Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo may have to forfeit more than $600,000 in public matching funds, the New York City Campaign Finance Board announced Monday, stating it had found reason to believe his mayoral campaign had inappropriately coordinated with an independent expenditure committee that’s spending millions of dollars to boost his campaign.

The preliminary ruling came during a public meeting where the board voted to approve a new round matching funds payments for dozens of candidates for mayor, comptroller, City Council, public advocate and borough president running in the June 24 primary — while denying any funds for mayoral candidates Adrienne Adams, Jessica Ramos and Michael Blake.

For the second time, the board also denied Mayor Eric Adams eligibility for matching funds as he looks toward the November general election as an independent candidate, ratifying last week’s decision by board chair Frederick Schaffer. Schaffer cited the campaign’s failure to cooperate with its investigation of allegedly fraudulent donations.

The mayor’s campaign attorney Vito Pitto didn’t respond to a request for comment. 

Cuomo got approved for his first round of matching funds — minus the $622,056 penalty for alleged coordination with independent expenditure group Fix the City — yielding a net $1.5 million in public dollars .

The board objected to an ad first aired on May 4 and paid for by $622,056 from Fix the City, which is backing Cuomo’s bid for the Democratic primary nomination.

Independent expenditure groups are permitted to raise and spend unlimited sums of money under the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision, but they are barred from coordinating with the campaigns they support. As flagged last month by Politico New York, Cuomo’s campaign used a tactic called “redboxing,” placing an inconspicuous link on its campaign website to messaging and videos intended to be used by the independent expenditure group. 

Investigators with the finance board found the May 4 ad was “not independent of the Cuomo campaign,” according to Richard Davis, a board member. 

“The board’s investigation into this matter is ongoing, and we will continue to evaluate the issue of improper coordination,” Davis said.

The board said Schaffer recused himself from voting on Cuomo’s matching funds “out of an abundance of caution” due to his interactions with then-Gov. Cuomo’s executive chamber in his role as general counsel to the City University of New York (CUNY).

Fix the City has amassed more than $7 million to support Cuomo, drawing heavily on the support of major finance and real estate players including hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, businessman Barry Diller, Related Companies chairman Stephen Ross, Mets owner and casino bidder Steven Cohen and developer Two Trees Management. It’s the most influential outside spending group in the crowded mayoral race, having spent more than $3 million so far to buoy Cuomo’s campaign.

Rich Azzopardi, a spokesperson for Cuomo’s campaign, said they planned to appeal the board’s decision. 

“Our campaign has operated in full compliance with the campaign finance laws and rules, and everything on our website was reviewed and approved by our legal team in advance of publication,” he said, pointing to similar tactics used by mayoral candidate Scott Stringer and comptroller candidate Justin Brannan, as noted in Politico’s coverage. No independent expenditure committees have reported activity in either race so far. 

State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani (D-Queens), a candidate for mayor who is consistently polling second behind Cuomo, slammed Cuomo’s campaign.  

“We don’t need another mayor who thinks the rules don’t apply to him,” he said. 

Mamdani has already pulled in just over $8 million in public and private funds for the June 24 primary, the maximum possible for candidates participating in the public financing program, and has received contributions from more individual donors than any other candidate in the race. 

The Money Race

Also getting public funding for the first time Monday in a run for mayor is former hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson, approved by the board for $1.9 million in public matching funds. State Sen. Zellnor Myrie (D-Brooklyn) and city Comptroller Brad Lander, who previously qualified for matching funds, received several thousand additional dollars in additional payments, bringing them up to $3.5 and $6 million raised respectively in public and private funds. 

Though he didn’t qualify for additional public funding Monday, with $4.5 million in public and private funds Stringer is the third biggest fundraiser after Mamdani and Lander.

But several other candidates have failed to qualify for public funds. With just a month before early voting kicks off, on June 14, they face an increasingly difficult path to victory. 

Among them are City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, State Senator Jessica Ramos and former State Assemblymember Michael Blake. None of them had met the required threshold of $250,000 raised from 1,000 individual donors, the board said. 

Additional reporting by Greg B. Smith.

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This story was originally published by Healthbeat. Sign up for their public health newsletters at healthbeat.org/newsletters.

The impacts of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ sweeping cuts to public health funding in New York state and New York City have started to come into focus, with wide-ranging consequences for disease surveillance and outbreak response, addiction recovery programs, and mental health services.

The state Health Department expects to lose more than $300 million, diminishing its disease surveillance and outbreak response work as it confronts emerging measles cases and the spread of bird flu.

In the past week, at least 50 employees at Health Research Incorporated, a nonprofit affiliate of the department, have been terminated. Meanwhile, the Office of Addiction Services and Supports faces $40 million in cuts, while the Office of Mental Health expects to lose $27 million, and some community organizations are warning of possible layoffs and disruptions to care.

New York Attorney General Letitia James, along with 22 other states and the District of Columbia, filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against HHS and Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., arguing that pulling back more than $11 billion in health funding nationwide violates federal law, endangers Americans’ public health, and leaves states “at greater risk for future pandemics and the spread of otherwise preventable disease.”

The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene faces more than $100 million in cuts to its funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As of Wednesday, the agency has not had any related layoffs, according to spokesperson Chantal Gomez. But the cuts will have a significant impact on the city’s public health work, leaders say.

In a declaration filed in support of James’ lawsuit, Dr. Michelle Morse, the acting commissioner of the city Health Department, said the termination of her agency’s grants will have “far-reaching, devastating consequences,” leaving the city “less prepared to respond to an infectious disease outbreak of any kind.”

At Least 50 Jobs

The HHS cuts to the state Health Department impact a wide range of state public health services, including virus surveillance, disease outbreak response, public-facing dashboards, and the work of preventing infections in hospitals and nursing homes, according to the office of Gov. Kathy Hochul.

“It’s all freaking egregious, and I am pained by the entire thing,” state Sen. Gustavo Rivera, a Bronx Democrat and chair of the Senate Health Committee, said of the sweeping cuts.

At Health Research Incorporated, 23 employees funded through a CDC grant to address Covid-19 health disparities were terminated on Thursday, and another 27 employees funded through the CDC’s Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity program were terminated on Monday, Health Department spokesperson Erin Clary confirmed to Healthbeat.

The cuts to OASAS will diminish addiction and prevention services statewide, likely impacting transitional housing for people leaving residential treatment or correctional facilities and programs making medication for addiction treatment more accessible, according to Hochul’s office. At OMH, the cuts may impact crisis stabilization programs and mobile crisis services, including 9-8-8 crisis call centers, among other programs.

In Albany, the state budget is officially late, with state leaders unable to reach an agreement by Tuesday’s deadline. While reeling from the recent HHS cuts, many New York leaders emphasize that the state will not be able to cover the grant reductions with its own money. No state “has the resources to backfill these sweeping cuts,” Hochul said in a recent statement.

While budget negotiations are ongoing, New York’s finite resources, competing priorities, and the looming threat of deeper funding cuts curtail its ability to replace the lost funds, multiple lawmakers told Healthbeat.

“This is just the tip of the iceberg, what we’ve seen,” said Assembly Member Amy Paulin, a Westchester Democrat and chair of the Assembly Committee on Health. “We expect major cuts to Medicaid, and we don’t know what that’s going to look like.”

Cuts to Funding to Fight Infection Diseases

The CDC’s more than $100 million cut to the New York City Health Department will primarily impact work related to combating infectious diseases, from surveillance systems and outbreak response capacity to local efforts to increase vaccination levels.

The funding reductions affect two types of grants that the Health Department received from the CDC, including through the ELC Program, which provides funding for local health departments to detect, prevent, and respond to disease outbreaks; and through Covid-19 supplemental funding, used to bolster immunization efforts and the surveillance of vaccine-preventable diseases.

The grants were set to expire in 2026 and 2027. At their termination last week, about $91 million of the awarded ELC funding had not yet been claimed, in addition to about $22 million of the Covid-19 supplemental funding, according to Morse’s declaration.

Morse described the loss of the ELC funding as “devastating” to the city’s efforts to rebuild its public health infrastructure after the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic, and its work to prepare for future public health emergencies.

The ELC funding has supported citywide disease surveillance and response efforts, including for measles, varicella, Hepatitis A, influenza, RSV, and foodborne illnesses, according to Morse’s declaration.

The funding is particularly essential for the agency’s ability to respond to disease outbreaks in congregate settings. If an outbreak occurred at a school or group home, for instance, the funding would support agency efforts to create on-site testing and vaccination capacity. In high-risk settings like nursing homes or shelters, the loss of ELC funding “increases the risk of death” for vulnerable populations if a respiratory virus outbreak were to occur, according to the declaration.

The ELC funding cuts will impact the agency’s Public Health Lab, which conducts testing for pathogens like measles, tuberculosis, rabies, and bird flu. Reduced funding will not only increase test times for all pathogens, but could entirely suspend testing for some illnesses, according to the declaration.

As a result, New York City “will be less able to detect dangerous pathogens at early stages,” making residents more vulnerable to disease outbreaks, Morse emphasized in the declaration.

The department’s Covid-19 supplemental funding grants supported the city’s work to allocate and distribute Covid-19 vaccines to providers, track vaccine coverage, and maintain its public-facing vaccine finder, among other activities. The funding has also supported efforts to address disparities in access to vaccination, including by setting up mobile clinics and leaning on community-based organizations to promote vaccination.

Eliza Fawcett is a reporter covering public health in New York City for Healthbeat. Contact Eliza at efawcett@healthbeat.org.

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This article was produced in partnership with New York Focus.

The number of stop-and-frisks performed by NYPD officers sharply increased last year, public data analyzed by New York Focus and THE CITY reveals.

In 2024, officers recorded 25,386 stops, a 50 percent increase over the previous year and the highest number since 2014. Nearly nine in ten people stopped by the NYPD last year were Black or Latino. 

Over 15,600 people were frisked during stops, a 43 percent increase over the previous year.

The spike came despite new practices adopted in January 2024 to curb unlawful stops, including trainings, audits and reviews of body-worn camera footage.

In response to a request for comment, the mayor’s office referred New York Focus and THE CITY to the NYPD’s press office, which did not respond to an inquiry.

Stop-and-frisks — otherwise known as Terry stops — refer to the police practice of stopping and patting down the outer clothing of individuals cops suspect to be armed and dangerous. During these stops, police may also search individuals’ belongings. 

Under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, NYPD officers stopped hundreds of thousands of individuals each year and conducted a record-high 685,724 stops in 2011. Few stops resulted in arrests, and the practice disproportionately targeted Black and Latino individuals. 

NYPD stops sharply decreased in the following years. In 2013, a New York federal judge ruled that the practice was ineffectual and, as implemented under Bloomberg, violated the constitutional rights of minorities. By 2021 — Mayor Bill de Blasio’s final year in office — NYPD officers conducted just 8,947 stops. 

Three years later, that number has nearly tripled under the Adams administration. 

Since Adams took office in 2022, stop-and-frisk incidents have risen each year and continued to disproportionately target people of color. NYPD officers recorded more than 15,000 stops in both 2022 and 2023.

A notorious “anti-crime” plainclothes unit resurrected by Adams may have contributed to those increases.

In a report released last month, attorney Mylan Denerstein, the court-appointed federal monitor, found that two specialized NYPD units — the Neighborhood Safety Team and the Public Safety Team — were responsible for a majority of unlawful stop-and-frisks in the first half of 2023. 

A previous version of the Neighborhood Safety Team was disbanded in 2020 after years of controversy surrounding its aggressive tactics. During his mayoral campaign, Adams pledged to bring the unit back amid heightened public concern over shootings. 

The Bronx has been disproportionately affected by the police tactic, with nearly four in ten stops occurring there last year. The borough is home to only 17 percent of the city’s population, and over 80 percent of Bronx residents are Black or Latino. 

Under Adams, police have increasingly initiated stops on their own rather than responding to 911 or 311 calls. Self-initiated stops more than doubled from about 23 percent in de Blasio’s final year to 51 percent last year.

According to Denerstein’s report, NST and PST overwhelmingly conducted self-initiated stops, while patrol officers often conducted stops based on radio runs or calls for service. Self-initiated stops were the most likely to be unconstitutional, she found. She wrote that the two specialized units needed to be “better supervised.” 

Denerstein has also found that officers frequently underreport stop-and-frisks. Her team’s audits of police encounters suggest that in 2024, officers failed to report four in ten stops.

Unconstitutional frisks and searches have risen in recent years. According to Denerstein’s letter, just under a third of searches and frisks in the first half of 2024 were unconstitutional. 

NYPD leadership created a new procedure called “ComplianceStat” in January 2024 to increase higher ups’ accountability for their officers’ conduct during stops. That may have resulted in more officers reporting stops in 2024, though any measures to decrease the number of stops appear to have been ineffective. Reported stops remained relatively consistent across 2024, with slight dips in June and December. 

Complaints about misconduct during NYPD stops have also risen in recent years. Last year, the NYPD closed 42 cases of stop-and-frisk misconduct substantiated by the Civilian Complaint Review Board, claiming that the watchdog agency had filed the complaints too late. The agency maintains that it filed them two months before the statute of limitations.

Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who has led the department since November, told the City Council last month that she would implement stricter measures against officers who violate policy while conducting stop-and-frisks.

Her promise came after Denerstein gave the NYPD a deadline. In February, the monitor demanded stop-and-frisk compliance levels of at least 85 percent by September and 90 percent by the end of the year, threatening to recommend “further action” otherwise. 
“We are tired of monitoring the NYPD,” Denerstein wrote. “It has been eleven years.”

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New York City’s convoluted property tax system, now exactly 50 years old, overtaxes large multifamily buildings, making it harder to build enough apartments to solve the city’s housing crisis.

The lowest property taxes are levied on homeowners, especially those who live in areas with fast-rising property values, even though two-thirds of city households rent.

Areas dominated by Black homeowners pay property tax rates that are double those of primarily white neighborhoods.

And the more expensive a cooperative or condominium unit, the more likely it will be to pay relatively low property taxes because of the city’s flawed system for assessing value.

Those are the major conclusions of a new report on the system called “Footing the Bill,” released Monday by the Community Service Society and the Progress and Poverty Institute, aligning those two progressive groups with fiscal organizations like the Citizens Budget Commission and real estate groups like the Real Estate Board of New York in calling for an overhaul of property taxes in the city.

The organizations will be hosting a “birthday party” panel discussion Monday in conjunction with the report’s release, all part of an effort to prompt mayoral candidates to address a looming issue campaigns have conspicuously avoided.

“I find it a little distressing that candidates are not mentioning the property tax,” said Martha Stark, the former city finance director who is a key force behind Tax Equity Now New York, the group trying to force changes through a lawsuit pending in state Supreme Court. “Maybe that is failure on our part.”

This year marks the 50th anniversary of a state Court of Appeals decision that found the city’s property system illegal. Since then, its replacement has “aged poorly,” according to the report — which echoes the findings of many other studies and media investigations in the past.

The unfairness of the system is clear, the Community Service Society and Progress and Poverty Institute’s study finds in its analysis of public data, including assessments and tax abatements. 

Residential properties with one to three units pay an effective tax rate of only 0.7% of their value while apartment buildings with more than 10 units face an average effective tax rate of 3.6%, about five times as much.

“This disincentives development of multi-family housing,” said Iziah Thompon, one of the authors at CSS. “The cost of property taxes are passed along to renters.”

The city caps the amount of any increase in value that can be added to a residential property’s assessment in any given year. Property owners in neighborhoods that have seen sharp increases in values like Park Slope or the East Village pay far lower taxes as a percent of market value compared with areas that have seen values rise more slowly like Canarsie, East New York and Cambria Heights. Park Slope and the East Village are primarily white, while Black homeowners dominate the other three.

The city also assesses co-ops and condos as if they were rent-regulated apartments, which leads to assessed values and property taxes much lower for luxury units, especially in Manhattan, than their market values would justify.

The system “benefits the haves over the have not,” the report concludes.

Court Case Looms

Meanwhile, the system could be upended by a case before a Supreme Court judge in Manhattan.

In 2017, frustrated by a lack of action, advocates and real estate groups behind Tax Equity Now filed a lawsuit challenging the system, charging it disproportionately affected racial minorities and perpetuated segregation. A lower court dismissed the lawsuit, saying the legislature could make changes if it wanted. 

On the last day of the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2021, a commission he created in part because of the lawsuit recommended sweeping changes to deal with the inequities, but so far nothing has come of them.

But early last year the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, reinstated the lawsuit by a vote of 4 to 3 and sent it back to the Supreme Court. The ruling also indicated that the majority agreed with some of the arguments of Tax Equity Now and suggested steps the city could take to make the system fairer even while acknowledging many reforms would require approval of the Legislature and the governor.

Under the ruling, the city could adopt uniform assessment practices on all residential properties and end the use of rent-regulated comparison for co-ops and condos, said Stark.

“It’s been a year, and the city has done nothing,” she added.

Tired of waiting, Tax Equity Now in January asked the Supreme Court judge hearing the case to issue a summary judgement forcing the city to make the changes the Court of Appeals suggested.

Last week, the administration of Mayor Eric Adams finally filed a response opposing summary judgement, claiming action would harm taxpayers and hurt the city’s fiscal health.

But the mayor remains committed to reforms, said spokesperson Liz Garcia, and expects to see reform legislation introduced later in the current legislative session. She did not give details on what changes Adams might propose.

Meanwhile, candidates for mayor have virtually nothing to say about the issue as they campaign. Only four candidates responded to a request by THE CITY to detail their position.

Former city comptroller Scott Stringer’s campaign said it expects to issue a statement on property taxes soon but had no comment now.

A spokesperson for Sen. Zellnor Myrie responded that he has long supported changing the system and noted he had told a group of journalists that “my administration is going to be open to conversations about how we fix some of the inequities in our property tax system.”

A spokesperson for former governor Andrew Cuomo, who is far ahead in the polls, referred THE CITY to a white paper on affordability that called for extending a 2% cap on increases in property tax collections that exists elsewhere in the state to homeowners in the city.

“I am not sure what that means, but more caps would make the problem worse,” said Thompson of the Community Service Society.

A request to the Cuomo campaign to respond went unanswered.

City Comptroller Brad Lander, who has been one of the most vocal politicians on this issue, has endorsed reforms including putting most residential properties into a single class and cutting rates on rental housing by 30% to match the levies on condos and co-ops and encourage more building.

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This article is adapted from our March 27 edition of RANKED CHOICES, THE CITY’s weekly election newsletter. Click here to sign up.

Dear New Yorkers,

It’s not unfair to describe New York City’s voter turnout as abysmal. We rank second-to-last among other big cities for getting to the polls. 

So, among a sea of nonvoters, who’s actually casting ballots, and where? We got a great reader question wondering just this.

To answer, I and my colleague Mia Hollie went through a trove of data provided by the Campaign Finance Board’s NYC Votes initiative and spoke to people who could probably predict which neighborhoods will see the most ballots cast.

One chunk of the city with reliably active voters is the west side of Manhattan, the Upper West Side in particular. Some neighborhoods in Brooklyn, including Park Slope and Fort Greene, also came out in big numbers for the last mayoral primary election, data shows.

Age is also a big factor. In the 2021 Democratic mayoral primary, for instance, the average voting age was 54, although the average registered voter age was 49, according to the CFB. 

Certain candidates could shift this for our upcoming primary, with younger aspirants like State Senator Zellnor Myrie and Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani — who’s very online persona could drive more younger voters to the polls. 

Read more about those voting trends in our story here, and let me know if you have any thoughts about improving the city’s consistently-low turnout! Questions and comments welcome at ask@thecity.nyc.

One other important thing to know about: President Donald Trump this week signed an executive order that looks to drastically change the county’s elections, including requiring proof of citizenship for federal elections and that all ballots be received by Election Day. Patch wrote about what this means for New York; legal challenges are sure to come. 

— Katie Honan and THE CITY’s election team

What We’re Reading …

• Instead of using her constitutional power to remove Mayor Eric Adams, Gov. Kathy Hochul opted for proposing some legal guard rails for him. But the legislature isn’t having it, and those bills have gone nowhere, Politico reported.

• A new poll has Andrew Cuomo in the lead, again, with more female voters surveyed supporting him than men. Number two in the race? Asm. Zohran Mamdani. (Grain of salt: A ton of voters are still undecided.)

• In case you missed it, here’s our interview with Democratic mayoral candidate State Senator Jessica Ramos. Our FAQ podcast crew is interviewing all of the Dems. Next week: Comptroller Brad Lander.

What’s Ahead … 

Days until the June primary: 89

March 29: Student-led mayoral town hall, 1 to 3 p.m. at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, 2 W. 64th St. in Manhattan. RSVP here.

March 31: Mayoral forum on climate justice hosted by Climate Works for All and moderated by THE CITY’s Samantha Maldonado. 6:30 p.m. at the CUNY Law School, 2 Court Square West, Queens. RSVP here; seats available on a first-come, first-served basis.

April 1: The deadline for a budget from Albany. Here’s a guide on that.

April 7: Public safety-focused mayoral forum co-hosted by Vital City and the CUNY Journalism School with THE CITY’s Reuven Blau. Roosevelt House at Hunter College, 9 to 11 a.m.

April 15: First day of independent petitioning for candidates not running with a party. If you see mayoral candidates gathering signatures for an independent run — especially Eric Adams! — let us know: ask@thecity.nyc.

Your Election Questions, Answered

❓Reader Gail R. asked: I’ll be out of the country for a few months leading up to and including the June primary. Does the city mail absentee ballots outside the country?

Answer: Yes, they do! To get an absentee ballot, fill out this application from the city Board of Elections and choose the option “Mail ballot to me at a different (mailing) address outside the U.S.” Bear in mind: The last day to apply for an absentee ballot is June 14. And it may take time to process and mail, so start early.

THE CAMPAIGN KICKER: Overhead outside the Barclays Center last week from a signature-gatherer from Cuomo, carrying a small stack of petition forms: “It’s harder than it looks.”

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The city Department of Transportation has launched a pilot program to deter commercial trucks from parking illegally in residential areas — but those efforts will not reach many neighborhoods most affected by the issue, according to a data analysis by THE CITY.

That irony was not lost on the residents and elected officials of Southeast Queens, who on Thursday gathered along a truck-lined street in Springfield Gardens to urge the transportation department to make them a part of the pilot.

“The people who live in our community deserve better than to have our neighborhoods treated as an afterthought,” said City Council transportation committee chair Selvena Brooks-Power, who represents parts of Queens Community District 13. That area logged 2,438 complaints about overnight commercial parking last year through 311 reports — second citywide only to Maspeth, Queens.

Complaints about the issue have increased consistently across the city over the last decade along with the rapid proliferation of e-commerce warehouses and distribution centers, 311 data shows. And Southeast Queens locals say they have borne the brunt of that burden, in large part due to their proximity to John F. Kennedy Airport, the busiest hub for international cargo in the northeast.

“Children are not safe in a community where trucks are parked all along our boulevards, and they can’t even see how to cross from one side of the street to another to get to school, to get to the park to play,” said community organizer Gloria Boyce-Charles. “There’s no reason why Southeast Queen should not have been included in this pilot project.”

The DOT pilot, launched earlier this month to introduce 45 parking spaces made for tractor trailers, covers just two of the 10 community districts with the most complaints about overnight commercial parking last year: Maspeth in Queens and Flatlands in Brooklyn.

Hunts Point in The Bronx — located in a community district that logged just 104, or 0.3%, of those citywide complaints last year — was selected as the third.

Southeast Queens Councilmember Nantasha Williams, who in February introduced legislation to establish overnight parking spaces in industrial business zones across the city, lamented how DOT had failed to consult local residents and elected officials while planning for the pilot project.

“When I got into the Council, one of the requests I gave was to have an interagency task force to address trucking related issues. I didn’t get any feedback on that — then all of a sudden, the administration created this and didn’t tell us,” Williams said.

DOT spokesperson Vincent Barone said the department has reached out to both Brooks-Powers and Williams upon learning of their interest in the pilot program, but said there are few opportunities in Southeast Queens where overnight truck parking could be legalized without encroaching on spaces outside local homes and businesses.

“We are aware and working on the freight challenges in Southeast Queens — including supporting a dramatic expansion of truck parking at JFK — and will review any proposed locations from local officials for a pilot expansion,” Barone said, adding that the project at the airport would provide more truck parking without having to put more trucks on local streets in the neighborhood.

Long Haul Parking

Just blocks away from JFK on Thursday, dozens of oversized trucks lined both sides of Rockaway Boulevard, blocking bus stops, obscuring local businesses and jamming up traffic.

Some of the trucks donned parking tickets on their doors and windows, while others had their license plates removed entirely to avoid enforcement. Many of them have been parked there for days, even months, locals say.

“See that green truck right there? That’s a bus stop. That truck has been parked in the bus stop for a week now,” said Craig Grant, 54, who lives just blocks away from a Q6 bus stop at the intersection of Rockaway Boulevard and 144th Terrace.

Grant’s 72-year-old mother often misses her stop because the parked trucks cover it completely, he said.

“Sometimes, if it’s a new bus driver, he doesn’t even realize that the bus stop is there because there’s a line of trucks and they pass the stop, so she gotta walk over,” said Grant. “I’ve been living here 20 years and it never looked like this.”

For 53-year-old Navin Jaimangai, a seafood wholesaler near Rockaway and Baisley boulevards who relies on truck drivers to deliver his goods, the inundation of illegally parked trucks — along with the scarcity of legal parking space — have also increased the cost of doing business.

“We’re getting issues from truckers that are saying, ‘We’re not coming to New York because we have nowhere to park’… Now they’re sending smaller trucks to do the pick-ups, and it increases shipping costs,” Jaimangai said. “We have a serious issue that’s developing and it’s getting worse every year.”

At a local deli, 57-year-old manager Mary Kim said sales there often come and go with truck drivers. And business has been hurting over the last year, she added, because there’s nowhere for them to park.

“They will stop by and they come here, get breakfast. But no more, because there’s no spot,” Kim said.

“They don’t stop anymore. That’s it.”

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Congestion pricing is putting paratransit riders in a somewhat faster lane, MTA numbers show.

Since the early January launch of the Manhattan vehicle-tolling initiative, speeds are up 5% for Access-A-Ride vehicles within the congestion relief zone south of 60th Street, according to MTA data. That’s in comparison to the same time period in 2024.

Total travel times have also come down for the service, which carries people whose disabilities prevent them from riding on trains or buses.

It’s turning some former naysayers around on the tolls.

“I was against congestion pricing because I felt sorry for the people who had to pay the tolls,” said motorized wheelchair user Milagros Franco, 48, who commutes daily on Access-A-Ride between Gramercy Park and Downtown Brooklyn. “But when I started to realize how quickly I get to work, I saw that it’s amazing, almost phenomenal.”

The upward trend — which is not limited to the congestion zone — continues an extended turnaround toward faster and more dependable service for Access-A-Ride, whose citywide reliability fell to its lowest level in years in 2021. That’s when on-time performance sunk to 70% for the broker car services that provide the bulk of Access-A-Ride trips and as customer complaints and driver no-shows climbed during the pandemic.

Between the start of congestion pricing and the end of January, 94.6% of for-hire vehicles picked up passengers in Manhattan within 20 minutes of scheduled pickup times. During the same period last January, their on-time performance stood at 91%. 

That figure also improved in February, when 94.9% of for-hire vehicles arrived within 20 minutes of scheduled pickup times. Last February, for-hire vehicles arrived within that window 90.6% of the time. 

“The customers are telling us they’re getting around faster,” said Rachel Cohen, vice president of paratransit at the MTA. “They’re seeing and feeling that difference in their travels.”

The 143,027 trips through the congestion relief zone in the first two months of this year accounted for 9% of all Access-A-Ride trips citywide.

“These are not trends that started in January, but since the congestion relief was instituted, we’ve seen faster vehicle movement within the congestion relief zone,” Cohen said. 

Paratransit riders said the Jan. 5 launch of tolls on motorists entering south of 60th Street has given a boost to their travels.

“Before it was almost an hour coming from uptown because of traffic,” said Eman Rimawi-Doster, a double amputee who commutes to the Garment District daily from her home in East Harlem. “Now it’s significantly gone down, so it’s more like 40 minutes, which I’d say is a great improvement.”

Michael Ring, a paratransit rider from Park Slope in Brooklyn, said he’s detected the changes during daily trips into Manhattan.

“I talk to every driver and they all say it’s less traffic in Manhattan and more business for them,” he said. “So it’s a win-win for them and a win for me because it’s just easier to get around.”

The improvements for New Yorkers with disabilities mark another gain for the vehicle-tolling scheme, which President Donald Trump is trying to squash. 

While speeds on many express and local bus routes have increased, and revenue for planned capital improvements to mass transit is on target to meet its mark, congestion pricing could be on the clock.

Trump’s federal transportation chief last week extended by 30 days the deadline for the MTA to end the tolling plan, which originally faced a March 21 shutdown deadline from the feds. The money generated from the tolls is supposed to fund transit improvements that include increasing the number of subway stations that are fully accessible to people with disabilities.

That threat looms large for New Yorkers with disabilities. 

“We could lose that ginormous amount of funding,” Rimawi-Doster said. “That’s a huge amount of money that goes specifically toward accessibility and improving paratransit, so if that was suddenly gone, I don’t know where the other money would come from.”

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After President Trump’s transportation secretary trashed the subway as a “shithole,” baffled MTA and NYPD officials pointed to a nearly 30% drop in major transit crime from a year ago.

Chief Joseph Gulotta, head of the NYPD Transit Bureau Chief conceded Monday that the subway is struggling with a safety perception problem — even as the number of robberies, assaults, burglaries and grand larcenies has sunk amid the latest influx of police officers into stations and trains.

“Over the past two months, we’ve seen a 28.2% reduction in crime, which amounts to 110 fewer victims compared to the same period last year,” Gulotta told members of the MTA board during a transit committee meeting. “I mean, those numbers speak for themselves.”

Gulotta’s monthly presentation on crime within the subway system came after federal transportation chief Sean Duffy said Saturday that Gov. Kathy Hochul could “clean up the subways” within a day and a half — but that “she chooses not to.”

One MTA board member called Duffy’s latest jab at the subway “pretty disappointing,” while another said, “What is our transportation secretary talking about?”

“If our numbers are saying one thing, they’re saying something else,” said Haeda Mihaltses, chairperson of the board’s New York City Transit Committee. “I mean, where are they getting their numbers from?”

“I think people love to pick on New York, people really hate what New York is,” added Samuel Chu, another MTA board member. “Now more than ever, we’re a place where people find a way to live together despite our differences, our eccentricities.”

Board member Andrew Albert said the USDOT secretary’s words were “a real slap in the face” to police officers whose presence within the subway surged again in January, when Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams assigned officers to ride on each train during the overnight hours. The $154 million deployment is being split between the city and the state.

“The whole thing is just aimed to make a point, obviously,” Albert said of Duffy’s digs. “I think riders are feeling a lot better seeing the officers and I’ve watched them move from car to car.” 

Duffy’s comments on transit crime followed his threat last week to pull federal funding from the MTA unless it provides the feds with plans for boosting subway safety and provides crime statistics that are already largely publicly available.

“If you want people to take the train, take transit, then make it safe, make it clean, make it beautiful, make it wonderful,” Duffy said Saturday while touring New Jersey sinkholes near Interstate 80. “Don’t make it a shithole, which is what [Hochul] has done.”

The country’s largest public transportation authority is already locked in a multi-front battle with the feds over congestion pricing.

The MTA last month sued Duffy and the Transportation Department after the administration of President Donald Trump moved to revoke federal authority for the vehicle-tolling plan approved by state lawmakers in 2019 and later approved under the Biden administration.

The nation’s first congestion-pricing plan launched in early January and is designed to generate more than $15 billion dollars for the MTA’s 2020 to 2024 capital plan. The five-year plan is a more than $50 billion blueprint to fund signal upgrades, station overhauls, the extension of the Second Avenue Subway through East Harlem and other essential infrastructure improvements.

But Trump has pushed to follow through on an August campaign pledge to terminate the vehicle-tolling initiative that Hochul herself paused last summer for several months. Following his shutdown order last month, the president crowed “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD,” in social media posts in which he also proclaimed, “LONG LIVE THE KING!”

The federal DOT, meanwhile, has extended its March 21 congestion-pricing shutdown deadline by 30 days, even as Hochul and the MTA have vowed to keep the south-of-60th Street tolling system in place.

Officials on Monday said that the tolls are on target to generate half a billion dollars in revenue for the MTA by the end of 2024 after taking in more than $40.4 million in net revenue last month. 

They also cited gains that include bus speeds being up 4% on routes within the congestion relief zone south of 60th Street, as well decreased travel times for paratransit trips within Manhattan.

“Once again, the extensive studies done are proving to be reliable as we close the second month of the program with revenue in line with projections,” said Jai Patel, the MTA’s co-chief financial officer. “This program continues to reduce traffic while generating projected funds for critical transit projects.”

Transit advocates warned that Duffy’s threats to yank federal funding from the transit system are dangerous to the well-being of the subway.

“We beseech Secretary Duffy to help us and not hurt us,” said Lisa Daglian, executive director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA. “The best way for him to know what the rider experience is like is to be one.”

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The population on Rikers Island has risen to 7,067 people this week, the highest total since 2019 — and almost twice as high as the target number needed for the longstanding plan to transfer incarceration operations to four borough-based jails. 

Department of Correction officials blame a host of factors: the state prison strike jamming so-called state-ready detainees on Rikers; lack of bed space in mental hospitals; and recent legal changes to court procedures supposedly dragging court cases on for longer periods. 

While the penal island has a maximum capacity of at least 10,000 in multiple buildings, the population increase jeopardizes the $16 billion plan to close Rikers jails by 2027 as required by a de Blasio-era law. 

The borough-based jail initiative calls for the construction of four smaller detention facilities near courthouses in Brooklyn, The Bronx, Manhattan and Queens, altogether holding 4,160 jail beds, along with 363 hospital beds. 

Due to a series of delays, the new jails are not expected to be completed until 2032, according to the most recent timeline based on city contracts. Missing the 2027 deadline would result in court proceedings that could end in fines or orders that people be moved to other jails or released.

The jail population had steadily gone down since former Mayor Michael Bloomberg first took office in 2001. During his three terms, the average city jail population dropped from 14,490 in 2001 to 11,827 in 2013. 

The downward trend continued during much of former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s two terms and the jail population fell below 4,000 in April 2020 during the peak of the pandemic. 

When Mayor Eric Adams took office in January 2022, the average daily population on the island was 5,700. 

The steady rise in that number since the waning months of the de Blasio administration comes as a federal judge overseeing the DOC contemplates whether to appoint a so-called receiver to take over the beleaguered department.

One factor jail officials have failed to discuss: the number of people getting arrested has gone up each year since Adams took office. 

An estimated 122,304 people were arrested and prosecuted in 2024, up from 109,965 in 2023 and 92,662 in 2022, according to the New York City Criminal Justice Agency. The number has steadily gone up over the past five years since the pandemic broke out in 2020, the records show.

In order to deal with more people behind bars, the facilities on Rikers are expanding rather than shutting down. Correction officials last week sought special permission from the Board of Correction to increase bed capacity at Otis Bantum Correctional Center (OBCC) dormitories on Rikers from 50 to 60. 

The DOC is also adding 72 beds at the West Facility’s annex dormitories by converting small programming rooms in each dormitory to accommodate an additional six beds per unit across 12 housing areas, according to the DOC’s variance request.

Jail officials also plan to use a currently empty housing area dormitory at the North Infirmary Command (NIC) for 28 additional beds. The move is pending approval for use from the State Commission of Correction (SCOC). 

“The department is utilizing every tool available to us to ensure we safely create bed space,” DOC Commissioner Lynelle Maginley-Liddie wrote to the Board of Correction on Feb. 27.

At a hearing last week, Dr. Robert Cohen, a member of the Board of Correction, the oversight body for the DOC, questioned why the department was looking to add more beds while at the same time moving to close Rikers. 

“You clearly have a plan to increase the number of people that are being incarcerated that’s inconsistent with the department’s commitment to reduce the population to be sufficient for the new jails,” he said. 

James Conroy, DOC’s deputy commissioner of legal matters, noted the department doesn’t have control over who is detained. 

“The people that come into our custody are not at our behest,” he said. “We don’t have control over state courts and who comes into the jails.” 

Stuck on the Island

Some of the problem is due to the state prison system blocking the transfer of detainees from city custody as it recovers from a nearly three week strike that resulted in some 2,000 correction officers being fired, according to DOC officials. 

There were 344 “state ready” detainees who have been sentenced to more than a year in detention waiting to be shipped to the state’s Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) as of March 11. 

“This number will continue to grow until DOCCS begins to accept the new admissions,” Raymond Sanchez, DOC’s assistant Deputy Warden in charge of the custody management centralized movement unit, told the Board of Correction last Tuesday. 

Maginley-Liddie has also used her powers as commissioner, via the 6-A program, to release 81 people early since she became head of the department in December 2023. 

The program, named after Article 6-A of the State Correction Law, authorizes the commissioner to release people sentenced to less than a year so they can finish their sentences at home. 

By contrast, Cynthia Brann, de Blasio’s DOC commissioner during the peak of the pandemic, released nearly 300 people via the 6-A program starting in March 2020. 

Approximately 500 people are currently eligible for the early release, according to DOC records. 

‘Discovery’ Delays 

Most of the people on Rikers have not been convicted of a crime and are awaiting trial, records show. 

A new “discovery” law requiring prosecutors to share more information with criminal defendants is also a major contributor to keeping people on the island longer, according to DOC’s Conroy. 

“The reality of why the population is increasing is because we have a pre-trial detention population that’s immense,” Conroy said. He said that in the court’s digital record-keeping system,  “every single one of the adjournments that you see for most of these individuals — 70% of which are serious violent felony offenses — are because of discovery compliance.” 

In January 2020, the state Criminal Procedure Law was changed to speed up timeframes for the sharing of evidence between prosecutors and defense lawyers. The move came after the New York State Legislature passed sweeping reforms to the law following years of complaints from defense attorneys about evidence being withheld until right before trial, or not shared at all. 

But prosecutors have struggled to keep up with the new mandates and say cases now take longer to process. 

As a result, Gov. Kathy Hochul supports a push to “streamline” the discovery reform legislation. 

Public defender organizations are vehemently opposed to any changes. 

“If the governor’s proposal to repeal discovery reform is adopted, more New Yorkers will suffer from case delays and be forced to languish on Rikers Island, further exacerbating the already high jail population,” Mary Lynne Werlwas, director of the Prisoners’ Rights Project at the Legal Aid Society, told THE CITY. 

The rise in the jail population does not come as a surprise to at least one former top city jail official. 

In 2023, former Correction Department commissioner Louis Molina predicted the population would hit 7,000 in 2024. 

Molina’s projection was based on an internal seven-page department analysis that begins with a section entitled “Napkin Math for Jail Population Estimation,” THE CITY reported in February 2024. 

The document used complex math and cited rollbacks to the state bail reform law and court delays for the projected increase. 

Keeping People Out of Jail

Adams frequently talks about the need to catch people “upstream” before they are arrested and entangled in the criminal legal system. He also touts specific drops in crime since he took office in January 2022. 

But he rarely talks about how the jail population has gone up from the 5,700 when he was first mayor. He has also frequently questioned the close Rikers plan and last November called for the creation of a specialized mental health facility in the place of one of the four new planned jails. 

An estimated 40% of the city jail population has been diagnosed with some type of serious mental illness, according to the Mayor’s Management Report. 

“It’s not logical to me to create four smaller Rikers,” Adams told reporters in November 2024. “One of those jails should be a state-of-the-art mental health facility where people can get real care.”

“It is criminal that we are incarcerating people with severe mental health illness,” he added. 

But the DOC has not talked with the mayor about creating that type of mental health facility since he brought up the idea with reporters, Maginley-Liddie told the City Council during a budget hearing on March 7. 

Meanwhile, at least 127 people found unfit to stand trial by psychiatrists are languishing on Rikers because there is no space at state-run mental health facilities, THE CITY reported last month.

Councilmember Sandy Nurse (D-Brooklyn), chair of the Council’s Committee on Criminal Justice, said the state prison strike blocking new admissions was a new excuse for the Adams administration. 

“Those very recent hiccups don’t take away from the overall fact that there hasn’t been the level of resourcing and prioritization into programs that divert people from Rikers or get them off of the island faster,” she told THE CITY. 

The Adams administration also got rid of nonprofit groups that helped the formerly incarcerated readjust to life on the outside and instead moved some of its re-entry programming in-house, she noted. 

“The use of alternatives to incarceration and detention programs are not being invested in at the level that advocates and service providers say that they need to effectively absorb people and move them into programs,” she said. 

Zachary Katznelson, executive director of the new Independent Rikers Commission re-convened by the City Council in 2023, urged Adams, his team and other power brokers involved in the process to take measures to reduce pretrial detention. 

More than half of the jail population has a mental illness and 700 people are so severely mentally ill that they cannot comprehend what’s happening in court, he noted. 

“It’s clear the Rikers population is significantly higher than it needs to be for public safety,” he said. 

On Wednesday, the commission released a report urging City Hall to appoint one person to oversee the Rikers shutdown plan — rather than have the responsibility spread across various officials and agencies. 

In order to reduce the jail population, the report suggested that the city expand its pre-trial electronic monitoring capacity, which New York City uses far less than surrounding counties, despite its efficacy.

The city should also boost its supervised release intensive case management pilot citywide “to connect more people with serious mental illness and addiction issues with treatment, housing, and services, ensure they come to court, and head off the commission of more crimes,” according to the report. 

The commission also suggested expanding so-called treatment courts for people with serious mental illness and addiction issues. 
“Decrepit, dysfunctional and violent, Rikers is a crumbling, inordinately expensive incubator of misery and reoffending,” the 114-page report said. “Every day its eight operating jails are open, incarcerated people and staff are at grave, unnecessary risk, and public safety is degraded.”

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This article is part of an ongoing collaboration between Chalkbeat and THE CITY.

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New York City parents and school leaders are fearful that President Donald Trump’s administration could cut into the roughly $2 billion the federal government sends to the nation’s largest school system each year. 

The U.S. Department of Education cut its workforce in half on Wednesday, and an executive order to dismantle the department entirely is expected to follow. 

Trump has long called to dissolve the U.S. Department of Education — starting in his first term. And newly confirmed Secretary of Education Linda McMahon seems poised to help, sending an internal memo to her staff last week where she described the department’s “final mission.”

“My vision is aligned with the President’s: to send education back to the states and empower all parents to choose an excellent education for their children,” she wrote in the letter.

But how Trump might achieve his goal to close the department is not straightforward: Only Congress has the authority to take such action. Still, with a gutted department, educators and advocates worry that major funding cuts will be on the horizon. 

“We’ve all been looking at the alignment of the Project 2025 playbook and the first… weeks of the new administration,” Aaron Pallas, a professor of sociology and education at Teachers College, told Chalkbeat last week. Project 2025 calls for the gradual phasing out of certain funding from the federal government, he added.

Federal funding made up about 5% – or $2.2 billion – of New York City Public Schools’ budget for fiscal year 2025, which ends on June 30, according to the city’s adopted budget. (That includes COVID relief money, which was set to expire next year regardless.) 

The city Education Department’s share of federal education funds is split across several grant programs targeting students from low-income households, those living in shelters, or students with disabilities, for example. 

The Trump administration has already taken steps to withhold funding from certain programs. The department’s Office of Civil Rights sent a Dear Colleague letter last month to schools stating that they must forgo their diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programs and activities to continue receiving federal aid. The DOE also launched an “End DEI” portal on its website.

The directive has garnered pushback, including in lawsuits brought by multiple civil rights groups. Several attorneys general, led by New York’s Letitia James, issued their own guidance to schools. And James, along with 20 other attorneys general, filed a suit Thursday to stop Trump’s broader efforts to dismantle the department.

In addition to abolishing the department, Trump and other conservative federal lawmakers have called for civil rights enforcement and major grant programs, such as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, to be transferred to other departments within the federal government while other programs might be passed onto states. 

Various scenarios could play out: Title 1 funding for high poverty schools and funding for students with disabilities could remain untouched — or they could be swept into broader budget cuts, converted into block grants given as a lump sum to states to spend as they see fit, or reduced by Trump’s push to steer more federal funding to private school vouchers.

While it’s unclear what will actually happen to the federal funding that the Education Department currently allocates, below are some of the highest-funded grant programs that the NYC Department of Education currently receives from the federal government, which could be at risk if the Trump administration restricts certain funds or calls for dramatic cuts:

ESSA, Title I ($679.1 million)

The Every Student Succeeds Act calls for students from low-income families to receive “fair, equitable and high-quality” education, according to the law. Federal dollars to support such students come from the Title I program.  

The city’s Education Department has received more than $679 million from Title I so far this fiscal year, accounting for about a third of the department’s federal education revenue. It’s the largest source of federal funding to local districts.

Though federal law says schools must have at least a 40% poverty rate to qualify for the funds,  districts have some freedom to set their thresholds, and in New York City, Title 1 schools serve at least 60% of students from low-income families. The money pays for costs including the salaries of paraprofessionals, mental health services, and technology upgrades. 

Close to 1,300 of the city’s 1,600 schools qualified for the Title I schoolwide program this year, according to school allocation memorandum reports. 

But there are strict requirements for how Title I funds may be used, Pallas said, and districts must provide a fair amount of guidance to school leaders on allowable expenditures. Title I funds, for example, cannot be used to fund the salaries of a gym or art teacher.

“The loss of Title I funding would widen the achievement gap, leaving our most vulnerable students without the resources they need to succeed,” said NeQuan McLean, president of the District 16 Community Education Council in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. “This would undermine years of progress made in District 16 and severely limit opportunities for students who depend on these services to thrive.”

Meal Programs ($545.4 million)

New York City participates in several meal programs subsidized by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, including the National School Lunch Program, School Breakfast Program, Summer Food Service Program, and the Child and Adult Care Program.

One in four children in New York City experiences food insecurity, according to a report published by the non-profit food rescue organization City Harvest.

All New York City public schools — as well as hundreds of public charter and private schools that operate outside of the city’s education department — provide free breakfasts and lunches to students through the federal government’s community eligibility provision. The provision allows schools to offer the meals at no charge to students, regardless of their families’ economic backgrounds, with the USDA covering the bulk of the costs.  

“This is the most cynical and cruel time to be cutting food programs,” said Liz Accles, executive director of the food access non-profit Community Food Advocates, referring to how an executive order could impact federal food program allocations.

With proposals by House Republicans to reduce access to SNAP benefits and increase the eligibility threshold for meal programs looming, Accles said there could also be a “potential compounding impact of these threats.”

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act ($290.8 million)

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act requires federal, state, and local education agencies to allocate funds to support students with disabilities. 

In order for states and school districts to receive the federal funds, they must agree to use the money to supplement their own spending, rather than replace it. Schools can use the federal dollars on supplies, transportation, salaries, and contracted services for students with disabilities, such as translation and job training services. 

At her confirmation hearing, McMahon proposed moving management of IDEA to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Moving the grant to a different department could force states and local education agencies to overcome additional bureaucratic hurdles when attempting to resolve civil rights complaints, said Senior Attorney at the Education Law Center Wendy Lecker. 

“Having it all in the education department means that the state and districts only have to go to one place,” she said. “They don’t have to duplicate efforts.” 

Additional ESSA Funding ($171.5 million)

Under the Every Student Succeeds Act, New York City schools also receive Title II funds, which support “effective” instruction. Title II funds can be used to pay for professional development programs, recruitment efforts, retaining educators in high-need areas, and other costs related to supporting educators. 

Title III is a formula-based grant program that supports both English language learners and immigrant students. For English learners, the funds can be used to enhance or develop new programs, provide instruction outside of school hours, or provide translation services to parents. The Education Department also uses the money to provide immigrant students with programs that help them navigate the U.S. education system, as well as services to their family members through community-based organizations.

Title IV covers additional education programs that enhance basic learning at schools. For example, the funds could cover a class on nutrition and the costs of food items to be included in lessons. The funds could also be used to pay for field trips. 

Health and Medical Services ($140.2 million)

Medicaid is a program that provides health care for free or at a low cost to low-income individuals. The reimbursements make up about 4% – or $81 million – of the Education Department’s federal revenue so far this fiscal year. 

The department uses the reimbursements to pay for health and medical services for students with disabilities, including physical therapy, transportation, or counseling. The city’s Education Department also expects to receive about $16.7 million for substance use prevention and intervention. 

Child Care and Development Block Grant ($125 million)

Through the Child Care and Development Block Grant Act, the federal government sends money to states to subsidize child care costs for low-income families. 

The city mostly uses its allocation from the state to provide low-income New Yorkers with child care vouchers. Recipients can then use the vouchers to enroll their children in a formal child care center, a family-based center or an informal setting, like a relative’s home. Nearly 53,000 children used the vouchers to enroll in an early childhood education program as of last December, according to a report by the Administration for Children’s Services, which administers the program. 

The city also uses the money for extended day programs beyond school hours and EarlyLearn, an early childhood program for babies and toddlers who are 6 weeks to 3 years old. More than 10,000 children were enrolled in the program last fiscal year. 

A potential cut to these funds would be “disastrous to the early childhood education program that New York City has been building to meet the needs and demands of working families across the five boroughs,” said J.T. Falcone, director of communications at United Neighborhood Houses, which supports a network of settlement houses that provide early childhood programming. 

Head Start ($70.7 million)

Head Start is a grant-based program run by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that provides free early childhood education to low-income families. About 19,000 children rely on the program in the city.

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