Hochul announces $237B budget agreement

ALBANY | On Monday evening, April 15, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced state lawmakers reached an agreement to spend $237 billion for fiscal year 2024-25. The agreement is $4 billion more than the Executive Budget plan Hochul released in January and it still has to clear approval in the Senate and Assembly, which lawmakers said could happen later this week. "We worked together to make a Budget that will make a difference in people's lives," she said of collaboration with Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Speaker Carl Heastie. "Each of us came to the table with really strongly held beliefs. But in the interest of our state, we pulled it together to deliver in a really collaborative way." The plan incorporates policy for affordable housing, new public safety measures, maintains Clean Water at $500 million and allocates $35.9 billion in school spending with $24.9 billion in school foundation aid. SCHOOL SPENDING The budget plan would launch review of the school aid formula. "The Legislature and I have agreed on a plan that makes long overdue adjustments to the (school) funding formula in next year's budget," Hochul said at a news conference in Albany. "This includes the hold harmless provision, which ensures up until now that school districts never receive less funding than the year before, regardless of population loss, their need, or the size of their surpluses." To accomplish this, Hochul said, the Rockefeller Institute of Government, in collaboration with the State Education Department, will conduct a comprehensive study on school funding with a focus on Foundation Aid. "They'll track down where the money is going to waste and how we can get every student the resources they need to learn, to thrive, to succeed ... we can't continue to have large sums of money sit in school district reserves when that money could be used in helping students in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color or return to the taxpayers." HOUSING The 2024-25 spending plan would create a statewide tax incentive for multi-family housing, making $650 million in discretionary funds exclusively available to Pro-Housing Communities. The state's first 20 Pro-Housing Communities include the Town of North Elba and The Town of Plattsburgh. Pro-Housing communities have documented housing stock increases of at least 0.33 percent (for upstate) in the last year or 1 percent over the previous three years (for upstate). The budget agreement also invests $500 million to develop up to 15,000 new housing units on State-owned sites. PUBLIC SAFETY Gov. Hochul said she would implement tougher laws to protect retail business, and this budget would increase penalties for offenders who assault retail workers. Spending adds $40.2 million for retail theft enforcement and a $3,000 tax credit for business owners to invest in security resources. "We will assign to build our State Police smash and grab unit. Never had one of those before," Hochul said. "Hope we don't need one for very long. And they're supposed to break up the increasingly sophisticated retail theft rings." To stem the growing incidence of hate crimes, budget policy would increase the number of offenses that could be prosecuted as hate crimes and invests $35 million in the Securing Communities Against Hate Grant to protect houses of worship, religious schools and other at-risk sites. The budget allocates $347 million to continue New York's efforts to reduce and prevent gun violence and $35.7 million to prevent and prosecute crimes of domestic violence. The budget adds $7.1 million to reduce recidivism and improve incarcerated persons' reentry into the workforce through more intensive supervision of individuals on parole. This funding would expand transitional housing and college programming to all state prisons, and provide transportation for visitors to and from state correctional facilities. HEALTH CARE Budget agreement maintains $3.9 billion to support distressed hospitals and includes a $20 billion multi-year investment to build new healthcare infrastructure, expand Medicare coverage for seniors and pregnant women. And it increases the home care worker minimum wage. It allocates $19 million for mental health services for school aged children, $55 million to establish 200 new inpatient psychiatric beds at State-run facilities; and mandates better mental health care at hospitals. A $31 million investment would expand mental health services for first responders and for individuals struggling with mental illness who are involved in the criminal justice system. Budget policy in this agreement would make New York the first state in the nation to offer paid leave to expecting mothers and would require employers to provide time for nursing mothers to express. Policy also would stop the proliferation of surgical procedures, such as C-sections, in situations where they're not necessary and increase access to care for postpartum depression. MEDICAID The budget agreement predicts $200 million in Medicaid savings through fiscal intermediaries by cracking down on Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program (CDPAP) fraud. "We made significant headway with this Budget – increasing oversight of the CDPAP, a program that the costs have gone up over 1,200 percent just in the last couple of years," Hochul said. "We will be instituting a single statewide fiscal intermediary. What that means is we'll have one fiscal intermediary managing this program – not the 700 that have proliferated in the State of New York. This alone will save us $500 million every single year and allow us to start putting controls and guardrails in place for what has historically been a very under=regulated program. That's how we ensure that the people who really need it get the best quality care while eliminating the waste, fraud and abuse." As proposed, the budget agreement would invest $7.5 billion in the health care system over the next three years through an amendment to New York's Medicaid Section 1115 Demonstration program to support actions to advance health equity, reduce health disparities, and strengthen access to primary and behavioral health care across the state. Budget policy would also authorize the state to pursue federal approval for a managed care organization (MCO) tax, which could generate significant revenue for the State to provide a multi-year investment in New York's health care system. TRANSPORTATION State spending would support mass transit systems statewide, including $7.9 billion in operating aid for the MTA, $333 million for upstate transit systems, and $551 million for non-MTA downstate systems, a 5.4 percent increase in funding. It also advances infrastructure programs by contributing $2.6 billion for the third year of a record $32.9 billion five-year Department of Transportation Capital Plan, funding projects that are reconnecting communities across the state, and $100 million for local programs through the CHIPS program. TECH INVESTMENT Hocul said budget provisions would establish Empire AI, making New York the first state to purchase artificial intelligence supercomputing power and place it in the hands of leading academic institutions. The investment, she said, would foster an ecosystem of innovation, research and growth. "This will position New York at the forefront of (the artificial intelligence) industry for decades to come. Our Budget allocates $275 million to make this become a reality and will be supported by $125 million in private and university funding. "This initiative will drive countless new discoveries and make New York State a national center for AI research," Hochul said. "We're going to have over $200 million invested to build four workforce development centers in Syracuse, along the I-90 corridor, where all the new jobs are coming, semiconductors – need I say Micron – and so many other areas." ENVIRONMENTAL FUNDING The budget agreement allocates $500 million for clean water, twice the amount originally proposed by Hochul. It maintains the $400 million Environmental Protection Fund and adds $47 million to support Hochul's goal to plant 25 million trees by 2033, which environmental groups said would help the state achieve the goal of planting and maintaining 1.7 million acres of new forest by 2040. REVENUE AND RESERVES In the budget announcement Monday, Hochul said the spending plan does not raise income or statewide business taxes. And it maintains state reserves at 15 percent, the gold standard in accounting. "Not only does it help our credit rating, but it also reduces borrowing costs. And it means we're better prepared to weather any storms that may lie ahead," Hochul said. "Some of you may recall back in January, I said we were staring down at sizable deficits, that we needed to exercise restraint to protect our financial security. Well, the good news is that since then, our revenue projections have exceeded expectations, putting us in a stronger position. "In my State of the State address, I said something I believe with all my heart: New Yorkers are more powerful together than we ever would be on our own. And we saw that with this budget process." In Albany Monday evening, Senate Deputy Majority Leader Michael Gianaris told NY1 political anchor Errol Louis on "Inside City Hall" that to say a deal is done is somewhat premature. "But we're close," he told NY1. "I'd say we're probably about 95 percent of the way there, and that last 5 percent is significant, of course," he said. "So hopefully in the next couple of days, we can wrap up the remainder."

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Hochul announces $237B budget agreement

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