Less than 100 days into their terms, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and leaders of the City Council have turned the city’s budget process into a political street fight in ways that will hurt the everyday New Yorkers they are supposed to be helping. Bloodying up one’s opponents might be an effective way to win elections, but it’s a questionable way to govern.

The latest back-and-forth began when councilmembers, led by Speaker Julie Menin, issued a detailed, 60-page analysis of Mamdani’s preliminary spending plan along with a boatload of suggestions about ways to close the city’s $5.4 billion budget gap. This included fairly dry, noncontroversial stuff, like properly recording the value of PILOTs (Payments in Lieu of Taxes) owed by some property owners, which amounts to $11 million a year, and accounting for the interest accrued on money sitting in the city’s bank accounts, which adds up to $145 million.

But Menin’s plan was silent on the hot-button question of whether the state should raise taxes on wealthy New Yorkers, and its avoidance of the topic set off fireworks.

“Council Speaker Julie Menin just released her budget proposal. Her plan claims to close the city’s $5.4 billion fiscal gap without taxing the rich or cutting services. The problem is that’s not what it would do,” Mamdani said in a prepared video. He also complained in a social-media post that the council plan “refuses to address the deeper structural imbalance between the City and the State, or to increase taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers and most profitable corporations.”

Things spiraled from there. “Speaker Menin’s proposals for alleged cost saving are bogus,” the pro-Mamdani New York Working Families Party tweeted. “Speaker........

© Daily Intelligencer