Blair Horner
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While lawmakers, public officials, lobbyists, and reporters have a reasonably good sense of how much and where New York State government spends money, there is very little publicly available about how well Albany delivers services. When it comes to spending money, legislation is introduced, hearings are held, financial plan updates are issued.
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New York – like the rest of the nation – spends enormous amounts of money on health care. Yet states’ health care spending varies greatly.
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New York’s massive $230 billion state budget ranks second only to California. To a considerable extent that ranking reflects New York’s population – the fourth largest number of residents among the states.
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There is no avoiding the cascading bad climate news: New records in temperature, catastrophic flooding, and ongoing wildfires, all put the world’s rapidly worsening environment in the “Code Red” danger zone. The flooding in the Northeast was the result of record-breaking rainfall. If the climate was a person it would be in the ICU.
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Halfway through 2023 and it’s clear that climate changes are triggering catastrophes across the globe. Incredible storms, wildfires, and floods are hammering people everywhere. There has been a record-breaking cyclone in southeastern Africa, an unusually intense typhoon in the Pacific, wildfires in Chile and Canada, unbearable heatwaves across Asia, the southern areas of the United States, as well as parts of Europe, and flooding from extreme rainfalls in Europe and Africa.
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The state Assembly convened an “overtime” session in Albany last week to take care of some leftover business from the scheduled session.
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A week ago Saturday, both houses of the Legislature seemed to have wrapped up their sessions. In many ways the session was like pre-pandemic versions. The Capitol and the Legislative Office building were open to the public; committees were held in public and in-person; hearings were held; lobbyists wandered the halls, buttonholing lawmakers and pleading their cases.
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Last week, Albany was a tale of two “cities.” Outside the Capitol building, Capital District residents and much of upstate gasped for air, stunned by the dystopian scenes of an orange air mass enveloping downstate New York due to the toxic smoke plumes from the incredible wildfires plaguing Canada.
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After months of debates, state lawmakers are now in the final week of the scheduled legislative session. If this week follows the historic pattern, lawmakers will approve hundreds of bills this week alone. Last session, of the 1,000 bills passed during the six months of the 2022 legislative session, 380 passed during the last few days of work.
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While you weren’t looking, it got harder to vote in New York. A voting practice that made it easier to vote has ended and unless state lawmakers act in the next couple of weeks, it will be much harder to get a mail-in ballot.