The New York City council approved a budget November 25 that raises property taxes 18.49% and cuts spending by $840 million, but restores $50.2 million in reductions proposed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, including a $9-million cut to libraries.
The speed by which the budget was approved—the mayor had released it only 11 days earlier—reflected the urgency facing the city, which is confronting its worst fiscal downturn since the 1970s. “We’re in a fiscal crisis. We have been bombed,” Council Speaker Gifford Miller said in the November 26 New York Daily News, referring to the September 11 attacks. “There is no silver bullet. It is this simple: We must find the money to pay for those things that we feel we must pay for.”
Posted December 2, 2002.