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Mayor Adams' budget plan restores NYPD funding, but won't reverse $58M cut to NYC libraries

Chris Sommerfeldt, New York Daily News on

Published in News & Features

NEW YORK — Mayor Eric Adams’ latest budget proposal includes restored funding for the NYPD, but doesn’t reverse a multi-million dollar cut to the city’s public library systems, sources familiar with the matter told the Daily News on Wednesday, raising the specter of additional service reductions at library branches across the five boroughs.

The executive budget bid for the 2025 fiscal year, which Adams is expected to formally unveil at noon Wednesday, will clock in with a total price-tag of $111.6 billion, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity to preempt the mayor’s announcement.

That’s an increase of $2.2 billion over the $109.4 billion preliminary budget plan Adams floated in January.

Despite the proposed spending increase, the executive plan does not fully restore $58.3 million in funding that has already been cut or proposed to be cut from the budgets of the city’s three public library systems, according to the sources.

While the sources told The News that the executive budget won’t undo the entire $58.3 million cut, it was not immediately clear if it might earmark new money to plug parts of that reduction.

Adams spokeswoman Amaris Cockfield declined to immediately say whether the executive plan will avert any chunk of the library funding cut.

 

Cockfield did note that the mayor cancelled two additional rounds of budget trims he initially planned to subject the libraries to this year and added: “We will continue to work with our partners in the City Council about funding for libraries as we go through the budget process.”

As part of a string of austerity moves meant to offset billions of dollars in city spending on the migrant crisis, the mayor already slashed $22.1 million from the library budgets in November. Due to that cut, the city’s three library systems has eliminated Sunday services across all their branches.

To boot, Adams’ preliminary plan from January proposed lowering library funding by another $36.2 million for the 2025 fiscal year, which starts July 1, making the total reduction $58.3 million.

Leaders of the New York, Queens and Brooklyn Public Library systems warned in Council testimony last month that they’ll have to scale back to just five days of service at a majority of their branches if they’re subjected to the additional spending trim for the 2025 fiscal year.

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