At an Albany Common Council meeting Wednesday, officials said a lack of fiscal oversight contributed to the multi-million-dollar budget deficit the city currently faces.
Earlier this month, it was announced that the city’s deficit for 2025 had increased from $15 million to $19.6 million. Mayor Dorcey Applyrs said at the time that poor budget management and unbudgeted expenses, like late invoices and overtime, led to the deficit.
The mayor, who took office this year, placed the blame squarely on her predecessor's administration. Applyrs, who was chief city auditor under the previous mayor, said it was the responsibility of then-mayor Kathy Sheenan’s office to oversee these things.
Sheehan, in response, said she was not made aware of how large the actual deficit was and that it was a joint responsibility between the auditor, the mayor, and the treasurer. She called for state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli to get involved and conduct a fine-grained audit, which is an idea the common council's finance committee was considering at the time.
Finance Committee Chair Meghan told the committee Wednesday that she was already in touch with the state comptroller’s office. They are hoping to make a move but are now deciding, based on the capacity of the comptroller’s office, whether to do a fine-tooth-comb audit or a review. According to Keegan, the train has already left the building.
During Wednesday's meeting, city Treasurer Darius Shahinfar gave an analysis of the city’s financial report for the fourth quarter of 2025. He said there was a lot of misalignment between what the city expected in the budget and what actually played out.
Shahinfar said there were many line items in the budget where the city expected grant revenue to come through, but it never materialized. The council does not know where grant funding, outside of capital projects, is supposed to go, or even, in some cases, if grant applications were filed.
In addition, Shahinfar said many city departments blew past their payroll budgets and dipped into money set aside for vacant positions. Plus, he said, the city was consistently late filing budget paperwork.
A spokesperson for Applyrs said she is in agreement with Shahinfar that additional oversight is needed.
The current mayor has answered 25 of the 56 questions posed by the Common Council about the budget, and in many of the answers, she points to the previous administration and previous budget director, Gideon Grande, who resigned earlier this year.
Keegan told WAMC that, overall, the lack of actual accounting for when and how grant money was going to come in definitely contributed to the deficit.
“I think what we are finding is that revenues were greatly inflated in order to justify the — or balance the — budget, rather than the budget really looking to provide a realistic context of what the city can afford based on the revenues that it has,” said Keegan, who provided examples.
The committee chair noted there’s no record that money from the state Office of Children and Family Services slated for the 2025 fiscal year ever came through. She also brought up Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) money that the council was told had come in for 2024 and 2025. She said when she checked with the FEMA website, that specific grant — the SAFER grant — had not been renewed for Albany since 2023. According to the answers Applyrs provided to the council, the city no longer qualified for it, but Sheehan’s administration had still included it in the 2026 budget.
Keegan said she could not find any Request For Proposals posted for the grant since 2023.
Current city auditor Sam Fein told WAMC, as auditor, sometimes you do have to go hunting for the information on city finances.
"There were a lot of people that missed this and, you know, didn't know what's going on," Fein said. "And you know, sometimes, as auditor, you also ... know sometimes what the administration shares with you. ... My job, or my role as auditor, my vision is that, you know, it's an independent oversight position. I'm going to dig into the data, I'm going to request information."
