Brian Lair on WNYC, and maybe by now you've heard that New York City has a financial problem, the city government itself.

As of now, the city is going into the next fiscal year

with what is estimated to be about a $5.5 billion budget deficit. They need to close it by

law with either revenue raising or spending cuts. And controller Mark Levine says these are

numbers that the city hasn't seen since the Great Recession.

And closing that gap has become the first fight that we've seen between the new mayors around

Mamdani, obviously, and the new city council.

The New York Times and others are even saying Mamdani and city council speaker Julie Menon are in a feud.

The Times uses that word.

Mamdani's preliminary budget released in February proposed two things the council says are off the table,

a 9.5% property tax increase if he doesn't get his income tax on the wealthy increase from the state

and a nearly billion dollar draw from the city's rainy day fund. Now last Wednesday the council

released its own plan, $6 billion in savings and revenue. That would close the budget cap. No property tax hike, no

rate on reserves, no cuts to services. Can they really do all that? Well, here's council speaker

Julie Menon, who released the council's plan alongside Finance Committee Chair Linda Lee,

who will join us in a minute. We want to be responsible and we believe that we can find the savings without making cuts.

We believe, and I think when you look at the full list, there are so many different items in this list

where we are able to responsibly reach savings without doing cuts on services whatsoever.

We're not at the point where we need to do

cuts. We can find the savings in the way that we did without cutting services. So our position has

been clear. We have been a hard no on the property tax. We also are a hard no on rating the rainy

day fund. And we released a report that showed that if you raid the rainy day fund, all that does is increase our borrowing costs and actually costs the city of New York a tremendous

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