After Syracuse Common Councilors on Tuesday unanimously voted to override all 45 of Mayor Ben Walsh’s vetoes, they received applause – a slow-clap from Corey Driscoll Dunham, the city’s Chief Administrative Officer.
The clap from the city’s third-ranking employee punctuated a budget process turned political battle.
Councilors have insisted that their more than $16 million budget cuts, unprecedented in number and scope, have nothing to do with the upcoming mayoral election.
Walsh, though, has questioned the Council’s motives, given councilors’ previous cooperation with his past budgets. This is the mayor’s final budget; Walsh is term-limited, and voters will decide his successor this November.
Two senior councilors – President Pro Tempore Pat Hogan and Councilor Chol Majok – are competing with Deputy Mayor Sharon Owens in the Democratic primary election on June 24. The party in March designated Hogan as its nominee. He and Majok maintain that fiscal responsibility, not political maneuvering, has guided the council’s actions.
In a briefing following the Council’s Tuesday vote, Walsh said that politics has “clearly influenced” Hogan and Majok throughout the budget process.
“I understand that politics is a part of this process, but politics is a means to an end. The end is to serve our constituents and to be responsive to our constituents,” Walsh said. “I’m afraid that politics has been the end for more than a couple councilors in this process.”
In April, Walsh proposed his final budget. The $348 million budget included a 2% property tax rate increase and pulled more than $27 million from the city’s fund balance.
The budget approved Wednesday by the council reduced the amount of money pulled from the city’s fund balance by about half and eliminated an increase in the property tax rate.
Councilor Corey Williams, who chairs the council’s Finance, Taxation and Assessment Committee, has said throughout the process that the council’s amendments are not political, seeing as Hogan and Majok would inherit the budget they have helped cut, should either be victorious in the mayoral election.
Williams did not immediately respond to a Central Current reporter’s attempts to contact him for further comment.
Read more of Central Current’s budget coverage:
- May 20: Mayor Ben Walsh vetoes 45 budget amendments; Common Council to vote whether to override vetoes
- May 17: What could the Common Council’s budget amendments mean for code enforcement, police, and public works?
- May 15: Compromise tough to come by as Walsh, Common Council leaders meet about budget
- May 11: Did Syracuse lawmakers abuse the state’s open meetings law while making budget cuts?
- May 9: How Syracuse officials anticipate budget cuts could affect city operations
- May 9: Syracuse lawmakers unanimously approve about $16M in cuts from mayor’s proposed budget
- May 7: Syracuse lawmakers used a taxpayer-funded analysis to inform its budget cuts. You can’t read it yet.
- April 9: What’s in Mayor Ben Walsh’s last proposed budget?
About an hour before the council overrode Walsh’s vetoes, syracuse.com | The Post Standard published a letter from Majok defending his votes as a responsible step toward saving the city from the threat of insolvency. In the letter, Majok called the council “the adults in the room.”
“Politically, there was no room left for negotiation after that press conference,” Majok said after Wednesday’s vote. Majok was referring to a press conference in which Walsh called the councilors’ cuts “draconian and dangerous.”
“You threw all the councilors under the bus when we were trying to do our job like you did your job, and if you had disagreed over what we have done, you should have come to us before you had a press conference.”
Owens criticized Majok during Walsh’s Wednesday press conference.
“Councilor Majok’s talking about being the adult in the room. You are the chair of the committee of public safety,” Owens said, “and didn’t have one conversation with the two chiefs that run those departments.”
Such spats marked the entire budget process. Not long after the mayor announced his budget proposal, the council paid $20,750 to a local firm to perform an analysis of the mayor’s proposal. Councilors, who said the report guided their budget amendments, refused to release a copy of the report before voting on the amendments they drafted. The council released the amendments at 11 p.m. on the night before voting on the amendments.
The council received reports about The Bonadio Group’s conclusions and drafted the amendments in caucus meetings — a move by the council that open government experts lampooned, Central Current reported.
Walsh vetoed about 45 of the council’s budget amendments. Williams and Hogan then met with Walsh. The meeting failed to yield a compromise.
As councilors on Wednesday voted to override each of the mayor’s amendments, a council staffer issued a statement on behalf of the council. That press release accused the mayor and his team of using “fear tactics” to distort the council’s budget cuts and foment unnecessary alarm among residents.
The council’s statement provided rationales for its cuts. It reiterated that cuts to the mayor’s proposed budgets for the Division of Code Enforcement, Department of Public Works, Fire Department, and Department of Parks and Recreation still marked an increase from what those departments were projected to spend in the 2025 fiscal year.
The statement also minimized the council’s cuts to the Police Department’s budget, pointing out that the cuts result in less than a 1% reduction to the department’s current year’s spending.
The council also wrote that the police chief reserves the option to request more funding should his department’s budget run empty prior to the end of the fiscal year.
A statement from the mayor, issued by his staffers shortly afterward, shifted the onus for any negative consequences of the budget cuts onto the council.
Walsh asked the city’s department heads to draft a contingency plan to implement the council’s amended budget.
“If councilors don’t support the cuts we’ve put forth, they will have to provide alternatives,” Walsh said. “This is their budget, and they will have to decide how to respond to unhappy taxpayers who don’t deserve to face the consequences of the council’s actions.”
The cuts the mayor’s team will put forth are not finalized yet, but the city last week issued a breakdown of how those proposed cuts would affect each city department.
The Department of Public Works and Codes Enforcement contended the council’s cuts could lead to staffing cuts; the Syracuse Fire Department warned the cuts will reduce safety for firefighters and civilians; and Parks and Recreation said the cuts would strain staffing for festivals, pools and youth-focused summer programs.
Majok hopes that the Council’s decisions will pay off, and that taxpayers will look back and understand why the council chose those cuts.
“As councilors, we are looking for the best interests of the city of Syracuse. People will not agree with them now,” Majok said. “Our hope is that in the long run, they will see why the councilors stood the way they did.”
Owens, though, said the council’s conduct demonstrates her mayoral opponents’ approach to leadership.
“The curtains are drawn on your government style,” Owens said. “which is not mine.”
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