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ALBANY – State lawmakers will blow past Wednesday’s deadline to pass Gov. Kathy Hochul’s $263 billion budget plan, as negotiations drag on over her push to delay green energy mandates and her bid to lower car insurance premiums.
Democrats in the state Assembly and Senate passed a one-week stopgap measure Tuesday keeping the government funded through next week amid the largely-stalled discussions between Hochul and legislative leaders.
“We’re still at the beginning of the middle, as it turns out,” Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins (D-Westchester) said, using a stale Albany adage to indicate the discussions have not moved much since they began in earnest about two weeks ago.
Stewart-Cousins indicated to reporters that the main issues holding up the talks were the non-fiscal policy-related items that Hochul pitched in her massive spending package proposal.
Sources familiar with the talks said the major sticking points were Hochul’s bid to delay the potentially crushing financial impacts of New York’s climate mandates and her proposal to change liability standards for insurance payouts after serious car accidents.
All of Hochul’s budgets so far have been late, marking five consecutive years of the state blowing past the April 1 deadline. Last year’s budget was only passed on May 8.
Republicans, who are mostly kept out of budget negotiations, derided the process as, once again, “crazy.”
“There doesn’t seem to be any desire, any urgency, to meet this deadline, which is crazy to me given that we’re in year eight of one-party control here in Albany,” Assembly Minority Leader Ed Ra (R-Nassau) told reporters.
Stewart-Cousins said discussions on monetary issues – including the Dems’ push to raise taxes – have yet to seriously come up in the three-way talks.
But the Legislature appears to be corralling support behind a statewide corporate tax increase, even as Hochul continues slamming the door on all new levies.
High-level talks will continue this week and over the weekend with lawmakers having a scheduled break in legislative work days until April 20.
The stopgap spending measure only lasts through next Tuesday, meaning pols will likely have to schlep back to Albany to vote on another barring a miraculous dam burst in negotiations.
Discussions over cementing New York’s sanctuary status into state law and other anti-ICE measures could also come up and gum up future talks, as well as sweetening pension benefits for state employees and adjusting New York City’s class size reduction mandate.
Hochul’s office didn’t respond to request for comment, but she has basked in her perennially late budget deals as a deliberate strategy to bully the Legislature, which does not receive pay amid the tardy budget.
“Not one person has ever come up and say, ‘Oh my God, governor, the budget’s late.’ They say ‘thanks for fighting for us,’ Hochul told reporters in mid-April last year flanked by a poster that read “good things happen in May.”
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