For the past few weeks, we’ve been starting our broadcast with an update on the New York state budget. And once again, Governor Kathy Hochul and state lawmakers have not reached a deal.
The budget is now 11 days late as Democrats haggle over a number of policy details the governor wants to include.
Joining WAMC's Samantha Simmons for an update is longtime capitol reporter Dan Clark of the Albany Times-Union.
Dan, how is this year different from past late year budget processes?
Well, it's interesting, because we have this gap in the middle of the month that the legislature was supposed to be off, so we're interrupting their two-week vacation this year so they can come back and try to make some progress on the budget. But it's also different this year, because the governor and the legislature seem to have a little bit more tension over policy issues that are in the budget. Criminal justice is a huge issue this year that's really, really important to the legislature, and the governor is trying to push back on them at that so it's ruffling a little feather.
There was conversation this past week about the possibility of lawmakers being paid while the budget is overdue, which would be a change in approach. Where did that leave off?
So, it's gone nowhere for right now, the assembly speaker has a bill that would make sure that they're paid if the budget is late, as you said, we don't really know exactly why he introduced it. It seems more of a member management kind of thing. He wants to make sure his members get paid. Maybe some of them have some concerns around it. So that's probably not going to happen. But there is a different bill that would withhold the governor's salary if the budget is late. That hasn't gone anywhere either. But I would say if one bill is going to move, maybe they both move.
What are the major sticking points at this moment in the talks?
The big sticking point is pretrial, criminal discovery, and for anybody that doesn't know, that's the exchange of evidence between prosecutors and the defense before trial. So Hochul wants to make it a little bit more flexible for prosecutors and give them a little bit more leeway. The legislature says, ‘No, we passed these laws for a reason. We want it to be strict so that cases can be dismissed when they violate the law.’ So, they're trying to figure out the exact language on how to make everybody happy. But that's really tough.
On Thursday, Hochul said there would not be a budget without her policies like changes to the discovery laws like you just mentioned, mandates on masks in public cell phones in school. Where do negotiations over these sticking points stand?
So, on Discovery, like I said, they are just going at each other. There's no resolution there on the mask issue. They haven't even gotten to that yet. Discovery is holding literally every other issue up. The only issue that we know that's been really resolved is the bell-to-bell cell phone ban in schools. We don't know exactly what that looks like, but we do know that it's a full day ban for students. Everything else is still open.
Governor Hochul said this week that good things happen in April, seeking to minimize the impact of the late budget. But what are the actual impacts of a spending plan being late?
So, there's no impact on state government necessarily. A late budget really matters to local governments, so school districts have to be planning their budgets, because the school budget votes are in May, so they're trying to figure out right now how much money they're going to get from the state. And if they don't know that, they can't make their budgets and they have to present a budget to the voters that may be less funding than what they're actually going to get. So maybe they're going to plan on cutting a position that they don't need to plan to cut it's really throwing everybody into this area of uncertainty.
When do you think we can expect a budget?
That's the big question. So, they're coming back on Tuesday and they're going to continue negotiations. If I were to guess, I would say either this coming week or the week after. But two years ago, we had a budget may 3, so there's plenty of time to figure it out. It really just depends on how much progress they make over the next couple of days.
And I spoke with several lawmakers this week, all of whom agreed that they'll be back for a special session amid federal cuts later this year. What do you think that could look like and what programs could suffer?
Well, here's the thing is that the state really isn't telling us that we keep on asking that question of, if there are these big cuts, what are you going to prioritize in trying to backfill that funding? And what the governor and the legislature has told us is they're not going to try to backfill this funding, because these are federal cuts that they can't fill. We're talking about $93 billion that New York gets from the federal government every year. It wouldn't be cutting all of that, but if we cut Medicaid funding, for example, which makes up more than half of that federal funding, it has real impacts for real people. So, they're saying, we're going to figure it out when it comes to us.
Capitol Reporter for the Albany Times Union, Dan Clark.
