Albany pols set budget plans, prepare for talks with Hochul
State lawmakers were finalizing responses to Gov. Hochul’s budget plan with blueprints of their own on Monday night, hammering out plans to protect tenants and pump more money into schools.
The proposals, from the state Senate and Assembly, were each expected to pledge the same amount of funding for the city’s migrant crisis as the governor’s blueprint, according to three people with knowledge of the plans.
In her budget proposal, Hochul had included a $2.4 billion investment in migrant funding for the city, a year-over-year increase of $500 million that the governor cast as a lifeline to the city in a time of need.
But last month, Mayor Adams visited Albany and told lawmakers that the $2.4 billion was not enough to ensure the city would be able to stave off budget cuts as it spends billions to shelter nearly 65,000 asylum seekers, according to city estimates. The city projects it will spend $10 billion by summer 2025 on migrant care.
Barring a shift in negotiations, it does not appear the mayor’s calls made an imprint on any of three budget proposals.
The introduction of the two legislative proposals marks the next step in the annual pushand-pull between the centrist Democratic governor and the left-leaning state Legislature.
The governor and lawmakers are working against an April 1 deadline to complete a budget for the next fiscal year. Last year, they blew through their deadline, only reaching an agreement after a monthlong delay.
But this year, the governor has charted a more cautious course, avoiding the bruising bail reform fights and housing-creation mandate proposals that slowed down negotiations a year ago.
In January, Hochul unveiled a $233 billion budget proposal that also satisfied a series of requests from Adams, including a fouryear extension of mayoral control of city schools.
The governor’s plan rankled suburban and upstate communities by adjusting the formula for school funding distribution, ending a policy that ensures schools receive at least as much state funding as in the prior year, regardless of enrollment declines.
Both the Senate and the Assembly proposals would restore the policy called “hold harmless.”
Hochul’s budget blueprint could also shortchange New York City by an estimated $130 million
by using a different inflation metric, according to officials.
The Senate and Assembly countered with proposals that would restore any cuts to school funding and would not extend New York City mayoral control through the budget. City mayors have controlled the city’s schools since 2002.
On housing, the Senate outlined a proposal to build new housing on state-owned land, offering a spin on an apparently similar plan to one that Hochul had offered in her budget.
Both would repurpose state land, but the lawmakers’ plan is modeled off mid-20th-century legislation that created the socalled Mitchell-Lama program, which created rental and co-op housing for mid-income families.
The original Mitchell-Lama program, crafted by state Sen. MacNeil Mitchell and Assemblyman Alfred Lama, produced more than 250 developments and upward of 100,000 units. The Senate branded its new program “Mitchell-Lama 2.0.”
Hochul has proposed pouring $500 million in state funding into a program aimed at building 15,000 units on state-owned land. It is unclear if the housing would be exclusively aimed at middle-income residents under the plan. After night fell on the state Capitol on Monday night, the Legislature’s proposals were still coming into view, and neither chamber had released their blueprints in their entirety. But it seemed a sure bet that the governor would be spending the coming weeks pushing lawmakers to limit the scope of their ambition.
“Since the beginning of time, governors come in low, and I think legislators like to come in high,” Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, a Bronx Democrat, said after the governor released her plan in January. “We’ll just see where we end up.”