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In 2023 Agenda, Hochul Vows to Make State Government Work Better for New Yorkers


Gov. Hochul delivers remarks (photo: Darren McGee/Governor's Office)


When she released her 2023 agenda in January, Governor Kathy Hochul announced a multi-pronged effort to “make government work better for New Yorkers” through improved access to government services and public benefits. How New Yorkers interact with state government will be overhauled and modernized, according to Hochul, in her 277-page State of the State policy book.

“By eliminating bureaucratic hurdles, simplifying processes, and utilizing new technology, we will vastly improve the way New Yorkers access services and benefits from State agencies,” Hochul said in the book that accompanied her address.

Hochul is promising residents a streamlined online experience, through the implementation of a series of technological enhancements aimed at uniting government agencies and eliminating red tape and frustrating inconsistencies. 

The proposed statewide initiatives will move several benefit applications more fully online, introduce the increased use of direct deposits, and expedite access to aid for those who qualify. The changes would apply to everything from obtaining tax credits to Childcare Assistance Program applications to Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) services.

In addition, Hochul will appoint a new Chief Customer Experience Officer to supervise these widespread changes.

Perhaps most significantly, the governor is promising a single login or ‘One ID’ for use across state agencies that will reduce the duplicative applications currently required of New Yorkers in order to receive aid and interact with state government.

“The aim of ‘One ID’ is to create a simple, straightforward and seamless path for residents who are eligible for state services,” said Scott Reif, a spokesperson with the state Office of Information Technology Services. “When fully implemented, ‘One ID’ will help the State better prevent fraud and allow eligible New Yorkers to more easily interact with their government and receive the benefits they need and deserve.”

The ‘One ID’ rollout will be carried out in four phases, building on initiatives that are already underway, according to Reif. Duplicate accounts will be eliminated, accounts will be consolidated across services, and a single ‘One ID’ will be rolled out with a soft launch. No exact timeline has been established.

The proposal is reminiscent of New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ delayed ‘My City’ portal; it does not appear any effort is being made to unify the efficiency-focused initiatives.

Most of the governor’s plan to make state government work better for New Yorkers does not appear to need to be negotiated with the State Legislature, unlike many other parts of her policy and fiscal agenda. On February 1 Hochul released her $227 billion Executive Budget for next state fiscal year, which begins April 1, and it has become the focus of a series of legislative budget hearings.

Hochul’s plan includes expanded use of e-signature technology. Currently, many documents must be printed, signed, and then scanned, placing a ‘time tax’ on New Yorkers who are in need of services, and delaying the receipt of aid. 

“We often field requests for assistance from New Yorkers who are having difficulty applying for rental assistance and other public benefits online because of the bureaucratic hurdles inherent in the process,” said Jeff Maclin of Community Service Society of New York, a nonprofit organization that works directly with low-income New Yorkers. “Any effort to make it easier and less onerous for people to navigate the system and obtain the information they need in a timely manner is a plus.” 

Currently, New Yorkers who are entitled to government services are often met by long wait times and outdated websites, Hochul’s press release stated. Hochul’s announcement cited the bureaucratic hurdles that Maclin pointed to as often preventing residents from ever accessing the safety nets designed to help them. Filing for unemployment insurance, accessing tax credits, and even simply applying for a driver's license often require in-person appointments, according to Hochul’s release. Forms and websites are laden with complicated jargon. Surface mail communications frequently go missing. Different agencies require the same information to be submitted across multiple applications, wasting processing time both for residents and State workers. 

In addition, eligibility for services like New York’s Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP), often differs from county to county. Hochul’s plan seeks to streamline all this, easing access to government, unifying service eligibility statewide, and simplifying communication across government agencies.

According to the January 10 press release from Hochul’s office, despite increased federal and state funding for affordable child care, the state estimates that less than 10% of families eligible for New York’s child care assistance program currently access these services. Of those who qualify for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC program, the state estimates only 50% utilize the service.

“Child care is critical for working families, especially women, to reach their full career potential,” said Suzanne Miles-Gustave, Acting Commissioner of the state’s Office of Children and Family Services. Dr. James McDonald, acting state health commissioner, added, “Families that rely on the Department’s Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program should have easy access without the burden of navigating cumbersome bureaucratic obstacles.”

To understand why individuals and families are not accessing the services they are entitled to, Hochul’s plan includes conducting a survey of eligible families to guide the distribution of benefits in the future.

Along with updating how people interact online with state services, Hochul’s plan promises to lower call times through the increased use of voice automation and chatbots.

The state’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) believes that through these technological updates, callers will see wait times reduced by 30%, according to Hochul’s announcement. “This assistance from the governor will go a long way toward helping us achieve the goals of our ongoing transformation initiatives, including bringing the DMV to where the customer is and changing the public’s image about us and what we do each day,” said DMV Commissioner Mark J.F. Schroeder.

With customer satisfaction and user experience at the forefront of the entire initiative, Hochul points to her record as Erie County Clerk, where she claims to have transformed the Department of Motor Vehicles customer service experience.

To oversee the promised improvements, Hochul has announced that alongside the appointment of a Chief Customer Experience Officer, a new team of digital professionals will carry out the widespread changes. This team will have its work cut out for it, attempting to make the announced enhancements and updates to many of what Hochul’s administration estimates is over 100 New York state websites still not optimized for mobile use. 

Maclin of CSSNY pointed to some additional potential hurdles in the initiatives designed to make services more accessible. “Not everyone has broadband and access to the internet,” Maclin said. “That goes for many low-income New Yorkers. So either there is a more aggressive push to expand broadband or options to conducting business with state agencies online is readily available and promoted.”

The state’s ongoing $1 billion broadband initiative seeks to alleviate these concerns, promising connectivity in underserved areas.

“New Yorkers who have limited access to the internet or technology will always have the option of contacting a customer service center by phone to get help from a live representative,” said Reif of the state’s Office of Information Technology Services, adding, “‘One ID’ and other initiatives will also reduce the number of people calling or visiting in person, which will free up personnel to help those who have difficulty accessing services online.”

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by Talia Barrington, Gotham Gazette

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New York Launch of Online and Automatic Voter Registration Delayed Until at Least May


Students registering to vote (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)


The state's new automatic voter registration system was meant to launch New Year's Day, but officials with the State Board of Elections claim emergency voting measures associated with the pandemic have forced the timeline back. The program is intertwined with an electronic registration system, meant to usher in widespread online voter registration, that is even further delayed – currently more than two years behind scheduled April 2021 launch.

State election administrators are now eyeing a May start date for online enrollment.

Sometime after that, the Department of Motor Vehicles will establish an automatic registration system, according to a spokesperson for the State Board of Elections who did not give a timetable.

The DMV is the first agency required by law to adopt automatic voter registration, or AVR, which will enroll eligible voters when they file personal information with what will be a series of participating agencies (unless the individual opts out). According to state law signed in December 2020, the DMV was supposed to launch on January 1 of this year, with a number of other participating agencies required to roll out the service beginning in 2024. That timeframe is still on track, according to the State Board of Elections.

“Unfortunately, due to unforeseen issues related to the pandemic, the plans for the rollout of both OVR and AVR have been impacted," wrote a State Board of Elections spokesperson in an email, referring to online voter registration and automatic voter registration and citing a number of laws and executive orders meant to limit the spread of COVID-19 at the ballot box.

"Many of those changes remained in place for the 2021 and 2022 elections and, as a result, required a reprioritization and refocusing of significant technical resources and staff time which would have otherwise been devoted to the implementation of Automatic and Online Voter Registration," the spokesperson wrote. "We are doing everything possible to ensure that appropriate measures are taken to expedite implementation of both Automatic and Online Voter Registration.”

A big sap of resources was the need – first under executive order and then temporarily under law – to rapidly create an accessible universal absentee balloting portal with the capacity to handle applications from virtually every active voter in the state. That took staff away from building the online voter registration and automatic voter registration systems, the spokesperson told Gotham Gazette.

The State Board of Elections had already blown the April 2021 deadline to stand up a fully electronic registration portal, blaming a hold placed on state funds by then-Governor Andrew Cuomo in the first months of the pandemic.

The board now has that money, $16.6 million, according to a spokesperson for Governor Kathy Hochul, who referred further inquiries to the board. The board is working with a vendor to build the internal system that transmits voter enrollment information to county election boards under both online and automatic voter registration. The State Board of Elections spokesperson said they could not release the vendor's name because the procurement process was not completed.

"These important electoral reforms are already behind schedule and need to be implemented as soon as possible," said State Senate Deputy Leader Michael Gianaris, a Queens Democrat who sponsored the automatic voter registration legislation in 2019, in a statement to Gotham Gazette. "I've made it clear to the Board of Elections that I will work with them to get this done soon and done right."

Under the law, participating agencies must integrate voter registration applications into applications for other services, which agencies will then transmit to county boards of elections. The idea is that as long as eligible voters are interacting with and providing their personal information to government agencies, they could also be automatically enrolled to vote. That would help boost registration rates, which have lagged. Individuals can opt out and agencies are prohibited from transmitting applications from people who are ineligible to register.

In the 2022 general election last fall 588,000 New Yorkers were eligible to vote but not registered, based on estimates of the vote-eligible population by the U.S. Elections Project, run by University of Florida political scientist Dr. Michael McDonald. Every year, New Yorkers who turn 18, gain citizenship, or are re-enfranchised post-incarceration become eligible to vote. Eligible teenagers will be automatically pre-registered under a recent state law that allows 16- and 17-year-olds to submit enrollment information in advance of their eighteenth birthdays.

Agencies are required to come to a rulemaking agreement with the State Board of Elections about how they will implement automatic voter registration, which is then subject to public comment. It is unclear if the DMV or other agencies have completed this process.

Under the law, the DMV's system must have an AVR system by the start of 2023. By January 1, 2024, the Department of Health; Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance; Department of Labor; Office of Vocational and Educational Services for Individuals with Disabilities; county and city departments of social services; New York City Housing Authority; and "any other agency designated by the governor" must all have AVR systems in place. SUNY must launch AVR by January 1, 2025.

Hochul's spokesperson said once the required agencies have implemented AVR the governor will evaluate whether to expand it to other agencies.

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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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As Prosecutors Get Budget Boost, Public Defenders Seek More Funding Too


Mayor Adams and Governor Hochul (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)


As Governor Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams, both first-term Democrats, double down this year on their focus on public safety and crime in New York, both have emphasized the need to give prosecutors and defense attorneys more resources to do their jobs. Both leaders have said the funding is necessary to abide by recent state criminal justice reforms and reduce court backlogs. But, while prosecutors across the state may soon be bolstered with more funding, public defenders say they aren’t aren’t receiving commensurate financial support from the two top Democrats.

New York State in recent years approved a series of criminal justice reforms to bail, discovery, and speedy trial statutes. As those reforms went into effect, the covid pandemic struck, impacting all aspects of the criminal justice system. Prosecutors and public defenders were already calling for additional resources to comply with the reforms, particularly the new discovery rules, while some officials – Hochul and Adams included – were faulting the changes for slowing down court cases at a time when crime was spiking in New York and nationally.

According to the latest data from the state’s Office of Court Administration, there is a backlog of 106,811 pending criminal cases across the state, up from 70,803 in 2022. Delays in the court system are one of the major factors in the increasing jail population, including in New York City. Data from the state Division of Criminal Justice Services shows that between January 2022 and January 2023, the average daily jail population statewide increased from 15,136 to 15,911, or about 5.1%; in New York City jails, the population increased from 5,344 to 5,821, about 8.9%.

Case delays also means that detainees spend longer in jail – in New York City, for instance, the average length of stay in a city jail has increased from 60 days in January 2021 to 108 days in December 2022. It is not easy to directly attribute the causes of the delays, but most experts and stakeholders agree that staffing at district attorney and public defender offices are a major factor.

In her executive budget released early this month, Hochul bemoaned the fact that the state’s criminal justice system was “absolutely paralyzed” by the pandemic. “And today, it's still clogged with backlogs denying justice to far too many,” she said, as she announced that the state would give court-appointed attorneys or public defenders their first raises in 20 years while also increasing funding for district attorneys (she’s also proposing more funding for reentry and alternative to incarceration programs, and further changes to the bail law).

Mayor Adams, in his 2023 State of the City speech, similarly said that ensuring speedy trials for defendants and justice for crime victims “means making sure our district attorneys and defenders have the resources they need to clear the backlog of cases and finding ways to expedite the discovery process.”

“Our legal system must ensure that dangerous people are kept off the streets, innocent people are not consumed by bureaucracy and victims can obtain resolutions,” he said. “This is something we can all agree on. Let's get it done in 2023.”

At a joint legislative hearing on the governor’s budget on Wednesday, Adams reiterated his point, saying, “our city’s district attorneys and public defenders are overwhelmed and need our help immediately. The state must make a major investment in them now or risk depriving defendants of their constitutional right to a speedy trial, delaying justice for victims and continuing the unprecedented level of attrition within each of these offices.”

District attorneys are funded largely by their respective counties, with supplemental state and federal grants. Public defenders, however, receive a much larger portion of their funding from the state and from localities. In New York City, the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice awards hundreds of millions in contracts for indigent defense funding.

Hochul’s and Adams’ budget plans show more focus on boosting prosecutors than public defenders, who play their own crucial role in the justice system, defending mostly low-income Black and Latino New Yorkers who cannot afford to hire private attorneys.

Funding for Prosecutors
The governor’s budget would increase “aid to prosecution” funding to $52 million in the next fiscal year starting April 1, up from $12.5 million in the budget that was adopted in April 2022. The funding would help all 62 counties across the state hire additional prosecutors and otherwise boost resources for district attorney offices. The budget, subject to negotiation with the Legislature, also maintains a $40 million pot of funding for prosecutors in the 57 counties outside of New York City to meet the requirements of the state’s discovery reform law, which took effect in 2020 and puts significant new responsibilities and tighter timelines on prosecutors.

A spokesperson for the state’s Division of Budget also said that an additional $7 million will be awarded to district attorney offices that create specialized units to shut down fentanyl supply chains and prosecute in cases of overdose deaths. “Distribution of these funds is pursuant to a plan submitted by the Commissioner of the Division of Criminal Justice Services and approved by the Director of the Budget,” the spokesperson said.

That is all welcome news to prosecutors, who have complained that discovery reform has been a heavy burden for overworked district attorney offices across the state, many of which have lost personnel in recent years.

“It's a welcome recognition by the governor that the burdens on the criminal justice system have changed dramatically, especially over the last three years or so,” said J. Anthony Jordan, president of the District Attorneys Association of the State of New York, in a phone interview. Last week, Jordan submitted written testimony at a joint budget hearing of the State Legislature on public protection, highlighting the need for more funding to help with staffing, training, new technology, and more as district attorney offices try to comply with the altered laws.

“The cost of compliance has fallen disproportionately on counties and so this is an important recognition by the governor that there is a significant role that the state must play in defraying these costs,” said Jordan, who is the DA of Washington County.

Jordan said that district attorney offices across the state have seen an exodus of experienced prosecutors, largely because of what they see as onerous discovery compliance requirements that have added to their workloads. DA offices have also not been immune to the trend of government employees departing to the private sector during the pandemic, in search of higher pay and more flexible work.

The discovery reform, he said, “relegated many trial attorneys to file clerks, and litigation that was not focused on guilt or innocence, but on paper chase. And that's more akin to practicing on Wall Street.”

A Manhattan Institute report released last month showed that prosecutors have been able to meet the discovery reform obligations within the mandated time frames in only 21% of cases – in local courts across the state, that rate is 16%, and in New York City local courts, that number falls to 13%. The report pointed out that, in New York City courts, dismissals increased from 44% of all disposed cases in 2019 to 69% in 2021; and statewide, dismissals increased by 14% in that period. In that same time, guilty pleas fell in New York City from 45% to 21%, and statewide, from 49% to 33%.

In the second annual judiciary survey on the implementation of the discovery law, released in December, 29% of judges in New York City reported that discovery obligations were met by the prosecution most of the time, compared with 79% of the judges outside New York City.

The numbers on discovery sanctions – including, but not limited to, dismissals, mistrials, and release under the state’s speedy trial statute – paint a complicated story, however. For instance, 62% of New York City judges said that the discovery legislation has greatly or moderately led to an increase in speedy trial release motions being granted, while 68% of judges outside of New York City said that the discovery reform has not caused an increase in these motions being granted. Mistrials were almost never granted.

In New York City, about 71% of judges said that the discovery law has led to slower case processing, compared with 30% of judges outside the city.

While fortifying prosecutors is essential, Jordan also agreed that public defenders should be given equal heft. “The justice system should be balanced,” he said. “The court should be funded properly, the institutional defenders, public defenders, they should be funded properly as should the prosecution. We are all performing state functions, just at the dollar of the county.”

“I would always rather litigate against a quality attorney because you're focused on the issues,” he added.

“Governor Hochul's Executive Budget makes transformative investments to make New York more affordable, more livable and safer, and she looks forward to working with the legislature on a final budget that meets the needs of all New Yorkers,” said Hazel Crampton-Hays, a spokesperson for the governor, in a statement.

In New York City, the mayor’s preliminary budget proposal for the 2024 fiscal year, which starts July 1, funds the city’s five district attorney offices at roughly the same level, or marginally lower, than the budget adopted last year for the current fiscal year.  

Between the budget adopted last year and the preliminary budget proposal, the Manhattan DA’s funding is flat at $147 million, the Bronx DA’s funding is down by about $600,000, the Brooklyn DA’s funding is lower by about $408,000, the Queens DA’s funding is unchanged at $86.4 million, and the Staten Island DA’s funding is down about $639,000. The mayor’s office did not provide an explanation for the decreases. 

Public Defenders Ask for More
Public defender organizations have already been struggling in recent years because of low pay and heavy workloads. In New York City, by June 2022, hundreds of staffers had quit the five public defender agencies that serve the city’s indigent population, according to The New York Times.

The governor’s state budget proposal includes $359 million for the Office of Indigent Legal Services, which assists counties and indigent legal service providers in the provision of services and monitors their implementation. This proposed budget remains unchanged from the enacted budget for the current fiscal year.

The governor’s budget also separately allocates $94 million (a $44 million increase) for the Office of Court Administration’s Attorney for Child Representation Program. That increase is meant to raise hourly wages for ‘18-B’ assigned counsel attorneys (private attorneys assigned by the court under Article 18-B of County Law) to $119 per hour for defenders in upstate counties and $158 per hour in downstate counties including New York City. Finally, Hochul’s budget plan includes $7.6 million for “aid to defense” programs that support defense organizations like the Legal Aid Society. That funding is also flat from this fiscal year.

But that may not be enough to support the needs of public defenders statewide. There are two separate issues at play – overall funding for public defenders such as Legal Aid Society, Brooklyn Defender Services, and others, and funding for 18-B assigned counsel programs, which involves private attorneys that are appointed by the court to defend indigent clients.

In testimony at the February 7 hearing, Patricia Warth, director of the state Office of Indigent Legal Services, said that the funding in the governor’s budget is inadequate, pointing to the office’s budget request of $382.8 million for indigent legal services for the 2024 fiscal year — about $23 million more than Hochul put in her plan. The largest discrepancy was in funding for family court representation – ILS requested $28 million while the governor proposed only $4.5 million.

“Without a significant state investment, attorneys are working under crushing caseloads without access to resources,” Warth said.

One of the main issues she noted is the need to increase wages across all indigent legal services for 18-B attorneys, who handle representation in roughly a third of cases, she said.

As Warth noted, increasing wages for 18-B attorneys is crucial to the implementation of the 2014 settlement in the Hurrell-Harring et al. v. State of New York case, which required the state to increase funding for mandated indigent defense in five counties – Ontario, Onondaga, Schuyler, Suffolk, and Washington. The state has since expanded the implementation of the settlement statewide through law.

Last year, the state appropriated $250 million for statewide implementation, which was part of the $359 million included in the governor’s new proposal – that increased investment has led to lower caseloads and higher average spending per case, according to Warth.

But, Warth noted, the state is already facing ongoing litigation over assigned counsel pay rates and the governor’s proposal to increase those rates is flawed. She said that it would both fail to resolve those lawsuits and likely lead to additional litigation. The state should fund the increase in rates instead of passing it on to counties and New York City, she said, and the state should not implement “case caps” on what an attorney can be paid for time on a case; hourly rates should be the same statewide; and there should be a mechanism for periodic rate increases.

“They are a vitally important part of the system and they haven't received an increase in rates since 2004,” she said. According to ILS estimates, the cost of raising pay rates would be between $150-180 million, based on pre-pandemic caseloads from 2019.

She also noted in her testimony that the last time 18-B attorney wages were increased in 2004, the state did not fund the increase, leading to counties cutting other public defense services to pay for it. “At the end of the day, funding public defense is a state obligation, and the state needs to pick up the tab for that obligation,” Warth said.

Mayor Adams also echoed that concern at Wednesday’s legislative budget hearing. He said the increase in 18-B attorney wages will cost the city at least $84 million starting in the current fiscal year. “Currently, we split this cost approximately evenly with the state, but, without state action, the city will be forced to cover the full cost of this increase,” he said.

State Senator Jamaal Bailey, a Bronx Democrat and chair of the Senate’s codes committee, has sponsored legislation for three years to increase pay rates for 18-B attorneys. “Equal access to justice is the foundation of our justice system. Underfunded and overburdened public defense systems not only erode quality of representation and public trust in the justice system, it upholds a two-tiered system of justice that can have grave consequences for New Yorkers who can least afford it,” he said in a statement to Gotham Gazette.

“Equitably funding public defense is fundamentally a matter of fairness – the individuals who continue to do this critical work cannot meet the needs of some of the most vulnerable in our society without adequate resources. It’s imperative that we shore up public defense funding to level the playing field and ensure that allocated resources sufficiently reflect changes in the industry and cost of living,” he added. 

The call for more funding and changes to the proposal have been echoed by legal defense groups across the state.

“Gov. Kathy Hochul recognized the need for increased pay for assigned counsel in New York State. But her proposal calling for lower rates upstate relative to downstate is not equitable,” said Sherry Levin Wallach, president of the New York State Bar Association (NYSBA), in a statement. “Creating two separate geographic tiers of justice is unconscionable for the persons seeking access to justice and the lawyers that represent them.”

The NYSBA sued the state to implement a statewide pay rate of $164 an hour, on par with court-appointed attorneys in federal courts. “The current compensation structure is unworkable and results in a shortage of attorneys to take on this important work,” Wallach said. “Access to justice, which is fundamental to our democracy, depends on the ability of individuals to receive legal representation. It’s imperative that this long-standing injustice be fixed in this year’s final budget agreement.” 

The New York City Bar Association has also included pay raises for 18-B attorneys on its state legislative agenda for this year.

The rates for 18-B attorneys are separate from pay for public defenders at service providers like the Legal Aid Society and Brooklyn Defender Services, which serve New York City and are funded largely by the state Office of Indigent Legal Services. Employees of those organizations are also facing tough times as their caseloads have ballooned and their wages have not kept pace.

“We are extremely disappointed that Governor Hochul failed to include any proposed allocation in her Fiscal Year 2024 budget for public defender and legal services organizations to address staffing and operational demands, instead prioritizing the needs of prosecutors and others in law enforcement,” said Legal Aid Society, in a statement after the governor’s budget was released. “Funding that favors one side of the legal system over all others reinforces bias and erodes efforts to further public safety.”

The mayor’s preliminary budget proposed about $126.6 million in contracts for Legal Aid Society (which cover indigent defense and other purposes as well), down from $192 million in the budget adopted last year for the current fiscal year. Overall, the budget proposes a $356 million allocation for indigent defense services. Both those numbers are expected to increase once the state budget is settled and the city has an idea of the amount of funding it will receive for indigent defense. For instance, last year, the city’s preliminary budget proposed $407 million for indigent defense, and later adopted a budget in June that allocated $434 million.

That nonetheless seems to suggest that the city’s contribution will be significantly lower than it was last year. Despite multiple requests from Gotham Gazette, which the mayor’s office acknowledged, City Hall did not provide any comment or clarity about the level of funding or why the budget proposes such a lower budget allocation despite the mayor’s own emphasis on funding prosecutors and public defenders.

Lisa Schreibersdorf, executive director of Brooklyn Defender Services, pointed to several other budget demands for the governor, above and beyond the budget requests made by ILS. Among those are cost-of-living-adjustments to the Office of Indigent Legal Services’ budget, increasing the funding by $10.6 million from $382.8 million to $393.4 million, which would help Brooklyn Defender Services increase pay for staff; an additional $4.9 million in “aid to defense” for a total of $12.5 million; and, chiefly, $127 million in funding to abide by the discovery reforms.

“The prosecutors and the defenders need the money, they all need the technology and they all need the staff,” Schreibersdorf said in a phone interview. “Because the amount of work that you're doing is roughly the same.”

She also noted that the churn of public defenders leaving their jobs because of increasing workloads only serves to delay court cases. “The mayor knows this story. The governor knows this story. This story is coming from the DAs and the defenders equally, and the cases cannot move to trial unless everybody is ready for trial,” she said.

Brooklyn Defender Services also called for $5 million for an indigent parole program, an additional $2.5 million for the New York State Defenders Association for a total of $3.58 million, and $1 million for a military veterans defense program.

Though Schreibersdorf said that indigent defense funding is a state obligation, she insisted that if the governor does not come through, the city should step in. “Somebody's gonna have to make it right,” she said.

“The City and State budgets are more than a list of numbers. They are a reflection of our values as New Yorkers,” said Justine Olderman, executive Director of the Bronx Defenders, in a statement to Gotham Gazette. “The draft budgets put forth by the Governor and Mayor, calling for rollbacks of bail reform and more money for police and prosecutors while massively underfunding public defenders and legal service providers, make a mockery of our standing as a national leader in social and racial justice. The Council and state Legislature must push back hard to ensure that these budgets help meet the needs and protect the rights of low-income Black and brown New Yorkers facing incarceration, deportation, family separation, and eviction.”

As Legal Aid Society calls for more state funding, it is under fire from its own members. Last week, more than 1,000 attorneys from the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys (ALAA), a union of public defenders, undertook a work stoppage amid contract negotiations with Legal Aid Society, a week after the union rejected an offer for a 2% salary increase.

The union noted that Legal Aid Society has sufficient funds to increase attorney salaries because attrition has created significant savings for the organization, and that it has increased compensation for managers while refusing a better contract for staff attorneys.

“Despite high caseloads and inadequate resources, members fight every day for justice for poor and low-income New Yorkers,” said Lisa Ohta, President of ALAA, in a statement last week. “Management tells us they appreciate our work, but appreciation doesn’t pay the bills. All staff deserve raises that address high inflation and attrition. We call on the Legal Aid Society to bargain fairly with ALAA so that staff can continue its vital work representing the most vulnerable New Yorkers.”

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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How New York Will Implement the $4.2 Billion Environmental Bond Act Passed by Voters in 2022


Projects underway (photo: Mike Groll/Governor's Office)


After voters overwhelmingly approved it last fall, state officials expect to issue the first bonds under the $4.2 billion Environmental Bond Act in the upcoming fiscal year, which begins April 1. It will take years to spend the entire sum, aimed at addressing some of the state's most dire climate and environmental needs.

The bond act authorizes the state to raise its general obligation debt to support public works in four broad categories: climate change mitigation, flood risk reduction, water quality improvement, and land conservation. Governor Kathy Hochul, state legislators, and environmentalists say the money is necessary to pay for critical infrastructure and to leverage other state and federal funding sources.

Hochul made it a central part of her climate platform in her first year-plus in office as she moves to implement policies to meet emission-reduction and renewable-energy mandates in the state's landmark 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, which will probably require bond act funds. The Democratic governor recently laid out her 2023 agenda with a major focus on environmental and climate policies that will in part be bolstered by bond act spending.

Before any of that can happen, though, the Hochul administration must set out the criteria and guidelines local governments and organizations will use to apply for grants for the myriad projects to be funded under the act, formally known as the Clean Water, Clean Air, and Green Jobs Environmental Bond Act.

The State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) is leading a working group of state agencies focused on developing procedures through a "robust engagement process…throughout the spring and summer," according to a DEC spokesperson. The groundwork they lay must then go through a public comment period before projects may be considered.

The state is expecting to finance $100 million in the next fiscal year, from April 2023 through March 2024, according to Hochul's financial plan. Its projection shows New York will spend less than a quarter of the total $4.2 billion over the next five years.

"We are moving as quickly as we can as a state enterprise to identify the current programs that exist, the ones that we are going to need to create new, and then developing the infrastructure behind that in order to stand those up," said Sean Mahar, DEC's Executive Deputy Commissioner, in a recent interview. "That's really our goal in the short term."

"Our staff and all the agency staff are excited about this and our sleeves are rolled up and we're at the table," Mahar said.

DEC and eight other state agencies make up the bond act working group: the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), the Environmental Facilities Corporation, Department of State, Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation, the Adirondack Park Agency, Department of Transportation, Department of Agriculture and Markets, Office of General Services, and Homes and Community Renewal. While subcommittees are focused on each of the four spending categories, the exact structure of the office overseeing spending is still in development, according to DEC. So are other pieces of infrastructure, like a public facing website, which will help New Yorkers understand how the dollars are being spent.

"I'm personally of the belief that the governor should hire a director to oversee…and to help arbitrate where there may be some disagreements, as may happen from time to time between various agencies," said Julie Tighe, executive director of the New York League of Conservation Voters, in a recent interview. Tighe and NYLCV were major proponents of the bond act, and part of a coalition that urged voters to pass it when it appeared as question one on the ballot this past fall.

The bond act and its implementing legislation outline dollar figures for each of the four categories and describe a smattering of the types of environmental work they can fund. It requires the executive branch to lay out the technical details of how entities will apply for grants while ensuring 35% goes to "disadvantaged communities."

The legislation outlines an array of projects that may be eligible, including: shoreline restoration, fish hatchery and farmland protections, wastewater infrastructure and municipal stormwater projects, green building, pollution mitigation, and zero-emission school buses. The money comes with certain labor requirements, including a prevailing wage mandate, apprenticeship agreements, and Buy America provisions on iron and steel.

Amy Chester, managing director of Rebuild by Design, a policy and research group focused on resiliency and another member of the "Vote Yes for Clean Water and Jobs" coalition, echoed the importance of setting up the right groundwork early on. "I think the biggest immediate step is for the State to determine which agency(ies) will administer the different components of the bond act, and how they will ensure that there is the capacity to staff the programs effectively," Chester wrote by email.

Hochul's fiscal year 2024 executive budget proposes to add 131 full-time DEC employees specifically to implement the bond act, but its projects will be executed by a long list of state agencies and authorities, local governments, and others.

Chester, who was a senior policy advisor to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, also noted the importance of a requirement to spend a third of funds in underserved and disproportionately impacted communities. She is eager to see how they will "be involved in the prioritization and awarding" of grants, she said.

Short-Term Goals
According to DEC, in the short-term the working group is focused on engaging the municipalities, nonprofits, and corporations likely to be stewarding projects. The administration must then promulgate spending regulations including the form and content of grant applications, which will then be subject to public comment before taking effect.

"What we want to do is really have a robust stakeholder engagement process where we work across the state to galvanize good local conversations to get the right types of projects identified and prioritized," Mahar told Gotham Gazette. "And then work creatively throughout all the funding sources that we have available."

The bond act is one of many state funding mechanisms, along with the Environmental Protection Fund and others, that will be used for those projects, many of which will build toward the state's statutory conservation and resiliency goals. Hochul announced a number of those priorities in her executive budget, only some of which rely on bond act funds. Last year, Hochul advanced many climate priorities, including work on two major renewable energy transmission lines she greenlit and contracts are also moving ahead on offshore wind, solar farm, and many other projects.

"We don't have details of exactly what the governor and the department have in mind and so [on Tuesday, February 14] is a budget hearing at which we will ask for more details," said Assembly Member Deborah Glick, a Manhattan Democrat and chair of her chamber’s environmental conservation committee, in an interview. Glick is hoping to probe the administration's timeline and organizational structure for spending the bond act money. She also wants to know how the administration will issue grants, whether they will go through a competitive bidding process, and how it will ensure broad participation.

The broader funding itself will not be the subject of budget negotiations, however, as that was allocated in the current fiscal year budget, passed on the contingency that voters approved the bond act. "They have the money," Glick said.

According to a spokesperson for State Senator Pete Harckham, the Senate's environmental conservation chair and a Hudson Valley Democrat, the Legislature's real oversight functions will begin after DEC goes through the public comment period as part of its rule-drafting process.

"We need to be moving forward expeditiously but we also need to be moving forward smartly," said Tighe of New York League of Conservation Voters, who previously served as chief of staff at DEC. Part of that means ensuring local governments and nonprofits have the technical support needed to compete for grants and implement projects. That will be essential to meet the bond act requirement of dedicating 35% of funds to environmental justice, she said (she and other advocates want to see that figure hit at least 40%).

That could mean addressing environmental issues that have plagued low-income areas, like lead pipes in urban centers or harmful algal blooms in upstate lakes, though the legislation doesn't include specifics. According to the state's webpage on the bond act, the criteria will be the same being developed for the state's Climate Leadership and Community Protections Act (CLCPA) by the State Climate Justice Working Group, a body of regionally diverse public members and representatives from DEC, NYSERDA, and the departments of health and labor.

James Hanley, a fellow at The Empire Center, a think tank, wonders if the state will "actually manage to achieve that" benchmark. "Well-to-do communities tend to [be] more connected to power…We'll see how it actually plays out," he said in a recent interview.

"There are big governments like New York City, and sophisticated governments like Suffolk County and Westchester County, that have a lot of people who would be dedicated to this," Tighe said. That means the state will need to make additional efforts to facilitate "geographic diversity" in projects.

New York City is already angling for a substantial share of bond act funds. In December, the City Council passed a resolution calling on the state to allocate bond act funds to the city proportionate to its share of the state tax base (62% of state tax revenue and 43% of the population comes from New York City, according to the resolution).

Shovel-Ready Projects
In order to get money out the door, the state is looking to first fund ongoing and shovel-ready projects, according to DEC.

That includes school bus electrification already funded by NYSERDA and water supply and flood risk initiatives under the Water Quality Improvement Program and Water Infrastructure Improvement Act. The state may use the bond act to bolster land acquisition programs run by DEC and the Parks Department and backed by the Environmental Protection Fund, according to Mahar. Many of the current programs are funded under the federal Clean Water State Revolving Fund and state investments under the Clean Water Infrastructure Act.

Hochul is also putting billions of dollars toward the environment outside the bond act. Her $227 billion executive budget includes $500 million for the Water Infrastructure Improvement Act, $400 million for the Environmental Protection Fund, and $200 million for parks. Another $400 million will go toward lowering energy costs and retrofitting buildings. Other programs to increase recycling rates and local contaminant remediation are also included. And NYSERDA contracts and coordinates massive renewable energy projects that may or may not include significant state funding.

In her new agenda, Hochul also proposed a cap-and-invest program, to be run by DEC and NYSERDA, which would place a tax on carbon emissions and invest proceeds into energy rebates for New Yorkers. Over $1 billion from that revenue stream would be placed in a Climate Action Fund to support the rebates.

The executive budget also expands the New York Power Authority's jurisdiction to help meet renewable energy targets and includes a number of building decarbonization proposals.

The bond act places New York in a stronger position to apply for federal funding under the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. DEC Commissioner Basil Seggos praised the Inflation Reduction Act as a boon to the types of environmental projects the administration is eying. "The [Inflation Reduction] Act is a major boost for New York's leading climate efforts and will ensure all states and localities can help galvanize the clean energy economy," Seggos said in a statement in August. "New York is extraordinarily well positioned to fast track these initiatives that will reduce the costs and burdens on energy consumers, secure protections and opportunities for disadvantaged communities, provide inflation relief to Americans and New Yorkers, all while reducing the nation's deficit."

The demand is certainly there. A recent report from the nonprofit Environmental Advocates NY found that the Water Infrastructure Improvement Act gave $279 million to 73 projects while 246 shovel-ready projects valued at $665 million went unfunded in the last grant cycle.

According to Mahar, the exercise now is lining up bond act requirements with existing programs and "seeing what the gaps are."

The Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act
A number of Hochul's executive budget proposals – especially the cap-and-invest and renewable energy programs – will help New York meet the lofty energy goals set under the Climate Leadership and Community Protections Act, which then-Governor Andrew Cuomo signed into law in 2019.

It requires reducing carbon emissions 40% by 2030 and 85% by 2050 from 1990 levels. It also requires 70% of the state’s electricity to come from renewable sources by 2030 and 100% by 2040. In December, the Climate Action Council, a governing body established under the CLCPA, issued a scoping plan of recommendations to guide the state's work. Hochul’s agenda is in part based on those recommendations.

The bond act, particularly the largest funding category, up to $1.5 billion, for climate change mitigation, can support those goals, according to DEC.

"I think the way that we've approached our climate mitigation efforts is really all hands on deck when it comes to implementing the scoping plan," Mahar said.

The bond act "is intended to be linked to the CLCPA so that they are addressing the full range of concerns that are out there, whether it's water quality, coastline resiliency, and so forth," said Assemblymember Glick, "but we need to get more detail on their timeline and how they will choose organizations to actually do the work."

"All of our targets are very necessary but also very ambitious," she said. "And frankly they're goals, we may not meet them all in the time frame set out."

"Even if you could build out all the renewables in say six or seven years, which I think is going to be a struggle, you have to have all the transmission lines, you know, there are a lot of moving parts," Glick said. The bond act will help. So will federal assistance under the Inflation Reduction Act, she said, "but my sense is that people aren't working as hard and fast as they did before the pandemic so I think we have to pick up our game."

Financing the Bond Act
The bond act outlines how much can be financed for each of the four categories. The largest category, at $1.5 billion, is climate change mitigation, which can include anything from green buildings to renewable energy to pollution remediation.

Projects to mitigate flood risk, a growing problem with more frequent superstorms and eroding protections, will receive up to $1.1 billion. Water infrastructure and land conservation will each receive $650 million under the act, with another $300 million not specifically allocated.

A third of all funding must go to projects in underserved areas that have borne the brunt of pollution, climate change, and scarcity. The projects must have a useful life of ten years in order to be eligible for bonding.

Hochul and the State Legislature already allocated the full $4.2 billion to DEC in the current fiscal year, meaning the administration will not necessarily have to return to the Legislature to authorize the spending.

The capital plan in Hochul's new budget projects $805 million of the bond act will be financed over the next five fiscal years, through March 2028. That includes $5 million in the current fiscal year, growing to a projected $100 million in FY 2024, $150 million in FYs 2025 and 2026, and $200 million in FYs 2027 and 2028.

"$805M is currently the minimum amount of disbursements expected from the Bond Act for the period," wrote Jason Gough, a spokesperson for the governor, in an email to Gotham Gazette. That estimate is based on historic capital spending trends for similar, mostly reimbursement-based environmental and parks projects, he said.

While the first bonds are expected to be issued in the upcoming fiscal year (from April 2023 through March 2024), the full $4.2 billion will be financed over multiple years.

The State Comptroller’s office works with the Division of the Budget to monitor capital spending under the bond act to determine when to issue general obligation bonds to reimburse state coffers, according to a spokesperson for Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. The office issues the bonds but does not have a role in determining which projects get awards, they said. Interest rates could impact state decisions on bond offerings, officials and advocates have said.

"Bond acts take years, if not decades to be spent out," DiNapoli told Gotham Gazette in a podcast interview in October, before voters approved it. "And because New York does have a high debt burden, this will be factored in before the state goes out to, you know, to borrow."

The bond act's debt service, paid through each year’s state budget, over the next five fiscal years is projected at $114 million with the first payment expected in fiscal year 2025. According to Gough, General Obligation Bonds are typically sold at the end of each fiscal year, meaning the debt service is not reflected until the following fiscal year.

The debt service is expected to rise to $354 million annually when all $4.2 billion has gone out the door.

"It's going to fund very important environmental initiatives, drinking water protection, wastewater management, open space preservation, and money targeted to deal with the climate issue, building and resilience helping us meet the very ambitious goals we have in New York State to deal with the issue of climate change," DiNapoli said in the October interview. "You need money to do this."

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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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Max Politics Podcast: Why It Costs New York So Much More to Expand the Subway, with Eric Goldwyn


The 2nd Avenue Subway under construction (photo: Governor's Office)


February 8, 2023 - Max Politics Podcast: Why It Costs New York So Much More to Expand the Subway, with Eric Goldwyn

Eric Goldwyn, a professor who has led a team at the NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management, joined the show to discuss his team's research on building transit and why it costs so much more in New York than other places around the world. The Transit Costs Project just released its New York Case examining the exorbitant, late, and over-budget first phase of the Second Avenue Subway as well as its Final Report.

Listen to the conversation and let us know what you think, on Twitter @TweetBenMax. You can listen to the show through the embedded audio below or download the episode wherever you get your podcasts at Max Politics.

Read more: Max Politics Podcast: Why It Costs New York So Much More to Expand the Subway, with Eric Goldwyn

Hochul’s Budget Offers Far Less Funding Than Requested by New State Public Campaign Finance Board


Governor Hochul presents her budget (photo: Mike Groll/Governor's Office)


Governor Kathy Hochul has included $39.5 million for New York's Public Campaign Finance Board (PCFB), a fraction of the funding the new agency requested to launch a long-anticipated public matching fund program for state campaigns.

Candidates for statewide and state legislative office now have the opportunity to receive a public match on small-dollar donations, a program meant to reduce the influence of big money donors in elections. On Wednesday, the Democratic governor released her $227 billion Executive Budget proposal that outlined $25 million for the pool of public matching dollars the board will eventually distribute and another $14.5 million for the State Board of Elections, which houses the PCFB, to launch the program for the 2023-24 election cycle.

That is far less than the $100 million for matching funds that the Public Campaign Finance Board requested in December, but it does meet the Board’s $14.5 million request to hire staff and develop infrastructure. The $100 million sought by PCFB and the $25 million Hochul is seeking in the fiscal year 2024 budget would be paid out for candidates running in the 2024 primary and general elections, which fall in fiscal year 2025.

According to the governor's office, Hochul's limited allocation is in part because there are no anticipated public matching fund payments in the upcoming fiscal year, but that fiscal year will run through the end of March 2024, just a few months before the June 2024 primary. The State Board of Elections and Public Campaign Finance Board have not yet published a calendar for the election cycle that would outline various dates when public matching payments will be distributed based on periodic campaign filings. A spokesperson for Hochul told Gotham Gazette that the overall appropriation in the governor's budget plan is a sign of her commitment to the program.

The governor’s Executive Budget will form the basis of negotiations with the Legislature, with an agreement due by the start of next fiscal year on April 1. Hochul, who just won her first term in the role, will be negotiating with the legislative leaders, State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, both fellow Democrats.

Neither Stewart-Cousins' nor Heastie's office returned requests for comment about funding the Public Campaign Finance Board.

The board is seeking a secure base of funding for when it begins distributing payments in 2024, when potentially hundreds of candidates for State Senate and Assembly will be enrolled in the program.

The PCFB "reviewed private reports and conducted internal forecasting" to reach the $100 million estimate for public matching funds needed in the election cycle now underway, according to a December budget resolution. The resolution specifically stated those funds would be for payments made in fiscal year 2025, which begins April 2024. That sum would build on $10 million Hochul and the Legislature already allocated to the fund in the current state budget. Advocates for stronger campaign finance laws called the PCFB request "reasonable." The entire State Legislature is on the ballot again in 2024, and every two years, with statewide elections next set for 2026.

A spokesperson for the PCFB commended the proposed operations funding but would not comment on the governor's relatively low public match appropriation.

"The Governor’s proposed executive budget will allow the Public Campaign Finance Board to continue its work in preparation for the 2024 State legislative election," wrote Jennifer Wilson, the PCFB spokesperson, in an email to Gotham Gazette. "The funding will allow for the hiring of additional PCFB staff needed for daily operations and the implementation of new software technology."

The executive budget announcement riled supporters of the campaign finance program on Wednesday who said it fails to meet the needs of the new program.

“New York’s public campaign financing program has the potential to break the dominance of our elections by a handful of the wealthiest donors and amplify the voices of everyday New Yorkers," said Joanna Zdanys, senior counsel at the NYU's Brennan Center for Justice, which has been a leading voice in advancing the new program, in a statement to Gotham Gazette. "While a start, the funding the Executive Budget provides for public financing falls short of what's needed to realize that promise."

"We applaud [Governor Hochul's] decision to fully fund the PCFB’s administrative request, but her budget appropriation of $25 million for the matching funds is insufficient for building a robust system at the state level," wrote Karen Wharton, an organizer with the progressive advocacy group Citizen Action, which has focused on campaign finance reform, in an email to Gotham Gazette.

Supporters say small-donor matching programs, like New York City's acclaimed model, reduce the outsized influence of mega-donors on elections, particularly after the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision that allowed for unlimited independent expenditures to support or oppose candidates. Advocates point to wide participation by candidates in New York City’s program and the results of elections in the city where candidates of modest and diverse backgrounds often win elections, as well as the greater reliance on small donations by congressional candidates who are women and people of color.

Hochul's campaign for governor raised attention last year for setting fundraising records, ultimately taking in $57.7 million in 2021 and 2022 under the outgoing rules, which included no public match and higher contribution limits. Roughly a third of her donations during that time – almost 10,000 – were over the matchable threshold ($250) under the new system.

Part of the $14.5 million the Public Campaign Finance Board sought for its operations included expanding its staff capacity of auditors, trainers, and compliance officers from 64 members to 118. The board is also exploring software to support the program, which includes tracking hundreds of thousands of donations made to hundreds of candidate committees each cycle.

New York State's new program provides a 6-to-1 match on in-state campaign donations between $5 and $250 for statewide offices. That means a $250 donation to a candidate for governor could be worth $1,750. For state legislative offices the size of the match is smaller. Candidates must reach certain thresholds in fundraising in order to qualify for public funds.

State lawmakers approved the new opt-in program in 2020. The first elections it will be in effect are the 2024 races for State Senate and Assembly, followed by the 2026 elections, when Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Attorney General, Comptroller, and all 213 legislative seats will be on the ballot.

Senate Minority Leader Robert Ortt did not return requests for comment about the funding proposal.

“The governor’s Executive Budget sets a more reasonable budget number than what was formally requested, but that’s where ‘reason’ ends," said Assembly Minority Leader William Barclay in a statement to Gotham Gazette. "Whether it’s $29 million or $114 million, political campaigns are not the place to spend the public’s money. I hope the governor maintains some level of fiscal prudence as budget negotiations move forward.”

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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

Read more by this writer.

Governor Hochul Presents $227 Billion Executive Budget for Next Fiscal Year


Gov. Hochul presents budget details (photo: Mike Groll/Office of Governor Kathy Hochul)


Governor Kathy Hochul on Wednesday released a $227 billion Executive Budget, her proposal for the 2024 fiscal year, which begins April 1, including major initiatives on mental health, affordable housing, public safety, and investments in “the New York Dream” to support seniors, young adults, parents, veterans, entrepreneurs, and others.

“It's a thoughtful plan that furthers our progressive values and our priorities as New Yorkers, but also ensures fiscal responsibility,” said Hochul, a Democrat who just won her first term in the office, in her speech, delivered from the Capitol in Albany, where she was flanked by top aides. “Our $227 billion budget will include unprecedented investments in areas that will make a positive impact in people's lives, that'll make the New York Dream real, and as I said, make it safer, more affordable. more livable.”

Hochul’s budget, which will now become the focus of legislative hearings and negotiations with the Legislature’s two Democratic supermajorities, presented fiscal details behind the policy agenda she laid out in her State of the State speech on January 10. The overall state budget is $227 billion, an increase of $5.4 billion, or 2.4%, over the budget that was adopted last April. The proposed budget includes $125.2 million in state funds, an increase of $2.5 billion, or 2%, and $80.3 billion in federal operating funds, a decrease of $2.6 billion, or 3.1%.

Despite the after-effects of the pandemic, New York’s economy has performed better than expected. The state Division of Budget projects that tax receipts will be about $5.9 billion higher than projected in the mid-year budget update issued in November, leading to a total surplus of $8.7 billion by the end of the current fiscal year.

But tax collections that surged in recent years are expected to slow in the years ahead, and there are warnings of a recession looming on the horizon. With that in mind, about $5.3 billion of the end-year surplus will be used for deposits into state reserves over the next two fiscal years, bringing the level of reserves to 15% of state spending two years ahead of schedule. The reserves will stand at about $24 billion by the end of the current fiscal year, the highest level ever.

Most of the remaining surplus funds will be used for prepayments into next fiscal year and to address future budget gaps, according to a budget briefing book released by the governor’s office.

The state economy continues to face risks with jobs and wage growth slowing, a volatile stock market coming off a very bad 2022, and the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes to control inflation, which could cause a recession. Projected budget gaps remain significant for the years ahead – $5.7 billion in FY 2025, $9 billion in FY 2026, and $7.5 billion in FY 2027. According to the governor’s budget book, those gaps are largely because of an expected reduction of almost $21 billion in tax revenues between FYs 2025-2027.

Hochul is putting additional funding into the two biggest sections of the state budget, and without any of the cost controls watchdogs have called for: local education aid and Medicaid. Overall, the budget proposal includes $34.5 billion for school aid, an increase of $3.1 billion, or 10%, over the current budget. Hochul is proposing an overall Medicaid budget of about $103 billion, including $59 billion in federal funds, $34.8 billion in state spending, and $8.9 billion from local governments.

Among the major announcements in Hochul’s budget are a series of housing proposals under the governor's “New York Housing Compact;” proposed measures to stabilize the finances of the MTA; a $337 million plan to tackle gun violence; a $1 billion plan to help address the tens of thousands of migrant asylum seekers arriving in New York in the last year; $1 billion to increase mental health care beds; another $1 billion for other health care infrastructure; $1.3 billion for economic development initiatives; $5.5 billion to address climate change and environmental protection; and more.

The governor also proposed eliminating the charter school cap for New York City, a measure that she first vocally supported last year while debating her Republican opponent for governor, then-U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin, and support for which she has not explained.

Among other especially notable specifics, Hochul omitted a proposed replacement for the expired 421-a affordable housing tax credit, which expired last year and she unsuccessfully tried to replace with a new program. But she did include a proposal to extend a deadline by four years for completed buildings to receive 421-a credits, from 2026 to 2030.

Though Hochul again emphasized that she will not raise income taxes this year, she did propose an extension of a temporary corporate tax increase first approved in 2021 that was meant to expire by the end of the year. That extension, through the end of 2026, would raise as much as $810 million in the 2025 fiscal year, according to the budget book.

The budget now sets the stage for negotiations with the state Legislature over the next two months before the next fiscal year begins. The State Senate and Assembly will present their own one-house budget resolutions outlining their respective priorities and will examine the governor’s budget over a series of hearings, while backroom negotiations proceed between the Legislature and Executive. It also triggers negotiations with other major stakeholders like Mayor Eric Adams, who gave a mostly positive initial reaction to Hochul's budget and will testify before the Legislature on his state budget priorities on February 15.

Public Safety
“Number one priority always has been keeping New Yorkers safe, full stop,” Hochul said, touting decreases in murders, shootings, and subway crime. In all, spending on public safety agencies will increase from $7.8 billion to about $8.1 billion, per her proposal.

Hochul outlined the details of a $337 million plan to reduce gun violence including doubling funding for the Gun Involved Violence Elimination (GIVE) program to $36.4 million for 20 police departments outside of New York City, $37 million for youth employment programs in GIVE jurisdictions, $1 million to help establish a dedicated Crime Analysis Center in New York City, $70 million for communities to respond to the aftermath of gun violence, doubling funding for alternatives to incarceration programs to $31.4 million, tripling funding for reentry services to $11.5 million, $40 million to help district attorneys implement discovery reform and $40 million for local district attorneys to hire hundreds of prosecutors, $20 million for pretrial services, and more.

Hochul also advanced her controversial proposal to further amend the state’s bail laws by removing the “least restrictive means” standard that judges are mandated to use when setting bail. The governor’s proposal would only apply to “serious offenders,” she said, while the law would remain the same for lower-level offenses that are bail eligible. “I will not turn our backs on the progress that was made, but conflicting language in the law leads to confusion and a lack of accountability for the judges to make their determinations,” she said. “So let's just simply provide clarity.”

Last year, Hochul held up the budget as she sought changes to bail laws to give judges more discretion, particularly in cases involving gun crimes and repeat offenders. This year, she said in a press conference after the budget presentation, the scope of her proposals is much narrower. “What is glaring to us and anyone who looks at it closely is that our law has two different standards in it and we're just focusing on that,” she said.

Housing
In her State of the State, Hochul announced a new “Housing Compact” to build 800,000 homes over the next ten years through a series of policy measures that include changes to zoning regulations, tax incentives, and housing creation targets for local and regional housing growth. The strategy is meant to supplement her $25 billion housing program enacted last year that will directly build 100,000 units of affordable housing over a decade. On Wednesday, she presented the many items from that strategy, including some proposals that she had floated last year but abandoned in the face of opposition.

Among the more controversial ideas is her proposal to essentially override localities that fail or refuse to meet housing growth targets, by mandating that developments be approved within a set time frame if they meet certain affordability criteria or allowing developers to initiate fast-track appeals to a new State Housing Approval Board or the courts. The measure is already being met with opposition from suburban lawmakers who rejected Hochul’s efforts to pursue much-needed housing growth last year.

Under her other proposals, the state will also promote “transit-oriented” development by requiring rezoning for higher density near MTA rail stations, streamline zoning regulations, increase the Floor-Area-Ratio (FAR) cap in New York City, expand the number of commercial buildings eligible for conversion to residential use (and new tax incentives to encourage that conversion), grant New York City the authority to legalize basement units, expand an existing property tax exemption to Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs), create a new local option property tax exemption for multifamily affordable housing, and more.

In her speech, Hochul also outlined additional investments that included a $250 million Infrastructure Support Fund for projects that support housing creation, a $20 million Planning Assistance Fund for localities, a $40 million fund for lead inspection for rental properties, and more.

“The bottom line is, the more houses we build, you increase housing stock, the prices go down,” she said. “It's called supply and demand. And then New Yorkers get what they deserve: options, opportunities.”

Mental Health
The governor’s budget proposal increases spending on the state’s mental health and hygiene system to $10.5 billion, an increase of $709 million, or 7.2%.

In her speech and the budget book, Hochul outlined both expense and capital allocations for the state mental health system. That includes a $1 billion investment to bring 1,000 inpatient psychiatric beds into use, including 850 beds previously taken offline and 150 new beds; $10 million to expand school-based mental health services; an additional $15 million investment in housing for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities; $60 million to fund the expansion of the state’s crisis center network to support people who use the 988 Crisis Hotline; $10 million in grants for suicide prevention programs targeting high-risk youth; and more.

Hochul also announced several measures to tackle the opioid epidemic. “We'll examine every possible solution to this crisis, and treat people experiencing addiction as people who are human beings who just need our help,” she said.

The governor also announced a 2.5% Cost Of Living Adjustment (COLA) for human
services providers and $38 million to support minimum wage increases, including her proposal to index the minimum wage to inflation, for staff at programs run by state mental health agencies.

Other Health Care
In the budget, the governor included a new $1 billion investment in health care infrastructure, building on a $20 billion multi-year investment she first enacted last year. But the budget book notes that there is still uncertainty around growing Medicaid costs, which is the largest aspect of the budget. The state projects spending $1.6 billion more than expected on Medicaid because of increasing enrollment in the current fiscal year – enrollment is expected to be about 7.78 million people this year, according to the executive budget financial plan. “That's a concern of ours very much,” Hochul acknowledged at the press conference. “The escalation of costs for Medicaid, especially if you look at the outyears, it's rather dramatic.”

Enrollment is projected to fall to 6.9 million people in the next fiscal year, and 6.5 million people by the 2025 fiscal year.

The budget does include other major health care proposals including expanding the state’s Essential Plan coverage; expanding Medicaid coverage of preventative health services, expanding access to primary care; $379 million to provide a reimbursement rate increase to hospitals, nursing homes, and assisted living providers; and more.

Child Care
The governor’s budget continues the $7.6 billion, four-year child care investment she enacted last year, and includes several new child care initiatives such as instant eligibility for parents who already receive other public benefits, lower child care co-pays, increasing the income eligibility for families to receive free child care, and 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave for state employees.

Education
The executive budget's $34.5 billion for school aid is an increase of $3.1 billion, or 10%, over the current year. That increase includes a $2.7 billion increase in Foundation Aid, fully funding it for the first time, and a $392 million increase in other school aid programs. About $250 million of the increase in Foundation Aid will be dedicated to high-impact tutoring programs.

The growth in education funding includes $20 million for new Smart Scholars Early College High School (ECHS) or Pathways in Technology Early College High School (P-TECH) programs, $10 million over two years for the high school-college-workforce pipeline, and more.

One of the major investments is an additional $125 million to expand full-day prekindergarten programs for four-year-olds – for an overall $1.2 billion annually – which will create about 17,500 new seats. The new funding would bring the state to 95% of universal prekindergarten coverage, according to the briefing book.

The governor also proposed an elimination of the cap on charter schools in New York City. There are currently 460 charter schools permitted statewide, including a cap of 290 in New York City, which was met in 2020. Hochul wants to do away with the city’s cap, thus allowing dozens of unused charters to be awarded to operators in the five boroughs. Another proposal would permanently authorize the reissuance of so-called “zombie charters” that were previously issued but where the schools have closed sometime since 2015. This would make available another roughly 19-21 charters.

Charter school proponents hailed the governor’s support for eliminating the city cap.
“A budget is a reflection of priorities – and with this budget proposal, Governor Hochul has proven that she prioritizes the voices and needs of students and families first,” said James Merriman, CEO of the New York City Charter School Center.

But the proposal was quickly criticized by some legislators, including those who chair education committees or have focused on education issues. State Senators Shelley Mayer, John Liu, and Robert Jackson said in a statement that they were “deeply disturbed and disappointed” by the idea. “By removing the geographic restrictions for charter authorization, NYC could see an increase of more than 100 new charter schools. This will further increase the financial burden on NYC traditional public schools, taking much-needed resources away from schools serving the vast majority of our children,” they said.

The MTA
The MTA has been kept afloat through the pandemic with billions in federal aid. But the agency has continued to have structural deficits, both pre-existing long-term fiscal challenges and additional gaps given ridership still far below pre-pandemic levels. The MTA has previously predicted that it would need to take several steps, including increasing fares and tolls by 5.5% later this year, to meet its budget shortfall should the state not step in with additional aid.

On Wednesday, the governor finally addressed the MTA’s fiscal woes in her budget. Her plan for the agency includes finding $400 million in operating efficiencies, $800 in additional revenue through a marginal increase in the Payroll Mobility Tax, $500 million in increased contributions from New York City, and $300 million in one-time state aid. The governor also proposed that the MTA should receive a share of the $1.5 billion in licensing fees from the issuing of three new casino licenses in downstate New York and between $462 and $826 million in projected annual casino tax revenue that will begin to flow in 2026. In addition, the state is also putting $150 million towards more MTA safety personnel as part of the governor’s public safety plan also aimed at increasing ridership.

Pursuing $500 million from New York City for the MTA could prove a controversial ask of Mayor Adams and city-based legislators. “The city annually contributes approximately $2 billion to the MTA in direct and in-kind contributions and, while we recognize the significant fiscal challenges the MTA faces, we are concerned that this increased commitment could further strain our already-limited resources,” Adams said in a statement Wednesday.

New York City Comptroller Brad Lander similarly pushed back against the governor’s proposal. “Just as the shift to remote and hybrid work hit the MTA’s farebox revenues, so too it hit the City’s commercial property tax revenues and redistributed them to the rest of the region,” he said in a statement. “Rather than fare hikes, an increased share of payroll taxes, revenue from new casinos, and the implementation of congestion pricing are the right ways to replace farebox revenue and make long-overdue upgrades to ancient signal technology and repairs. The State should not stick the City with the bill to sustain our regional public transit system.”

Migrant Assistance
More than 42,000 migrant asylum seekers have arrived in New York City over the last year, according to estimates from Mayor Adams’ office, straining the city’s ability to provide shelter and other services. The mayor and other officials have repeatedly called for additional funding to meet those needs, mostly from the federal government but also from the state.

The governor, on Wednesday, seemed to heed that call as she proposed spending $1 billion on service and resettlement efforts. But her proposal involves the city, state, and federal governments each taking on a third of the costs. “The Budget creates a framework for the financial burden of such services to be evenly split between the levels of government,” the budget book reads.

Environment and Climate Change
Hochul announced several major climate programs and funding initiatives in her speech. Among them is a Cap-and-Invest program, which will cap emissions statewide and require major greenhouse gas emitters and heating and transportation fuel distributors to purchase allowances for their emissions. The emissions cap will be reduced annually, as the state attempts to reach the targets set under the Climate Leadership and Community Protection ACt of 2019, which sets the state on a path to cutting economy-wide emissions by 40% by 2030 and by 85% by 2050.

The governor also announced a $500 million investment in clean water infrastructure, $400 million for the state Environmental Protection Fund,  $400 for utility relief and energy retrofits for homeowners,  $200 million to improve state parks, and support for passage of the Waste Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act to increase recycling rates. The budget also includes the new Climate Action Fund, which will distribute more than $1 billion annually raised from the Cap-and-Invest program.

The governor also announced support for legislation to ban fossil fuel equipment in new construction, phase out fossil fuel heating equipment in existing buildings, and more.

Capital Budget
The budget also includes a $95 billion five-year capital plan to fund infrastructure such as the governor’s $25 billion housing program and the Department of Transportation’s $32.8 billion overall program.

It will fund new initiatives including $890 million for 2,150 new psychiatric residential beds for people with mental illness, $2 billion for CUNY and SUNY, $100 million to buy and renovate a new forensic laboratory, an additional $80 million for the renovation for a new State Emergency Operations Center, $1.7 billion for the reconstruction of the Wadsworth Center public health labs, $200 million for the EmPower Plus program to help low-income homeowners make their homes energy efficient, $500 million for clean water infrastructure, $1 billion for health care infrastructure, $200 million for parks and recreation, $845 million in new economic and community development funding, $455 million for the redevelopment of Belmont Racetrack, and more.

Reactions
“In the midst of an unprecedented affordability crisis, the Governor presented a state budget that continues to tax and spend without providing any real relief to struggling New York families and businesses,” said Republican State Senator Rob Ortt, the Senate minority leader, in a statement. “New York is facing a public safety crisis, and yet, there was no specific plan to fix the state’s disastrous bail laws. Instead of presenting solutions to make New York more affordable, this budget adds billions of dollars in new spending and imposes a new payroll tax that will hurt downstate New York businesses.”

Mayor Adams said in his statement that there were “many victories worth celebrating” in the governor’s budget, including her support for New Yorkers with serious mental illnesses, housing solutions, and public safety proposals.

But, he noted, “There are also areas of uncertainty that will require deeper review.” He said he wanted to see more detail on her proposal to aid with the asylum seeker crisis, and also expressed concern that her call for $500 million in additional city funding for the MTA “could further strain our already-limited resources.”

Kathryn Wylde, President & CEO of the Partnership for New York City, which represents the largest businesses in New York, praised the governor’s budget proposal, particularly the plans to address the state’s housing shortage and mental health crisis. “In this new era of remote work, and federal restrictions on foreign immigration, New York must focus resources on what it will take to make the city and state more affordable and attractive for workers and employers. The Executive Budget seeks to advance that agenda,” Wylde said in a statement.

Fiscal watchdogs praised the governor for adding more funding to reserves, even as they pointed to the economic risks that lie ahead.

State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli said in a statement he was “pleased” with the additional deposits to the rainy day fund. “Robust increases to reserves will better prepare us for future downturns and challenges,” he said, as he highlighted the uncertainty from high inflation, the state’s lagging job recovery and depleting federal aid.

He also expressed concern about the state’s debt burden, and has proposed a debt reform plan that he said will “impose meaningful limits on debt and ban backdoor borrowing.”

“While the reserve deposits help buttress New York against a recession,” said Andrew Rein, president of nonprofit Citizens Budget Commission, in a statement, “the budget also extends the temporary business tax surcharge and adds money for recurring programs without offsetting savings to support them in the future, setting the stage for potential future service cuts and unfortunately extending our nation-leading combined corporate tax rates.”

“The Governor’s proposal usually sets the floor in negotiations with the Legislature,” Rein added. “All New York State leaders should focus not just on today, but on protecting generations of New Yorkers from a future downturn and self-made fiscal crises arising from unaffordable spending or counter-productive taxes.”

There were a variety of other mixed reactions, including several advocacy groups who were disappointed with omissions from the governor’s budget.

Michael Zurlo, president of the New York State Association of Counties, took issue with a proposal in the budget that would allow the state to pocket Enhanced Federal Medical Assistance Program (eFMAP) funds meant for localities, shifting a $1 billion burden to local taxpayers. "At a time when New York is facing an affordability crisis, the last thing the Governor should do is burden local taxpayers with more costs that will drive up the cost of homeownership and rent, increase business expenses and make New York more unaffordable," he said in a statement.

“Governor Hochul’s executive budget for FY24 makes some strides but does not go far enough to meaningfully support immigrant New Yorkers, at a time of unprecedented need in our state,” said Murad Awawdeh, Executive Director of the nonprofit New York Immigration Coalition, in a statement. He particularly pointed to failure to fund legal services for immigrants in immigration court and to expand health coverage regardless of immigration status.

Reinvent Albany, a good government advocacy group, pointed to several issues with the governor's budget including, but not limited to, insufficient funds for the new public campaign financing program, no policy improvements or funding increases for the Freedom of Information Law process, and increased business subsidies that have failed to work in the past. "We are dismayed that the Governor is doubling down on billions in totally discredited business subsidies while cutting and freezing other state agencies and programs. Either her advisors are badly misinformed or her administration is totally cynical and swimming in pay to play," the group said in a response. 

They also noted that some questions remain unanswered. "Unfortunately, the Governor does not clearly show the public the high future cost of her proposals like increasing the Film/TV subsidy to $700 million a year, nor answer big questions like how the State is paying back the $9 billion federal Unemployment Insurance loan," they said. 

The New York League of Conservation Voters praised the governor's many climate and environment-related proposals including a new Cap and Invest program, investments in public transit, the Waste Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act, banning emissions in new construction, funding for energy affordability and home retrofits, and more. "The Governor’s 2023 budget proposal is a forward-thinking approach to addressing the pressing environmental challenges we face. We look forward to working with the governor and state legislature in the coming year to see these priorities to fruition," the group said in a statement. 

Among the items that weren’t in the budget was a measure to allow a “vacancy reset” for rent-regulated apartments that have been unoccupied and are in need of major repairs. New York City landlord groups, led by the Community Housing Improvement Program, say that the proposal is crucial to fund necessary repairs to thousands of dilapidated vacant units. 

"CHIP is having productive conversations with the governor's office and dozens of state lawmakers as we work to find a solution that would bring vacant rent-stabilized apartments back online,” said Jay Martin, Executive Director of CHIP, in a statement. “While a fix was not in the governor's initial budget proposal, we are optimistic that one will be in the final budget that passes.”

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

Read more by this writer.

Note - this article has been updated with a section on the governor's climate proposals and additional reactions to her budget. 

What's Next for New York's New State Campaign Finance System?


Voters at the polls (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)


New York State's new public campaign finance program is preparing to award as much as $100 million in matching funds over the 2023-24 election cycle when the entire State Legislature will again be on the ballot.

The bi-partisan Public Campaign Finance Board, part of the State Board of Elections, is seeking $114.5 million in the next state budget to fund the new voluntary matching program during its first election cycle. Most of the funding would go toward candidate campaigns who meet requirements for public matching dollars, while it would also help the organization grow into a fully-fledged agency of 118 staff members.

The program, which lawmakers passed in 2020 and went into effect immediately after the general election this past November, lowers limits on individual contributions to statewide and state legislative candidates, and establishes various public matches on in-state or in-district donations between $5 and $250. The program is somewhat modeled after New York City's lauded public funds program. It is intended to increase the influence of everyday campaign donors against the massive sums that mega-donors and SuperPACS pour into elections.

Governor Kathy Hochul is set to present her executive budget on Wednesday, which will tee off two months of negotiations with the State Legislature ahead of the April 1 start of the next fiscal year. Hochul, a Democrat just elected to her first full term, raised record sums under the old system, with its higher contribution limits and no public match.

"Governor Hochul included funding for the public campaign finance program in her first budget and we will release details of the Executive Budget later this week," wrote spokesperson Hazel Crampton-Hays in an email to Gotham Gazette. Hochul made no mention of the new program in her State of the State address in January or the accompanying 275-page agenda booklet.

Last year, Hochul and the Legislature allocated $20.6 million to the program, including $10 million for matching funds, which advocates for the program saw as a gesture of support for the newly passed system. That budget gave the Public Campaign Finance Board's seven members the authority to hire 64 staffers. The board’s membership includes the four members of the bipartisan State Board of Elections and three commissioners appointed by Hochul, the Legislature's Democratic majority, and the Republican minority. That included bi-partisan co-executive directors, deputy directors, and counsel, as well as auditors, candidate liaisons, administrators, and enforcement staff, according to a State Board of Elections spokesperson.

The Public Campaign Finance Board has been busy conducting training for candidates, registering campaign committees, and setting regulations.

Now it is pivoting from laying the groundwork to launching the program.

Ten candidates have already registered committees for the 2024 state legislative elections. For the 2026 statewide elections, the lone registrant is Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli's campaign.

In a budget resolution passed in December, the Public Campaign Finance Board approved the $114.5 million budget request, which would cover personnel, capital spending, and a $100 million public matching fund. The Public Campaign Finance Board "has reviewed private reports and conducted internal forecasting" to reach the $100 million estimate for payments in the following fiscal year, according to the resolution.

The board is also exploring software and other infrastructure to support the hundreds of candidates running for governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, comptroller, and the 213 seats in the State Legislature. More training resources, including a handbook for candidates, are coming soon, according to the Public Campaign Finance Board website.

Joanna Zdanys, senior counsel at NYU Law School's Brennan Center for Justice, urged Albany leaders to include the Public Campaign Finance Board’s full request in the state budget.

“The $114.5 million that the Public Campaign Finance Board has requested is a reasonable down payment on a stronger, more inclusive democracy for New York," said Zdanys, in a statement to Gotham Gazette.

"The funding will help the PCFB to assist campaigns in participating and complying with the voluntary program, including by hiring additional candidate liaisons on staff and implementing software improvements," she wrote.

The Public Campaign Finance Board has yet to publish a calendar of payment dates and matching claims schedules for the 2024 cycle. According to the State Board of Elections, candidates in the program will use the same filing schedule as non-participating candidates, with the addition of periodic required filings in March of 2024.

Candidates for statewide office can receive a 6-to-1 match for every in-state contribution between $5 and $250. For example, a qualifying $5 contribution would give a candidate $30 in matching funds.

Candidates for state legislative offices may receive between 12-to-1 matches and 8-to-1 matches for qualifying small-dollar contributions, depending on the size of the donation up to $250. Donations from corporations, lobbyists, and campaign vendors are not eligible to be matched, but there is no barrier on matching donations from people with state business, unlike New York City's program. The campaign finance law sets qualifying thresholds for who is eligible to receive public funds and limits on how much they can get.

In order to qualify, candidates for governor must raise $500,000 from 5,000 New York donors. Candidates for comptroller and attorney general must raise $100,000 from 1,000 in-state donors. Candidates for State Senate must raise $12,000 from 150 in-district donors and Assembly candidates have to take in $6,000 from 75 in-district donors.

Fair Elections for New York, a coalition of hundreds of organizations including the Brennan Center, also called on Hochul to fulfill the Public Campaign Finance Board’s budget request.

"Candidates and voters alike will need to learn how the matching system works and how to participate, and the agency must have funding for the staff and infrastructure to make that possible," the group wrote in a statement in December. "These funds will also be essential for candidate and small donor confidence in the program’s viability."

Two weeks earlier, State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli and State Board of Elections Commissioner Douglas Kellner, both Democrats, joined members of the coalition for a rally at New York City Hall to bring attention to the launch of the new system. “New York’s new public campaign finance program will eliminate barriers and level the playing field for good, qualified people to run for public office,” DiNapoli said at the time. “It will help get big money out of elections and better ensure New Yorkers are put first."

The Senate and Assembly Democratic majorities did not return requests for comment on funding the new program.

The Legislature's Republican minority leaders balked at the PCFB's funding request. “It comes as no surprise that New York’s public campaign finance system is going to be expensive," said Assembly Minority Leader William Barclay in a statement to Gotham Gazette. "Taxpayers should not be forced to fund political campaigns. They don’t need their money being spent on political consultants, mailers or advertisements. I’ve been opposed to this idea from the beginning, and if it comes with a $114.5 million price tag, it gets even less appealing.”

"While New Yorkers endure a crime and affordability crisis, Albany Democrats are focused on forcing taxpayers to foot the bill for their political campaigns," Senate Minority Leader Robert Ortt said in a statement.

On Monday, Brennan Center and the national government transparency group OpenSecrets published a study applying the parameters of the new system to the most recent 2022 elections. The study estimated the public match would have increased the share of small donations (less than $250) in state legislative races from 11% to 67% of all donations. For state races, that number could increase from 6% to 41%.

The researchers found that the 200 biggest contributors to candidates in 2022 gave nearly $16 million in donations, more than the 206,000 individuals who gave donations of $250 or less. Those sums are also dwarfed by the tens of millions of dollars in outside SuperPAC spending.

Citizens Action of New York, a progressive grassroots advocacy group and a member of the Fair Elections coalition, has conducted trainings to get the word out. "Our trainings raise awareness about the PCFP [Public Campaign Finance Board] and encourage candidates to opt into this groundbreaking program," wrote organizer Karen Wharton, in an email to Gotham Gazette. "Information is key."

Ben Weinberg, director of policy at the good government group Citizens Union, another coalition member, noted that participation in New York City's program has become "ubiquitous among new candidates and incumbents of all backgrounds and parties."

The progressive Working Families Party, which endorsed Public Advocate Jumaane Williams against Hochul in the Democratic gubernatorial primary last year, where he was massively out-raised and -spent, is also backing the $114.5 million request in its legislative agenda this year.

“New York can counteract the corrosive influence of dark money and empower everyday New Yorkers through its new small donor matching program," wrote WFP Director Sochie Nnaemeka, in a statement in January. "To ensure the long-term success of the program, we’re calling on our state leaders to allocate the $114.5 million requested by the Public Campaign Finance Board to sustain this groundbreaking public financing system."

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by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

Read more by this writer.

Note: Gotham Gazette is an independent publication of Citizens Union Foundation, sister organization of Citizens Union.

NYCHA Repeatedly Missed Local Hiring Requirements, Costing Residents Jobs and Income


Work at NYCHA (photo: Demetrius Freeman/Mayoral Photography Office)


This article is published in partnership with New York Focus
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When Hurricane Sandy landed in New York City in 2012, it hit public housing hard. The sprawling Red Hook Houses, on the Brooklyn waterfront, lost power for weeks. And the recovery was slow: major renovations didn’t start until almost five years after the storm. When the federal dollars finally came in, though, they spelled a big economic opportunity — more than $500 million worth

“I saw the money as an opportunity for the neighborhood to eat,” said Karen Blondel, a longtime resident and tenant advocate at Red Hook Houses. That promise was backed up by a law known as Section 3, which requires a portion of jobs created by federal housing funds to go to low-income local residents. 

But that’s not how things played out. “When I looked out the window at the actual workers, none of them live in public housing,” Blondel said, speaking to New York Focus shortly before the 10-year anniversary of Sandy. 

Data provided by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) to federal authorities bear out her concern. 

Annual reports NYCHA submitted to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) from 2016 to 2020 — obtained by New York Focus through a freedom-of-information request — show that the authority has often missed its Section 3 targets by large margins, particularly when it comes to construction and renovation work.

“To see such a huge job and not see as many people as I thought should have been working or getting training was very disappointing,” Blondel said of the Red Hook restoration. 

Until late 2020, Section 3 held that — “to the greatest extent feasible” — at least 30 percent of workers NYCHA hired should be low-income local residents, with public housing tenants getting priority. Similar benchmarks applied to outsourced work: Section 3 specified that at least 10 percent of construction contracts, and 3 percent of non-construction contracts, should go to qualifying Section 3 businesses. 

A Trump administration rule change in late 2020 loosened those criteria, shifting the benchmark to 25 percent of labor hours for all projects and removing the explicit preference for public housing tenants. But for the period covered by NYCHA’s reports — the most recent the authority was able to provide — the earlier criteria were in place. And NYCHA, in many cases, failed to meet them. 

From 2016 to 2020, no more than 0.3 percent of NYCHA construction contracts went to Section 3 businesses in any given year. NYCHA also fell afoul of the targets for direct hiring, despite starting off on a strong foot. In 2016 and 2017, it reported that virtually all the workers it hired for repairs qualified under Section 3. The next year — as overall hiring jumped — the Section 3 share plummeted to just 16 percent. It continued to decline through 2020. 

Some tenant leaders say they’re not surprised NYCHA has missed its targets.

“I believe it to be a steady doughnut” — a zero, said Manny Martinez, resident council president for South Jamaica Houses, of the authority’s Section 3 contracting rate. NYCHA’s self-reported figures for construction contracts match that description. 

Martinez has lived in the South Jamaica development nearly his whole life, and feels residents like him have been robbed of economic opportunities they were promised under Section 3. Had NYCHA met its targets, nearly $250 million more in contracts would have gone to local residents over five years, according to New York Focus analysis of the authority’s reports. 

“That investment alone…would have made these communities much different than what we currently are,” Martinez said.  

New York City Council Member Alexa Avilés, chair of the Council’s public housing committee, said she has heard similar concerns from many residents.

The figures NYCHA reported “are not a surprise, but they are still upsetting,” she said. 

“The mandate is right,” Avilés continued. “The public dollars should be supporting the training and hiring of residents of public housing...There should be real opportunities there that are being squandered.” 

NYCHA said it is taking steps to hire more residents, despite a long list of constraints. 

“NYCHA is committed to providing employment and training opportunities to public housing residents under the Section 3 initiative and have made several improvements… to meet this goal,” said spokesperson Nekoro Gomes by email. “HUD and the Federal Monitor have both recognized the effort we’ve put in to improving capital project delivery and these measures will serve to improve the capacity of this vital program.” 

Gomes highlighted the Section 3 rates NYCHA reported for day-to-day operations and non-construction contracts, which usually met or exceeded the HUD benchmarks. 

But “capital” work — meaning one-time renovations or repairs — was by far the biggest source of new jobs, and NYCHA’s reported numbers suggest that efforts to hire within its own community slipped down the list of priorities.

In part, NYCHA’s trouble keeping up with Section 3 reflects another urgent need: an enormous, and mounting, backlog of repairs. Entire developments have gone days or even weeks without heat or hot water; months without cooking gas; and years without remediation of hazardous lead, mold, and asbestos. 

“They’re just floundering trying to do what they can to keep the buildings running,” said Iziah Thompson, senior policy analyst at the Community Service Society (CSS), an advocacy and research nonprofit that often focuses on NYCHA. “In the ideal world, you want them to be a provider of housing and a provider of job training. But [they] did the housing part first, I think, and I don’t blame them for focusing on that.”

The sharp drop in NYCHA’s Section 3 hiring rate in 2018 partly reflects a surge in hiring overall, essentially of construction and building trades workers needed to address those long overdue repairs. Between federally funded Sandy recovery efforts and general repairs required under a 2019 agreement with HUD, NYCHA hired thousands of workers. 

That may have gotten more repairs done — but rarely by tenants themselves. And jobs remain an equally pressing need for many public housing residents.

NYCHA developments and their surrounding neighborhoods have some of the highest unemployment rates in the city, which in turn faces higher unemployment than the country as a whole. In sections of East New York and the South Bronx where NYCHA developments are most concentrated, Census five-year estimates put unemployment at 15 percent or more. The city average is half that

Unemployment rates within NYCHA developments may be even higher. CSS’s latest complete survey of public housing residents, conducted in 2021, found that some 22 percent were out of a job, with the highest rates among Black and Latino residents. 

If Section 3 had been implemented to its full extent when big federal funds came in, the picture would look much different, said Keith Swiney, president of the Section 3 compliance firm Motivation Inc. and a national expert on the law. 

“You’d have residents riding around in Bentleys right now,” Swiney said. 

Section 3 had its origins in the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, a capstone of the civil rights era. The law sought not only to provide low-income people with decent housing, but to give them jobs building and maintaining those homes — the key goal enshrined in Section 3. 

“Public Works, Not Charity: Black Houses, Black Jobs,” read the title of one article about the law, published that summer in Commonweal magazine and reproduced in the congressional record

Though Section 3 has been tweaked in the decades since, its core principle stands: housing authorities and developers that receive federal subsidies must make their best efforts to ensure that a portion of the jobs they create go to low-income local residents. 

The country has never truly delivered on that principle, Swiney said. Agencies that go above and beyond the law’s mandate are a rare exception. But if anyone should be meeting their targets, he said, it should be NYCHA. As the country’s largest public housing agency, it has the power to set a national example.  

Swiney cautioned that NYCHA’s self-reported numbers should be taken with a grain of salt: the 100 percent Section 3 hiring rate it submitted to HUD in 2016, for example, was likely inflated by faulty accounting. On the flip side, the authority may actually have under-reported how many of its construction contracts qualified under Section 3, because it didn’t have the means to fully track that workforce. 

But the big picture remains the same: “What those folks didn’t get is actually a very palatable amount of economic lift,” Swiney said. 

Sandy was a case in point. In Red Hook, the lion’s share of the work went to companies like Adam’s European Contracting, Inc., a Greenpoint-based firm. According to a tracker published on NYCHA’s website, the company was awarded one of the single largest public housing contracts of the last decade — $380 million — for its restoration work in Red Hook, and more than $900 million altogether for NYCHA work since 2013. 

Adam’s did not respond to requests for comment. Its website notes that it is a woman-owned business, founded by a Polish immigrant, and that it works with a variety of unions to supply labor. 

Indeed, Section 3 is far from NYCHA’s only hiring criteria. The authority has also signed a project labor agreement (PLA) with the New York City Building and Construction Trades Council (BCTC), which requires that contractors hire almost all of their workers through union hiring halls. Martinez, the Queens tenant rep, said NYCHA has used this as an “excuse” to not bring more of its own residents into the fold.

“If these unions are demanding 100 percent union requirements, then either the union or the contractor has to start making room for these unqualified persons to get trained,” he said.

Swiney, the consultant, said there has historically been “a gigantic conflict” between Section 3 and organized labor. 

BCTC president Gary LaBarbera strongly disputed this characterization. 

“We do not view the PLA as an impediment, but as an opportunity,” LaBarbera said by email. “While labor unions do not hire workers directly, we use the PLA to ensure every worker on the job receives the same rate of pay, the same level of benefits, and the same security and protection as any other worker performing the same craft.” 

LaBarbera stressed that the building trades have worked with NYCHA to provide training and apprenticeships to residents, offering them a path to the middle class and promoting safety on the job. 

But Martinez said those opportunities have been “minuscule.” Thompson, of CSS, agreed that training opportunities have been inadequate, in part because tenant reps have not gotten a seat at the table when NYCHA negotiates collective bargaining agreements. 

Another hurdle arises from the way NYCHA carries out repairs: typically, piece by piece, focusing on elevators in one instance and roofs the next, for example. That need for specialized workers makes it all the more complicated to ensure that training syncs up with job openings. 

That could change if NYCHA were to undertake more comprehensive retrofits, Thompson said.

“The potential for a huge jobs program is there. The workforce is obviously there. But the case has to be made,” he said. 

The controversial Preservation Trust approved by state lawmakers last year could offer a test case: it promises some of the first full-scale retrofits to NYCHA’s buildings outside of the RAD-PACT system, which transfers buildings to private management. Better yet would be a direct infusion of federal funding, Thompson said — but with Build Back Better long dead and Republicans in control of the House, that can’t be counted on any time soon. 

In the meantime, the city and state both need to step up to make sure that NYCHA residents get both the repairs they need and the jobs that come with them, Avilés said. 

“We have to walk and chew gum at the same time,” she said. “While yes, we have to prioritize, we have limited resources — we cannot ignore one side of the ledger for the other. The residents deserve both.”

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This article is published in partnership with New York Focus

After Second Legislative Passage, New York State Equal Rights Amendment To Go Before Voters in 2024


Gov. Hochul signs abortion rights legislation (photo: Governor's Office)


Voters in the fall of 2024 will have a chance to enshrine civil rights protections for women, LGBTQ people, and abortion access into the state constitution after lawmakers on Tuesday pass the New York State Equal Rights Amendment for the second time.

If approved by voters, the state constitution will for the first time prohibit discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, national origin, disability, and sex, "including pregnancy and pregnancy outcomes, sexual orientation, gender expression.” The amendment's sponsors say those protections include reproductive rights, which would add New York to the minority of states that include access to abortion in their highest governing documents.

Though there is that final step to go, the victory for women's and LGBTQ rights advocates comes just after the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision and 100 years after Congress first introduced the Equal Right Amendment for women to the U.S. Constitution, which has never been ratified

New York would be part of a growing number of states to adopt an ERA in recent years. The amendment saw renewed interest last year, after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe and made abortion a top issue in state and federal elections across the country. The court’s conservative majority opinions have also raised concerns that the body may be open to reconsidering other established rights, including marriage equality and obtaining contraception. Twenty-two states have adopted some form of ERA, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, double the number in 2019.

The amendment would go further than the federal Equal Protections Clause by protecting against actions that have a discriminatory effect, regardless of intent, "thus providing a critical legal tool to dismantle acts that in effect perpetuate and/or result in inequality," according to a memo from State Senator Liz Krueger, a Manhattan Democrat and the resolution's sponsor. The amendment would be "self-executing," meaning it wouldn't require further implementing legislation in order to enforce it, if it is passed by voters this fall. That was a point of contention in previous iterations of the resolution and one of the reasons the State Senate and Assembly failed to agree on an ERA before 2022.

“On what would have been the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Senate Majority is delivering on the promise to pass for the second time the Equal Rights Amendment to ensure that New Yorkers get the opportunity to codify abortion in our state Constitution, and afford equal protection from discrimination to women, LGBTQI+ individuals and many more New Yorkers," said Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the first woman and first Black person to lead the chamber, in a statement.

"We will continue to focus on protecting our reproductive rights and enhancing protections for our abortion providers while expanding access to the full gamut of reproductive health services," Stewart-Cousins added.

The resolution is part of a reproductive rights package to pass in the Senate, which includes an abortion access grant fund called the Reproductive Freedom and Equity Program. With the exception of the ERA, the bills in the package either have yet to be introduced in the Assembly or remain in committee.

"Today, we passed the Equality Amendment for the second time, which, if approved by the people, would enshrine in our constitution expanded protections for the civil rights of New Yorkers and ensure that no one is denied the opportunity to fully participate in society on the basis of their identity," Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie said in a statement.

"Women have waited far too long to be included in our State Constitution,” Senator Krueger said in a statement, “but so have LGBTQ people, people with disabilities, Latinos, and everyone who has faced discrimination based on characteristics that are beyond their control.”

Assembly Member Rebecca Seawright, another Manhattan Democrat and the resolution's prime sponsor in her chamber, echoed that sentiment. "We are closer than ever to enshrining a woman’s right to choose and equality protections against discrimination in the most important governing document of our state," she said in a statement to Gotham Gazette.

“While New York has a robust set of anti-discrimination statutes, our state Constitution is inadequate when it comes to ensuring equality,” said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), in a statement to Gotham Gazette. “Next November, New Yorkers will be able to demand the lasting protections of a constitutional amendment that would prohibit discrimination against groups who have been historically targeted."

The fervor that erupted last year around the overturning of Roe and other rulings by the conservative Supreme Court pushed the Legislature's Democratic supermajorities to act quickly to come to an agreement on its provisions in the waning days of legislative session last year.

State constitutional amendments must be passed in two consecutive legislative terms and then be approved by voters in a referendum. Tuesday's vote marks the ERA's second passage. New Yorkers casting ballots in the fall of 2024 will be able to vote to approve or disapprove the ERA.

Democrats' have had a mixed record on ballot questions in recent years with the passage of recent environmental protection measures but failure of high profile electoral and redistricting amendments. Lawmakers are expected to put the question on the ballot in the fall of 2024, seeking to avoid leaving the ERA’s fate up to voters in the off-year 2023 election, where there will be few races on the ballot, turnout will be lower and approval less certain.

2024 will be a high-turnout presidential election year, with many other races on the ballot as well.

"We will enshrine these rights, not just in law, but in the Constitution of the State of New York with ERA, and we're going to do it again," Governor Kathy Hochul said at a press conference organized by Planned Parenthood in the Legislative Office Building in Albany ahead of the vote Tuesday. "We're not going to finish until we get that over the finish line. We're not going to stop."

Hochul, New York's first female governor, included passing the ERA in her State of the State agenda this year along with other protections for people seeking abortions. Those would include personal data protections for abortion seekers, authorizing pharmacists to prescribe abortion medication and contraception, and allowing SUNY and CUNY health care centers to provide medication abortions.

"Here in New York, we will continue to take bold measures to protect the rights of New Yorkers, and I applaud the New York State Legislature for taking another crucial step toward enshrining the Equal Rights Amendment into the state constitution," the governor said in a statement after the resolution passed Tuesday. "Last year, I was proud to convene an Extraordinary Session of the legislature that led to first passage of this historic amendment, and I am grateful the amendment is on its way to being presented to voters next year."

***
by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

Read more by this writer.

Max Politics Podcast: Roberto Ramírez on Hector LaSalle's Nomination for Chief Judge and Latino Representation in New York


A rally in support of Hector LaSalle for Chief Judge (photo: Don Pollard/Governor's Office)


January 24, 2023 - Max Politics Podcast: Roberto Ramírez on Hector LaSalle's Nomination to Become Chief Judge and Latino Representation in New York

Roberto Ramírez — a founding partner and political strategist at The MirRam Group, a former Assemblymember, Bronx Democratic Party leader, and advisor on Freddy Ferrer's mayoral campaigns — joined the show to discuss Hector LaSalle's nomination to be the next Chief Judge of New York, Latino representation at the highest levels of government, and more. 

Listen to the conversation and let us know what you think, on Twitter @TweetBenMax. You can listen to the show through the embedded audio below or download the episode wherever you get your podcasts at Max Politics.

Read more: Max Politics Podcast: Roberto Ramírez on Hector LaSalle's Nomination for Chief Judge and Latino...



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