‘Shortchanged’: BP says Queens doesn’t get fair share of city funding

Queens Borough President Donovan Richards’ office would receive the least in per capita funding when compared to the other four borough presidents’ offices under Mayor Eric Adams’ proposed budget. Photo via Queens BP’s office/Flickr

By Jacob Kaye

The Queens borough president’s office will receive the lowest funding per capita of all five borough presidents under Mayor Eric Adams’ proposed budget.

The expense funding allocation caught the ire of Queens Borough President Donovan Richards on Monday night during a meeting of the Queens Borough Board.

Under the mayor’s proposal, the Queens borough president’s office would receive $2.25 in expenses budget funding per person, despite Queens being the second most populous borough in the city. Only Brooklyn, with around 2.7 million people, has more residents than Queens, which has 2.4 million people.

Under the proposal, Brooklyn residents would get .18 cents more than residents of the World Borough and Manhattan residents would get an additional .80 cents. The Bronx would get $1.89 more than Queens to spend per resident and Staten Island, the least populous borough, would get $9.54 in expense funding per capita, or $7.29 more than Queens residents.

“We’re being shortchanged,” Richards said during the meeting.

In all, the mayor has proposed sending around $5.4 million in expense funding to the Queens borough president’s office, which can be used to cover borough presidents’ operating expenses, including paying for staff, government offices and supplies, as well as discretionary funding to be doled out to organizations in the borough.

The proposed funding figure for the BP’s office ranks third largest in the city – Brooklyn would get $6.7 million, the Bronx would get $6.1 million, Manhattan would get $5.2 million and Staten Island would get $4.7 million.

But when broken down per capita, Richards says there’s a problem.

“This has been a historic disinvestment in the people of Queens,” he said. “I don't want to pit boroughs against boroughs, but how does Staten Island get more funding per capita compared to Queens when we were at 2.4 million people?”

Richards said that his anger over the funding isn’t necessarily directed at the Adams administration – or any previous mayoral administration, for that matter – but instead at the formula used by the mayor’s office to determine expense budgeting.

The borough president said the formula doesn’t accurately take population into account, nor does it take other important factors into account, like the fact that Queens is home to the largest migrant population in the city.

“I do have 50,000 [migrants] in my care, and I would hope that the administration sees that and is sensitive to that, and would invest in the borough holistically whether it was just migrants here or not,” the borough president said.

Also exacerbating the inequity is the fact that Queens is expected to grow to the largest borough in the city in the coming years.

“At the end of the day, our population growth means that there needs to be more investment in human capital in the borough,” he said. “There's no reason that the children of Queens shouldn't see the same investment, especially if this formula is supposed to be dictated by population as other parts of the city.”

It’s not the first time that the Queens borough president’s office has seen the fewest dollars per capita in expense funding – in fact, in recent decades, it’s become the norm.

Last year, the Queens borough board also railed against the discrepancy between Queens and the other four boroughs, as well as the general budget cuts proposed by the mayor last year – this year, Adams proposed a large number of cuts only to scale them back when presenting his executive budget.

“The per capita investment in the residents of the borough has always been less than any other borough,” Queens Community Board 14 chair Dolores Orr said during last year’s meeting. “It's disgraceful.”

But the borough president told the Eagle on Tuesday that it’s not all doom and gloom.

The Queens borough president’s office often accounts for the highest capital budget in the city, and Richards said that the current administration has been particularly supportive of efforts to build in the World’s Borough.

“The administration has financed more housing for Queens than any other borough, there are more school seats slotted for Queens than any other borough and we have a lot [of other projects] in the queue,” Richards said.

Nonetheless, the borough president said he’s hoping the expense budget funding issue gets resolved this year once and for all.

“The administration should be more than a willing partner to fix the formula situation,” the BP said.

“Nothing has ever been given to Queens, we fight for it,” he added. “I'm hoping that the mayor, being that he's from Queens, will look at these numbers, and really try to adjust the formula situation.”

Richards said that he’s also gotten buy-in from some of the other borough presidents who also feel the formula for determining both expense and capital funding isn’t quite equatable.

Should the formula be changed to more accurately reflect population and other expenses, the BP said it would put an end to the annual cycle of fighting for more funding.

“It's unfair to the borough president, it’s unfair to the population here, it's unfair to the elected officials who every year have to go in and beg for them to, quite frankly, be fair,” he said. “It's just a question of fairness.”

The mayor’s office declined to comment.