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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Another reminder that coming up right after the eleven o'clock news, we're going to launch our new six-part series on the year of Bill and Rudy, how 1993 help set us up for the issues we're dealing with in 2023. Today is the 30th anniversary of the inauguration of Bill Clinton as president, and we're going to play a couple of little clips from Clinton's inaugural address that are going to be eerie in one way or another, and set up conversations about how 1993 help give us 2023. That's coming up in about a half hour.

New York City Comptroller Brad Lander joins us now even as he keeps his eye on the fiscal stability of New York City, which is the comptroller's main job, and it's a complex time for that actually, with money from the federal government for pandemic relief drying up and things like that. He is taking some positions on policy issues that are sometimes in and sometimes not in agreement with Mayor Adams on the migrant influx, for example.

Last week, by way of just a little more background, the mayor revealed his $103 billion preliminary spending plan for the next fiscal year. Some of the highlights include allocations for affordable housing, critical road repairs, that development project at Willets Point in Queens near City Field, and money to accelerate projects that are supposed to reduce the city's carbon emissions.

The budget is slim, though, in certain respects. Gothamist reports that it only offers 2% more than last year overall, citing Mayor Adams's emphasis on fiscal responsibility during the time of economic uncertainty, as well as mounting expenses from the migrant crisis that are expected to grow to over $1 billion. The political question on the table if you've heard progressives speak in the last couple of days, last couple of weeks, since this budget proposal came out is, is the mayor being too stingy with respect to things that really matter to long-term equity in the city? There are people on the right, however, knocking him for cutting the police budget. We're going to talk about all of this now and more with New York City Comptroller Brad Lander. Mr. Comptroller, welcome back to WNYC.

Comptroller Brad Lander: Good morning, Brian. It's so great to be with you as it always is.

Brian Lehrer: Let's start with the migrants. Last week you took to Twitter to express criticisms of the mayor's trip to the Texas border town of El Paso saying the trip does little to deliver the dollars that New York City needs to provide shelter and services. Instead, it risks reinforcing a harmful narrative that new immigrants themselves are the problem. Do you think that's what he was saying?

Comptroller Brad Lander: I think there's a risk that that's what people hear him saying. We have to ask him what he means. I think the place for us to start is New York City has been a refuge for people fleeing violence and poverty for generations. It's good for our economy, it's our identity as the city and then to say there's no room at the inn, to say there's no room in the city, there is always room for newcomers in New York City. It's just how we thrive from Flushing to Wall Street. I think those comments risk amplifying division. Now, where we agree is we need better--

Brian Lehrer: Let me jump in. Even on that point because he was on the show yesterday. I don't have a clip, but he was basically saying that migrants today, like immigrants through time, make New York City stronger economically and other ways. We just need a lot of federal help and a lot of state help right now to have the money to resettle so many immigrants so quickly in the city. Do you not hear him that way?

Comptroller Brad Lander: I deeply agree with him that we need federal and state dollars to provide shelter and services, that it's a national obligation to provide safe haven for those seeking asylum, that the right to shelter is in the state constitution and we need federal and state dollars. Look, his administration has scaled up the shelter and services that we are providing those folks and we need more support, but I know I've talked to people even in just the last week who basically said to me, "Brad, I heard the mayor say we don't have money, we don't have room. Am I going to lose something? Is my community going to lose something because of what we're doing to provide support for these folks to get on their feet?"

Of course, we need to do more for longtime New Yorkers who are in NYCHA, who are homeless, but if they think and they hear the mayor say there's that choice to be made, there's no more room, there's no more money, he said on a couple occasions we're going to have to make those choices, I think you risk dividing people, rather than unifying them. That's why we've tried to also emphasize our agreements, our places of unity. We are reaching out to and have been reaching out for months to both federal and state-elected officials to get the resources and stepping up together to help this set of folks get work authorizations, get resources and be able to start becoming contributors to that new New York.

Brian Lehrer: As comptroller do you disagree with his estimate that it's going to cost the city between $1 billion and $2 billion dollars more to resettle the number of migrants who are coming to the city right now just in the next year than if this wave had not begun?

Comptroller Brad Lander: Yes, we share that estimate. The significant majority of those expenses are for shelter, not people that were in shelters we already had. That's new shelters set up for the asylum seekers, and that's these [unintelligible 00:06:21] or reception centers. The cost of that likely will exceed $1 billion over the next year and yes, we really need a big share of the 800 million dollars the federal government set aside at the end of the year.

The state is only paying about 16% of the city's shelter costs overall, but they're paying effectively zero for the shelter costs of asylum seekers because they're not eligible for public assistance under state definitions. It's rotten of the state to give us nothing for the shelter costs of asylum seekers, and I really hope that will be in the governor's budget when she puts it out.

Brian Lehrer: On that, you agree with the mayor. Well, to what you tweeted and what you said, the mayor talked back to you specifically on how he thinks you're proposing to pay for resettling the migrants at this news conference yesterday. Here's a clip that we got from New York Post audio.

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Mayor Adams: His answer to it is raise taxes on rich people to pay for migrant asylum seekers. You're the comptroller. You should be concerned about the financial hit our city is seeing. He should be writing letters with me and going to D.C. I don't know if Brad actually went to D.C. at all to advocate for money. I don't know if he called anyone. My conversations with Senator Schumer. I don't know if he did.

I said with you all last week, I asked him, share the tweet. Share the letters that were sent to say New York City needs help. When I see someone tells me, I should not go to El Paso to see this problem and to talk with the mayor there, so that we can work together, I just don't understand the logic of it. Is it political or is it something for the city? It just bothers me when people are just disingenuous. We have a crisis in our city.

[end of audio playback]

Brian Lehrer: Want to keep that conversation going, Mr. Comptroller?

Comptroller Brad Lander: I'll just say a couple of things. First, there is room and always will be in New York City for newcomers, and there's room for the mayor and I to have respectful disagreements. I have been out there loud about the need for state and federal funding as early as September. I had a great conversation with Senator Schumer about it at the Al Smith's dinner in October about work authorizations and federal resources.

I'm thrilled he fought so hard to get $800 million in the federal budget in December, and change the rules on how that money is allocated in ways that hopefully, FEMA will give us more of it. I don't think the mayor's trip to El Paso enhanced our chances of getting a greater share of that federal dollars, but I really do want to work with him in the conversations he's having and we're having with state legislative leaders, with the FEMA administrator and the federal government.

I think there's going to have to be room for respectful disagreement on, I guess, how we talk about the belief that New York City is anchored as a place that welcomes immigrants, has thrived in the past and will thrive in the future, and whether it's productive to say things like, "There's no room at the inn," or not while I hope we really can work together on how we get more of that money from Albany and Washington, and also how we spend that money thoughtfully, carefully, effectively here to deliver those services.

One last point, and maybe this will transition to talking a little more about the state and city budgets. I definitely never said that we should raise taxes on the wealthy for asylum-seeker services. Those I think should come increasingly from Albany and Washington. The mayor and the governor put out this great new New York report that said as we come out of the pandemic, we need to set some ambitious goals, more affordable housing, get to universal childcare, better subway service. I don't think we are going to be able to provide all of those things unless we do ask the wealthiest New Yorkers to pay just a little bit more.

I think that is exactly what a comptroller should be doing, is saying, what's a smart and wise, both short, medium, and long-term approach to the budget so we could keep growing this city. We know more people want to come here all across different income levels and from other parts of the country as well as other parts of the planet, but they can't afford to live here. We're going to need to put more into affordable housing, more into childcare, more into transit.

I do think that will take a little more from the wealthiest New Yorkers who have actually seen their portfolios and their property values grow through the pandemic. The mayor's saying that's off the table. I just don't see how we'll be able to make the long-term investments not just that newcomers, but the folks have been here a long time also need,

Brian Lehrer: Are you proposing to raise taxes at the city level or the state level, or both?

Comptroller Brad Lander: There's a conversation. The state budget goes first. The mayor put out his preliminary budget, but in every year, the preliminary budget is just that. It's preliminary, it's first name. First, there's going to be a conversation at the state level. How do we fill the big gap the MTA is facing because farebox revenue and ridership is down because of the shift to hybrid work? What are we going to invest in affordable housing? The governor spoke of a vision of expanding childcare. I want to see how that plays out. I think it would make sense for there to be a focus.

The state has a lot more ability to do carefully target and progressive revenues. That would be maybe a corporate business tax or a high earner business tax or a high real estate value flip tax pay for those things. Then when the budget conversation heats up here after the adoption of the state budget at the end of March, we'll have to see where that lands and what we want to do at the city level.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take a few phone calls for New York City comptroller, Brad Lander, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. You can tweet a question @BrianLehrer. Yes, let's talk about the city budget. One thing that people say about the de Blasio administration, like de Blasio, not like de Blasio on whatever points, he got fairly lucky because he was mayor at a time of economic growth and therefore, expanding city tax revenues.

Then we got a lot of pandemic relief from the federal government the last couple of years. Now that's drying up. There's a bit of an economic downturn in the city. Jobs aren't coming back as quickly or as they are nationally on average, and we're going to face maybe the toughest New York City budget in years. What's your assessment?

Comptroller Brad Lander: First, I think you're right. The Bill de Blasio will go down in history as the most fiscally lucky Mayor in a long time. The challenge right now is that there's just so much uncertainty. There's really good news and good signs and a really not so good news and signs. I just got some new job numbers, were back nearly at 98% of the jobs we had pre-pandemic. Tax revenues for both the city and the state have continued to beat projections at the city level, about $2 billion over the current year.

The next one is how those revenues are coming in. In some areas like healthcare and even in technology where there've been some layoffs recently, we're above pre-pandemic levels. I think a lot of optimism in the New York City economic future. There are really big challenges as well. Wall Street profits are projected to drop 57%, and that's a big chunk of the revenues the city has gotten, vacancies in Midtown and commercial office buildings are a really big challenge and for the budget itself, because we're going to have to renegotiate the labor contracts, pay these additional asylum seeker costs because Wall Street is down, and so that affects our pension returns.

It's a really challenging moment and I sure don't envy the mayor having to navigate a budget amidst so much uncertainty. I do think the long-term prospects for our city which we worried so much about right at the start of the pandemic, remain really strong. We should lean into investing in what helps New Yorkers afford the cost of housing, afford the cost of transit, afford the cost of childcare so people can afford to stay and to come here and keep growing the economy with their energy and creativity.

Brian Lehrer: What do you think about the way that the mayor's preliminary budget allocates city funds? I think in this first year of his administration last year there was so much talk about crime and a lot of the push and pull was do we mostly try to use law enforcement to tamp down crime or do we at least also invest a lot more in preventing crime in the longer term, the roots of crime which do have to do with housing, mental health treatment, economic equity, all those things.

A lot of progressives in city council, you used to be the head of the progressive caucus in city council before being elected comptroller. A lot of progressives in city council were very unhappy with last year's budget in terms of how much it did or did not invest in those long-term things. What do you see in the new budget proposal from the mayor?

Comptroller Brad Lander: Yes, one way the mayor talks about things that I actually really like is his upstream and downstream analogies. He talks about the need to go upstream on public safety and on a lot of other things. It is true, this budget holds the NYPD harmless. It doesn't implement meaningful or significant reductions there. Especially when you consider the likely increases of overtime, it'll likely go up.

While it does cut a lot of those upstream services, I'll just give one example of like an upstream investment I'd really like to see, the city's main local-level housing subsidy is called city thefts. We testified at both an HOA rules hearing and the city council this week about opportunities to expand city thefts to raise a little bit what it could pay a landlord and expand who can get it.

Because if we could do that, we could help families get outta shelter, then our shelter system wouldn't be bursting to the seams and they could be backed on their feet contributing and we could get more folks off the street and address the public safety and public health issues that are homelessness. I do think the budget proposal cuts slightly a lot of those upstream investments while holding harmless, the downstream ones. I think, hopefully, and this is why we might need to look on the revenue side, we can have the resources to continue the upstream investments as well.

Brian Lehrer: Jason in Brooklyn has a revenue idea. Jason, you're on WNYC with Comptroller Brad Lander. Hi, Jason.

Jason: Yes, hi. Thanks very much. I was just learning that the city since 1980, I believe, had a very small tax on alcohol although only on beer and liquor, not on wine. It's never been adjusted for inflation. My understanding is that it's like penny per serving or something like that but if that was adjusted for inflation that could raise tens of millions of dollars. Also, again, it was not extended to wine that maybe because the wine industry in New York State is quite powerful and this would require state approval to raise the city's liquor tax as I understand it. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Jason, thank you. Have you ever heard that before? Are you aware of the wine and liquor taxes?

Comptroller Brad Lander: Thanks, Jason. Yes. That's one that we talked about. As Jason rightly says, that, like almost anything else, the city would want to do requires Albany approval. The city has very limited ability to shift or adjust revenues, taxes that's mostly got to be either be done by Albany or Albany has to authorize the city to do it. There's a number of interesting things like this.

Obviously, there's new revenue that will come from the new cannabis businesses. As Council Member Brewer and others have talked about the gray market shops and trucks that are popping up, they don't pay any taxes at all. If they outcompete the new license stores not only will those license fees not be getting what we're trying to offer them, but we won't collect the revenues we need. There's a lot [unintelligible 00:19:32]

Brian Lehrer: Which is taxed at a higher rate, legal alcohol or legal cannabis?

Comptroller Brad Lander: Such a great question. I don't know the answer to that, but I want to know it. I'm going to go see what I can learn about it.

Brian Lehrer: To Jason's proposal. One could argue that if the tax on liquor is lower, you could argue for parody. I'm not proposing that. I'm just saying it's a way to look at it.

Comptroller Brad Lander: It's a great question and I'm getting the balance right of where we tax consumption, where we tax income, where we tax real estate, where we tax sales and windfall profits, this is the analysis that we should be using this moment to do.

Brian Lehrer: Annette in Laurelton, you're on WNYC with Comptroller Brad Lander. Hi, Annette.

Annette: Good morning to both of you. I don't see where it was negative that the mayor went to the board. I think that was very wise. The mayor his face was like, almost 40,000 people being sent to the city, and for the comptrollers to say, "Oh, well, it's no big deal." No, it is. We have issue with housing, and we have a lot of issues in the city and he has to address those issues. For the comptroller to be nitpicking, I think it's negative.

Also, I hope that the governor will work with the mayor because I think a lot of the new comments and the call of migrants and all that could go to upstate. They have a lot of land. They lost a lot of population so I would like to hear the comptroller speak on that issue. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. I wonder what your conversation would be like with the comptroller of Utica, New York, or Schenectady, or places like that, that have been losing population. Do you think they would be down with the mayor's suggestion to the governor to try to work with some upstate cities that are losing population to resettle some of the migrants, of course, if the migrants want to go there? Nobody's advocating forcing people to live in a certain place.

Comptroller Lander: I think this is a great idea, especially with your last point in mind. There are upstate cities and towns and places all around the country that have been revitalized through immigrant energy. Folks build networks and connections. I think that's a dynamite thing. I think it would be great if the federal government could do more to help nurture those connections and help identify where people might like to get someplace, and then transfer their asylum case to the nearest office, which should not be that hard, but usually, it winds up backwards from that.

I definitely think in New York, that the governor is convening and working with other municipalities to identify places that would be thrilled to have folks and have more affordable housing and give some state resources for that. I just totally agree with Annette and with the mayor, that that is a good idea.

At the same time, that's a wonderful opportunity where it works, but for those folks who want to be here, because this place is an incredible opportunity because we got Senegalese migrants in the Bronx, and because we've got folks coming from Afghanistan and Ukraine fleeing war, and because, yes, folks from Venezuela might know someone that's already here, and they want to get one of the jobs that we do have here. This is a city that's generating a lot of unfilled jobs all across the marketplace.

I just think leaning into that is good for our city, in the long term. I really taken this point that we have a lot of challenges. Housing Affordability is a giant one, and so let's lean into building more housing, to protecting tenants, to providing resources like those city [unintelligible 00:23:43] that I mentioned, and I do want to be a voice of unity. I hear it's a challenge when there's disagreement. My goal is not nitpicking, my goal is a kind of unity that embraces that future New York that I really believe we can build.

Brian Lehrer: One more call. Bonanza in Westchester, you're on WNYC with New York City Comptroller Brad Lander. I think this is going to be pushed back on his idea of raising taxes on anyone, right?

Bonanza: Yes. Hi. I wanted to know, New York State already pays one the highest taxes in the country. I'm an immigrant. I work hard. Now, I'm close to retirement and I'm looking at myself thinking where should I move where I can still have some friends left. I have to move out of state with no friends whatsoever. Why are we talking about raising taxes, we need to look at the people who are about to retire, how are they going to manage? You have the highest property tax, you cannot hold on to your home after retirement unless you have a bazillion dollars sitting there. There are very few people who can afford to live in this.

Eventually, I think, what we are looking at is people are going to start voting Republican because Democrats talk out of their mouth and they do nothing for immigrants, nothing for any of the issues on the ground, but come election time, they are all talking about how they all for the immigrants, how they all for families, they are for nothing. They just talk. I was a die-hard Democrat and I think, I'm going to be a Republican now. I don't care who comes, but anybody whether [inaudible 00:25:20].

Brian Lehrer: Bonanza, thank you very much. Let's get a response and we have a minute left in the segment for anything you want to say to her, and anything you want to say wrapping up.

Comptroller Lander: Well, I wish I could ask what neighborhood she lived in and what job she has because actually we really really agree I'm fighting hard to reform property taxes to reduce them in and out borough neighborhoods. It's another big piece of what we're pushing for in Albany. I totally agree who we're talking about is looking at the very wealthiest New Yorkers' support.

Those portfolios are billions of dollars whose homes are worth tens of millions, and I think they can afford to pay a little more to folks. Just like her, we can do more for her so that we can reform our property taxes to ease the burden on our borough homeowners so that we can invest in childcare costs and affordability and in transit that will reduce the burden on working middle-class New Yorkers and make it easier to thrive here and we do have to roll up our sleeves and get that done.

Brian Lehrer: New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, we always appreciate that you come on with us as one of the three city-wide elected officials in addition to the mayor and the public advocate. They're just three of you who get elected citywide, and we appreciate how accessible you are in answering some slings and arrows questions as well as some supportive ones. Thank you very very much.

Comptroller Lander: It's great to come on and great to talk to your listeners.

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