NEW YORK — In a move that provoked harsh backlash last week, New York Mayor Eric Adams called on City Council members to fork over half of their discretionary funds to help pay for the ongoing migrant crisis that has plagued his administration for months.
But in a letter to the Council making that request, Adams neglected to mention that he and several officials in his administration were previously staunch defenders of letting local lawmakers have full discretion over how to spend their so-called member items.
“Member items impact people on the ground, and we can’t starve people on the ground,” Adams was quoted by City & State as saying in January 2013 while a state senator. “No one knows better about the services needed in the community than the representative in that community.”
The then-Brooklyn state senator also said retaining lawmakers’ discretion is so important that individual instances of corruption shouldn’t be an impetus for tanking the member item concept. “Let the judicial system deal with the abuses of it,” he said.
Discretionary spending pots — which have long been part of both City Council and state Legislature budgets — allow New York lawmakers to funnel money directly into nonprofit efforts in their districts under the auspice that local elected officials know how to best allocate cash for their constituents.
Adams’ past declaration of support for member items stands in contrast to his Dec. 20 letter to the Council, in which he urged the body’s 51 lawmakers to set aside 50% of their discretionary cash for costs related to his administration’s handling of the city’s migrant crisis.
“I am hopeful that the City Council will voluntarily reduce the remainder of Fiscal Year 2023 expense discretionary spending by up to 50% where appropriate to help meet this challenge,” Adams wrote in the letter, which was obtained by the Daily News.
On the same day he sent the letter, the mayor ramped up the rhetoric in an interview with the editorial board of a New York tabloid, saying Council members “need” to cough up half of their discretionary cash.
“We need them to take a 50% cut in the end of the year so we can contribute and throw the money in a pot,” he said, adding that his administration estimates it will spend $1 billion this fiscal year alone on providing shelter and services for the thousands of Latin American migrants who have arrived in the city since this spring.
The dissonance between Adams’ 2013 comments and last week’s missives prompted intense pushback from Council members.
”Before he was mayor, Eric Adams understood well that neighborhood nonprofits provide vital services for youth, seniors, homeless New Yorkers and working families,” said Brooklyn Councilman Lincoln Restler, who was among 14 Democratic members who vowed last week to oppose Adams‘ latest budget blueprint due to his discretionary funding broadside and proposed belt-tightening at some agencies.
“Mayor Adams’ proposal to slash resources for community-based organizations is sadly consistent with his austerity budget proposals that are starving city agencies of essential services.”
Adams spokesman Fabien Levy disputed the notion that the mayor is pushing for cutting the Council’s discretionary pot.
“There is no suggestion that lawmakers surrender their discretionary funding,” Levy said Monday. “What we are asking is that they consider using some of their discretion to help asylum seekers ... especially given some Council members continue to propose new spending programs.”
Brooklyn Councilman Justin Brannan, a Democrat who chairs the body’s Finance Committee, pushed back on Adams’ request for a diversion of discretionary dough by putting it into the city’s fiscal context.
“Our discretionary funds account for about one half of 1% of the entire New York City budget,” he told The News. “Yet that 0.59% of $101 billion is life or death for thousands of nonprofit organizations and the New Yorkers they serve. This isn’t pork; everyone knows these are funds that support critical programs and services that New York’s most vulnerable rely on.”
Council members use their Schedule C discretionary allocations for a range of initiatives, and much of the money ends up going into municipal agencies.
According to Council data, members have earmarked nearly $30 million in Schedule C funds for immigrant services this fiscal year and more than $2 million for homeless services. Last week, The News revealed Adams’ administration will also receive a “substantial share” of $800 million in federal aid allocated for the migrant crisis.
“We are consistent supporters of the work required to advance the health and safety of New Yorkers and understand that any attempt to undermine these essential organizations and workers serving our communities would set our city back,” Mandela Jones, a spokesman for Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, said when asked for comment on the mayor’s past embrace of discretionary spending independence for lawmakers.
The 2013 statement wasn’t the first time Adams trumpeted the importance of letting lawmakers retain discretion on member item spending.
In 2009, Adams secured $10,000 in state Senate discretionary funding for a research center in his district devoted to implementing the policy goals of formerly convicted felons. “We’ve got to know what we’re doing in Albany,” Adams said then in defense of the funding. “If we know beforehand what the impact is, we might better find a way to solve a problem.”
Adams isn’t the only member of his administration with a history of defending the importance of lawmakers’ spending discretion.
Laurie Cumbo, a former Council member who serves as Adams’ cultural affairs commissioner, was prompted to run for Council in part because of her activism against a decision to end member items on the state level, according to a 2017 Gotham Gazette article. And in 2012, Cumbo made the case for member items to the New York Observer, telling the outlet that divestment from the federal government had trickled down to the local and state level.
“There’s also been a divestment of investment into our communities, it began on the federal level with the attack on ‘pork’ that we call ‘meat and potatoes’ in our world,” she said at the time.
Eric Ulrich, Adams’ former Buildings commissioner who resigned under a cloud of controversy last month, also touted the importance of member items during a state Senate run in 2012.
“Part of the job of the elected official is to fight for as much money to bring back to your district as humanly possible,” he said at the time. “When you don’t do that, and when you fail to bring back money to the community, there’s something wrong with the picture.”
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