Priya Natarajan’s office on the third floor of City Hall has a desk, a chair, a window that does not open and a whiteboard that already runs out of room. She is the entire staff of the Office of Budget Analysis, which the council created in March to give itself an independent read on the numbers the mayor’s office sends over.
“My job is to be the person who reads the footnotes,” she said. “Every budget has a story in the footnotes.”
What she found first
Her first report, delivered to the council last week, concerned the city’s vehicle fleet. The replacement schedule assumed a twelve-year life for police cruisers that are being retired at seven, a gap that will cost roughly $4 million over the next three budgets that nobody had planned for.
Natarajan has asked for two analysts in the next budget. The council president has said he supports one. The whiteboard, meanwhile, lists fourteen topics, with the pension fund circled twice.
