Sounds like he's restructuring a payment plan that was already designed to push the pain into the future. Who knows if it will have been better to stave off the near term pain or let the financial time bomb set decades ago tie his hands.

> Delaying payments of the city’s full pension obligation until 2037 from 2032 would save the city nearly $2.3 billion in the next two years, Mamdani said, without affecting retiree benefits. The reamortization schedule alters the original amortization plan constructed in 2010 that had the city pay higher amounts of its pension debt each year until the Fiscal Year 2032 cliff, at which point the entire obligation would be erased from the city’s books.

> Under Mamdani’s new plan, which will need approval from state lawmakers by June 30, the city would pay a similar amount each year until FY32 when it would decrease year over year for the final half-decade of payments.

> “If you look at the payment schedule that was initially agreed upon from 2010 to 2032, it's a payment that increases every single year, increasing upwards of $6 billion by the final year before then dropping like a cliff down to $0,” Mamdani said on May 12. “What we are proposing is extending that cycle by five years, and that is an extension that would ensure that we would pay the same amount every single year as opposed to what is currently a variable amount increasing year after year.”

> Pension experts have previously warned the city against executing a reamoritzation plan, arguing that it was a short-term fix that would saddle the city with big costs in the 2030’s. But Andrew Perry, director of fiscal research at the Fiscal Policy Institute, a finance think tank, argued in a blog post that the current amortization schedule is “poorly designed” — due to the escalating payments and dropoff in 2032 — and said Mamdani’s new plan is an “act of prudent fiscal management.”

> Ken Giardin, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan institute, argued the opposite, saying that the payment plan relies on the city’s five pension systems that “are hardly models of fiscal health," continuing to pump out positive returns.

> “The entire reason we're talking about the unfunded accrued liability is because the systems made excessively optimistic assumptions in the past—that's why NYC will already be paying off decades-old debt in the 2030s,” he said. "Mark your calendar for 2032, when city [politicians] will be wishing they hadn't done this.”

https://thechiefleader.com/stories/through-state-funding-new...