Bill de Blasio unveils $73.9B budget with new spending
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio unveiled his first executive budget Thursday, a $73.9 billion proposal in line with his reflexively liberal vision of greater government involvement for the less fortunate.
De Blasio devoted much of his financial resources to create a budget — which now will be subject to negotiations with the City Council and must be approved by July 1 — that backs up the campaign promises that ushered him into office in January, when he became the city’s first Democratic mayor in a generation.
His signature campaign pledge was to fund universal prekindergarten and expanded after-school programs for middle-schoolers with a tax hike on the city’s wealthy. When that idea died in Albany, the state government stepped in with $300 million for pre-K but little for the after-school programs, prompting the mayor to proposing spending $145 million in the next fiscal year to expand programs for nearly 100,000 children.