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Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced last week that by securing state funding, instituting a new tax on second homes, delaying payments of the city’s pension obligations and pushing back a costly class size mandate he has successfully balanced the city’s budget for Fiscal Year 2027. The measures close what Mamdani said earlier this year was a $12 billion budget gap without raiding the city’s reserves or increasing property taxes — last resorts that Mamdani said the city would have to undertake if it didn’t receive state aid.
His executive budget, released May 12, includes millions of dollars to hire 84 new civilian staff at the FDNY, 20 new staff members at the Civilian Complaint Review Board, as well as millions for Mamdani’s Office of Community Safety and the Office of Hate Crime Prevention. It also solidifies millions of dollars of investments in the Department of Parks & Recreation — that will baseline dozens of positions — as well as additional money for city libraries, CUNY, cultural organizations and the city’s Fair Fares program that provides low-cost transit rides to city residents.
Governor Kathy Hochul's approval of nearly $4 billion in direct aid, including a tax on second homes that could bring in $500 million, combined with over $1.3 billion in savings, went a long way to closing the budget gap. Much of the rest of the gap was filled by proposed pension reamortization.
Delaying payments of the city’s full pension obligation until 2037 from 2032 would save the city nearly $2.3 billion in the next two years, Mamdani said, without affecting retiree benefits. The reamortization schedule alters the original amortization plan constructed in 2010 that had the city pay higher amounts of its pension debt each year until the Fiscal Year 2032 cliff, at which point the entire obligation would be erased from the city’s books.
Under Mamdani’s new plan, which will need approval from state lawmakers by June 30, the city would pay a similar amount each year until FY32 when it would decrease year over year for the final half-decade of payments.
“If you look at the payment schedule that was initially agreed upon from 2010 to 2032, it's a payment that increases every single year, increasing upwards of $6 billion by the final year before then dropping like a cliff down to $0,” Mamdani said on May 12. “What we are proposing is extending that cycle by five years, and that is an extension that would ensure that we would pay the same amount every single year as opposed to what is currently a variable amount increasing year after year.”
Pension experts have previously warned the city against executing a reamoritzation plan, arguing that it was a short-term fix that would saddle the city with big costs in the 2030’s. But Andrew Perry, director of fiscal research at the Fiscal Policy Institute, a finance think tank, argued in a blog post that the current amortization schedule is “poorly designed” — due to the escalating payments and dropoff in 2032 — and said Mamdani’s new plan is an “act of prudent fiscal management.”
Ken Giardin, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan institute, argued the opposite, saying that the payment plan relies on the city’s five pension systems that “are hardly models of fiscal health," continuing to pump out positive returns.
“The entire reason we're talking about the unfunded accrued liability is because the systems made excessively optimistic assumptions in the past—that's why NYC will already be paying off decades-old debt in the 2030s,” he said. "Mark your calendar for 2032, when city [politicians] will be wishing they hadn't done this.”
Marianne Pizzitola, president of the NYC Organization of Public Sector Retirees, said in a text that she does not support the reamortization plan.
Beyond getting state approval for the reamoritzation plan, lawmakers will have to get the approval of leadership of the city's five pension funds and likely the unions whose members pay into them. Already, the Police Benevolent Association has signaled, the New York Times reported, that it’s not buying into the new reamortization plan.
Leadership of the Uniformed Firefighters Association and Uniformed Fire Officers Association, whose members pay into the NYC Fire Pension Fund, did not respond to request for comment. Thea Setterbo, a spokesperson for District Council 37, who’s members are tied to the New York City Employees’ Retirement System, said the union was reviewing the proposal.
"The city has asked for pension restructuring," Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, said in a statement. "Any plan has to be approved by Albany and evaluated and approved by the trustees of the pension boards to be enacted."
Mulgrew's members pay into the Teachers' Retirement System.
City Comptroller Mark Levine did not directly comment on the reamoritzation plan, but commended Mamdani for his budget plan while warning it relies on “short term pension savings, without solving for the fact that City government continues to spend more than we take in, even in a year of record revenues.” A spokesperson for Levine said the Comptroller has yet to create an official assessment of Mamdani’s reamortization plan.
Under Mamdani’s executive budget, the FDNY will receive $9 million annually to fund 84 new civilian positions. It's unclear which department these civilians would be hired into.
One union leader representing civilian staff at the FDNY was unsure and the FDNY did not provide details on the new positions in its response to a request for comment
Mamdani’s new Office of Community Safety will receive $40.9 million in fiscal year 2027 and roughly $40.2 million annually beginning in fiscal year 2028 under the budget plan. Though during his campaign, Mayor Mamdani said he’d hoped to reach a budget of $1 billion for the new agency, officials maintain the $40 million represents a critical first step.
Mamdani said the office would respond to mental health calls as well as oversee other neighborhood safety initiatives.
The mayor reiterated his hopes to build alternatives to traditional policing alongside accountability measures for the NYPD.
“Public safety means more than policing alone,” Mamdani said in announcing the agreement. “This budget invests in the people and programs that prevent harm before it happens while ensuring accountability and transparency remain central to city government.”
The $3.2 million added to the CCRB’s $29.2 million budget beginning in FY27 will fund 20 additional staff positions at the city’s independent police oversight agency charged with investigating allegations of NYPD misconduct. Though the CCRB initially requested $65 million,
CCRB Executive Director Jon Darche thanked Mamdani in a statement and said that the "Mayor’s proposed budget will enable the CCRB to complete its work more efficiently and effectively."
The agency currently operates with a headcount far below what officials say is necessary to fully investigate complaints in a timely manner — working with 247 out of the 267 budgeted positions. Darche told lawmakers in a City Council hearing earlier this year that the CCRB’s FY27 request sought funding for 500 total staff positions — an increase of 233 employees from the FY26 budget.
Even at that level, he noted, the agency would still have roughly 500 civilian employees overseeing a police department of about 35,000 uniformed officers.
Darche warned lawmakers in his Council testimony that the agency’s growing workload had outpaced its staffing levels for years. The CCRB received 5,617 complaints in 2025 — the second-highest total in a decade — involving more than 22,000 allegations of misconduct.
“Civilians deserve justice in a timely fashion, and police officers deserve an appropriate resolution in a timely fashion,” Darche said in March. “Our budget request enables that.”
Darche added then that staffing shortages forced the agency to close roughly 1,390 complaints last year without full investigation under its “Strategic Resource Allocation Determination,” or S-RAD, policy. Fully investigated cases took an average of 432 days to close in 2025.
While the CCRB had requested a significantly larger expansion, officials said the additional hires approved in the budget would help reduce investigative delays and expand the agency’s oversight capacity.
The budget also baselines dozens of positions in the Department of Parks & Recreation, including urban park rangers and staff in the Natural Resources Group that were previously funded on a year-to-year basis.
Under the status quo, dozens of workers wait in limbo for months to learn if their jobs have been renewed and often only find out if their position will be maintained for the following year days before their potential layoff date. These workers and their union leaders have pleaded for years with city leaders in public hearings and private meetings to baseline their funding in order to stabilize the positions, and while the initiatives in Mamdani’s executive budget won’t bring back former colleagues who were cut, parks workers and union officials were celebrating the funding in the days after it was announced.
Reyna Wang, a forester and chair of Local 375’s parks chapter, said that the potential baselining of the dozens of parks positions was a “huge victory.” Wang herself was laid off as an urban park ranger in June 2019, with only a few days notice, when the funding for her position was not renewed.
The city finalizing the baseline funding for these positions would prevent other park rangers from suffering the same fate.
“Opportunities for outdoor education and recreation are difficult for New Yorkers to access, especially those from marginalized communities,” Wang said in a text. “The Urban Park Rangers play a crucial role in closing this gap by providing free or low cost school partnerships and opportunities to canoe and camp within the 5 boroughs, among a plethora of other programs, but these contributions often fly under the radar in discussions on funding for Parks.”
According to Joe Puleo, president of Local 983, around 50 urban park ranger positions have been baselined into budget funding as have 20 associate park service workers.
“It’s a great thing,” Puleo said. “It’s given us some hope.”
Mamdani’s executive budget released this week is the penultimate step in the city’s budget dance that concludes at the end of June when the City Council and Mayor reach agreement on a final budget for the next fiscal year. Most years, the City Council, in its response to the Mayor, seeks to add hundreds of millions of dollars more in funding for crucial programs to the budget.
Mamdani has likely preempted some of those additions by including funding for the Parks Department, city libraries and CUNY, that are typically Council priorities.
The CUNY funding includes a baselined $15 million for community colleges as well as $55.8 million to help repair CUNY facilities, James Davis, president of the Professional Staff Congress of CUNY, said in a statement.
“What a change it is to have a Mayor who responds to a budget crisis with investment instead of austerity, 'insourcing' to public servants instead of outsourcing to expensive for-profit vendors and taxing the rich instead of cutting CUNY and public services," Davis said. "This budget amounts to a structural investment in opportunity for more than 80,000 community college students."
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