Mayor Mamdani and New Yorkers Want to Tax the Rich. Where Is City Council Speaker Julie Menin?
Leaders in city and state government support raising taxes on the wealthy, but Gov. Hochul and Speaker Menin are refusing to get on board. Now, grassroots groups are increasing the pressure.
Luca GoldMansour
New Yorkers sent a clear message to the political establishment last November when they elected Mayor Zohran Mamdani: It’s time to tax the rich. That message has grown all the more crucial with the announcement of a $5.4 billion shortfall in the city’s budget that could jeopardize social services. But with state budget negotiations well underway, a powerful duo is posing a significant challenge to the mayor and his allies.
Gov. Kathy Hochul’s opposition to raising taxes — and the veto power she holds over any budget bill — has rightly garnered significant media attention. Outlets like Politico and the New York Times are portraying the negotiations as a first major test of strength between Hochul and Mamdani.
But so far less noise has been made about resistance to raising taxes from New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin.
Menin, who represents Manhattan’s wealthy Upper East Side neighborhood, makes no secret of her personal wealth. She is currently living in a multi-million dollar apartment, as Dropsite journalist Ryan Grim pointed out on X. Her husband, Bruce Menin, is a co-founder of Crescent Heights, a real estate developer that was worth more than $12 billion as of 2018. She campaigned for speaker largely behind the scenes, reportedly promising to serve as a check on the incoming Mamdani administration.
Now she’s making good on that promise. After months of paying lip service to Mamdani’s affordability agenda and taking plenty of opportunities to stand with the mayor in front of the press, she is refusing calls to support the increased taxes needed to fund the mayor’s proposals and avoid imperiling city services. In response to a question on FOX 5 New York about Mayor Mamdani’s plan to the rich and corporations, Menin countered: “I think there’s a third path… what we really need to focus on is savings.”
As in most cities, progressives in New York are perennially brushing up against hard constitutional limits to their powers. The city has long been at the mercy of its state government, which alone has the authority to raise personal income and corporate taxes. As a result, the city consistently contributes more to state revenues than it receives in services.
Menin doesn’t personally control budget bills in Albany. But as the city’s second most prominent official, her voice holds significant sway over the political considerations of state lawmakers like Gov. Hochul. Should the city put up a united front, Hochul might find herself pressured to give in to Mamdani’s demands. To that end, progressive NYC council members are coalescing their support for raising corporate taxes. But Menin has not signed on to their efforts nor made use of her clout to organize the council’s more centrist lawmakers.
The threat of cuts to city services comes as New York’s affordability crisis rages on. Median rent in Manhattan jumped above $5,000 per month in February for the first time ever, according to a report released earlier this month. New York is increasingly a tale of two cities. Some neighborhoods—or entire boroughs—face food insecurity rates higher than 30 percent. Meanwhile, as of 2022, the city was home to some 724 individuals worth at least $100 million, and hosted more millionaires than anywhere else in the world.
It’s no wonder New Yorkers responded favorably to Mamdani’s singular campaign focus on affordability measures like universal childcare, freezing the rent, and free and fast city buses. His universal childcare proposal alone would, according to Mamdani’s office, save New Yorkers an average of over $20,000 per child.
In January, Gov. Hochul committed to realizing something resembling Mamdani’s childcare vision through a phased-in process that would not be funded by tax increases. But Mamdani remains adamant that the billions in potential revenue from new taxes on New York’s ultrawealthy are the most responsible and equitable path towards a city that’s affordable for all its residents.
Leaders in both chambers of the state legislature agree. Still, Menin is undercutting Mamdani’s negotiating position by claiming new taxes are not necessary to deal with the city’s budget shortfall. Her office did not respond to repeated requests for comment from In These Times.
“There definitely are savings in the budget, without a doubt, and I’ve been talking about these for months,” Menin said on noted Islamophobe Sid Rosenberg’s radio show in February.
In early March, her office released a proposal she claims identified $1.7 billion in these potential “savings” in the city’s budget to help reduce the gap.
But the Mamdani administration wasted little time in offering a rebuke. Menin’s proposal included savings that had either already been accounted for in the mayor’s plan or would result in workforce cuts, an unnamed source from the mayor’s Office of Management and Budget told Politico.
Mamdani’s supporters argue that by failing to propose a legitimate solution to the shortfall, Menin is endorsing cuts to social services by default.
“Speaker Menin’s position is based on bad math. The ‘savings’ she’s talking about will hamstring city services, even if it’s from the backend. But she knows that — her goal is to muddy the waters of what’s actually a very clear situation: if Governor Hochul doesn’t tax the rich, city services and New Yorkers will pay for it,” Ella Mahony, communications director for NYC-Democratic Socialists of America’s Tax the Rich campaign, tells In These Times.
Groups like NYC-DSA, Working Families Party of New York, and Our Time — an organization focused on mobilizing Mamdani’s former campaign volunteers — are focusing their grassroots organizing efforts on helping push Mamdani’s tax proposals over the finish line.
All three groups helped organize a day of action in Albany last month where over 1,500 people rallied to demand Hochul and state representatives raise taxes. Volunteers with NYC-DSA and Our Time have been canvassing neighborhoods across New York City in support of Mamdani’s agenda since he was inaugurated in January. They understand they will also have to take the fight to Menin.
“We are going to have to actually put pressure on the Speaker,” said Jasmine Gripper, state director of the Working Families Party of New York. “We are going to be making phone calls to her constituents and supporters in her district and also across the borough, to make sure that people are calling into her office and that she hears from New Yorkers.”
As negotiations continue to ramp up and more New Yorkers are made aware of her position, Menin could be made to feel the heat. Polling consistently shows New Yorkers favor raising taxes on the wealthy. A Sienna poll released in early March shows that 62 percent of city residents support raising taxes on individuals making more than $1 million, with only 21 percent in opposition. That gap widens among Democrats across the state, with 72 percent in support and just 13 percent against.
With Menin’s position so out of line with mainstream opinion on this issue, it’s clear she intends on only representing people like herself, says Divya Sundaram, deputy director of Our Time.
“It should come as no surprise that Speaker Menin would rather balance the budget by squeezing working New Yorkers than taxing the very rich,” Sundaram tells In These Times. “From her side of a high nine-figure household balance sheet, the system is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.”
The consequences of this budget battle for the people of New York, and the impact of Menin’s obstructions, should not be lost in coverage of the political back and forths, Gripper said.
“The children of New York are still struggling to have their basic needs met,” according to Gripper. “We should be embarrassed that 1 in 10 children in New York City are experiencing homelessness. We are at the brink of a crisis for working families and we have to do something immediately.”
Luca GoldMansour is a Lebanese American journalist from New York City. He has a master’s degree from the Craig Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY.
