oppose the buffer-zone bills. He said the bills allow the Mamdani administration the ability to implement the buffer zones as it sees fit, and that the union trusts the mayor’s commitment to protect worker and free speech rights.

“I think the mayor has demonstrated his commitment to labor several times over at this point, so I have full confidence in his administration’s ability to do that justly,” Elkins said.

Jewish and Catholic Leaders Voice Support

Religious organizations who favor buffer zones around schools also send their own letters to Mamdani.

“Schools are not just buildings, they are spaces where children should feel safe, supported, and ready to learn,” the letter said. “When access to those spaces is compromised, the impact is immediate and serious.”

The letter was signed by Jewish school leaders as well as the superintendents of schools within the Catholic Archdiocese of New York and the Diocese of Brooklyn, which covers nearly 150 schools across the five boroughs. 

Disclosure: Irizarry Aponte is a PSC-CUNY member in her role as an adjunct instructor at the Craig Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY.

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On a breezy Monday morning on a quiet corner of Queens, 11 leafy new neighbors arrived on a truck, fresh from a nursery in Kansas City.

Elm, red maple and cherry trees — some with pink blossoms — would be planted next to the sidewalks across a few blocks of Cambria Heights, a suburban-style neighborhood of homes with grassy front lawns. 

As workers hoisted a tree out of a bag surrounding its roots, a woman with a phone to her ear leaving a nearby house called out to ask what kind of tree the workers were planting: an elm that would grow to be up to 70 feet tall over the next three to four decades.

“Adding to the family!” she exclaimed, grinning, before getting into a car.

Cambria Heights is among the neighborhoods with the highest risks of extreme heat, where temperatures are hotter than the city’s average and where some blocks lack any trees. 

Monday’s tree-planting session came as part of a strategy in its second year that prioritizes putting new trees in the neighborhoods most vulnerable to extreme heat, rather than in response to ad hoc 311 requests, as had been done in years past. 

And planting those trees took on a particular significance as the Mamdani administration on Tuesday released a plan to expand the tree canopy to cover 30% of the city by 2040.

“To reach this 30% goal, it’s going to take work from every actor in the entire city,” said Jessica Einhorn, chief of forestry programs at the Department of Parks and Recreation. “This program planting trees, especially in the high [heat vulnerable] neighborhoods, is really critical towards that equity angle.”

In those riskier areas, the tree canopy — or the area of the city currently covered by trees and their leaves — currently stands at 19%, compared to about 26% in others, city Chief Climate Officer Louise Yeung told the City Council in March. (Overall, tree canopy covers just over 23% of the boroughs according to the last count in 2021. That was after a net increase of 1.2% since 2017.)

Trees across the city serve more than an aesthetic purpose — they add to the health and resiliency of a neighborhood. Areas with a robust tree canopy and vegetation have shown to be slightly to significantly cooler compared to places where green space is scarce and pavement is plentiful. Trees also help to purify air and can reduce water runoff to mitigate flooding. 

And their value as heat-regulators will only increase in the near future.

By the 2040s — the due date for the 30% canopy goal — New York City’s temperatures could be between nearly 3 and 6 degrees hotter due to the effects of climate change, according to the New York City Panel on Climate Change. Heat is dangerous: it contributes to the deaths of over 500 New Yorkers on average each year, with Black New Yorkers twice as likely to die compared to whites.

The city already experiences the urban heat island effect, meaning it’s hotter because of the density, pavement and tall buildings than elsewhere. But some areas are significantly greener and cooler than others, while other neighborhoods are more vulnerable to heat based on a combination of physical factors — like existing trees — and social considerations, like residents’ income and access to air conditioning.

The Parks Department’s tree-planting strategy, announced in 2024, does away with the system where anyone can call 311 to ask for a new tree — except for the loophole New Yorkers can make a $1,800 donation to do so, as previously reported by THE CITY.

The new system instead divides the city into more than 400 zones, planting trees in every viable place within a zone while removing stumps and dying trees. 

Each community board district will have a zone serviced every three years, and Parks plans to hit all zones every nine years. (Here’s a tentative schedule of tree-planting locations.) The most heat-vulnerable neighborhoods are on track to be completed by the end of 2027, Yeung said.

Money Grows Trees

Mamdani’s plan is the first time the city has set a target date for the goal of a 30% canopy. But critically, the money to pay for it has not been committed.

“Many of the actions in the plan rely on existing program budgets and aim to ensure that we are spending smarter,” City Hall spokesperson Jessica Woolford said in a statement. “We are creatively leveraging funds from government and private sources to advance our shared goals.”

City Hall did not offer its own estimate for the cost. But according to a 2022 estimate from a local environmental advocacy group, it would cost about $500 million to plant a million trees and achieve its canopy goal.

“The plan is great, but what comes after is the most critical part,” said Shravanthi Kanekal, a resiliency planner at the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance. “It’s going to signal a whole lot to see how much they dedicate funding to the plan.”

Though as a candidate, Mamdani promised to dedicate 1% of the budget to the Department of Parks and Recreation, his preliminary budget this year proposed spending just half of that — cutting nearly $34 million from the department’s budget in the current fiscal year.

“I’m really glad to see the city set a goal of 2040, and I think what we’ve been looking to is how to further accelerate achieving that goal,” said Tami Lin-Moges, director of the cities program at the Nature Conservancy. “But obviously that really relies on increased investments. … Investing in parks and the urban forest is an investment in livability in New York City.”

Greening the city so almost a third of it has tree canopy will require money, manpower and shoring up interest from New Yorkers, said Simon Skinner, chief of programs and operations at the New York Restoration Project.

He pointed to the successful initiative to plant a million trees that the Bloomberg administration launched in 2007. It took eight years, short of the decade expected. 

“It shows it’s possible,” Skinner said. “Everyone was pulling in the same direction because it was such a big initiative coming from City Hall.”

Skinner said several agencies coordinated to prioritize the goal as private landowners got involved, and the government and its partners educated kids and adults on tree planting and stewardship. 

In Cambria Heights on Monday, interactions with neighbors showed some of the challenges the city may face as it reaches for the goal; not everyone was happy about the newly rooted neighbors.

Derrick Simmons, a long-time resident of a nearby block, stopped by to talk to the Parks workers about the problems he’s had with trees.

“The trees have fallen on different people’s cars. They broke up the sidewalks,” he said. “I know they said that this is supposed to make the neighborhood more beautiful, and I get that. But of course we got 26 trees. We don’t need any more trees.”

A bit later, another neighbor walked by and said the tree roots were messing with his home’s sewer pipes: “I live on the next block. We got tree-lined streets. It sucks!” 

Navé Strauss, Parks’ director of tree planting, said, “Our mandate is to plant every available location.”

Einhorn said Simmons and his neighbor’s complaints indicated there was a lot that could be done to “increase the connection between people and their trees.” 

“We do as much as we can to care for the trees, but really it’s those blocks where like a property owner or a neighbor will come out and water the tree or maybe plant flowers around that the data shows that those trees are better off than the others,” she said. 

To reach the 30% canopy goal, trees will need to be planted on privately owned property, not just in public parks and on streets, Einhorn said — “and more than anything else is preserving our existing tree canopy.”

That maintenance — pruning, watering, cleaning tree beds and removing invasive vines — is important for trees to thrive and for the canopy to expand. All of those tasks require people to do them, which costs money.

“Obviously it’s sexy and nice to plant a bunch of new trees, but we have to also look after what we already have,” Skinner said. “They have an outsized effect on things like reducing heat and absorbing pollution.”

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