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THE NY STATE BUDGET IS 12 DAYS LATE. DOES ANYONE CARE?



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By
Jon Campbell

Published Apr 12, 2024

Modified Apr 12, 2024

17 comments

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By
Jon Campbell

Published Apr 12, 2024

Modified Apr 12, 2024

17 comments

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Gov. Kathy Hochul and state lawmakers were hopeful they would be able to get a
final state budget in place by Easter.

The day came and went.

Then, they were hopeful they could get it done before Monday’s solar eclipse, or
by the end of Ramadan.

Those are in the past, too.

Hochul and lawmakers have failed to meet the state’s April 1 budget deadline
each year since she took office in 2021. Last year’s 32-day-late spending plan
marked the latest date a budget was passed since negotiations stretched into
August in 2010.

This year’s budget is 12 days late and counting. But with negotiations expected
to continue into at least next week, some budget-watchers are wondering whether
the bad old days of continuously missed deadlines — which were held up for years
as a symbol of Albany's dysfunction — have returned.



“If it's a little late, it's worth it if the budget's great,” said Andrew Rein,
president of the Citizens’ Budget Commission, a think tank that specializes in
New York state and city finances. “But this is longer than a little late and
we're starting to get back in the habits of late and later budgets. That does
not give New Yorkers confidence that their government is being run well.”

A late budget comes with few practical implications for everyday New Yorkers.

It does not result in an immediate government shutdown, as a missed budget
deadline can do in the case of the federal government. So far, Hochul and
lawmakers have approved three bare-bones, short-term budget extenders that
ensure the state workforce gets paid as scheduled and services continue to run.

The Senate approved a fourth extender on Thursday, with the Assembly following
on Friday.

But when the budget process stretches into late April or into May, it can start
to cause problems — particularly for hundreds of school districts throughout the
state that rely on state funding to ready their budget proposals for voters by
April 23. (That doesn’t include the state’s so-called "Big 5" school districts,
including New York City, whose budgets do not require voter approval.)

Very late budgets were the norm in Albany in the 1990s and the 2000s, with
governors and lawmakers regularly working into the summer months before striking
a final deal. That changed in 2011, when then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo began
prioritizing on-time budgets, or at least close-to-on-time budgets, as a symbol
of government functionality.



It was different when David Paterson first got to the New York State Capitol in
1986.

The future governor, a Democrat from Harlem, was a first-term state senator back
then. And when lawmakers passed the budget on April 5 that year — five days
after it was due — they heard about it.

“They wrote about it in the newspapers as if we had set the Capitol on fire or
something,” Paterson told Gothamist on Thursday. “It was, like, the worst thing
you could ever do.”

Paterson was governor for three annual budget cycles. His first, in 2008, was
nine days late — a relatively short time considering Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s
resignation had thrown Albany into turmoil just a few weeks before.

“As long as the agreement is reached by the end of April, by the next year
nobody really talks about it,” Paterson said. “I do think that New Yorkers are
more concerned with what's in the budget, as opposed to when it actually gets
there.”

Paterson’s last budget, in 2010, stretched into August. It ended only after
Paterson began inserting spending cuts into the short-term budget extenders,
forcing lawmakers to approve them or shut down the government — pioneering an
approach that, with just the threat of its use, helped Cuomo seal a string of
on-time budgets.



Hochul, however, has been hesitant to use the same approach.

Both houses of the Legislature are controlled by Democratic supermajorities.
Hochul, a Democrat, hasn’t publicly threatened to insert her spending priorities
— such as adjustments in Medicaid and education funding — into the budget
extenders.

Instead, Hochul has repeatedly said she’s more concerned with getting the right
state budget rather than an on-time one.

“It’s most important that we work together to get a budget that delivers for New
Yorkers,” Hochul told reporters on April 4. “And we are truly getting close to
that outcome.”

The ongoing budget talks have provided an opening for Republicans in the
Legislature, who were quick to criticize Hochul and legislative leaders after
the governor signed the fourth budget extender Friday afternoon.

“Twelve days late and counting," said Assembly Minority Leader Will Barclay, a
Republican. "Apparently, an on-time budget is simply optional for the Democrat
majority, because once again, here we are passing another extender with no end
in sight."



This year, Hochul and lawmakers have been unable to reach agreements on a bevy
of thorny issues ranging from housing policy to Medicaid spending to education
funding.

Housing discussions have dominated much of the governor’s closed-door
negotiations with Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie (D-Bronx) and Senate Majority
Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins (D-Yonkers).

Those talks have centered on a compromise that would pair a renewed tax break
for New York City developers with new anti-eviction protections for renters. But
as the specifics of an emerging deal began to trickle out this week, advocates
for developers, tenants and landlords all went on the offensive — pushing back
against parts of the potential deal they found unacceptable.

Jay Martin, executive director of the Community Housing Improvement Program, a
group that represents small landlords of rent-stabilized apartments, said nobody
is happy with what’s being proposed — “not the tenants, not the developers and
certainly not us.”

“And then the question is: Why are we forcing a housing package so that
everybody can do a photo shoot and say it was a big success?” he said. “It's not
going to build new housing. It's not going to help rent-stabilized [landlords]
fix their problems. And it's not even going to make the tenants happy on the
renter protections.”

Martin said he’s gotten to the point where he would prefer to remove the housing
discussion from budget negotiations — which is what happened last year, too.



“I think at this point, all sides would probably prefer that considering no
one's really happy with the direction it's going,” he said.

State Sen. Brian Kavanagh, a Manhattan Democrat who chairs the Senate Housing
Committee, said lawmakers are “genuinely, comprehensively” trying to respond to
the state’s “housing, affordability, eviction and homelessness crisis.”

When he was asked on Thursday whether housing could fall out of budget talks
again, Kavanagh said “anything is possible” — though he made clear that’s
nobody’s preference at the moment.

“There's been a strong sentiment expressed by the governor and the Senate and
the Assembly to do a housing package in the budget,” he said. “So that's the
operating assumption now.”

This story was updated to note that the state Assembly passed and Gov. Kathy
Hochul signed the budget extender Friday afternoon, and added a comment from
Assembly Minority Leader Will Barclay,




Tagged

new york state
new york city
housing
Kathy Hochul
Politics

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Jon Campbell
Twitter

Jon Campbell covers the New York State Capitol for WNYC and Gothamist. Prior to
that, he covered the Capitol for more than a decade for the USA TODAY Network.
He has twice earned the Walter T. Brown Memorial Award, an honor given annually
by the Legislative Correspondents Association alumni for outstanding state
government coverage. Jon grew up in the Buffalo area and graduated from the
University at Albany. Got a tip? Email Jon at jcampbell@wnyc.org or Signal
518-210-7087.

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