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When Will NY’s Lawmakers Start Making Laws Again?
By
Ross Barkan
Published May 14, 2020
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By
Ross Barkan
Published May 14, 2020
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During a typical May, Albany is a frenetic place. Lawmakers are holding hearings and lobbying colleagues. The state legislature is rushing to pass bills before the session ends in June, adjourning for the rest of the year. The governor is huddling with legislative leaders to hammer out his last-minute priorities.
COVID-19 has drastically upended the end-of-session rhythm. Since the state budget passed at the beginning of April, the legislature has not met at all—not in-person or remotely—to vote on bills. As the virus killed more than 700 New Yorkers every day, legislators seemed content to take a backseat to Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has been running the state with extraordinary emergency powers and executive orders.
In a 55 day period from when he declared a stage of emergency on March 7th, Cuomo changed a total of 262 laws and issued more than 25 executive orders. The state legislature, which spent much of 2019 passing a raft of historic legislation and at times sidelining the governor’s office to bring the bills to the floor on their own timeline, has been absent from this process. Cuomo is now a popular national figure, holding widely viewed daily TV briefings. Legislative leaders and their members are mere spectators.
“Absolutely it’s concerning,” said Sarah Goff, the deputy director of Common Cause/NY, a good government group. “What we have is what I would describe as a service gap in government functioning.”
Though the leaders of the Democratic-controlled legislature, Speaker Carl Heastie and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, have maintained they are moving at a proper pace, lawmakers in their ranks are getting restless. Many are tired of Cuomo governing by fiat, signing executive order after executive order with no legislative input. They want to know why their leaders haven’t held a session remotely, when the New York City Council has already held two remote stated meetings and passed significant legislation.
No date is set for state legislators to convene remotely to vote on bills. Time is ticking, since the legislative session would typically end next month.
“It’s crazy. We should obviously legislate,” said State Senator Gustavo Rivera, a Bronx Democrat. “It’s as if we were a plane circling an airport waiting for the tower to say it’s safe to land.”
The official reasoning, from Heastie and Stewart-Cousins, is that they are waiting for federal stimulus funding to shore up New York’s dire fiscal situation, with more than $10 billion in cuts on the table as revenue evaporates from the coronavirus-induced shutdown. “We’re looking at the bills, but again, it’s very very dependent on what the federal government is going to do for us,” Heastie told Spectrum News.
“I’m just asking people to for a little bit of patience,” he said. “We’re not just sitting on our hands.”
Stewart-Cousins, the majority leader, has echoed these sentiments. “The first joint legislative hearing took place on May 13th, the next is coming up on May 18th, and more are coming. The Senate will be returning to session shortly to act on important legislation,” Gary Ginsburg, a spokesperson for the Senate Majority, told Gothamist.
Meanwhile, legislators in the Assembly and Senate have introduced more than 300 bills, with a number of them related directly to COVID-19. They include bills to cancel rent for those impacted by the pandemic and raise taxes on the wealthy to fill looming shortfalls. Just this week, two state senators, Toby Stavisky and Shelley Mayer, introduced legislation to temporarily raise taxes on those making more than $5 million a year, aiming to divide the new revenue between K-12 public schools and SUNY and CUNY. Lawmakers are actively begging their leaders to get back to work.
“Whenever any members ask the leader [Stewart-Cousins], ‘Hey, are we going back?’ she has said ‘yes,’ over and over again. Now what a lot of us want is to say, ‘okay, let’s pick a date,’” said State Senator Alessandra Biaggi, another Bronx Democrat who has grown increasingly critical of Cuomo’s response to COVID-19. “There are three coequal branches of government and more than 200 legislators who are very much ready to work, who feel urgency about this moment.”
So far, the state legislature has held just a single hearing remotely since passing the budget in April. That came this past Wednesday, when lawmakers heard from small business owners reeling from the pandemic. More hearings on other topics are planned. Lawmakers, in particular, are calling for investigations into the state’s handling of nursing homes, where more than 5,000 residents have likely died from coronavirus.
On Friday, the State Comptroller will release a report detailing how grim the state’s current fiscal situation remains. Cuomo will then have the power to impose budget cuts. The legislature will get only 10 days to respond with their own suggestions. In this new budget process, created in April in the wake of the pandemic, lawmakers can’t vote for revenue raisers or tax hikes. They can only do that outside of this process, in the normal session.
When that will be is still anyone’s guess. Assemblymember Robert Carroll, a Brooklyn Democrat, said it’s time to start debating and voting on bills specifically tied to COVID-19. As Cuomo recruits titans of industry to help plan the state’s recovery, Carroll also wants the legislature to have a role in determining what it will mean for billionaires like Bill Gates to “reimagine” education and other post-pandemic facts of life in New York.
“It’s not that this needs to be an adversarial exercise. The problem is Bill Gates, for as smart as he is, was not elected by anybody in the State of New York,” Carroll said. “If Bill Gates is going to reimagine education, I have a few questions.”
Carroll, like other lawmakers, is awaiting the call to get back into session. “We can call ourselves into session at a moment’s notice. We would need no more than 12 hours to be notified, the night before, to get onto Zoom and do XYZ,” he said. “I am confident we can do it.”
Tagged
COVID-19
Albany
andrew cuomo
state legislature
Ross Barkan
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