We won’t know for sure until the state budget is officially closed in the next few days, but it seems clear Mayor Zohran Mamdani did an extraordinary job of persuading Governor Kathy Hochul to pony up an extra $4 billion in assistance to the city. But that doesn’t mean Mamdani is out of the fiscal woods.

“New York City is now in its fourth year of spending more than it collects, and spending has far outpaced inflation for a decade,” write Ken Girardin and John Ketcham, fellows at the conservative Manhattan Institute. “Instead of taking a scalpel to city agencies, the mayor took the train to Albany.”

The mayor’s $124.7 billion executive budget includes a last-minute agreement by the governor to institute a controversial new tax on the luxury homes of out-of-state owners, but even that cash infusion might not be enough, according to some of the municipal stakeholders who must sign off on Mamdani’s numbers before the fiscal year ends on June 30.

“Tax revenue is growing. We had a record bonus season on Wall Street. Despite that, expenses are growing even faster,” Comptroller Mark Levine told me. “It’s leading to this imbalance that we’re all trying to work on. We’ve got to fix that structural imbalance for the long term, because we don’t know what’s coming next year and beyond.”

“We are giving him the benefit of doubt that they’ve done their due diligence. But this is why we have hearings,” City Councilmember Nantasha Williams of Queens, a member of the council’s budget negotiating team, told me in an interview. “This is why the council........

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