New York City Mayor Eric Adams cut a budget deal with lawmakers last week after negotiations that were complicated by the rising costs of caring for asylum seekers, Erin Ailworth and I reported last week in The Wall Street Journal. The mayor spurned calls by progressive members of his own party for more spending on other priorities, such as education and social-service programs, increasing their frustration with his moderate tack.
The 62-year-old Democrat—thought to be a rising star in his party—has increasingly turned his energy toward finding shelter for tens of thousands of asylum seekers after riding into office on a message of reducing crime. The city has a rare right-to-shelter requirement, putting a legal onus on Adams to find ways to care for the more than 81,000 migrants who have streamed into the city, mostly after illegally crossing the country’s southern border.
Adams said handling the migrant crisis required finding room in last year’s budget for a $1.4 billion outlay. The city plans to spend at least $2.9 billion in a $107 billion budget that takes effect July 1.
“There are many things we could have poured our money into if we had that $1.4 billion,” the mayor said, even as he touted how the budget deal struck Thursday with the City Council addressed the needs of New Yorkers.
Hank Sheinkopf, a political consultant in New York, said the sparring between the mayor and the more liberal council is part of a larger power struggle between the two sides over the direction of a city with increasingly strained resources.
“The era of ‘We can do everything in New York City’ is over,” Sheinkopf said. “The progressives want more and he needs less, and the question is, where do they meet?”
RIP DICK RAVITCH: I was saddened by last month’s passing of Richard Ravitch, who I first encountered in 2009 when he was named New York’s lieutenant governor. (“It was, without a doubt, the most useless experience of my life,” Dick later said.) The NYT’s Sam Roberts wrote a great obituary here, including the story of how Dick, as a Columbia University student, waged a lonely campaign for Adlai Stevenson in 1956. He loved New York City, and he understood the overlapping and complicated webs of power and personality that can drive it forward or snarl it in place. That included helping to find a way out of the New York City fiscal crisis and rejuvenating the subway system as chairman of the MTA.
In the last decade, Dick became greatly concerned with the decline of the traditional media, and in particular a decrease in the amount of close reporting on public finance. As Greg David described, Dick was fundamental in the founding of The City. He also sponsored week-long seminars for working journalists from around the country to bone-up on their fiscal skills. I took the class in 2015. It taught me how to read bond documents and to dissect a financial plan.
After I started working for the Journal, Dick called with congratulations and invited me to get a drink. We met in his office in Riverside Waterside Plaza, and then went to the nearby Water Club. We were supposed to join a dinner party, but went left instead of right once we walked in. Dick hit the oyster spread and I got some Manhattans. It took us about five minutes to realize we didn’t recognize anybody.
I whispered to a waiter, who told me that this was the Such-and-such family reunion. I walked back to Dick and told him to start walking and not look back: we had accidentally crashed a party. We went back to the lobby, studying the tops of our shoes, before bursting into snickers.
RIP Dick. I’m one of many people who will miss you.
THE QUESTION: Since it’s the Fourth of July, who signed the Declaration of Independence on behalf of New York? And who was the only New Yorker to sign the U.S. Constitution?
Have an answer? Drop me a line at jimmy.vielkind@gmail.com. Or just write with thoughts, feedback or to say hi.
THE LAST ANSWER: St. Louis lost the greatest percentage of its population between 1950 and 2000 of any other major American city. Though to be fair, much of that 59.4% decline resulted in growth in the surrounding county. Over the same period, Pittsburgh’s population declined by 50.7%, Buffalo went down 49.6%, Detroit dropped 48.9% and Cleveland decreased 47.9%. In the subsequent 23 years, Detroit has fallen even further while Buffalo has at this point leveled off.