State budget unlikely to be finished before end of month

Albany insiders think the state budget might drag into May as legislative leaders appear incapable of coming to a meaningful compromise on policy items after weeks of closed-door negotiations. Gov. Kathy Hochul said she wouldn’t mind spending her summer negotiating in  Albany, but so far it’s been a dreary spring. This wouldn’t be the first time that Hochul has delayed a budget until May; in 2023, the budget was held up due to fierce debates over rolling back bail reform and only passed on May 3. 

There are a few deadlines, legal and spiritual, that Hochul has to contend with as she holds firm on her budget goals. The first was April 1, the date that the state is supposed to have a budget in place – though it’s more of a suggestion than an actual deadline at this point. Hochul and the Legislature easily blew past that deadline. The next was Passover on April 12, which normally marks the start of a two-week holiday for the Legislature. But without an on-time budget, they’ll now be back in Albany passing temporary extenders for a few more weeks. 

At this point, the only people truly aware of the lack of progress are Albany politicos and state lawmakers who had to cancel a spring getaway. If there isn’t a budget in place by May 20, though, it will impact school boards in New York and the communities they serve, which will need to vote on their own budgets by then. Without a firm answer on Foundation Aid – the main mechanism to fund state public schools – districts will be in a sticky position and could be left wondering why they can’t get a firm answer on the resources they’ll have to work with.  

According to legislative leaders like Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, substantive work on the fiscal sections of the state budget has taken a backseat to policy debates, which have yielded little progress as lawmakers prepare to pass a fifth budget extender on Tuesday. There is talk that Hochul’s cheery outlook on protracted negotiations will lead to a budget that comes in noticeably later than last year’s April 20 agreement.

Discovery reform is the main sticking point in budget negotiations, although an expansion of involuntary commitment and a mask ban are also gumming up the works. In her executive budget proposal, Hochul included changes to the state’s discovery law meant to address prosecutors’ concerns that too many cases were being dismissed on technicalities. The governor’s proposal would allow judges to impose less severe penalties for prosecutors who fail to turn over evidence on time and would also allow prosecutors to only turn over materials to the defense that they deem “relevant” to the case, rather than all material “related” to the case. Lawmakers and criminal justice reformers are concerned that the changes would create a more unjust legal system and reduce any impetus for prosecutors to act in a timely fashion, and some are prepared to dig in their heels. 

The dynamic is creating a situation where policies that the average New Yorker might not even know about, let alone fully grasp, are affecting their day-to-day lives and contributing to a sense of Albany’s inherent dysfunction. Blair Horner, senior policy advisor at the New York Public Interest Group, said that a budget so late that it calls back to the Pataki era – when the budget often wasn’t finalized until June or July – could set back public trust. 

“It is obviously an important component, not only to the schools, but to the communities that these lawmakers are elected from, and there's no getting around it,” Horner told City & State. “It makes Albany look bad. The budget being late makes Albany look bad. And it does throw a sort of body blow to the public's trust in their own government. They're supposed to get the budget done by April 1.”