Mayor Adams restores last of NYPD academy classes he cut last year with budget update

Mayor Eric Adams said Wednesday he would reinstate the last of five NYPD academy classes that he suspended last year due to budget strains related to the migrant crisis.

Hizzoner announced the restoration as part of his November update to the $112 billion Fiscal Year 2025 budget agreed upon by his budget team and the City Council in June. The reversal means that 1,600 more NYPD cadets will join the force in 2025, bringing the force’s total headcount to nearly 34,000.

The update increased the total FY 2025 budget to $115 billion, though the Mayor noted that the spending plan remains balanced. According to the mayor’s budget office, the increase of roughly $3 billion from the adopted budget came mostly from state and federal grants.

“We have the resources to make important investments both in our city and New Yorkers,” Adams said.

Adams said the plan reduced out-year budget gaps from the June adopted budget. He noted it also includes savings of $785 million between FYs 25 and 2026, mostly coming from less spending on the migrant crisis.

The mayor said the city saved $495 million in asylum seeker costs between FY 25 and 26. Those savings stemmed from a significant drop-off in the number of new arrivals entering the five boroughs in recent months and the city’s moves to cut migrant spending through its shelter eviction policies.

Graduates of the NYPD academy celebrate their graduation at The Theater at Madison Square Garden in October 2024.Photo by Dean Moses

The five suspended academy classes, four of which the mayor had already restored earlier this year, were part of a wave of dramatic spending reductions he enacted to balance the city budget amid massive projected spending on the migrant influx. However, Adams’ budget director, Jacques Jiha, said the savings in the latest plan were not achieved through the mandatory cuts across city agencies instituted in previous budget updates.

Many Parks funding cuts remain

The mayor’s plan notably did not reverse all of the cuts previously made to the Parks Department amid a rash of brush fires that have been tearing through the city’s green spaces in recent weeks.

City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams and Finance Chair Justin Brannan, in a statement, blasted Adams for not investing more funds in parks while the brush fires continue to burn. They also pushed back on the notion that the migrant influx caused the city’s financial troubles.

“Despite claims to the contrary, new arrivals have neither bankrupted nor destroyed our city,” they said. “At a moment when our parks and vital greenspaces are vulnerable and experiencing brush fires caused by a historic drought, the lack of investments to maintain and protect them despite available resources is irresponsible.”

Adams has since reversed many of those trims he made over the past year, declaring they were no longer necessary due to better-than-expected tax revenues and the reduction in migrant crisis costs.

But Adams maintained that if he had not made the broad cuts, the city’s finances would be in much worse shape today, given the $6.4 billion Adams said the city spent on caring for migrants.

“It was financially prudent to do so because little did we know we were going to need $6.4 billion in the migrants and asylum seekers,” the mayor said. “If we didn’t make those smart decisions early, starting Jan. 1, 2022, we would have been in a very dark place as a city, but we did and those decisions were important.”

The budget that the council passed earlier this year restored funding to most of the vital areas that city lawmakers and advocates had pushed to make whole. Those include the city’s three public library systems, cultural institutions, and early childhood education programs.

The restorations came after a protracted battle over the mayor’s cuts between his budget team and the council during the spring. Council leadership long insisted the city had more than enough revenue coming in to avoid the trims altogether, while the mayor’s office was much slower in recognizing those additional dollars.

Following the Tuesday press conference, Jiha insisted the council is being “misleading” because the difference between the two sides’ projections was only a couple of percentage points.