Mayor Adams took a victory lap Monday over the adoption of a municipal budget that reversed his controversial cuts to the city public library systems, vexing City Council members who argued it’s disingenuous for him to celebrate the rollback of spending reductions he long advocated for.
In a string of morning television and radio appearances, as well as a celebratory press conference at upper Manhattan’s Inwood Library, the mayor said he and Council Speaker Adrienne Adams were jointly responsible for ensuring that the $112.4 billion city spending plan adopted Sunday undid $58.3 million in cuts to the libraries he enacted or proposed as part of this year’s budget process.
“Folks like to say the City Council restored — no, we restored, we work as a team,” the mayor said on PIX11. “We sit in the room and we look at the money coming in, the money coming out, and then we make these tough decisions.”
Later Monday, Adams appeared in Inwood where he was unapologetic about being portrayed as the villain in the libraries saga and pushed back against the notion that the crisis around cuts was of his own creation.
“I don’t mind being the villain of the city that I love,” he said. “We had a $7 billion hole in our budget … We were able to find $7 billion in savings.”
Most of the library cuts the mayor pushed for never took effect, as they were only proposed and never enacted.
Luiz C. Ribeiro for NY Daily News
New York City librarians and supporters rally at City Hall Park on Tuesday, March 12, 2024. (Luiz C. Ribeiro for NY Daily News)
However, a $22.1 million cut to the libraries’ operating budget was enacted by the mayor last November as part of a so-called Program to Eliminate the Gap. That cut resulted in the library systems being forced to eliminate seven-day service at dozens of branches across the city, a development that sparked outrage from Council Democrats and advocates who argued it deprived working class New Yorkers of a critical public resource.
As part of the budget deal inked this weekend, that cut is now being scrapped and libraries are expected to resume seven-day service. Adams did not say Monday how soon seven-day service will come back.
Given that the mayor carried out the cut that forced libraries to abolish seven-day service, Queens Councilwoman Tiffany Cabán said his Monday victory lap left a bad taste.
“New Yorkers who haven’t been able to access their libraries on Sundays for weeks on end won’t be fooled by this propaganda tour,” said Cabán, a democratic socialist and one of three left-wing Council members who voted against the budget Sunday over concerns about it not lowering NYPD spending. “We know the cuts to our libraries were unnecessary to begin with … We deserve a lot better.”
Uptown Manhattan and Bronx Councilwoman Diana Ayala, the chamber’s Democratic deputy speaker who played a prominent role in the budget talks, said the mayor’s habit of cutting spending and then reversing himself shows he did not engage in “efficient leadership” in this year’s process.
“The mayor is obviously free to do whatever he wants to do with his time and spread whatever narrative that fits his needs, but everybody knows that the library and cultural wins happened because of advocacy from the Council. It wouldn’t have magically appeared otherwise,” she said.
Ayala noted she wasn’t invited to Monday’s event in Inwood.
“No love lost,” she said.
Asked on PIX11 whether he wishes he would’ve done anything differently during this year’s budget process, Adams suggested he has some regrets.
“You always want to do things differently,” he said, “but life is not about looking in the rearview mirror, it’s the front windshield that matters.”
During the press conference in Inwood, lawmakers and advocates made sure to thank the mayor for agreeing to restore funding in the budget, but they also lavished praise on those who pressured him for months to roll back his austerity measures.
“I’m grateful for the advocates who made their voices really loud, and thank God for them,” said Yvonne Stennett, executive director of Community League of the Heights, a Washington Heights-based community development group. “I’m grateful to the mayor and grateful to the City Council for making this happen.”