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Dear <<First Name>>,

I hope you are staying safe and well. I wanted to take the time to send you an update on the New York City budget that the Council passed on Monday night. I am pleased to announce some historic wins for our community with some major capital projects we funded. Additionally, I believe the budget prioritized many of the concerns I have heard about from you over the past 6 months as we seek to help our city in its comeback. Here's some of the highlights! 
District 5 Capital Projects 
In this year's budget our district received a tremendous amount of capital funding. My office combined with the Speaker, the Mayor, and the Borough President to allocate over $21 million in discretionary funding to Council District 5 projects. These projects will help ensure we have strong schools, better maintained green space, and more robust social service providers. You can see more info on a few major wins below:
PS 290 Playroof
As Patch Reported, parents and administrators have been clamoring for years to build a playroof on the top of PS 290, one of only a handful of remaining schools in Manhattan without any sort of dedicated outdoor play space. I worked with First Deputy Mayor Lorraine Grillo to bring $5.5 Million of City funding and finally close the gap. I am so excited to be able to support this project and provide the playspace to students. 
Ruppert Park Comfort Station
Ruppert Park sorely needs a renovation and my office is excited about the upcoming plans which include a dog run. However, the original renovation plans did not cover a comfort station, the final step. With robust funding of $4 million dollars from my office and the Speaker Adrienne Adams, we will get the comfort station built!
Upgrades at Carl Schurz and John Jay Park 
Our District ranks 47 out of 51 in terms of open space despite also being one of the densest in the entire city so it is imperative that we take good care of the Parks we do have. We delivered over $1.3 million dollars in critical funding to renovations in both parks this year. In Carl Schurz, we'll be repaving pathways (one of the winners of Participatory Budgeting) and in John Jay we'll be repaving the central walkway and building an ADA Ramp. 
Isaacs Center Window and Door Upgrades
The Isaacs Center is a great service provider for our entire community, but their facilities are in need of an upgrade. I was thrilled to partner with Borough President to overhaul their infrastructure with window and door upgrades.
General Budget Funds
I am very pleased with the general funding allocations in this budget, some of which I am highlighting below. However, I am concerned about the cuts to the education budget and will be working with the Speaker’s office to address them immediately in the coming months. Constituents have frequently reached out to me about sanitation, quality of life, mental health, and social services and I advocated for robust funding to those causes during budget negotiations. I am very pleased about the wins we secured on so many of these issues.
Sanitation

Since taking office, I have pushed DSNY to be fully funded so we can clean up our streets and deal with the many sanitation problems we’re facing across District 5. Locally, I secured new midblock baskets on 86th Street and increased basket pickup. Here are some of the exciting wins as funding for DSNY has now surpassed prepandeemic levels:

  • Litter Basket Service: $22 million to support citywide 6-days/week, twice daily litter basket service pickup which my office also further subsidizes to keep our streets clean
  • Enhancing the School Organics Collection Program: $9.2 million
  • $3.5 million to support Organics Drop-Off Sites 
  • New Public Waste Container Pilot Programs: $1.28 million
Education and Youth Services
I believe strongly in the importance of funding our youth services programming. These create stronger communities and they also help our economy as they provide such important job training. I wanted to highlight a few funding wins in this area I’m excited about:
  • Summer Rising Program: $277 million which now serves 110,000 students in grades K-8 — up more than 10 percent from last year.
  • The City is also expanding Summer Youth Employment Program to 100K slots by baselining almost $80 million dollars 
Affordable Housing
Finally, I want to mention that we heard from so many constituents about housing affordability. I wanted to highlight a few of the things we did there:
  • Expanding City FHEPS to fully fund and increase the rental voucher rate to match Section 8 levels: $237 million
  • Expanded Funding for Drop-in Centers, Safe Haven Beds, and Stabilization Beds: $171.3 million
  •  We are protecting working and middle-class homeowners with a $90 million dollar property tax rebate for owners making less than $250,000 a year
  • Additional staff and services at Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD): $19.2 million
So, I just wanted to send along this update as you might have seen frequent news coverage about the budget over the past few days. May everyone have a great Father's Day weekend! Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks,
Julie
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