Come January, a new mayor of New York will take office with the city facing a bad budget forecast: cloudy, chilly, with a chance of apocalypse.  You wouldnât know this by following the candidates around now. Theyâre out campaigning on the sunny side of the street â a place where, to hear them tell it, thousands of new police officers will soon be on patrol, tens of thousands of dilapidated public-housing units are about to be swiftly repaired and new affordable apartments built, and children will one day be heading off to their universal prekindergarten classes, getting a head start on life in a greener, safer, sturdier city in which the middle class and the City University are resurgent, jobs and services are abundant, and thereâs money to cover all needs.  Those visions are seductive; theyâre supposed to be. Politicians donât get elected by predicting failure and doom.  But doom can happen, especially when unrealistic promises meet dismal facts like these: a $2 billion gap in the cityâs $70 billion budget; huge and steadily growing pension obligations and health care costs for city workers; middling economic growth; the unexpected and continuous costs of disasters like Hurricane Sandy. One burden is the contracts covering 300,000 workers in nearly every municipal union. Mayor Michael Bloomberg let them all expire years ago, and they have not been renegotiated. The unions havenât had raises in recent years, and they are expecting the next mayor to hand over nearly $8 billion in retroactive pay. That is more than the cityâs annual operating budgets for police, fire and corrections combined.  When those looming obligations compete with sorely needed, dearly wanted city services â libraries, parks, police, schools â who, and what, gives way?  Commentators, think tanks, outfits like the Independent Budget Office and the Citizens Budget Commission, the occasional debate moderator and quizzical citizens have been talking about this for a while. The candidates, to a person, have tried not to.  Itâs understandable. Bill de Blasio does not want his soaring vision constrained by mundane objections about whether his plan to tax rich people will pass in Albany. Christine Quinn, running in the shadow of her ally-adversary-millstone Mr. Bloomberg, wants desperately not to annoy New Yorkers the way he has. And William Thompson Jr. didnât win the teachersâ union endorsement by promising to stick it to them in contract talks.  But with the primary looming on Sept. 10, and the final Democratic debate on Tuesday, it would be good for voters at least to hear answers to tough questions. How are you going to solve the budget puzzle, starting with filling the $2 billion hole that Mr. Bloomberg left behind, and the $8 billion the unions are demanding? What services will you cut? What taxes will you raise?  The Democrats havenât shied away from promising to raise taxes. Itâs just that â as with Mr. de Blasio and his bold education plan â they seem to have already spent much of the revenue somewhere else. (Ms. Quinn says sheâll raise taxes if necessary, but not as a first resort.) And they have been cagey about those expired union contracts, saying they wonât negotiate them in public. At least Anthony Weiner says he wants union members to pay a little toward their health care premiums. (Most of them now pay nothing, an untenable policy.) The Republicans, Joseph Lhota, John Catsimatidis and George McDonald, have vowed to get tough with the unions but raise no taxes â a satisfying prescription to them, perhaps, but not a problem-solving one.  There is no deficit of suggestions about what to do. The Independent Budget Office regularly publishes a detailed list of âBudget Options for New York City.â It doesnât critique any of them. It only supplies them, to inform the debate. They include big (and, in our view, wise) ideas like adding tolls on the East River bridges (for $1 billion in revenue) and restoring the commuter tax ($802 million), and little ones, like increasing fees for birth and death certificates ($8 million) and having teachers do their jury duty in summer months ($2 million in savings).  The next mayor will have a chance to repair Mr. Bloombergâs abysmal labor relations, engaging the unions in a tough-but-honest conversation. He or she can start doing the same with the rest of us, right away. That will require saying things that are risky and unpleasant. But thatâs the difference between campaigning and governing. The sooner we hear the truth, the better off weâll all be.
In the race to succeed Mayor Bloomberg, the campaigns seem to be avoiding any talk of unpleasant budgetary realities.