Yesterday, April 1, was the state’s budget deadline. Would you like to guess whether we have a finalized New York State budget at this time? (Hint, no.)
Albany lawmakers and Gov. Kathy Hochul have already passed one budget extender to April 7 and may well pass another. They appear somewhat unhurried in actually hashing out the particulars of what is expected to be a $260 billion budget against a backdrop of steep economic volatility and a federal government that presents threats both from deep incompetence and open hostility.
That the budget is late is not particularly notable, given that it is always late, and no one in Albany ever really cares about it being late. It’s a habit much lamented by the local officials in New York City and around the state whose budget decisions depend on what Albany eventually comes up with. To be clear, the state budget isn’t late because lawmakers are haggling over, say, the exact right amount of funding for different government agencies; the actual budget part of the budget negotiations is a somewhat secondary concern to sensitive policy priorities. As Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins put it recently, “We really haven’t started on the money part yet.”
This happens every year because of the budget’s unique status as a must-pass piece of legislation that lawmakers can plausibly hold up if they don’t get their priorities included – priorities that might well be too contentious to otherwise pass in standalone bills. This time around, those issues seem to be:
- The state’s climate standards and other energy questions I wrote about recently
- The issue of taxes, specifically the big push by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his allies to raise rates for the state’s highest earners and corporate interests, which Hochul has dismissed as a nonstarter
- Proposed constraints on the operations of federal immigration agents in the state which I also recently wrote about, and:
- Hochul’s push to reformulate aspects of state law around car crash insurance payouts.
The latter point sounds a bit inside baseball, and indeed I haven’t really touched on it, partly because it’s less important in the city, where fewer people have cars, and partly because even across the state there’s a relatively small pool of people who would be affected by it. Nonetheless, the proposal has become a spending bonanza, with the New York State Trial Lawyers Association spending some $1.4 million lobbying to oppose Hochul’s push while Uber has dropped $8 million in an ad campaign to support it.
Very basically, the new language would limit who can receive insurance payouts from crashes, how much they can receive and under what circumstances. For example, those deemed to bear more than half of the responsibility for a crash could receive no damages.
Hochul’s contention is that this would lower car insurance premiums — part of her more overarching affordability agenda, which also encompasses the climate target rollbacks — while the trial lawyers, who obviously depend professionally in part on the ability to collect significant payouts from crash litigation, say it will limit victims’ ability to seek rightful compensation. It seems that this has now become a sticking point among policymakers.
When I saw “policymakers,” really I mean Stewart-Cousins, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, and Hochul, the “Three Men in a Room” of yore, meaning the governor and the leaders of the Assembly and Senate. Two of them are not men, of course, but the concept is still the same — the state’s three top elected officials negotiating over the budget behind closed doors while the public and even other lawmakers anxiously await dribs and drabs of information. Other elected officials are involved and have some ability to push their preferences or threaten to withhold votes, but the actual budget deals that matter are hashed out by this trio. It’s not unusual for lawmakers to vote on the budget without knowing everything that’s in it, the result of both this semi-secretive process and the last-minute rush to pass what’s inevitably a very late bill.
This is also likely why the budget policy often ends up with weird errors and unintended consequences. To look close to home, here’s how one such error impacted nonprofit journalism: In 2024, state lawmakers tucked into the budget a provision that would provide tax breaks to journalistic outlets to help them hire and maintain workforces. It quickly became clear, however, that nonprofit and public outlets would be excluded from the program because of what many believed was a drafting error by lawmakers in the frenzied run-up to the budget’s passage. A coalition of journalistic, government and civic organizations is now pushing for the state to create a new subsidy program that could be utilized by these excluded outlets (including, in theory, this one).
It’s unclear if this fix will ultimately make it into the budget, but this whole exclusion and campaign to fix the exclusion seems like a gigantic waste of time. This problem probably would have been identified immediately and addressed in the legislative language had the initial program made it through the standard legislative process, as opposed to being slammed into the budget in a way that didn’t give anyone time to read it.
Now, we’re going to spend at least the next week hearing a drip-drip-drip of tidbits about the backroom negotiations as legislative staffers guzzle coffee and try to condense conceptual agreements into actual, actionable legal language. We in the press and the public are not really going to have time to parse what lawmakers have settled on when it comes to, say, efforts to rein in potential cooperation with ICE by local and state officials.
Frankly, I have no idea how other states make their budget sausage, or if this is standard practice. But it seems to me that lawmakers passing something they haven’t read after reams of deals are cut in secret is not the ideal way to settle the most contentious policy issues of the year. It’s true that the budget being reliably late does give you, the public, more time to exert pressure on your state lawmakers on the issues you care about … but I do hope we can move away from this dysfunctional approach sometime.
