A few months into its third full fiscal year since the pandemic’s start, New York City’s finances have never looked so flush — and, at the same time, so precarious.

That decidedly mixed message was the main takeaway of Tuesday’s annual meeting of the state Financial Control Board.

Chaired by the governor, with other ex-officio members including the mayor and both city and state comptrollers, the board is a legacy of the city’s brush with bankruptcy in the 1970s. Although its actual “control” of city finances ended in the early 1980s, state law still requires the board to certify that the city budget is balanced under general accounting principles (a more stringent requirement than the state imposes on itself), with no delayed debt payments, deficit borrowing or other fiscal funny business.

Read the full piece in the New York Post.

You may also like

NYC schools should worry less about ‘mindful breathing’ and more about reading

Mayor Adams should save his oxygen for the real crisis in our schools — our children are not being taught how to read, if they’re even showing up to class at all. Read More

Spend! Spend! Spend! New York pols burn $9 billion hole in our pockets

When Gov. Kathy Hochul and state lawmakers approved New York’s latest budget, they pushed spending to its highest level in history. New data about the state’s financial picture show they didn’t think enough about the future. A new budget proje Read More

Putting Hochul to the test: Will the governor use her budget powers to protect New York’s fiscal future?

“We will not be raising income taxes this year,” Gov. Hochul declared in January at the opening of New York’s 2023 legislative session. Read More

What Gov. Hochul must do to prevent a coming fiscal crash

The pandemic and its fiscal aftermath have given rise — temporarily — to a state budget trend unique in New York’s history. Read More

Albany’s latest gift to the teachers union will shackle NYC schools — and their budgets

The Legislature last week put a new spin on the debate over “mayoral control” of New York City’s schools by shackling the Big Apple with a costly class-size mandate. Read More

Hochul’s first budget rewards unions at taxpayers’ expense — and sets the state on the road to insolvency

New Yorkers are aghast that the Buffalo Bills stadium deal, which will fill the pockets of a wealthy NFL team owner with their tax dollars, is in the state budget the Legislature just adopted. Read More

Calling Tax Cut “Theft,” Cuomo Continues to Push For Federal Bucks With Phony Math

The results of this week’s Georgia Senate runoffs, assuring Democrats will soon control both houses of Congress, as well as the White House, had to come as a huge relief to Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Read More

How a Blast From the Past Could Save NYC Again

Forty-five years ago this month, then-Gov. Hugh L. Carey and the state Legislature passed a landmark law, the Financial Emergency Act, designed to rescue Gotham from imminent bankruptcy. Read More