Earlier this week, Mayor Eric Adams fielded questions about nailing a budget deal with City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams by the June 30 deadline with the utmost confidence.

“Adrienne and I are very competent,” the mayor said on Monday. “We know how to get in the room and land the plane.”

The council speaker — who once worked as a flight attendant — had an aviation metaphor of her own.

“We have banked left. We’re in a holding pattern,” she said on Thursday. “We’re circling the airport and, if possible, there will be a diversion.”

Budget talks have picked up as the deadline gets closer. Meanwhile, on the day all councilmembers met in the chambers, advocates made their last-ditch efforts to press their case for more funding.

They held a rally outside City Hall and chanted, “No more cuts.”  

The council speaker said her goal is negotiating a budget on time, and the focus is on restoring cuts the mayor originally ordered to deal with the loss of federal COVID money and increased spending on migrant services.

“We’re continuing to restore items that were cut that the Council believes should have never been in cut in the first place. So we are becoming the Council of restoration instead of the Council of building,” the council speaker said.

Restoring cuts to libraries and cultural institutions, mental health services, housing programs and early childhood education are among the priorities for the Council in negotiations, the council speaker said.

But the sticking point is how much money the city has from taxes and revenue to spend in the budget.

“We still believe that there is money there. We saw in excess of a billion dollars that we believe need to work and behalf of — not just restoring — but building funding for everything that we just mentioned,” the council speaker said.

Finance chairman Justin Brannan said the Council is still fighting to restore cuts.

“We have to restore so many cuts just to get us back to where we were and then we have to go from there. And a lot of these agencies are still down right skeletal. They have to staff up, they need money for more staffing. A lot of the agency heads and commissioners are very concerned,” Brannan said. “They come to us privately and tell us they need more money for their agencies and we’re fighting to try to get it.”

In a statement, City Hall spokeswoman Amaris Cockfield said, “We balanced the budget by making tough decisions early in the process, achieving budget savings, and controlling spending, as well as having the benefit of a stronger-than-expected economy.”

She added, “In the lead up to the end of the month, we are focused on working closely with the Council to adopt an on-time budget that meets our mutual priorities and delivers for everyday New Yorkers.