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Mamdani’s budget ultimatum for Gov. Hochul is a crisis of his own making

Budgets are usually about choices, but Mayor Mamdani’s fiscal 2027 budget proposal presents Gov. Hochul and state lawmakers with just one: They can sign off on the suite of tax hikes he’s demanded, or he’ll ask the City Council for a painful property tax increase of almost 10%.

The mayor has complained — not without some merit — that the Adams administration lowballed expenses. If the city’s finances are truly in “crisis” condition, the appropriate response is triage.

But the mayor has yet to administer even basic first aid.

The “chief spending officers” he tasked with trimming spending haven’t yet made suggestions, and the phrase “hiring freeze” hasn’t been uttered.

Instead, he’s sending property owners to the hospital with a 9.5% property tax hike.

Many players and factors brought about the current “crisis”:

The DOE is a representative example of what ails city finances.

It’s the biggest part of the budget, and Mamdani would have DOE spend an extra $2.8 billion next year. But enrollment is collapsing amid outmigration and falling birthrates: the city had more than 87,000 public-school first-graders a decade ago. Today it’s around 70,000 — and a bigger share of them are attending charter schools after parents lost confidence in the city’s public-education system.

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In total, over that time, DOE has lost about 118,000 students, yet half-empty schools remain open.

As Manhattan Institute fellow Danyela Souza Egorov wrote recently, 112 public........

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