Hochul is slated to attend as a guest of Rep. Adriano Espaillat, a Manhattan-Bronx Democrat. Last year, Espaillat brought Mayor Adams as his guest to the State of the Union.

In a statement, the governor said much in New York hinges on federal action, including “addressing immigration and border security” after Republicans upended a bipartisan deal to secure the southwestern border.

Hochul apparently would be the first sitting New York governor to attend a State of the Union speech since at least the early ’80s. She is the first woman to serve as New York’s governor, and Espaillat said he thought it would be fitting to bring her at the start of Women’s History Month.

“She also has been a strong visionary for the state,” Espaillat said by phone, praising her work to help secure federal funding for families.

Hochul, a Democrat, has fostered a warm public relationship with Biden, and she is set to serve as one of his campaign surrogates in his expected general election race with Donald Trump.

Though she has at times directed public criticism toward the White House over the city’s migrant crisis, she has had a far gentler touch than Adams on the issue.

The Democratic mayor was removed from the president’s surrogate squad last year after saying Biden had “failed” New York.

The State of the Union offers a chance for the 81-year-old president to turn popular perceptions as he tilts into campaign mode and tries to dispel widespread concern that he is too old for another term.

Polls show Trump leading Biden.

New York politicians sent an array of messages through their State of the Union guests.

Rep. Tom Suozzi, the Democrat who won a special election on Long Island last month, invited the parents of Omer Neutra, a member of the Israeli Army who was taken hostage in Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks and remains missing.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, an Albany Democrat, invited Billie Jean King, the trailblazing tennis legend.

And Sen. Chuck Schumer of Brooklyn, the Democratic majority leader, invited a 25-year-old Ukrainian soldier who lost one of his legs below the knee after he was injured by a landmine. The soldier came to New York City this winter for medical treatment.

Schumer said he hoped the presence of the soldier, Andrii Chevozorov, would bring attention to the need for American weapons and equipment in Ukraine, which is losing ground to Russia’s invasion. 

Legislation to provide more U.S. aid to Ukraine has been held up by House Republicans.

Schumer told the Daily News he was bringing Chevozorov to “make a point” to the Republican speaker of the House, Mike Johnson of Louisiana.

“If he doesn’t put the bill on the floor, he will regret it next year and the year after,” Schumer said, warning of the Ukrainians’ plight. “One of the American leaders told me that if we don’t give them armaments, Russian tanks could be at the border of Poland in a year.”

Chevozorov is expected to wear his uniform to the speech.

The lawsuit, filed by Nassau County in federal court on Tuesday, marks a major escalation in a public battle between the county’s Republican executive, Bruce Blakeman, and the Democratic state attorney general over the transgender sports ban.

Last week, James issued a statement threatening legal action against the county over the order, declaring it “transphobic and blatantly illegal” and instructing Blakeman to “immediately rescind” it. Her office also penned a cease-and-desist letter to Nassau County.

But before James went to court, Blakeman sent the first legal shot, filing a 12-page lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York that said James’ cease-and-desist letter “violates the constitutional rights of biologically girls and women who are a federally recognized protected class.”

The complaint cited the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection, and argued the order conferred protections to women and girls seeking fairness in athletics. The reach of Blakeman’s order would be limited to county-run facilities.

The complaint seeks a declaratory judgement asserting that the county order is legal.

In a statement responding to the lawsuit, James’ office said: “Our laws protect New Yorkers from discrimination, and the office of the attorney general is committed to upholding those laws and protecting our communities.”

“This is not up for debate: the executive order is illegal, and it will not stand in New York,” said the statement.

Because James’ actions had been limited to a cease-and-desist letter and a press statement, it was not clear that Blakeman’s complaint had presented a controversy demanding intervention by the courts, said John Barrett, a constitutional law professor at St. John’s University.

“The jurisdiction of the court begins with actual cases and controversies,” Barrett said. “This complaint may be more in the nature of a press release or a political position than a serious commencement of litigation.”

A plaintiff in the lawsuit is the father of a female 16-year-old volleyball player who, the complaint claimed, could be subject to “risk of injury by a transgender girl” if transgender females are allowed to participate in girls youth sports.

When Blakeman announced the ban two weeks ago, he could not cite for reporters any examples of transgender women or girls creating competitive disadvantages in athletics in Nassau County.

Blakeman said the county wanted to “get ahead of the curve.”

At a news conference Wednesday, Blakeman added: “It is coming to Nassau County — it is coming to all communities.”

He said courts have held that the “government can take appropriate, reasonable legal action to protect the citizens even if the harm has not actually been done yet.”

Gov. Hochul, a Democrat, issued a statement last month saying that Blakeman was seeking to “score cheap political points by putting a target on the backs of some of our state’s most vulnerable children.”

Barrett said the lack of concrete examples of harm in Nassau County’s lawsuit could hinder it by raising a question of legal standing.

“All of this is pretty abstract, and that kind of imaginary non-actual, non-concrete injury interest is usually a constitutional problem,” Barrett said. “It’s usually a basis for a court to conclude: We don’t have judicial power here.”

Susan Hazeldean, a Brooklyn Law School professor, agreed that Nassau County had not been harmed. She said she did not see a legal basis for the claim and that it appeared to be aimed at getting positive publicity.

But Hazeldean added that the state may not seek to dismiss Nassau County’s lawsuit. Instead, the complaint may simply serve as a starting gun for arguments in court about the ban’s legality.

“Presumably the State of New York believes that the executive order is unlawful and wants to see it enjoined,” the professor said. “I assume they’re going to want to make that clear to the court.”

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.”

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.

Aviles, who heads the Council’s Immigration Committee, said the administration must put $150 million to “enhanced” immigrant legal services and add an additional $10 million to “adequately fund” adult education for immigrants.

“This defunding of literacy and legal services undermines opportunities that we seek to create in our civil society, and it just doesn’t make sense. It must be addressed immediately,” she said. “This is about sustainability of services for immigrant New Yorkers — 40% of the city’s population.”

The hearing — one of several the Council will hold as part of vetting the mayor’s preliminary budget and negotiating a final spending plan — came one day after the Council released a new revenue projection forecasting $3.3 billion more in tax receipts than a projection by Mayor Adams’ budget director, Jacques Jiha, a development first reported by the Daily News.

As part of her demand to restore cuts, Aviles grilled Manuel Castro, the commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Immigration Affairs, about new spending requests his office has made of the administration and what specific services he believes deserve more funding.

MIGRANTS

“We have yet to request funding,” Castro said in response, adding that his office is “in conversation” with the mayor’s budget office about its needs.

Aviles continued to press Castro on the needs of his office, and specifically touched on its ability to provide legal services to immigrants. But Castro declined to put a specific dollar figure to his office’s spending needs.

“I can’t seem to get an actual concrete number from you,” Aviles said. “I don’t know if that’s because you don’t know it, or you don’t want to put it on the table, or you haven’t quite decided.

“I would just love for you to have the opportunity to say: ‘This is what we need. This is what we’re fighting for.'”

The Council focused not just on what Castro’s office needs, but also on how the city’s immigration apparatus spends the money it has on hand.

The questions come amid several controversies stemming from for-profit, private contractors the city has hired to handle the influx of about 180,000 migrants into the city since 2022.

One of those companies is DocGo, which Attorney General Letitia James began probing last August over accusations that the company mistreated migrants. Another is Mobility Capital Finance, a company that will provide debit cards to 500 migrant families with children as part of a pilot program designed to lower food costs.

Molly Schaeffer, interim director of Adams’ Office of Asylum Seeker Operations, testified that she “would get back to” the Council about how many for-profit companies and entities based outside the city are providing migrant services to city, as opposed to nonprofits.

“We want to get more nonprofits involved,” she said.

Schaeffer estimated that the debit card pilot program would save the city about $600,000 a month in costs associated with buying and delivering food to migrants.

“If this works out, it would replace DocGo deliveries,” Schaeffer noted, but she would not say whether the city could claw back money from its DocGo agreements when Aviles questioned her about it.

Aviles also questioned why the city is agreeing to higher hourly rates charged by for-profit contractors as opposed to paying less for nonprofits that charge less.

“We’re seeing this over and over again — obviously not simply with [Immigration Affairs], but in this entire space we are seeing a prioritization of corporations and for-profit corporations and not for not-for profit, competent organizations that have been here,” Aviles said.

Schaeffer responded that it’s “a point well taken,” but stressed that there was a mandate to provide services to migrants as quickly as possible.

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.

The survey, carried out in late February by Hart Research and financed by the American Federation of Teachers, showed 10% of neighbors supporting the state’s plan to shutter University Hospital at Downstate, a teaching hospital.

Overall, 54% of neighborhood respondents said they strongly opposed the plan, and 18% said they somewhat opposed it, according to poll results released by the labor union. The poll was conducted in nine zip codes around the hospital.

The poll’s release came as politicians and labor leaders rally to the cause of the medical center, which is located in the predominantly Black neighborhood of East Flatbush.The hospital is on the chopping block under a proposed transformation plan from Gov. Hochul’s administration.

“Central Brooklyn needs Downstate,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, told reporters in a video briefing on Monday, adding that the community “wants to make sure this hospital is strengthened — not closed.”

Central Brooklyn has a shortage of quality health care options. A January state Health Department report said hospital quality is “generally low across Brooklyn and is lowest in communities with a large proportion of Black residents.”

The Downstate hospital houses the lone kidney transplant program in Brooklyn and one of two high-level perinatal care centers in the borough, according to the office of the local state senator, Zellnor Myrie, a Democrat.

Last week, Myrie and the Rev. Al Sharpton delivered impassioned speeches to a hundreds-strong rally in opposition to the planned closure.

The Downstate medical center sits across the street from the city-run Kings County Hospital Center. Some in-patient services offered by the state-run hospital would be moved into the city hospital under the state’s plan, according to a spokeswoman for the state university system.

The spokeswoman, Katie Blitz, issued a statement Monday saying, “We’ve heard from hundreds of community members about their concerns and aspirations around Downstate, and are working with the community to come up with a plan that will save this gem.”

But the statement also said the hospital’s “ongoing fiscal crisis and physical condition have put all of the inpatient, outpatient, and academic services Downstate currently provides at risk of catastrophic failure.”

Under the state’s plan, it is unclear if the kidney program and the perinatal care program would continue to be provided in East Flatbush, or moved elsewhere in Brooklyn.

The poll results published Monday surfaced concerns that services would decline if moved across the street. According to the data, 55% of respondents said they did not feel confident Kings County Hospital would provide good emergency room services if Downstate closes.

Black residents were especially concerned about the plan, according to the poll results: 77% said they opposed the state’s plan.

“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.

The effort is aimed at giving a competitive helping hand to nonwhite developers who historically haven’t made up a significant portion of affordable-housing builders in New York City.

The new fund, which the city is calling the Minority Business Enterprise Guaranty Facility, is composed of $25 million from Goldman Sachs Asset Management and an additional $25 million from the city’s Housing Development Corp. and will essentially serve as a financial backstop for minority-owned developers, which often don’t have that kind of cash at their disposal.

Such guarantees are usually required by lenders as a prerequisite to grant loans, which has led to minority developers either missing out on work, or having to partner with larger, white-owned firms.

“There are probably a lot of developers in the city who have no problem putting up that guaranty,” Deputy Mayor Maria Torres Springer said. “But it has been an historical barrier for [minority businesses] in the city, and we want to dismantle that by providing that important guaranty.”

At a City Hall press briefing Monday, Torres Springer and the mayor predicted the $50 million will help unlock $500 million in loans to minority developers seeking to help build housing at a time when the city’s vacancy rate hovers at an abysmal 1.4%. The city’s Housing Preservation Commissioner Adolfo Carrion Jr. said that’s the lowest it’s been since 1968.

Calls to address the city’s ongoing housing crisis have grown louder with every dire new stat: about a third of New Yorkers are severely rent burdened, a report by the Community Service Society says, meaning they spend over half of their income on rent. And a vacancy survey from last month also found just 0.4% of apartments available on the market in 2023 were for under $1,100.

Those numbers come as Adams has largely put the onus on Albany to address the housing crisis after a housing compact floated by Gov. Hochul fell apart last year. A key issue is 421-a, the expired state tax break for developers meant to spur affordable-housing creation. The real estate industry says it’s crucial for encouraging new construction — but whether the state Legislature will be able to agree on a replacement this session remains to be seen.

“One of the most important ways we can address this crisis is simple: build more housing,” Carrion said. “We can’t wait to move forward on our ambitious housing agenda — and this includes empowering our minority business enterprise firms to take the lead.”

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.