Comptroller Proposes City Charter Reforms to Limit Budget Leeway for Mayor and Council

Stepping into the political minefield created by Mayor Eric Adams’ launch of a Charter Revision Commission, Comptroller Brad Lander will propose budget reforms Friday through the commission that he says are a test of the mayor’s panel.

Lander, who is on a long list of people who could challenge Adams for reelection, is seizing on the need for the mayor to prove the commission is more than a political stunt in order to push changes to budget and fiscal policies long sought by budget watchdogs.

Established immediately after the City Council proposed last month to advance its own charter reforms that would have given it the right to confirm or reject mayoral appointees to key agencies, Mayor Adams created his own charter commission, controlling which proposed charter changes are ultimately sent on to voters to ratify. But the mayoral committee’s first meeting this week was poorly attended , including by its own members.

“The charter commission should not be pursuing petty political agendas,” Lander told THE CITY. “But we do need stronger fiscal management and this could be an opportunity to deliver it.”

In response, the mayor’s press office said, “the Charter Revision Commission is excited to hear from every New Yorker and will review all ideas brought to them.”

Lander noted that this year marks 50 years since the fiscal crisis in which the city barely escaped bankruptcy but had to endure a decade of deep budget cuts that crippled many city services in order to restore its financial health. While the crisis led to many important budget reforms, they are in desperate need of updating, he said.

The first and probably most important charter change proposed by Lander would require the mayor and the Council to establish a formula under which budget reserves would be increased when tax revenues are strong. This new rule would regulate when funds could be taken from the reserves when tax revenues fall — a step the mayor and the Council have resisted for years.

For example, the city currently has $8.2 billion in its various reserve funds, a record in dollar terms but only 7% of the city’s budget, which is well below that maintained by other large cities.

Despite a tax windfall that has allowed the mayor to restore many of the spending cuts he had previously proposed, Adams is not planning to make any addition to the reserves this year. The Council doesn’t seem likely to do so, either.

The exact details of that formula need to be worked out, and there probably isn’t time to do it before charter reforms must be proposed by the commission, Lander said. But a mandate would force the mayor and Council to act, he added.

The second most important would be to impose a limit of 15% on the amount of money in any budget that can be used to pay debt service, including interest and principal repayments. Debt service in the current budget is headed up to as much as 15% if the city spends the money it has outlined in its capital plan. Debt service is legally required to be paid first, leaving less money for other programs.

In a move that will be strongly supported by the thousands of nonprofits that rely on city funds for operations, the proposal would require the city to set specific time limits for the city to finish each stage of the procurement process for outside contractors as well as for payments, and report on its success rate.

The mayor and comptroller agreed on setting such time limits more than a year ago but nothing has been done. While the proposals do not include penalties, Lander could support adding those to the reforms.

The final two measures would require periodic multi-year efficiency and savings targets for each agency, designed to replace the episodic use of so called PEGs (program to eliminate the gap) to force agencies to become more cost-effective.

It would also require the city to embrace methods established by fiscal watchdogs to assess and report on its infrastructure, which would help show both the state of things like roads and bridges and the expected costs to maintain or replace them.

The comptroller’s plans have already won support from the director of the Independent Budget Office and the Citizens Budget Commission, as well as a series of trade groups for non-profits including the Human Services Council of New York and the Supportive Housing Network of New York.

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