New York City officials reached a handshake deal on the city's $62.9 billion budget last week and spent the weekend trying to hammer out the final details as the state budget remained in legislative limbo.
It wasn't clear last week what changes, if any, were in play for Mayor Michael Bloomberg's proposed capital plan, which totals $9.6 billion. Office of Management and Budget spokesman Raymond Orlando said details will be available today for the fiscal 2011 budget.
"All the small details will be finalized this weekend," Kim Thai, spokeswoman for City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, said Friday. "The major points have been agreed upon."
Unlike New York State, which still had no final budget deal nearly three months into its fiscal year, the city is poised to pass a budget before the July 1 start of its fiscal year.
The exact impact of state budget cuts to the city remains in dispute. The budget agreement assumes $1.3 billion will be trimmed, but the state estimates the haircut at $748 million. The city's budget also assumes economically sensitive tax revenue will generate $3 billion less than in fiscal 2008.
Gov. David Paterson said Friday that his latest emergency spending bill will include portions of the state budget that remains in dispute. The Legislature must pass his emergency spending bills every week without amendment to avoid a shutdown, in the absence of a final budget.
Paterson first submitted his budget proposal in January and some of the contents of that submission have been enacted piecemeal in the weekly extenders the Legislature has passed since its fiscal year began on April 1.
"Today, I am taking the final step toward enacting a budget and closing the deficit," Paterson said. "When taken with the other portions of the budget that have already been passed, the final budget will fulfill the core principles of my initial proposal: shared sacrifice combined with recurring spending reductions and responsible budgeting."
Paterson said his final budget does not borrow any money to fund general operating expenses. The Legislature, and Bloomberg, have criticized some of Paterson's proposed cuts as being too deep.
The city's deal includes 1,000 layoffs and the reduction of 2,000 teachers through attrition, according to published reports, far fewer than the nearly 11,000 jobs Bloomberg said needed to be cut last month to close the deficit.
