Mayor Eric Adams has blamed his unpopular budget cuts to municipal services on a migrant crisis that has so far cost the city more than $4 billion. Now, his team is identifying a new target: the mandated closure of the detention complex on Rikers Island that Adams inherited but never fully embraced.
City budget director Jacques Jiha slammed the closure’s timeline for eating into the city’s debt capacity, chilling City Hall’s ability to fund other priorities through its capital budget such as affordable housing.
“I keep telling folks this is a real, real problem,” Jiha said during a City Council budget oversight hearing Monday. “And what makes it worse … is the fact that even though we know we’re not going to spend the money for the borough-based jails by 2027, we need to keep it there.”
Adams has voiced skepticism of the timeline that would require Rikers to shut by 2027, the date in the closure plan passed under Adams’ predecessor, Bill de Blasio. In 2019, the City Council voted to shutter the notoriously violent institution and build replacement jails in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens at a projected cost of $8.7 billion.
Jiha said the city is “struggling to maintain” the massive cost of the borough-based jails plan, alongside funding the School Construction Authority and Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which, taken together, are “consuming all the capacity” of the city’s debt, he said.
“We have about $10 billion left in debt capacity, and schools, borough-based jails, BQE, these three projects [are] way above that amount,” Jiha said.
Jiha, who testified for nearly four hours, was responding to ongoing questions from Council members upset about budget cuts to projects funded through the city’s capital budget.
City Comptroller Brad Lander rejected that claim during his own testimony.
Lander, a left-of-center Democrat often at odds with the mayor, refuted Jiha’s assertion that the fiscal year 2024 debt capacity is $10 billion. He pointed to Gov. Kathy Hochul’s allowance for increased debt limit in the city’s budget as he blasted Jiha.
If Hochul’s increase is adopted, Lander said, “neither [the city’s Office of Management and Budget] nor the comptroller’s office project that the city would hit its debt limit, even including all of the Rikers expenses, the additional money from the SCA plan and the BQE in the budget any time in the next decade.”
Closing the jail complex on Rikers has been a goal of Landers’ fellow progressives, lending added incentive for him to question Jiha’s remarks.
City Hall did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the comptroller’s figures.
The city is supposed to ensure debt service does not exceed 15 percent of tax revenue every year, and current levels stand at around 10 percent, Lander said.
“We have meaningful room,” he added.
Meanwhile, Jiha called the cost of the migrant crisis “staggering,” saying it “pushed fiscal year 2024 far out of balance and drove the fiscal year ’25 gap to a very high level.” In response to that, Jiha said, Adams gave him four directives to stabilize the city’s finances: no raising property taxes, no layoffs of city workers, minimize service disruptions and “do not expect the federal cavalry to ride to the rescue.”
Adams has used his bully pulpit to criticize the White House for — in his view — failing to adequately fund the ongoing migrant crisis in New York.
“We did not have the luxury of time, so we drafted and implemented a plan immediately because making the tough but necessary adjustments early would stabilize the city’s finances more quickly,” Jiha said.
The city has spent about $4 billion on asylum seekers since the spring of 2022, Jiha said. He added that the budget assumed $1.5 billion in state aid for migrants, but the state only promised $1.1 billion.
Of the $150 million in federal assistance pledged to the city, he said it has only received $50 million.