NEW YORK — The city’s budget could bounce back quicker from the coronavirus than originally thought.

Speaking to the City Council, the mayor’s budget director, Jacques Jiha, said the city will likely add 517,000 jobs by the end of 2022. Private sector jobs fell by 560,100 in New York City last year, according to the state Department of Labor, largely because of the pandemic.

“We see the economy picking up in 2021. It’s going to get stronger in 2022," said Jiha, the director of the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget. “New York will recover faster than most people anticipate because of the impact of the vaccine, the stimulus."

While Midtown is often desolate now, Jiha said he thinks workers will be heading back to their office jobs in Manhattan soon — an assumption some might question. He said city workers are expected to return to their offices in May to “set an example."

“We expect the economy to begin to pick up,” Jiha said. “As more people are inoculated, you’ll see people coming back to the office, coming back to New York." 

There is still a lot of uncertainty in that surprisingly optimistic fiscal portrait. For one, the city is facing hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts from the state. Jiha said those cuts include shifting $250 million in required charter school costs over to the city and a $50 million cut to core public health services. According to the budget director, the governor’s proposed state budget also threatens to slash nearly $500 million from the city’s public hospital system over the next two fiscal years. 

The city is planning to cut costs on its own. The mayor unveiled an attrition plan in January, which requires the loss of three positions at any city agency to hire one new person. Uniformed agencies, including the Police, Fire, and Sanitation Departments, as well as teachers  Departments are exempt from this requirement, Jiha said. 

Jiha said the price tag for reopening schools fully this fall is expected to grow significantly from earlier predictions — from $516 million to $767 million. 

City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, who is exploring a run for city comptroller, questioned whether the city was doing enough to prepare for the fiscal uncertainty. 

“There is still a tremendous amount of uncertainty about our economy. The budget proposal that we are seeing, it seems to be pretty short-sighted, and what I mean by that is we are pulling from our reserves, still promising labor savings, reducing debt service costs and hoping that the feds come through,” said Johnson. “What I don’t really think we are seeing is serious efforts to identify efficiencies or long-term efforts to reduce costs." 

While most officials are optimistic federal aid will be coming from Washington, the exact number is unclear. During his testimony on Tuesday, City Comptroller Scott Stringer said New York City could get as much as $5.6 billion from the Biden stimulus plan.