Adams asks wealthiest New Yorkers to help pick up the slack for cash-strapped city: ‘All hands on deck’

Mayor Eric Adams pleaded with some of the Big Apple’s wealthiest residents on Friday to step up for New York City agencies as they face steep cuts due to rising migrant costs.

“This is a time when it’s an on-deck time,” Hizzoner told a packed room in Harvard’s glitzy clubhouse at a Police Athletic League luncheon Friday afternoon.

“As it goes, New York goes, America goes, but I’m going to need you more than ever to support many of these organizations like PAL, the Robin Hood Foundation and others,” the mayor told the crowd, which included Tony Danza. , John Catsimatidis and Mitchell Modell, the former CEO of the sporting goods chain.

“A time when our philanthropic interests need to align with some of the gaps and services we’re seeing today,” the mayor continued.

The request came during Adams’ first public comments since unveiling the first of three rounds of 5 percent cuts to the New York City budget to account for the billions of dollars to which it is pending to attend to the tens of thousands of asylum seekers who have flooded the city.

He also asked another question to the New York elite, to contact their federal representatives and the Biden administration.

“I need your voice to come to Washington, D.C. and say this is your city,” Adams said, adding, “New York City is the economic agent for this entire country, and we can’t continue to see the New York City has a national crisis like we’re witnessing now.”

On Friday, Adams showed how his administration has focused on intervening in the lives of inner-city children and how his school’s chancellor, David Banks, has focused on “a quality education,” which he said which is key to keeping children out of prison. .

The mayor, however, failed to mention the steep cuts to after-school and summer programs and other extracurricular activities, as well as the DOE’s budget cut of more than $1 billion through fiscal year 2025.

“Now we’re going to need you more than ever,” Adams said, before addressing the elephant in the room.

“Unfortunately, we announced some really painful cuts to our services yesterday,” he said, adding: “It will affect every area of ​​service delivery in the city.”

The mayor described the process as “one of the most painful moments of his public service career.”

As part of the belt-tightening plan, the NYPD will cancel the next five academy classesbringing uniformed officer levels to their lowest level in three decades by June 2025.

Firefighters are also on the table if they do “long-term light spots”, meaning they’ve been injured on the job or are sick, in a move described as incredibly cruel by fire sources.

The city will soon see dirtier areas around pedestrian areas and parks and have fewer public trash cans, mostly in the outer boroughs, with the Department of Sanitation cutting nearly $100 million over the next two fiscal years under the plan.

The city is expected to spend more than $12 billion caring for migrants, with more than 140,000 arriving in New York since the start of the crisis in the spring of 2022, with little help from the federal government.

Adams threw a similar strain on dealing with the flood of asylum seekers, telling the crowd that desperate migrants were simply coming for the American dream, but to get it they have to be able to work.

“There is nothing more un-American than not being able to get up in the morning or in the afternoon and go to a place where you can support your family,” he said.

The city, for its part, has them it was only able to receive 2% of the tens of thousands of migrants who must come to New York to request a work permit from the administration.

Only 3,200 asylum seekers have filled out the proper paperwork to start earning a wage, either through federal temporary protected status, which allows migrants to apply immediately, or those who have been in the country seeking asylum for more than six months.

Others may have applied through nonprofits or on their own, but that number was unclear and no one was tracking applications.

The feds were very high successful in helping this process, sending 1,700 requests during a national security clinic. That pop-up but it was canned after two weeks.

Adams added that the city has seen some progress, noting that more than half of the migrants passing through New York are no longer in the care of the city.

“They live alone, they do it for themselves or they have moved to stabilize their lives. So there has been a lot of success.