The big story on Tuesday was Mayor Mamdani's budget proposal.
Everyone covered the big ticket items — especially a controversial, but some say overdue, increase in property taxes. Literally every outlet in the Big Seven covered it: NYDN, NY Post, NY Times, amNY, Gothamist, Hell Gate and The City.
But after years of watching former Mayor Eric Adams defund and decapitate the Department of Transportation, we were pleasantly surprised by Hizzoner's "down payment" (as Ben Furnas called it) on ramping up staff and funding for the agency. Dave Colon had that story, but we're going to keep his eye on this one as it plays out, as you might have guessed.
In a related budget angle, it's worth noting that the mayor’s proposal fell short of his campaign promise to double the budget of the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, a small agency whose mandate has expanded to include enforcement of the delivery worker minimum pay and other laws regulating the app industry.
Instead of an across-the-board budget increase, the agency's “Delivery Worker Protection” unit will expand from spending $570,000 in fiscal year 2026 to $1.023 million in fiscal year 2027 — a 79-percent increase, not a 100-percent increase. Meanwhile the agency will add just nine employees to its headcount.
Last year, the department testified it would need 20 new employees just to properly regulate app giants — and that budget request didn’t even include funding to enforce the delivery worker deactivation bill, which goes into effect in early 2027 and will require another 34 employees to properly enforce, according to the Council’s fiscal impact statement.
Still, the budget news was good enough for Mamdani to avoid a reset of Streetsblog's Mamdani-O-Meter (right), which is now at 17 days, an administration record.
In other news:
- Have you been composting? You'd better get on it, because the Sanitation Department is back to ticketing. (West Side Rag)
- Uber and Lyft aren't properly serving the disabled community. (The City)
- Many Citi Bike stations are still glaciers, Council Member Shahana Hanif shows in this tweet. And Two Wheels Good reminds us that shared scooters in Queens aren't faring too well either.
- Here's more news on why New Jersey Transit riders are going to suffer so much over the next month. (NY Times times two)
- The Gateway Tunnel project is still on hold even as money slowly trickles in from the Trump administration. (amNY, Gothamist, The City)
- More poop news. (Hell Gate)
- Komanoff and Pearlstein make sure that Fox News got the full picture about Mamdani's transit agenda.
- On a personal note, I didn't make City and State's "50 over 50" list, but that's OK — I'm sure it's only because I'm being considered for the "60 over 60" list anyway, what with my May 19, 1965 date of birth.
- Finally, we're happy to see that Council Transportation Committee Chairman Shaun Abreu is in Buenos Aires. Hopefully, he brings us back great bus rapid transit as a souvenir:
