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Two weeks ago, Mayor Zohran Mamdani summoned the media to a press conference to paint a dire picture of New York City's finances. Eric Adams had left the City budget in such a hole, Mamdani said, that within two years there would be a $12 billion budget gap.
To close this gap, he argued, the state needed to, for one, stop screwing over New York City when it came to sharing revenue. But what Governor Kathy Hochul and the state legislature really needed to do, he said, is pass his proposed tax on millionaires.
That day, skeptical reporters hammered Mamdani for specifics on this enormous budget gap, which he did not offer. Post-presser, the shared sentiment among the City Hall press corps, which had very closely covered the budget battles of Mamdani's predecessor, was: That was all kind of bullshit, right?
We wrote a few weeks ago that the budget gap Mamdani was touting was largely smoke and mirrors, a nightmare scenario based on assumptions that Wall Street bonuses and tax revenue would come in extremely low and spending would be high. That's the type of scenario that comptrollers project to make sure the City never gets out in front of its skis on spending, which rarely end up being reality. (As one City budget insider told Hell Gate a few weeks ago, the first thing a mayor should do with a comptroller's assessment? "Put it in the trash.") This week, Mamdani himself admitted his doom-and-gloom projection was, in fact, bullshit — and by painting such a dark picture, the Great Communicator made one of his first major public relations missteps.