{"id":791238,"date":"2026-05-12T14:24:15","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T14:24:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/791238\/"},"modified":"2026-05-12T14:24:15","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T14:24:15","slug":"whats-holding-up-the-new-york-state-budget","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/791238\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s holding up the New York State budget?"},"content":{"rendered":"

May 12, 2026 \u2014 <\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>The New York State Capitol in Albany, NY. Photo: Wally Gobetz<\/a>, Creative Commons, some rights reserved<\/p>\n

The New York State budget is more than a month late. Last week, there was hope<\/a> that lawmakers and Gov. Kathy Hochul had made a deal on a potential $268 billion spending plan.<\/p>\n

But Assembly leadership said there are still more details to iron out<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Northern Light co-host Catherine Wheeler spoke with New York Public News Network capital reporter Jimmy Vielkind about what’s happening in Albany.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Catherine WheelerWhat’s holding up the New York State budget?<\/p>\n

CATHERINE WHEELER<\/strong>: What is the latest? Do we have a budget yet?<\/p>\n

JIMMY VIELKIND<\/strong>: We do not have a budget. If I had uh been a better student of Latin, I would know how to say “no habemus budget.” Lawmakers are still working at the State Capital. Gov. Hochul was in New York City on Monday and is back today. Things are still going back and forth since the kind of mini-blow-up last week. I understand that top fiscal aides to both the governor and leaders of the state assembly and state senate talked a lot over the weekend.<\/p>\n

But Gov. Hoke hasn’t spoken with Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins since late last week. So, today with everyone back in the same city, back in the same building, hopefully there will be some more progress.<\/p>\n

WHEELER<\/strong>: So, let’s break it down. Back in January, in her State of the State address, Gov. Hochul said affordability is her top priority. Are we seeing policy living up to that in this budget?<\/p>\n

VIELKIND<\/strong>: Well, Gov. Hochul would certainly argue yes. The answer to that question is yes. There are several things she’s put on the table, which she believes will help make New York more affordable. That includes, first and foremost, some increased funding for child care. Now, there’s a program called CCAP which provides subsidies to families around New York State. Hochul has proposed increasing that by about 50% to $1.2 billion.<\/p>\n

Related stories:<\/p>\n

Currently, there are waitlists in places around the state, including Essex County, where people who want to get these child care vouchers just can’t because the state funding is on a first-come, first-served basis. That’s scheduled to go up significantly. I’ve heard no controversy about it, and it should go through and have a pretty sound and immediate impact on the lives of many New Yorkers.<\/p>\n

The second big push by the governor on the affordability front has to do with auto insurance. So she proposed a series of changes, including cracking down on fraud and changing payout standards, which she says will eventually reduce rates for people. As of right now, the plan is to limit payouts to people who are found to be at fault in crashes and also to narrow the definition of what is a serious injury. That limits what can be paid out for damages and pain and suffering, and it’s really technical thing that actually hits home on someone’s pocketbook while they are paying their rates.<\/p>\n

Finally, there’s a program for utility rebates. This is something that came up during budget talks, and we still don’t have details about the exact amounts that people will be getting or how they will have to apply to get it. But the state is planning to spend $1 billion to give relief as energy costs have been elevated and are really exacerbated by the ongoing war in the Persian Gulf and in Iran. All right.<\/p>\n

WHEELER<\/strong>: So some things we can kind of expect, some things still in flux. Is there anything else we know that is getting in the budget, and anything we know that is definitely out this year?<\/p>\n

VIELKIND<\/strong>: It’s hard to declare things dead until the budget is actually done, but we do seem, from what I’m hearing from lawmakers and other sources, that there’s a general agreement, which is Hochul’s favorite phrase, about a number of major issues. And I can go through a few of them. But the big caveat is that they haven’t actually printed the budget bills, let alone passed them. So, it’s difficult to speak with perfect specificity about exactly what’s going to happen.<\/p>\n

But this year Democratic lawmakers, after doing nothing last year, are coming together to push on plans to protect immigrants in the wake of President Trump’s federal crackdown. So, a package of laws respecting immigrants would involve a prohibition on local jails using their space or renting their space to ICE for detainees. One facility that might be impacted is Clinton County, which until recently, had rented several beds to ICE agents that were detained at the Northern border. There’s also going to be a prohibition on formal 287-g agreements. Now, these are formal contracts between local counties and the federal government in which local police officers are essentially cross-deputized to do immigration enforcement activity. The most impacted county is Long Island’s Nassau County, and perhaps it’s no coincidence that the county executive there, Republican Bruce Blakeman, is running against Hochul. Finally, there are going to be restrictions on agents wearing masks while they’re on duty and restrictions on enforcement in so-called sensitive places, which include schools and hospitals. Now, Democrats say this is all necessary to protect immigrants and to make sure that local police resources are being used on local crime. But Republicans say that restricting coordination like this is just going to make things less safe. They’re really decrying this. Tom Homan, the border czar, is even threatening to send more ICE agents into New York if this law is passed.<\/p>\n

Another big area is the climate law that we’ve seen, where the 2030 mandate to reduce emissions is going to be eliminated and replaced with a new goal of a 60% emissions cut by 2040. That’s according to my colleague Jon Campbell’s reporting<\/a>. There will be still a mandated 85% cut in emissions by 2050. And also, there will be a change in the method for calculating emissions which is going to have perhaps a much broader-reaching impact. Environmental advocates are pretty upset about this and what the governor is doing. She has sold it as an affordability measure.<\/p>\n

Then finally, one policy that’s still up in the air is a plan to create protest-free buffer zones around houses of worship. Originally, the goal was to put these buffer zones around reproductive health clinics as well, but that dropped out in negotiations. We’re still trying to find out exactly what the parameters of this policy will be and it’s possible that it will get dropped out of budget talks.\u00a0<\/p>\n

WHEELER<\/strong>: Jimmy, some of the biggest hold-ups on getting this budget deal done have been around issues involving New York City like the proposal to tax pied-a-terres there and also looking for other ways to solve the city’s multi-billion dollar deficit. Why does what’s happening in New York City matter to the rest of the state? How does ensuring its health and future benefit us here in the North Country?<\/p>\n

VIELKIND: <\/strong>Well, with all due respect and love for the North Country, New York City really is the economic engine of New York State. The state government gets its money primarily from income taxes, and income taxes are paid primarily by a small set of wealthy individuals. I think the top 2% of New York taxpayers pay half of New York State’s income tax, and those people predominantly are located in and around New York City. So making sure that New York City is vibrant, making sure it has a solid economy, making sure it is safe, and that the transportation systems work well really does have a big impact on the rest of the state because state services sort of flow in a reverse sort of a reverse flow of money from the city to the rest of the state. And that’s one of the reasons there’s so much focus there in addition to the fact that about half of New York State’s population lives within the five boroughs.<\/p>\n

WHEELER<\/strong>: Now we want to do a little peek behind the curtain. We’ve been hearing for weeks now that state lawmakers and the governor are hashing out the details. Can you give us a little insight into what that process has actually looked like?<\/p>\n

VIELKIND: <\/strong>Sure, so the governor and as I said, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the Senate Majority Leader, they tend to meet privately and talk at a high level about what things are going to go in, what things are going to go out. There’s a back and forth, and then both Heastie and Stewart-Cousins go back and they brief the Democrats who make up their conferences that are in charge of the legislature. Republicans are out of this process, and they complain that it’s non-transparent. And as the budget is more than six weeks late, they say that it’s pretty dysfunctional. Government reform groups have also said for years that the budget process is pretty opaque and non-transparent. So, that’s essentially as best I can understand what the process is actually like. There were hearings earlier this year where a lot of these arguments were made publicly, but then, starting in about mid-March, things really went behind closed doors.<\/p>\n

WHEELER<\/strong>: So, at the top we said the budget is more than a month late. I think it’s about five weeks late. What are the consequences of that?<\/p>\n

VIELKIND<\/strong>: This is now the latest the state budget has been since 2010. For many people, normal humans who are listening to this and are living their daily lives, there might not be a very clear or discernible consequence. You start to have problems with entities that get money from the State of New York, and that includes local governments and school districts. I think many listeners know that school districts have to present a budget to voters, which is going to be on the ballot one week from now, May 19. Local governments, too, have to put together their spending plans for the year. That biggest local government, New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani is today producing and announcing his executive budget, and he’s going to have to put big placeholders for possible aid from the state in there. So that’s that’s really where we start to see the consequence of this and the inability of other people kind of down the food chain and down the line to make plans because the state has not gotten its job done.<\/p>\n

WHEELER<\/strong>: Jimmy, any guess on a timeline that will wrap this up?<\/p>\n

VIELKIND:<\/strong> Oh, you know, I had thought optimistically that we would see the final votes by the end of this week. Last week’s blow up and sort of the lack of progress in recent days leads me to think that we’re going to go at least another week. So I would say it will happen sometime next week at the very earliest, but you know what they say, close only counts with horse shoes and hand grenades.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"May 12, 2026 \u2014 The New York State Capitol in Albany, NY. Photo: Wally Gobetz, Creative Commons, some…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":791239,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[20184,5229,8771,405,403,17050,5226,5225,5228,5227,80,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-791238","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-albany","9":"tag-america","10":"tag-hochul","11":"tag-new-york","12":"tag-new-york-city","13":"tag-new-york-state","14":"tag-newyork","15":"tag-newyorkcity","16":"tag-ny","17":"tag-nyc","18":"tag-politics","19":"tag-united-states","20":"tag-united-states-of-america","21":"tag-unitedstates","22":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","23":"tag-us","24":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116562065559468220","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=791238"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791238\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/791239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=791238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=791238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=791238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}