The April 1 deadline has come and gone. The Democrat for the state’s 127th assembly district, which comprises much of Central New York, gives us the latest on what is holding up the New York state budget for the fifth year in a row.

This interview is from April 3, 2026, and has been edited for clarity.

It’s late, period. How close, or maybe how far, are we? Are we fourth quarter? Halftime? Did we even start the game?

We’re still in the first quarter.

Oh dear.

Yes.

We’ve stated our positions a couple of times. We’ve gone into a bunch of meetings and…there’s still the positions. I don’t think anybody’s moved all that much — although, there are some things that are happening. There are some of the primary issues the governor [Kathy Hochul] wants to deal with that I think…In the beginning, we’re probably eighty or ninety percent of the way there. But there are a couple issues that are going to take a while.

What are some of the issues that are holding things up? Why no movement on them?

Auto insurance is one thing. The governor is on her affordability tour at your local whatever. She’s stopping everywhere to talk about that. And it’s true, everybody wants affordability, so auto insurance is one of those things. We’re ninety percent OK with auto insurance. There are some things about joint and several responsibility and comparative negligence that some of the people who are in our conference, who have worked in this world for many years, think are a little dangerous, what the governor’s trying to do.

But there are other suggestions they have in order to lower costs. They think that what the governor’s put in is fine, it won’t lower it enough that the ratepayers will see the difference, but maybe some of the executives will get bigger bonuses.

Is there another big issue that you think is holding things up?

SEQR [State Environmental Quality Review Act]. We would like to speed up the SEQR so we can build more. We’re trying to build housing — a lot of housing — and we need to build it quickly. It’s a problem everywhere in the United States. It’s a problem especially in Central New York with Micron coming, the 5,000 construction workers that are going to be here, and then the 125,000 people that are eventually going to move here to work at Micron and some of the supply chain companies that they bring.

Affordability: that’s certainly a buzzword in the entire world. You hear it everywhere. Is there anything that you, state lawmakers in Albany, can do? Is there anything in the state budget that can help us with some of these high prices?

I think that some of the things the governor is talking about are more longer-term. We’ll see increases down the road. As far as today and now, we [New York state assemblymembers] wrote a letter to the governor and we said: There is money [$770.6 million of unused Clean Energy Fund money] that utility companies are holding from charges. It’s supposed to be for things to affect climate change in the future. Why don’t we go ahead and use that money for rebates? You can send people — singles, maybe $300; couples, maybe $500 — something like that, something we can give them to help with costs right now.

[You can read a recent letter on the same topic from New York state senators online here.]

Other than that, unless you go ahead and implement some of the C.L.C.P.A. [Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act] things. Cap and invest…cap and invest, while they’re going around saying it’s going to raise all costs to everybody, was…cap and invest was built to provide $3 billion a year. What that was supposed to be used for would be rebates to about 85% of the people in New York State. So anybody that makes — I don’t know what it was, $300,000 a year, something like that — would get rebates. And they would not see an increase, or most would actually see a small decrease in their costs.

Those are things we’re trying to put out there, and hopefully the governor will pick up on some of that.

A lot of people are very concerned about the cost of things and they’re looking for relief. Can the budget deliver some of that?

I think the budget can deliver some relief. It’s not going to be what probably everybody is hoping for. There’s things that are way out of our control. The federal government is still interested in tariffs. There’s a war going on. Not only the one in the Middle East: the one in Ukraine’s still going on. Ukraine provides 20 or 25% of all the wheat in the world [Note: This is a common misconception. In actuality, at the time when the between Russia and Ukraine began, Ukraine produced about 3.7% of the world’s wheat, according to the United Nations, though it was still among the world’s top exporters of wheat. Those wheat exports have been further disrupted once the war began.]

There’s all sort of stuff going on right now that, frankly, were things of choice, and not necessarily things that had to happen. I don’t think we can compensate for all of that.

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