Gov. Hochul is deploying 750 members of the Guard and 250 state and MTA police officers to subway stations to inspect passengers’ bags following a spate of violent incidents across the system.

“No one heading to their job or to visit family or to go to a doctor’s appointment should worry that the person sitting next to them possesses a deadly weapon,” Hochul said Wednesday beside MTA Chairman Janno Lieber in front of a giant system map at the MTA’s Rail Control Center.

“They shouldn’t worry about whether someone’s going to brandish a knife or a gun.”

The random checks will fall well short of the body scans and pat downs of airport-level security. Straphangers are already familiar with how this will work — cops at tables performing random bag checks have appeared at subway turnstiles from time to time in the 22 years since the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

Transit officials said the state support would simply allow for more such spot checks throughout the system, and that the National Guard, MTA police or other state law enforcement won’t be patrolling the trains.

The additional law enforcement power is one of a slate of state actions Hochul hopes will reduce crime underground — a “five-point plan [to] rid our subways of violent offenders and protect all commuters and transit workers,” as she put it.

“I am sending a message to all New Yorkers — I will not stop working to keep you safe and restore your peace of mind whenever you walk through those turnstiles,” she said

Besides the bag checks, the five initiatives include a $20 million plan to beef up the number of clinical teams responding to people in mental distress on subways from two to 10 systemwide.

Another of Hochul’s five initiatives is her support for the MTA’s plan to install surveillance cameras inside conductor and train-operator cabs. That initiative is a direct response to the slashing of MTA conductor Alton Scott, who narrowly survived a random assault last week when he stuck his head out of his cab as his train stopped at a Brooklyn subway station.

“If a camera had been positioned in Alton Scott’s conductor cabin last Thursday, we probably would have already apprehended the person who slashed his neck,” Hochul said.

“Today I’m directing the MTA to install cameras in every single conductor cabin, as well as [on] platforms that face the cabins,” she added.

No platform-mounted camera caught Scott’s attacker last week either.

MTA officials have stated that the station had multiple working surveillance cameras, but none were pointed at the conductor’s mid-platform position when Scott’s late-night A train pulled into the Rockaway Ave. station in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Transit brass declined to comment Wednesday on how many other stations might need upgrades to their camera coverage, citing security concerns.

Transport Workers Union Local 100 has long opposed putting cameras in conductor and operator cabs, citing privacy concerns. The MTA said last week it will install the cameras anyway.

A Local 100 spokesman said Wednesday that the union will support the installation so long as the cameras are solely for safety purposes, and are not used to support disciplinary cases against union members.

Hochul’s fourth initiative is proposed legislation to ban anyone convicted of an assault on transit from the system for three years. Currently the law allows a ban only on those who are convicted of assaulting a transit worker.

Her fifth initiative is improved coordination between MTA officials and district attorneys and police. That initiative will include regular meetings to discuss subway crime, the first of which is scheduled for next week.

As part of that fifth initiative, Hochul said, the MTA will hire a new “criminal justice advocate to assist the victims of crime in the system,” and develop a system to “flag recidivist offenders” to district attorneys.

NYPD brass and MTA leaders blame the uptick in crime on repeat offenders.

“One percent of subway arrestees, according to the NYPD, are responsible for well over 20% of the crime,” MTA boss Lieber said. “We need to have a collaboration with the [district attorneys] so they have that full information.”

The NYPD is fighting a 15.5% jump in felony assaults at city subway stops and trains.

Police have counted 97 such assaults in the subway system this year as of Sunday, 13 more than in the same period of 2023.

Misdemeanor assaults — slaps, punches and other relatively minor attacks — are down 3.9% for the year, with 249 misdemeanor assaults as of Sunday, 10 fewer than the 259 that had occurred by this time last year.

NYPD brass has said grand larcenies — property theft and pickpocketing — are the main thing pushing crime rates up in the subway system. Those crimes are up 17.8%, from 163 reported incidents last year to 192 this year.

There have been three homicides on the transit system so far this year, up from one this time last year.

The most recent was two weeks ago, when a man was fatally shot two weeks ago while on board a southbound B train in the Bronx.

On Tuesday, police arrested a man for allegedly stabbing a passenger onboard an uptown A train in what cops described as a hate crime.

Arrests in the system are up 45% over last year, according to police, with 3,261 arrests so far as of Sunday, up from 2,243 last year.

Earlier Wednesday, Mayor Adams — who did not join Hochul at her announcement — said NYPD officers will also be increasing bag checks in the subway system.

Neither the mayor nor transit officials would say at which stations the ramped-up bag checks will take place. An Adams administration spokesperson said there will be 94 NYPD bag screening teams deployed to 136 stations each week.

“They’re going to be a seven-day-a-week operation,” NYPD Transit Chief Michael Kemper said in a Wednesday morning appearance with Adams on CBS New York.

Adams said the checks will be “random” and that the Police Department won’t engage in any “profiling.”

“People who don’t want their bags checked can turn around and not enter the system,” he said.

The governor’s plan to put National Guard soldiers in the subway system was met with alarm from civil libertarians.

“This plan is whiplash inducing. The city only recently trumpeted safety data,” Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement.

“These heavy-handed approaches will, like stop-and-frisk, be used to accost and profile Black and Brown New Yorkers, ripping a page straight out of the Giuliani playbook,” she said, comparing Hochul to the former Republican mayor.

Albert Fox Cahn, head of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, expressed specific concern about the use of the National Guard.

“We shouldn’t militarize the MTA when crime rates are falling and budgets are contracting,” he said in a statement.

“I fear how many New Yorkers will be wrongly arrested or hurt before we recognize that soldiers have no place on the streets of democracy.”

“After last week’s event, we’ve had no outreach at all from law enforcement, and we have no indication that the mayor is a target of any pending investigation,” Lisa Zornberg, Adams’ chief counsel, told reporters during the mayor’s weekly press briefing.

Zornberg and Adams were otherwise reluctant to offer comment during the briefing about Greco, whose two Bronx homes were raided by FBI agents on Thursday.

They declined to explain why Greco was just days before the raids added to a list of Adams administration officials who are considered “policymakers,” a development first reported by the news outlet The City.

The mayor also declined to say whether he regrets any of his hiring decisions, given that Greco’s the third campaign or administration official in just the past few months to get their homes raided by the feds.

“I can’t answer that question,” the mayor said. “I’m not the reviewer. The reviewers can answer that. I follow one belief: Follow the law, that’s what I follow.”

The mayor did confirm Greco remains on paid sick leave from her post as his Asian Affairs director. Greco, a longtime aide and political fundraiser for Adams, went on leave after suffering a medical episode when the feds stormed into her homes shortly before dawn Friday, according to City Hall.

The exact focus of the investigation that prompted the Greco raids remains unknown. The investigation’s being led by the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn.

The raids came on the heels of reports that Greco helped host several fundraisers for Adams’ 2021 campaign that drew straw donor concerns from city regulators. The city Department of Investigation also launched a probe into Greco last year following reports that she had made a City Hall staffer renovate her kitchen for free while on the municipal government’s time.

In November, the FBI raided the homes of Brianna Suggs, Adams’ top political fundraiser, and City Hall aide Rana Abbasova as part of a separate investigation into whether the Turkish government pumped illegal foreign money into his 2021 campaign. After those raids, Abbasova was suspended, while Suggs got reassigned to a new, yet-to-be defined role on Adams’ reelection campaign.

While he hasn’t been publicly accused of any wrongdoing, the feds stopped Adams on the street in November and seized his cell phones as part of the Turkey probe, which is being led by the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan.

As first reported by the Daily News on Monday, the city has only received $49 million of that money because federal authorities say the Adams administration isn’t filing the right paperwork to secure the rest. One Biden administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to be candid, even said Adams’ team hasn’t “stepped up to the plate” when it comes to putting the right application paperwork together for the remainder of the aid, which was allocated last year by Congress.

Asked why his administration’s struggling to furnish the right documentation, Adams sought Tuesday afternoon to flip the script back on the feds by noting the outstanding $107 million is small potatoes when compared with the $4 billion the city has spent so far on providing housing and services for migrants.

“Why don’t you go back to that person who stated we haven’t stepped to the plate, and say: ‘Have you guys stepped up to the plate and helping them with this $4 billion, securing the border, allowing people to have work authorization, make sure we have a decompression strategy?'” said Adams, who has for over a year lamented what he sees as a lack of migrant crisis help from the Biden administration. “Ask them: Have they stepped up to the plate? New Yorkers have stepped up to the plate.”

To offset migrant spending, Adams has in recent months enacted steep city budget cuts. The cuts have resulted in various service reductions, including the elimination of Sunday hours at all public libraries.

After the mayor’s briefing, a White House official told The News that the Biden administration wants to provide New York City with more financial help to alleviate the migrant-related fiscal burden, noting it supported the creation of a new $1.4 billion fund that’d reimburse cities across the U.S. for migrant costs. However, House Republicans have blocked that allocation.

“Of course, we would love to do more,” the White House official said.

Jacques Jiha, Adams’ budget director, first revealed during a Council hearing Monday that the city has only received $49 million in migrant aid from the feds to date. In his testimony, Jiha said the city hasn’t been able to access the rest of the aid due to “stringent” eligibility requirements that make it “very difficult” to apply.

Neither Adams nor multiple top advisers who joined him for Tuesday’s briefing at City Hall would provide more details on what specifically in the requirements are tripping up their application.

“We’ll look into it and circle back to you,” Fabien Levy, Adams’ deputy mayor for communications, said when asked for specifics.

Sheena Wright, Adams’ first deputy mayor, suggested a finger should ultimately be pointed at the feds, not the mayor’s team.

“We know how to submit paperwork,” she said. “So I think the question is for them: Why haven’t these funds been released?”

Among other requirements, municipalities applying for the aid must provide names, dates of birth and so-called alien registration numbers for migrants who stand to benefit from the financial support, according to guidance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The FEMA guidance also says spending on hotels cannot exceed 5% of the total amount of aid requested by any given municipality, a wrinkle that could pose a problem for the city, which is housing thousands of new arrivals in hotels.

According to Biden administration officials, FEMA dispatched a team to New York last week to help Adams’ office with resolving aid application snags.

However, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, Adams’ chief adviser, claimed it’s “not true” a FEMA team came to New York when asked about the matter during Tuesday’s briefing.

“Why don’t they come and say, ‘Listen, this is what you need to provide,'” Lewis-Martin said. “If we give people paperwork to fill out and they cannot get it done, please assist them.”

Asked about Lewis-Martin’s comments, the White House official reiterated that the FEMA team was in New York last week and provided on-the-ground application support. The official said the administration would contact Lewis-Martin about the matter.

A City Hall spokesman did not immediately return a request for comment on whether Lewis-Martin misspoke.

The latest clash between the mayor’s team and the Biden administration comes as more than 60,000 migrants remain housed in city shelters. Though he says he still supports Biden’s reelection bid, the mayor has been vocally frustrated for months with what he sees as a lack of migrant crisis help from the Democratic president, including declaring last year the commander-in-chief had “failed” New York City.

The outstanding federal migrant aid issue came up during a budget hearing held in the City Council on Tuesday, when Manuel Castro, Adams’ Immigration Affairs commissioner, testified that the city is banking on receiving the full $156 million from the feds this year.

Castro’s comment prompted Brooklyn Councilwoman Alexa Aviles, a progressive Democrat, to note that the city has received less than a third of the outlay so far.

“There are some operational issues to address there,” she said.

The woman, whose name is being withheld by The News, filed a so-called “notice of claim” in Manhattan Supreme Court in November saying she intended to sue the mayor for $5 million over allegations that he subjected her to “sexual assault, battery and employment discrimination” while they both worked for the city Transit Police Department in 1993.

Since that brief filing, the woman and her attorney have declined to provide more details about her accusations. Adams, meantime, has vehemently denied the accusations, and his attorneys said as recently as a few weeks ago that he had yet to be served with her claim, a formality required to kick off any court proceeding.

However, on Tuesday afternoon, Sylvia Hinds-Radix, Adams’ corporation counsel who leads the city Law Department, filed papers in Manhattan Supreme Court demanding that the woman provide “the complaint in this action” within 20 days.

The filing from Hinds-Radix indicates the initial claim has finally been served, as the Law Department otherwise wouldn’t be able to demand a full complaint.

Megan Goddard, the woman’s attorney, did not return a request for comment Tuesday, and neither did a spokesman for the mayor. A Law Department spokesman declined to comment.

In addition to Adams, the woman named the NYPD and the Guardians Association as defendants in her initial claim. The Guardians is a Black police officers’ fraternal organization that the mayor used to head in the 1990s.

Adams confirmed in November that he expected the Law Department to represent him in any case brought by the complainant.

The woman filed her claim under the Adult Survivors Act, a state law that opened a one-year window in 2022 for victims of sexual misconduct to sue their assailants even if the statute of limitations on the claim had expired. Adams’ accuser filed her notice of claim on Nov. 22, 2023, one day before the one-year window closed.

Teachers and safety staff at the Sheepshead Bay school went public over the weekend with claims that students paraded through the halls in October chanting “Kill the Jews!” In the months that followed, students made death threats to a Jewish teacher’s family and drew swastikas throughout the school, three staff members told CBS New York.

The staffers, joined by local elected officials and advocates, have accused the principal and broader school system of letting hate go unchecked.

But city officials pushed back Tuesday, saying the claims of what happened at Origins have been exaggerated.

“The cause of combating antisemitism is not served by people exaggerating or putting out false claims,” the public schools’ first deputy chancellor, Dan Weisberg, said in a briefing at City Hall on Tuesday. “The central claim that was in the initial article about the situation at Origins about students rampaging through the hallway, many of them chanting antisemitic slogans, we can find no evidence of that — none, zero — including from educators who were in the hallways on that day.”

“Not helpful to demonize and paint with a broad brush students at an incredibly diverse school, to demonize a principal who’s trying to do the right thing,” he told reporters.

Weisberg confirmed that students at Origins have said “inappropriate things to teachers,” but said the principal, Dara Kammerman, reacted “decisively.” Students who broke the code of conduct faced discipline, he said. Kammerman carved out time to talk about “difficult issues,” and enlisted the Museum of Jewish Heritage to teach the history of antisemitism and Jewish history.

“We have to make sure we’re educating our kids, but that’s exactly what is going on,” Weisberg said. “We continue to investigate; we’ll follow up on any incident.”

At the same time, Mayor Adams said he does not want “anyone to think that we are being dismissive of the real fear that people are feeling.”

“We’re not saying that people don’t have justification for being afraid. What they’re feeling is real, just like any other group that have gone through that, and we have to fix that problem, ” Adams said.

A lawyer for the Origins staffers said there is proof to back the allegations, including video of the hallway protest. He said that is just one of “dozens and dozens of instances of antisemitism.”

“Even in this time of heightened antisemitism, I am shocked at the level of depravity on display here,” said Mark Goldfeder, senior counsel at the Brandeis Center, “and at the administration’s callous, indefensible tolerance of it.”

“Antisemitism, like all forms of hate, is not intuitive, it must be learned. Apparently, it is being taught at Origins, and that is simply unacceptable,” said Goldfeder, who confirmed the Brandeis Center is “actively preparing” to bring potential litigation.

Since Hamas’ terror attacks on Israel in October, some Jewish families and teachers have reported feeling unsafe in the city’s public schools, including a Hillcrest High School teacher who was targeted by students because she attended a pro-Israel rally days after Oct. 7.

Others have accused local public schools of not doing enough to protect pro-Palestinian activists during Israel’s military counteroffensive, including a Palestinian-American math teacher whose face and social media posts were displayed on a digital billboard last month outside his school.

While Weisberg, the first deputy chancellor, defended the principal’s attempt to not just penalize her way out of problems at the high school, some are calling for discipline. The campus safety manager reportedly filed 15 complaints with his higherups but no action was taken to his knowledge, he told CBS New York.

“When it comes to antisemitism,” said Gerard Filitti, senior counsel at the Lawfare Project, who spoke at a protest at Origins over the weekend, “it seems that people are allowed to get away with it.”

In a major speech this winter, Schools Chancellor David Banks announced that all principals are undergoing a training on how to apply the discipline code. He said that it was critical for schools to find a balance between “tangible consequences” and chances for students to learn from their mistakes.

“If financial conditions improve and the economy remains strong, we will work with the Council, as we always do, to look at priorities of the Council and the administration and then see what can be fully or partially restored,” Jacques Jiha, who heads Adams’ Office of Management and Budget, said during an hourslong Council hearing.

Jiha made that comment after Council Speaker Adrienne Adams (D-Queens) specifically asked him about undoing a $24 million cut that the mayor subjected the city’s three public library systems to in November that forced them to eliminate Sunday hours at all their branches.

Jiha declined to make any specific commitments, though.

“I cannot commit at this point in time that we are going to restore X, Y and Z,” the budget director testified.

The hearing, held to examine the mayor’s $109.4 billion preliminary budget proposal released in January, marked the official starting point of months of negotiations between the mayor’s office and the Council before they must come to an agreement on a city financial plan before the July 1 start of the 2025 fiscal year. In coming weeks, heads from nearly all city agencies will appear before the Council to testify about their budgetary needs.

Ahead of Monday’s hearing, the Council released a new revenue projection, first reported by the Daily News, that projects the city to be on track to rake in $3.3 billion more in income, property, sales and business taxes over the 2024 and 2025 fiscal years than what’s predicted by Jiha’s office.

Council Democrats repeatedly argued in the hearing that their rosier revenue projections should allow the mayor to undo many of the budget cuts he pushed through in November and January on the auspice that the city needed to offset migrant crisis spending and accommodate Jiha’s lower tax revenue forecast.

“With higher than expected revenues in this fiscal year and a durable, resilient economy, I believe our city has the flexibility to reverse many cuts that have been made,” Speaker Adams said at Monday’s hearing.

Jiha did not say he’s ready to accept the Council’s new revenue estimate. He did tell Council members he’s “hoping that your forecast is right,” though.

Brooklyn Councilman Justin Brannan, a Democrat who is chairman of the Finance Committee, suggested after the hearing that he was optimistic.

“If both sides of City Hall can walk into the room with the same shared set of objective data, we will be fine,” Brannan said when asked if he’s hopeful about getting some of Mayor Adams’ cuts reversed. “Hardworking New Yorkers deserve nothing less.”

The mayor already undid some budget cuts in January, including at the NYPD, the FDNY and the Sanitation Department. He said he was able to do so because he had ordered his administration to drastically reduce the amount of money being spent on housing and services for newly arrived migrants.

In Monday’s hearing, Jiha said a key element of managing migrant spending is driving down the number of migrants in city shelters. The administration’s primary vehicle for reducing the census is its controversial 30- and 60-day policies, which limit how long migrants, including families with children, can stay consecutively in shelters.

“If we don’t bring down the population, I don’t know how we’re going to sustain this in the long run,” Jiha told Council members.

“We know it’s not going to happen by 2027,” Jacques Jiha, the mayor’s budget director, told the City Council’s Finance Committee on Monday.

Jiha also said the new total cost for building the four borough-based jails has risen to $15 billion. That’s almost double the $8.7 billion the city estimated construction would cost in 2019, when the plan to close Rikers was signed into law by then-Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Jiha suggested a spike in cost for construction material is in part to blame, saying, “The price of steel has doubled.”

In December, Mayor Adams and former state chief judge Jonathan Lippman penned an op-ed in the Daily News underscoring the pledge to close the notorious jail complex. But the mayor, a Democrat, has repeatedly suggested it won’t happen by the mandated deadline and has discussed developing a “Plan B.”

In August, he called the original approach “flawed from the beginning.” The original plan envisioned a jail population of 3,300. After dropping to less than 4,000 during the pandemic, when releases to preserve life were a priority, the population is now more than 6,100.

Across the same period, the jails suffered a relentless stream of in-custody deaths — 16 in 2021, 19 in 2022 and nine in 2023. The federal monitor tracking violence and use of force in the jails issued report after report criticizing the management of the system.

In November, the Legal Aid Society and the U.S. attorney in Manhattan submitted filings arguing for the system to be taken from city control and handed to an outside receiver appointed by a federal judge. The city has yet to file its expected opposition to the move.

The new Brooklyn Borough Jail already has a completion date two years after the deadline in 2029. Target opening dates for new jails in the Bronx, Manhattan and Queens remain unclear.

“The Adams administration is not above the law, and City Hall has a statutory obligation to close Rikers Island by August 2027,” said Tina Luongo, chief attorney of the Criminal Defense Practice at The Legal Aid Society.

On Oct. 19, Council Speaker Adrienne Adams reconstituted the Independent Rikers Commission to take another look at the closure plan with the intent of keeping the deadline but allowing for leeway based on other emerging factors.

Jacques Jiha, the director of Adams’ Office of Management and Budget, disclosed the paltry amount the city has received so far during a marathon City Council hearing on Monday.

Asked why the city hasn’t received the full $156 million it was allocated, Jiha told Council members: “The [application] requirements are so stringent … but we’re working on it. We’re trying to collect the remaining $107 million.”

An official in President Biden’s administration told the Daily News later Monday that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has for months provided the mayor’s team with “extensive technical assistance” to help the city access the full aid allocation. The official said that included dispatching a FEMA team to the city just last week to help walk Adams administration officials through the application process.

“Unfortunately, they have not stepped up to the plate,” said the Biden administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to be candid. “There really isn’t a federal government problem here. They just haven’t submitted the documentation to unlock the funds.”

Asked about the Biden official’s comments, an Adams spokeswoman said the mayor’s administration hasn’t missed any deadlines and is working with federal stakeholders on expediting the release of the remainder of the available funds.

The $156 million set aside for the city is part of an $800 million program administered by FEMA.

The program, established as part of budget negotiations in Congress last year, is designed to help alleviate costs incurred by municipalities across the U.S. that are seeing large influxes of mostly Latin American migrants.

The Biden administration official said multiple other U.S. cities have managed to unlock the full amount of their migrant aid allocations, including Chicago, which received about $32 million.

The FEMA initiative is based on a reimbursement model, meaning municipalities can apply to get costs covered after they’re incurred. Expenses eligible for reimbursement under the program include costs related to providing shelter, food, transportation, health care and other supportive services for newly arrived migrants, according to FEMA.

Ultimately, the FEMA cash is a drop in the bucket as compared to the total amount of money spent by New York City on the migrant crisis. As of the end of last month, the Adams administration has shelled out “just over $4 billion” on housing, feeding and providing services for the tens of thousands of migrants who remain in the city’s care, Jiha said.

Since migrants first started arriving in waves in spring 2022, the mayor has lamented what he sees as a lack of financial relief from the feds.

He has drawn the ire of some fellow Democrats for publicly saying Biden isn’t doing enough to help, including declaring last year that the president had “failed” the city. The mayor has also argued Republicans in Congress share blame for blocking long-sought immigration reforms.

When asked at Monday’s Council hearing whether Gov. Hochul is doing enough to help the mayor’s administration, Jiha deadpanned: “No.”

“We should be getting at a minimum a 50-50 share,” he added, referring to the mayor’s request for the governor’s administration to pick up half of the city’s migrant crisis tab.

Hochul’s executive budget unveiled last month set aside about $2.4 billion in state migrant aid for the city over the coming fiscal year, a proposal that falls short of the mayor’s 50%-50% demand.

In July, Manhattan Federal Judge Jennifer Rearden ruled the administration needed to speed up processing of cash assistance and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program claims, commonly known as SNAP benefits, in response to a class action lawsuit filed months earlier. Under her ruling, all backlogged applications have to be cleared within the legally prescribed 30-day time frame by the end of March.

So far, that goal hasn’t been met completely, but, according to Monday’s announcement from the mayor’s office, 90% of backlogged SNAP cases and 97% of overdue cash assistance cases have been addressed.

“Our administration has nearly eliminated the cash assistance and SNAP backlogs — processing more than 50,000 applications and building on our work to ensure vulnerable New Yorkers can get the support they need,” Adams said in a written statement.

The more than yearlong saga over delayed benefit payments came into the public eye in January 2023 when four New Yorkers with outstanding benefit claims sued the city over the delays. The suit, which was later granted class action status, ultimately led to Rearden ruling the city needed to act quickly.

Under federal and state law, the city is required to process claims with 30 days of them being filed.

The Legal Aid Society, which is representing the plaintiffs in the case, said Monday they “are very pleased that the Adams administration was able to correct the egregious backlog of applications filed by low-income New Yorkers for these lifesaving benefits.”

“Going forward, we will continue to hold the city accountable for any processing delays that adversely impact our clients,” the society said in a written statement. “We await further details from the city on how the backlog was reduced to ensure that any eligible household received the benefits entitled to them by the law.”

The press release put out by Adams’ office Monday noted that as of last Thursday, 411 SNAP applications and 1,154 cases of cash assistance are “pending ontime processing.” Whether all of those pending claims will be processed by Judge Rearden’s March 31 deadline remains to be seen.

But city Social Services Commissioner Molly Wasow Park seemed confident they would be when speaking Monday with the Daily News.

“We are not only on track, but ahead of schedule, so I’m feeling very good about where we are right now,” she said.

To chip away at the backlog, Wasow Park said, the city hired nearly 1,000 additional social services workers to help address claims — an exception to a broad hiring freeze the mayor put into place in the light of low revenue projections and the increased costs associated with more than 150,000 migrants flowing into the city over the past two years.

“Hiring was a big piece of it,” she said. “As we brought them on, we really invested in training, making sure people were able to step in and start doing the work as quickly as possible.”

The news Monday should help to address recent statistics that have not reflected well on the administration. Those numbers, which came out as part of the Preliminary Mayor’s Management Report in January, showed that the “application timeliness rate” on SNAP claims had hit about 40% in the 2023 fiscal year compared with about 92% in 2021. The same measure was even worse when it came to cash assistance — in 2023, it stood at about 29% for those claims, compared with 95% in 2021.

During a budget hearing Monday morning, Jacques Jiha, Adams’ budget director, said the main reason the administration is struggling with benefits processing is because poverty rates in the city are worsening, increasing the number of residents who need food stamps and cash assistance.

“We have a growing number of poor people,” he said.

Jiha touted the administration’s strides in clearing the backlog as well, but he was not warmly received by at least one lawmaker in the City Council.

“It doesn’t negate the fact that these applications were taking forever to get processed,” said City Councilwoman Diana Ayala (D-Bronx, Manhattan), who is chairwoman of the General Welfare Committee.

The new Council projection, which was obtained exclusively by the Daily News, predicts the city will receive $3.3 billion more in income, business, sales and property taxes over the 2024 and 2025 fiscal years as compared to what the mayor’s Office of Budget and Management projected in its most recent forecast. The latest OMB forecast, released in January, came after  Adams enacted sweeping budget cuts last year at all city agencies justified by previous — and much lower — revenue projections.

The Council’s new, even rosier revenue projections sharpen Council Democrats’ arguments that many of the mayor’s cuts were never necessary — a charge they’re certain to put front and center as budget hearings kick off in the chamber Monday.

“I wouldn’t say happy days are here again just yet, but from 3K to CUNY to our cultural sector, thanks to a resilient and durable economy, we’ve got plenty to restore all the blunt cuts that had a disproportionately negative impact on vital programs and were never necessary in the first place,” Council Finance Chairman Justin Brannan said. “I hate the term cautiously optimistic, but if the shoe fits.”

Adams has said that prior forecasts from his team were based on sky-high migrant crisis costs and the administration’s practice of making more conservative estimates based on the fact that it is legally mandated to balance the city’s budget.

“The Council projections can be more liberal. We have to make sure that we have enough money to pay the bills to keep the lights on,” Adams said at a news conference in January.

Jacques Jiha, Adams’ OMB director responsible for the administration’s tax revenue assessments, explained a few days after the January briefing that the city’s forecasts also factored in the U.S. economy, where he notes “almost most economists were predicting a hard landing of the economy.”

“This is because interest rates were rising. We had 11 consecutive increases in interest rates. So, economists were projecting a recession more or less,” Jiha said. “So, the key here is we had anticipated a recession last year, like most economists, and instead we had a soft landing, okay, we’re still landing, okay, but it’s not a crash, okay?”

Jiha will be the first to testify as part of the Council’s 2025 fiscal year budget hearings Monday. Heads from nearly all city agencies will then offer testimony in the coming days and weeks before the mayor and the Council must come to an agreement on a budget before the July 1 start of the 2025 fiscal year.

Brannan and several other Democratic members of the city’s lawmaking body said in recent interviews that priorities for this year’s budget hearings include rolling back cuts Adams made to the city’s early childhood education 3K program, city libraries and public colleges.

And the Council is feeling emboldened, given the administration’s earlier lowballed revenue projections, two successful efforts to override vetoes from the mayor and a federal investigation Adams’ campaign is facing into his ties with Turkey.

Council Speaker Adrienne Adams affirmed last week that a primary focus for her going into budget negotiations will be reversing cuts enacted by the mayor in November and January that, among other service reductions, forced the city’s public library systems to eliminate Sunday hours at all their branches. She also said she’s deeply concerned about under-staffing at the city’s Human Resources Administration, which has resulted in most applications for food stamps and cash benefits not being processed within a legally required timeframe.

“We are going back to the table, we are going back to prioritizing those things that should have never been taken away from New Yorkers in the first place,” the speaker said in response to a question from The News during a press conference last week at City Hall.

“We are going to take a look at everything,” she added, speaking broadly about the cuts enacted last year as part of the mayor’s November and January cost-cutting Programs to Eliminate the Gap, or PEGs.

PEGs have been the primary mechanism by which the mayor has enacted budget cuts over the past two years. He has argued the cuts are needed to offset the hundreds of millions the city’s spending every month to care for thousands of newly-arrived migrants, most of them from Latin America.

The new Council forecast suggests there is enough money to both care for migrants and keep city agency budgets intact, though.

In addition to foreseeing $3.3 billion more in revenues over the 2024 and 2025 fiscal years, the new Council forecast says the city’s on track to rake in far more money in taxes than acknowledged by the mayor’s office in the long run.

Through July 1, 2028, the Council’s fiscal prediction says the city will take in $13.8 billion more than what the mayor’s team predicted. In total, the mayor’s November and January PEGs slashed about $7 billion in city government spending over that time span, according to City Hall budget documents.

But other Council members predicted that despite the leverage they now have going into the budget hearings, they expect the mayor to dig in after the Council recently overrode two of his vetoes of public safety bills, a move that’s resulting in bad blood behind the scenes. If that happens and there’s a deadlock in negotiations, the Council could vote down the mayor’s 2025 fiscal year budget in June, a drastic measure that would likely have political ramifications for both sides.

The foremost bit of leverage the Council is expected to rely upon are the mayor’s revenue projections, which have consistently fallen below not only those of the Council, but of the city’s Independent Budget Office as well. In a report put out last month, that entity estimated revenue of $2.8 billion more than the projection from Team Adams.

Nathan Gusdorf, director of the Fiscal Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, noted that it isn’t unique for the mayor’s projections to be lower than the Council’s, but said what’s qualitatively different is for a mayor to make such deep cuts so early in the process.

“The administration’s decision to implement preemptive and unnecessary cuts has weakened the city’s ability to deliver core services and may hurt New York’s long-term economic health,” he said. “Given the city’s recent practice of severely underestimating city revenue, the hearings will likely scrutinize the administration’s approach to fiscal management and its choice to needlessly cut critical public services.”

Since announcing his latest round of cuts in January, Adams has slightly changed course. Last month, he announced the cancellation of another round of spending cuts initially planned for April, saying he didn’t need to move forward with those due to “better-than-anticipated” tax revenues and separate cuts to spending on migrants.

“Our tough but necessary fiscal management decisions, including achieving a record level of savings and reducing asylum seeker costs, and revenue from better-than-expected economic performance in 2023, closed the $10 billion budget gap, allowing us to meet our legal obligation to balance the budget,” Liz Garcia, a spokeswoman for the mayor, said.

While the revenue projections are likely to be the most potent advantage the Council has, it isn’t the only one.

Adams has not been accused of any wrongdoing in connection to the federal probe into his ties with Turkey, but the FBI seized his electronic devices in public last year and has raided the homes of three people tied to his administration and political operation. A probe into Adams’ former Buildings Commissioner Eric Ulrich resulted in several indictments and is ongoing as well.

Those headaches for the mayor are unlikely to be raised publicly in budget negotiations, but Council members are certainly aware of them and view them as another, if not more subtle point of leverage.

“The mayor is weak on every point,” said one Council member, who also spoke anonymously and was once aligned with the mayor. “You have the criminal investigations, but he still just likes to project this aura of confidence — that he’s untouchable. It’s certainly on the minds of Council members.”