Gothamist Reports That New York City Has Identified 14 New Problems In Time For Next Year’s Budget

Annual Budget Cycle Produces Discovery Of Issues That Will Be Funded Partially Studied Thoroughly And Solved Approximately Never

MANHATTAN, NEW YORK — Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat report, with fiscal context from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, that New York City has entered its annual budget season with a $4.2 billion projected gap and the identification of 14 new “priority areas” that the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget has proposed to address through a combination of partial funding, comprehensive study, and the specific municipal governance technique in which a problem is given a name, a working group, a budget line, and a one-year timeline before being folded into next year’s list of priority areas with a status notation of “ongoing.”

The 14 new priority areas join 37 priority areas from the 2025 budget cycle, 29 from the 2024 cycle, and a cumulative list from previous cycles that OMB’s own records show has 213 items, of which 14 have been fully resolved, 67 are described as “making progress,” 89 are described as “ongoing,” and 43 are described as “subject to funding availability,” which is the budget document’s vocabulary for “not funded.” The new priority areas include: rat mitigation (which has been on the priority list since 2018 under various names, including the current administration’s “rat czar” initiative, which produced a dedicated official, a social media presence, and a 3.2 percent reduction in rat complaints that OMB attributes to the initiative and that the Department of Health attributes to weather patterns); public school ventilation systems; and a study of the feasibility of a comprehensive composting program that the city has been studying since 2014 and is now studying again with new baseline data.

The Budget Gap: Its Annual Management

The $4.2 billion gap will be addressed through the standard combination of expenditure reductions that are not exactly cuts, revenue projections that are optimistic, state aid assumptions that may not materialize, and the specific New York City fiscal technique of moving things between fiscal years in ways that reduce the current year gap without eliminating the underlying obligation. The city has managed its finances this way for long enough that the technique has become the standard practice rather than an emergency measure, and the OMB analysts who produce the budget projections have developed sufficient expertise in the technique that the gap is consistently managed within acceptable parameters without the city ever resolving the structural imbalance between its commitments and its revenue that produces the gap in the first place.

The City Council will hold seventeen hearings, propose seventeen amendments, and pass a budget that is within $200 million of the Mayor’s proposed budget and is described by both the Mayor and the Council as a victory, which is also a standard technique.

The Rat Situation

3.2 percent fewer complaints. The rats are still there. For NYC fiscal satire at The Daily Mash.

New York And The Civic Comedy Tradition

New York City has been generating material for satirists since the first European settlers arrived and decided to purchase an island for sixty guilders, establishing the civic tradition of transactions that seemed efficient at the time. The modern version of this tradition runs through the penny press, through H.L. Mencken, through the New Yorker, and through every stand-up comedian who has started a set with “so I was on the subway” in a West Village club. New York is simultaneously the American city most complained about and most deeply beloved, which is its defining civic characteristic and the reason every New Yorker who leaves eventually misses it in ways they refuse to admit for at least three years. The specific pathologies of New York governance — the housing gap, the infrastructure lag, the rat-to-human ratio, the transit perpetual delay event — are not unique to New York. They are the urban pathologies of every large American city compressed into one place and given a media ecosystem that covers them with appropriate seriousness and inappropriate humor in proportions that vary by publication. This piece chooses humor. The New York Times chooses seriousness. Both are legitimate responses to the same facts. The MTA delays are real regardless of which genre processes them. The coffee is five dollars. This is not satirical. It is just expensive, and the deli owner is not to blame, and the customer will return tomorrow.

Statistics cited draw from public city data, MTA reports, and reporting by Gothamist, the New York Times, and The City. For ongoing coverage, Bohiney New York and prat.uk New York.

This article is satire published by the Bohiney Network. The events, officials, statistics, and institutions described are drawn from public records, verified news reporting, and established journalistic sources. The satirical frame — the deadpan tone, the mock-serious institutional assessment, the measured exaggeration of political and bureaucratic dynamics that are themselves frequently more extreme than the exaggeration applied to them — is original to this publication and to the editorial tradition of which it forms a part. Readers who encounter this piece in a context that presents it as straight news should be advised that it is not straight news; it is satirical journalism in the tradition of publications that have understood since Swift that the most accurate way to describe certain situations is to make them slightly more ridiculous than they actually are, which in the current political environment requires less exaggeration than one might wish.

The satirical tradition in which this piece operates — from Jonathan Swift through Mark Twain through Private Eye through The Onion through the contemporary publications working in the same vein — holds that exaggeration applied to genuine absurdity produces a more accurate picture of reality than straight-faced reporting sometimes can, because the exaggeration forces the reader to notice what the straight-faced version normalizes. The events and policies satirized in this piece are real. The treatment of those events and policies is satirical. The combination is the point. Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat are satirical publications. Everything in them should be read accordingly and shared generously. For more satire in this tradition, see The Onion, The Daily Mash, NewsThump, Waterford Whispers News, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/

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