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Brigid Bergin: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Brigid Bergin, senior reporter in the WNYC and Gothamist newsroom. Coming up on today's show, we'll hear what happened at the Rent Guidelines Board Meeting last night. Spoiler alert, they did not freeze the rent for rent-regulated apartments. WNYC and Gothamist reporter David Brann will have the details in just a little while. Plus, our health and climate story of the week, what we know so far about Governor Hochul's plan to open a new nuclear power plant in New York State. This announcement comes about four years after the Indian Point power plant was shut down in Westchester County. We'll talk about the pros and cons of nuclear power. We'll get Ruth Marcus' take on the Supreme Court term that just ended. She was a longtime Washington Post columnist who is now writing for the New Yorker. She'll also weigh in on where things stand with tax and spend mega bill that President Trump is urging Congress to pass this week.

We'll wrap up today's show with a preview of what could have been a moment of great suspense, the next round of ranked choice voting from last week's primary election. They will come out at noon today, but instead, Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani's big primary night numbers mean we already know he's the official winner of the Democratic nomination, but we're still going to dig into the numbers and hear what else we should be on the lookout for.

First this morning, even as lawmakers in Washington continue to work through issues on the president's tax and spending bill, here in New York City, our local lawmakers approved a budget for fiscal year 2026 yesterday. Negotiations between the City Council and the mayor's office continued throughout last week when, oh yes, there was a major election that almost everyone involved with hammering out this deal was a part of. Look at these New Yorkers walking and chewing gum at the same time.

Now, of course, the city is legally required to adopt a balanced budget by the start of the fiscal year, which is today, but getting to a final agreement takes real work. Joining me now to unpack some of the details of this $116 billion spending plan is City Council Finance Committee Chair Justin Brannan. Councilmember, welcome back to WNYC.

Justin Brannan: Always good to talk to you, Brigid. Thanks for having me on.

Brigid Bergin: Listeners, we know it takes a lot of input to reach a final budget deal. I'm sure there's some of you who work to influence the outcome of this budget. Were you fighting for childcare funding? Did you want to see more legal funding for immigrants? We want to hear the story of your budget wins, or maybe there's something you think this budget should include but doesn't. Call with your budget wins, losses, or if you just have a question for my guest, City Council Finance Committee Chair Justin Brannan. The number is 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. You can call or text that number.

Okay, Councilmember, before we dive in, can you talk a little bit about the process? These negotiations, as I said, have been going on while you've got a primary election going on, but really they go further back to when the mayor proposed his preliminary budget back in January, right?

Justin Brannan: Yes, this all starts in earnest in the first weeks of January when the mayor put out his preliminary budget. Then we go into a month of preliminary hearings, then the mayor puts out his executive budget, then we do another month of executive budget hearings, and it all needs to get wrapped up in time for the fiscal year, which starts today for FY26. We passed the budget yesterday on time, balanced.

It's a crazy, hectic process, especially if you're someone like me who is running citywide at the same time. I didn't have much time to campaign because I have a day job and was actually trying to negotiate the budget. We're happy with where it landed, and I'm happy with going forward here.

Brigid Bergin: In years past, the Council and mayor's office have really been at odds over major issues like cuts to library hours and cutting early childhood education seats. What were some of the sticking points in this year's negotiations?

Justin Brannan: It's interesting. It's amazing what a election year can do for a budget forecast. The City Council has always been pretty strong on forecasting and talking about the economy and the money that we have to spend. I think one thing that's important to remind folks is that we don't spend on debt, we don't spend on a deficit. The money that we allocate, $116 billion budget, that's all money that we bring in through tax receipts. We don't start at zero and just spend money until we run out of ideas. We are legally-mandated, charter-obligated to allocate or save the money that the city takes in.

I think this year we showed that when the mayor puts false austerity and budget brinkmanship aside, we can deliver a budget that actually works for New Yorkers to deliver a safer, fairer, healthier, more affordable city, but in order to do that, it only happens when City Hall stops pretending that this is a monarchy and that they actually acknowledge that the Council is the co equal branch of democratic city government.

A lot of the priorities that we were able to get done in this budget are items that we've been fighting for for a very long time. It's just we finally got to agree that these were important shared priorities.

Brigid Bergin: Councilmember, the details, as you said, were being worked out at the very same time you and the speaker were both running in very busy primary elections. Mayor Adams is, of course, also up for reelection running as an independent. How do you think that changed his posture during negotiations? How did it change the overall process this year?

Justin Brannan: Well, I think it changed everything. The negotiations were much smoother. His executive budget was much more generous than in years past where his executive budget was skeletal and we were basically just picking meat off of the bone to try to keep the libraries open. This year I think there was more of a willingness to negotiate with the Council and to land on our shared priorities. whether it was the historic $50 million increase in immigrant legal services that, until a couple of days ago, we were at 5 million until Adrian and I started slamming on a couple of tables to get into 50 million.

You had $4 billion in capital funding to support our City for All plan, the creation and preservation of affordable housing. What I'm most excited about is this big bold 0-2 initiative that will help hundreds of low income families and represent a real leap towards making New York City the first American city to provide free universal childcare.

Now, these are all priorities that we've been fighting for for a very long time. We didn't just come up with this a week ago, but with the mayor running for reelection and maybe some people in his team telling him, "Now's the time to spend some money, do some popular stuff," the mayor finally acknowledged the City Council as that co-equal branch of government and we were able to get some of these priorities funded.

Brigid Bergin: Well, I want to dive into the details of some of those a little bit more, but if you've just joined us, it's the Brian Lehrer Show in WNYC. I'm Brigid Bergin, senior reporter in the WNYC and Gothamist newsroom, filling in for Brian for a couple days. He deserves a vacation. Don't we all? My guest right now is City Council Finance Chair Justin Brannan, and we're talking about the city budget that was just approved yesterday at the council meeting.

We're interested in your stories. If there's something in this budget that you really want to shout out, maybe you've been fighting for something, whether it's that childcare funding that the council member just mentioned, the funding for immigrants, legal funding to support immigrants. We want to hear your stories of budget wins, or maybe there are things that you really wanted to see in this budget that didn't make the cut. We'd like to hear that, too, or your questions for my guest, City Council Finance Chair Justin Brannan. The number, 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. Again, you can call or text at that number.

Councilmember, you started to mention some of the big-ticket items that are in this budget. We mentioned it's a $116 billion budget. My colleague Elizabeth Kim reported on that new pilot program that would offer childcare to hundreds of low-income families with children under three, at a cost of about $10 million. What is the thinking here? Is this supposed to be a runway for a broader universal child care program?

Justin Brannan: Absolutely. I think everyone running for higher office this year was rightfully and continues to be rightfully focused on our affordability crisis in the city. I think there are two main pillars of that stubborn and sticky affordability crisis. One of them is we need to build more housing that people can actually afford and the second is lack of access to affordable child care.

I think you're seeing it as the quintessential free market failure, where you see that providers are getting paid peanuts and parents are saying, "It's too expensive." There's a perfect example of somewhere where the government needs to step in to fix this, to provide a service that would be a game changer for our economy, for the workforce and for working families.

The $10 million allocation to what would be a mix of school day, school year and extended day, extended year seats, this would be for kids, zero to two, run by the Department of Education, and it would offer hundreds of seats. We don't have the full number yet, but we want to try it because we know it's going to work.

For me, I think the last big bold idea this city had was Bill de Blasio's universal pre-K and 3-K. We haven't had any big, bold ideas since then. We've been fighting over getting the grass cut in the park and keeping the libraries open, and that's due to Mayor Adams and his false austerity nonsense. Now we're in a place where the mayor is hoping he'll get reelected, so he suddenly wants to do some good [inaudible 00:11:20]

We had this ready to go because I think this puts us on the path to really becoming the first American city to offer universal childcare. If you can do it in New York City, you can do it anywhere. I think, rightfully, you're seeing all candidates running for citywide office now talking about how important this would be and what a game changer it would be, but like you said, like you're asking folks to call in, this victory really belongs to the parents who refused to give up when Adam said that childcare wasn't a priority and the organizing that folks did that's turned universal childcare from a, "Gee, wouldn't that be nice?" to something that really should be non negotiable.

Brigid Bergin: You mentioned that this is something that all the candidates for citywide office are talking about, but it is something that the presumptive Democratic mayoral nominee, Zohran Mamdani, has made a central plank in his platform, universal childcare. How much did that influence the negotiations? Did you feel any of that in the room?

Justin Brannan: Well, look, this is something that a lot of us have been talking about for a long time, and Zohran included. There's a bunch of elected officials in Albany and in the city of New York that have been talking about universal child care for years. I think Zohran rightfully tapped into that and captured the imagination of the city, what's possible and why not? When we come up with ideas that would actually make a tangible difference in the lives of working families, how come those ideas are immediately painted as radical, but tax breaks for billionaires somehow is not radical? Delivering universal childcare for the city of New York should be a no brainer. It's not a radical idea.

This is something that a lot of folks have been pushing for for a long time, especially the advocates both in Albany and the city, so this is something that's always been on our agenda, but we've never had a mayor who actually cared about it. I think the Council and Zohran have always been on the same page as far as getting universal childcare done. Maybe Eric Adams suddenly cared about this because he knows that Zohran cares about it. For us, this was something that's always been on our to-do list, but we had a partner on the other side of City Hall who cared enough to do it, and now we did. That's a testament to Zohran.

Brigid Bergin: Councilmember, a listener texts, "The mayor runs nearly all city agencies. Therefore, after the mayor and Council agree on a budget, what prevents a mayor from not necessarily spending money as called for in the budget? We certainly have seen Trump refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress."

Justin Brannan: That's a great question. The reason we do the handshake, it's more than just a ceremonial action. It's really, our way of saying that we agreed on how this money is going to get spent and it better get spent that way or else, there's going to be hell to pay. The City Council now, our job doesn't end when we shake hands. Now we get into the oversight of making sure, ensuring that the money that we agreed on being spent, whether it's in the Department of Education or Department of Environmental Protection or any of the city agencies, we have to hold the mayor accountable to ensure that that money is spent the way that we agreed to.

That's a huge part of our role as the co-equal branch of government, as the check on the mayor, is to do that oversight to ensure the money is spent the way that we agreed to have it spent.

Brigid Bergin: Councilmember, pre-K and 3-K seats have been a source of a lot of debate in previous budgets. Are those programs fully funded in this budget?

Justin Brannan: Yes, we have all the money we need. Part of what we realized early on was, there are some issues that you just need more money. You've got to find more money to fund them, to expand them. The early childhood education system, and I worked on this as a [inaudible 00:15:35] under Mayor de Blasio, where we rolled out UPK and we were super aggressive about it and super unorthodox about how we went about connecting parents with seats.

Mayor Adams did the opposite. He starved the system to try to show that it wasn't working and he starved the outreach. He would say, "Well, look at this area here. No one wants the pre-K seats. [inaudible 00:16:00] you haven't spent a dime in doing any advertising or any outreach or any language access." We realized that the early childhood education system, it wasn't just getting more money, it was actually reforming the system so that we were connecting the seats where the demand was and we didn't have more seats in one area where there was low demand. You had to right-size the system.

Now I think we're back on the right track, but we have to stay vigilant, because this mayor has already shown that he doesn't really care much about early childhood education and thankfully this year is an election year for him, and suddenly he does care about it. I'm the guy that negotiates the budget, so I don't care- I'll take it, I don't care why he suddenly cares about it. I need it for the city, but now we've got to stay vigilant to make sure it succeeds.

Brigid Bergin: Councilmember, another thing that I think some people see as a win for the mayor is some funding for e-bike regulations. I understand there's a new $6 million program to beef up enforcement through the Department of Transportation, which is, these regulations seem to be an increasingly important priority of the mayor's office. Any sense of how that's going to work?

Justin Brannan: That was a real priority for the mayor's side. I think the devil's going to be in the details there to better understand how that office is going to be funded and what they're envisioning for the office. That was a priority on the mayor's side and something that now, through the legislative process, we'll have to hammer out.

Brigid Bergin: Councilmember, one of the criticisms of this budget deal is that it doesn't take into account what feel like really looming cuts from the federal government, possibly the state government. Just yesterday, City Comptroller Brad Lander joined me to say this about the budget.

City Comptroller Brad Lander: I was advocating for them to add $1 billion to our Rainy Day Fund and $1 billion to our general reserve to get ready for the cuts that are coming, and unfortunately, nothing was added to the budget to prepare. There were good additions, $50 million for immigrant legal services, which we were talking about before, and that, plus the 50 million the governor's providing, makes it possible for New York to step up there. I love seven-day library service at 10 additional branches, some money for child care. I think it's a mistake to have failed to add to the reserves, given what we know is coming from Washington.

Brigid Bergin: Councilmember, I know you have said this budget is trump-proofed, but how so? Why not set more money aside in the Rainy Day Funds?

Justin Brannan: Look, if you want to set aside more money, you have to cut it from somewhere. You have to take it from somewhere. We have almost $8.5 billion in reserves. That's the highest that our reserves have ever been. The Council has fought every year for the past three years to ensure that we were adding to our reserves and to ensure that it stayed at that historic level. You can't run a city on reserves, so even if you put $20 billion in reserves and the federal government came and cut 10% of our budget, you'd be able to run the city for that year, but then what do you do?

We made a prudent and very conscious and deliberate decision to deploy money into the programs and into the communities that need it most, that are most under attack by the administration in Washington. The communities that would be hit hardest and first and worst by the cruel policies coming out of Washington, they need money in their communities now. They need programs funded now. They don't need money put aside for a rainy day.

With an $8.5 billion reserve, which we feel is healthy and prudent, if you want to put more money in the reserves, you got to cut from somewhere. We were not going to make cuts at this time. You have to stay vigilant, like you said. We've already seen a couple hundred million dollars that have been clawed back out of our budget that was legally-appropriated by Congress and took this administration, at City Hall, two weeks to sue to get that money back. We need to be a little bit more aggressive and urgent in our response.

At this time, with the threat of Washington, us adding more money to the reserves and just basically being a sitting duck and saying, "Look, we've got all this money in reserve," maybe Washington is going to see that and think that they can mess with us even more.

That was actually part of our decision making, a rare moment where we agreed with OMB, where we both said, "You know what, at this time, we need to put money into immigrant services, we need to put money into universal child care, into libraries, into CUNY, into all the things that New Yorkers rely on instead of squirreling away another billion dollars, we'd have to cut it from somewhere," but then it's just sitting there. I think it would make us even more vulnerable to more cuts from Washington.

Brigid Bergin: I will tell you that most of our callers have called in with questions related to housing and development, and so we're going to take one of them as we come to the close of this segment. Virginia in the West Village, thanks for calling WNYC.

Virginia: Hello. Hi. Hi, Councilmember. Thanks so much for taking questions. My question is regarding the funding for the development and preservation of affordable housing. I'm curious about, one, rent-stabilized apartments aren't going to become more affordable. They only go up. Building more buildings in the city isn't going to help the existing rent-stabilized tenants because it seems to always just-- our rents are always just increased.

My question is, many of these buildings in the city that were filled with rent-stabilized tenants and rent-stabilized units were purchased by real estate investments over the last 10 or so years solely to push tenants out of those properties, to push rent-stabilized tenants out of those properties. Many of them have been very successful, and these real estate investors have grown very wealthy doing this.

My question is, has there been any effort in the City Council to prevent the very same investors who have grown wealthy by undermining affordability, is there any effort to keep them from accessing future affordable housing development funds? Because I don't think HPD is actually doing their job.

Brigid Bergin: Virginia, thanks for your call. Councilmember?

Justin Brannan: Thanks, Virginia, for the question. Part of the Council's City for All Housing Plan, our goal there was to deepen affordability of housing production. We did that by significantly increasing funding in HPD's Five-Year Capital Plan for extremely low and low income affordability in ELLA and NYCHA Section 9, Rehabilitation and Repairs. We're laser-focused on deepening those affordability targets for the very reasons that you've mentioned.

That's what the City for All plan was all about. In our budget that we just passed yesterday, there's $4 billion of capital there that is earmarked for the creation and preservation of housing that New Yorkers can actually afford, and strengthening the support for faith and community-based organizations, affordable housing development. We're trying to use every tool we have in the toolbox to create more housing because we do, believe that it's a simple supply and demand problem, and that if you build more housing, it will bring down the rents for other people. Obviously, you have to stay vigilant and do oversight over those predatory actors that are trying to exploit tenants and drive people out of the city.

Brigid Bergin: We're going to take one more caller for this segment with Council Finance Chair Justin Brannan. We've been talking about the city's new budget, but we are also about to have a conversation about the city's Rent Guidelines Board. We're going to go to John in Brooklyn who says he is a constituent of yours, Councilmember. Go ahead, John.

John: Yes, good morning, Councilmember. I'm in Dyker Heights, Bay Ridge area, so I'm very familiar with you. I'm a small landlord, and if you or other councilmembers are so concerned about affordability, I'm on the opposite spectrum of the previous caller with rent-stabilized buildings. I have a 16-family building. These people stay for 10, 20, 30 years. When they move out, you can't do anything cosmetic. You have to gut-renovate the whole thing.

If you're so concerned about affordability, why don't you help small landlords? I don't mean publicly traded companies, but mom and pop people that live in your district who can't afford to upkeep rent-stabilized buildings because it's become politically convenient to just bash landlords that work every day, pay child support and everything else just like other people do. It's become politically acceptable. Just blame everything on the landlord.

Brigid Bergin: John, I want to give the councilmember, since we're running short on time in the segment, a chance to respond. Councilmember, any response to the challenges landlords face?

Justin Brannan: Sure. Look, I do represent a lot of small landlords in southern Brooklyn, and I am not someone who's going to, wholesale, demonize landlords. There's a lot of multi-generational landlords, especially in immigrant neighborhoods, who own small apartment buildings or small homes. Look, I think with the insane affordability crisis in the city right now, elected officials, you have to support a rent freeze. It's a button that you can push to actually make life a little bit easier for people during this insanely expensive time.

There is an ecosystem here that we have to address, the fact that if your costs, as a landlord, keep going up and I'm not paying you more rent, well, there's a deficit there that we have to figure out. There's a delta.

I do think that the state and the city can be doing more to help subsidize that so that we're not balancing that gap on the backs of tenants, but that we're actually making sure landlords have what they need to make those repairs. I think it's a larger conversation we can have, but I do acknowledge the ecosystem that when I pay my rent, that money goes for you to pay your property taxes and to pay a plumber and to play an electrician. I get it. A lot of us get it. We've got to figure it out.

Brigid Bergin: Well, we are going to have to leave it there for now. My guest has been City Council Finance Chair Justin Brannan. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Justin Brannan: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

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