July 1, 2024 Office of the Mayor News
Curt Menefee: There's good news for New Yorkers and a sense of relief. A $112 billion budget agreement has been reached and the deal restores the majority of the budget cuts that were being proposed by the mayor earlier this year.
Rosanna Scotto: With us this morning is the mayor from Gracie Mansion. Nice to have you back, Mayor Adams, how are things?
Mayor Eric Adams: Good, excellent, getting ready for a nice summer.
Scotto: Okay, but first let's talk budget because everybody was concerned. Coming down to the wire, it's a big budget and everybody was concerned because there's been a lot of reports about your relationship with the City Council speaker. Would they come and find common ground? What happened?
Mayor Adams: The thing about… Everyone was concerned but Eric and Adrienne. You heard me say over and over again that we're going to land the plane and I was extremely confident because not only do we share the same last name, but we share the same goals and that's to uplift working-class people and that budget reflects that.
Scotto: Okay, so one third of the increase in the budget because people are dissecting it. It's a very big budget. One third of the increase, is that due to the migrant crisis here in New York City?
Mayor Adams: It has a major impact on it and I made the right decisions when I came into office. I told the agencies that we have to do what everyday New Yorkers are doing and that's properly manage the money that's in the city. We found over $7 billion in efficiencies and good thing we did that because little did we know, we were going to be facing a $4.9 billion migrant and asylum seeker crisis and navigating out of COVID and so yes, it has a major impact on our budget, but we also had sunsetting dollars from the federal government from COVID. These programs were temporary dollars for permanent programs. We had to find the funding for that. We had to settle all of our union contracts. This took major handling, and Jacques Jiha and Finance chair, Justin Brannan, really made the right decisions so that Speaker Adams and I were able to settle this budget.
Menefee: All right, you mentioned the $7 billion you found in efficiencies. I want to go back to November when you had your first budget proposal, you talked about a lot of cuts. City Council said you were miscounting, I think the number's about $6 billion in the budget. Your budget proposal in April still had a lot of cuts in it, not as many as November, but still a lot. This got rid of just about all of those cuts. Was that $7 billion found somewhere? Is that the difference between where you were in April versus where you are now?
Mayor Adams: No, and you know what's interesting? I'm so glad you raised that. We found over $7 billion in efficiency. We restored over $340-something million. When people think about the efficiencies that we identified, they believe, because we did restorations, that all those efficiencies were incorrect. No, $7 billion we found in efficiency. What we did with the City Council and the speaker and the members is say, okay, now let's look at what are some of the crucial ones, putting back $58 million in the library, $53 million in our cultural affairs, being able to fund pre-K, 3K, putting money in the MetroCards, making sure we put $2 billion in housing. We smartly made the right decision, but we have to first say to our agencies, listen, these are taxpayers' dollars. We have to do a better job in managing those dollars.
Menefee: All right, so let me ask, you have said all along, hey, we're going to land the plane, we're going to land the plane. You always say that. Why does it have to circle the airport so many times? It's like constantly, okay, we're going to cut this, we're going to do this. Then in the end, we wind up being here.
Mayor Adams: Think about it for a moment. Let me just say this word for you. 200,000 migrants and asylum seekers. You don't know if you can land yet until you make sure that everything is prepared correctly. It takes real smart thinking, balancing this budget, the uncertainty of our economy that we were facing, not knowing how many more asylum seekers we were getting. We're still getting close to 5,000 a month. We did the smart thing of saying you can't stay forever. We did the 30-day program. We're down to 65,000 in our care. If we didn't make these decisions about doing efficiencies in the beginning of the administration, telling people you can't stay forever in our shelters and managing this crisis, brother, we would be having a different conversation right now.
Scotto: Can we talk a little bit, I know a lot of people are so happy libraries are going to be restored and of course pre-K, everything looks great for that. There's some people who are concerned about the Police Department. You have not increased the size of the Police Department. They are facing major overtime. I know three City Council people were very upset. They felt that there was too much money for the Police Department in this particular budget. How do you balance this?
Mayor Adams: You've been following this for a long time and I don't think you can remember one year where the numerical minority talked about too much for our public safety apparatus. That includes Department of Correction, Parks Police, NYPD, and the like. Listen, these officers had to monitor over 3,000 protests after the October 7 massacre in Israel. These police officers took over 15,000 guns off our street, over 40,000 mopeds and illegal three-wheelers off our street. Managers of how we brought our transit system after that slight up increase in January, we are now at record levels of safety in our transit system with 4.1 million riders. I am not compromising on public safety and I'm not going to listen to the noise of people that don't understand that our prerequisite to prosperity is public safety. We don't want a decreased number of police. We want to recruit more in police. We're asking everyone out there, if you have a bright young man or woman, take the exam. We want you to join the greatest police department on the globe. It's not our desire to see the decrease in numbers.
Scotto: Mayor, the police have to deal with this Venezuelan gang presence. Apparently… We've done a number of reports here at FOX 5, where there's concern that these Venezuelan gangs are infiltrating the migrant shelters, they're bringing in guns. What do you know and how are you going to keep this from escalating?
Mayor Adams: I share that concern. I thank for some of the coverage that the station has done on this topic, I sent Commissioner Weiner and First Deputy Commissioner Tania Kinsella, I sent them down to Colombia to do an analysis of this dangerous gang. We want to get ahead of it. It is a concern of ours. We're utilizing the intel and we're utilizing the information that came from South America so that we can, one, identify, two, make sure they don't get a foothold in our city and make the proper apprehensions. One of those members shot two police officers and in our debriefing indicated the normality of that in Venezuela. We're going to stay on top of this and our gang division as well as our Intelligence Division is looking at this so we don't allow it to take a foothold in our city.
Scotto: Will you put metal detectors in migrant shelters all over the city?
Mayor Adams: Yes, that's our desire. We want to make sure that we have the proper metal detectors because we don't want guns being smuggled into these centers, these shelters. Yes, that is our desire.
Menefee: One last question about that. You talked about the migrant who brought it to everybody's attention publicly during his arraignment for shooting the two police officers. Is this an issue that you and the Police Department knew about before or did you learn about it through him?
Mayor Adams: No, we knew there was an issue with a small number, a small number of migrants and asylum seekers who were participating in gang behavior and we don't want to broad brush everyone that has come here looking to pursue the American dream. I think that allowing them to work, I said it over and over again, and now there's a national call from national immigrant groups. We knew that there was something going on. Remember, we did a takedown in the Bronx where there was a group that was taking cell phones and credit cards using mopeds. We knew that there was some organized behavior taking place and we were on top of that. He only reinforced what we had beliefs in the beginning.
Menefee: All right, before we let you go, you started the interview by saying you're getting ready for summer. Fourth of July is this weekend. We know you're vegan. Vegan hot dogs or vegan hamburgers, what's your choice?
Mayor Adams: I'm going to enjoy the entire fireworks. 10,000 free tickets we're giving out. People are going to have a safe Fourth of July. We have the best show on earth right on our waterfront. I'm looking forward for the excitement.
Menefee: Like a politician, you didn't answer the question.
Scotto: Right, exactly. Take a bite of a real hot dog. It won't kill you.
Mayor Adams: I'm going to go to my favorite restaurant called Scotto's.
Menefee: There you go. Have a little pasta for it. Whatever you do, enjoy it. Thank you for joining us this morning.
Mayor Adams: Thank you, take care.
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