Richards shares city budget status with Queens
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The Queens borough president’s office briefed the Queens Borough Board on the status of 2023 budget talks and how Queens residents will be affected. Photo by Wasted Time R via Wikimedia Commons
By Rachel Vick
The Queens Borough Board met last week to discuss the best way to spend the nearly $5.1 million allocated to the borough president’s office in the city’s proposed budget and how Queens residents will be affected by proposed cuts.
Queens’ portion of the $98.5 billion proposed budget offers the second most-populous borough the third largest sum of cash and Borough President Donovan Richards committed to working with Mayor Eric Adams to get Queens residents the most the city can offer. Queens often receives the least amount of funding per capita.
“We are having conversations… but we recognize coming out of this pandemic how important it is to ensure that our funding is either restored or enhanced so we can make many of the changes we've talked about, [like] assisting community boards, helping out organizations in need,” Richards said.
“Whether you're in Western Queens or Southern Queens, many of the issues the borough is facing are similar, so, I'm hoping we'll make a lot of progress on Queens not getting its fair share coming into this budget, especially with a mayor from Queens,” he added. “I’m cautiously optimistic.”
Queens also saw the lowest per capita funding for community boards.
All of the five borough president offices saw a cut, and the funding to the Queens office is down $1.59 million from last year, as the city prepares for a future without federal pandemic aid.
Richards’ office issued recommendations for the different city agencies, and for the borough president’s office to help make up for the cuts.
They also analyzed the breakdown of changes to city offices like the Department of Education , down about $800 million from last year, the Department for the Aging and the Department of Youth and Community Development.
Richards' worries for school cuts are rooted in concern of losing seats, missing out on new schools and other assets to support Queens’ school children. He also condemned cuts to senior meal delivery services and senior centers, a population that was particularly isolated during the pandemic.
Recommendations for increasing Department of Health and Mental Hygiene funding include focusing on increasing beds in Queens and a new city hospital on the Rockaway peninsula. Richards said the office is seeing a significant number of requests from medical facilities doing their best to expand their capacity.
Last week, Adams committed to the creation of a new Health + Hospitals facility for the peninsula.
Delores Orr, who has chaired Community Board 14 for years, said she thought “we were moving into a world of equity,” but lamented the same observations made by Adams. She expressed worries about the logistics behind creating a new hospital where the state already tried to cut beds.
Richards said he has heard support from Governor Kathy Hochul in helping to preserve and grow the borough’s health resources, and said he “feels good” about the prospect of city, state and federal support for the project.
“We have not seen anything in the budget, but are working through it with the administration,” Richards said. “We know this was a life and death matter for residents of the Rockaways. We have immense needs [in Queens].”
City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams offered additional insight from her place at the helm of the legislative body negotiating the budget with the mayor. She recalled her earliest years on the council, seeing Queens get less funding than Staten Island per capita, and celebrated the 2022 Queens delegation to make sure the borough “is taken care of.”
“To see where we’re still not [seeing funding]... we've gained some ground but certainly not where we need to be in terms of population and funding,” she said. “We're going to do our part at the negotiation table.”
