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The NY state budget is 12 days late. Does anyone care?
By
Jon Campbell
Published Apr 12, 2024
Modified Apr 12, 2024
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Photo by NYS Senate Media Services
By
Jon Campbell
Published Apr 12, 2024
Modified Apr 12, 2024
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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
Jon Campbell
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 [email protected] or Signal at JonCampbellNY.90.
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