Editor’s note: Budget days are the worst

Budget days are always the worst days as a political journalist. You’re waiting all day for documents, and once you get them, you have to synthesize staggering amounts of information in a matter of hours – or sometimes minutes. The numbers make you go cross-eyed, every question to the press office is met with “we’ll get back to you on that” and the whole time you have a sinking feeling that you’re getting some technical detail wrong.

So I was relieved to be busy at City & State’s Higher Education Summit on Feb. 17 as Mayor Zohran Mamdani released his first preliminary budget – leaving my colleagues, led by senior City Hall reporter Annie McDonough, to dive into the numbers and surface with a great story on the mayor’s ultimatum: tax the rich, or raise property taxes.

But I’ve learned not to lose sleep over breaking news in those first hours. The best budget reporting often comes in the following days and weeks, when reporters – and wonks, watchdogs, advocates, staffers and everyone else – have had a chance to breathe in, breathe out, and take a look.

From that, City & State reported Mamdani muddied the math on his proposed tax increases to help his political point. News outlet The City found that Mamdani fell short on his promises to fund parks and libraries, while Gothamist went further and broke news the mayor’s budget would actually reduce funding for libraries. And Fox News may have been the first to notice that Mamdani killed his predecessor’s plan to add 5,000 more cops.

We even got a state budget scoop at the Higher Education Summit, when state Sen. Toby Ann Stavisky noted Gov. Kathy Hochul’s spending plan included a cut to programs for disadvantaged students at the state’s public colleges.

So study up. Mamdani math class is in session, and we got our first assignment.