Getting them to budge(t)

Another day, another missed budget deadline in Albany. The legal April 1 date became the temporary April 4 date. Those are both history and they’ll aim for next week. Yeah, yeah, we’ve heard it before: “A good budget is more important than a timely budget.” Why can’t it be both? Already gone from the mix is Gov. Hochul’s noble effort to bring some rationality to school funding. Election-year legislators killed that.

Will a real housing plan emerge from this morass? This is the crisis that undergirds so many New York crises. Lawmakers already failed to maintain the 421a tax exemption or introduce a new one, slowing the pace of affordable housing development that the majority claim to want. When Hochul last year set forth a truly bold plan to meet the moment on housing construction, legislative leaders strangled it in the crib.

Now, it’s not enough to just throw in some poorly executed exemption and call it a day; legislators should tailor it specifically to the needs of the state and NYC in particular, meaning a bit of flexibility and incentives for developers not only to build housing in moderate and relatively high income bands but for the New Yorkers squeezed the most, those at the lowest income brackets.

Will the honorable members agree to close down the thousands of illegal pot shops? That is a necessity from the Legislature’s stunningly half-baked legalization three years ago. They didn’t build in real enforcement mechanisms or authorities in a way that the city and state are still trying to clean up, now with the consequence of thousands of unlicensed shops and an anemic legal market, which only has a tiny handful of shops.

Their cannabis fumble is a lesson that the Legislature seems to have to relearn periodically: do it right or do it twice, with the second time a harder lift. They clearly didn’t learn that lesson with the mess they made of the state’s bail laws.

We can already envision the hand-wringing that will come after the entirely predictable consequences of letting mayoral control lapse, as lawmakers bemoan the ensuing chaos and the impact it’ll have on the city’s hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren. How about, instead of going through that act, they just do what we all know they’ll eventually do anyway and extend mayoral control, ideally forever.

If lawmakers are going to use subway safety as a cudgel, they should take steps to tackle the underlying causes, particularly mental health. We can’t have a situation where the need is increasing and the bed capacity is decreasing, and programs like the governor’s subway mental health teams need support to keep moving the needle.

Migrant arrivals are thankfully no longer the big daily headline, yet that doesn’t mean that NYC’s needs on this front have disappeared. The state should keep doing its part to cover some costs, both by providing state resources like Creedmoor, funding initiatives like legal assistance for migrants and providing cold hard cash to cover some of the city’s ongoing expenses. As we’ve long maintained, the socalled crisis will become a benefit to the state as folks leave shelter and join the labor force.

Maybe one day some of those migrants will be in Albany, finishing up an on-time budget.