Anthony Weiner tested one of his likely attack lines against City Council Speaker Christine Quinn on Thursday night, saying the budgets passed by New York City lawmakers include unrealistic spikes in property assessments and assumptions in extra revenue from fines and fees.

Weiner, talking to his former constituents at a civic association meeting in Ridgewood, Queens last night said, “without naming names, if you vote for those budgets, you’re voting for that tax,” and that “in a weird way, they just raised your taxes, whether they say gave you a tax increase or not.”

After his remarks, I asked Weiner if it’s fair to say that a vote for those city budgets is a vote for a tax increase, since the city budget is a complicated document with funding to all sorts of programs and revenues from a variety of sources.

“When you assume increases in revenue in these discretionary lines, it has to be based on some reasonable assumption,” he said. “When it comes to things like fines and fees and property taxes, it’s hard to explain what those assumptions are in this economy. Virtual zero inflation. Not an explosive Ridgewood property market. Not any reason to believe there’ll be this increase in the number of trash summonses, or increase in the number of people putting the wrong letter on their signs or forgetting to put the phone number on it. “So, if there’s a reason to, but there’s not. They’re basically stop-gaps and they’re basically just ways to do back-door tax increases.”

Weiner’s budget criticism could also taint de Blasio and City Comptroller John Liu, both of whom voted for the city budgets each year they served in the City Council from 2002 until their respective elections to citywide office in 2009.

(Azi Paybarah)